The Chris Moeller Archives

"Love or lack of it"

Facebook really used me and I don't feel good about it. I "like" Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood on the social media site, and they sent me a news article last week about the new Rogers' documentary film Won't You Be My Neighbor?. I linked my way to that and read it, then they exploited that weakness by sending me an Amazon listing for the 2015 book Peaceful Neighbor-- Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers and I bought that book moments later with just a few easy clicks. Now I'm sure I'm a marked man for any number of online point of purchase displays.

The book is enlightening. Written by Michael G. Long, a religious studies professor at Elizabethtown College, is interested, among other venues, in the ecumenical roots of Rogers' worldview. Fred was an ordained Presbyterian minister before he was a public television star. He was also a radical Christian pacifist. His entire first week on the air nationally with Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, in 1968 shortly after the discovery of the My Lai massacre, was devoted to teaching children the tragedy of war. He believed that war violated the word of God in any instance. He believed that it was child abuse even to send a child's parent away from their home to fight in a war, that it violated the sanctity of the child's sense of safety and well-being. Nothing was more important to Fred Rogers than protecting children, and nothing was more abhorrent than violating their trust. He was not only a pragmatic pacifist, meaning that he believed non-violence was effective, but he was also a principled pacifist, meaning that he embraced it on principle even in instances where he did not believe it would be effective, and I'm appreciative to Michael G. Long for introducing me to that distinction.

Rogers' other countercultural beliefs included an early commitment to civil rights and tolerance of gays and lesbians. I invite you to watch the new film to witness for yourself the person of Francois Clemmons, a gay African-American man, who was Officer Clemmons in the neighborhood, who soaked his feet in a kiddie pool on-air with Mr. Rogers during a time that blacks were being denied entry into swimming pools, and who was an openly gay man working on the set of the series in Pittsburgh. Fred championed the vegetarian movement, empathy for animals, and environmentalism. He opposed consumerism and the idea that any of us, but particularly children, existed to be consumers. He opposed the death penalty, believing that it set a horrible example for children. He called it an example of "power punishment," that is, negative reactions to something we identify as a "personal challenge" or a threat to our security. He believed in "loving punishment" instead, the absence of revenge, and redemption.

His lifelong focus was early childhood development, but he believed that those principles formed during that time were the ones that stayed with us, so what applied to children should apply to adults as well. Until I saw the movie, I was unaware that Fred Rogers retired briefly from his program during the 1970s to focus on making programs for adults, exploring music and all matter of topics of that series, but the final products didn't catch the public's fancy. Indeed, Rogers was out of step with the majority of American adults on any number of social issues at that time including several already mentioned (and even more so today). He was probably the most radical figure in the history of American television, a man that only non-commercial television could give us, and a man who became synonymous with public television itself. He is, easily, the most important man in the broadcast channel's history, almost single-handedly responsible for keeping it funded by Congress for several years. The film explains in detail.

He was infuriated by other television programming aimed at children, all of it faster-paced, louder, and dumber than his show. He believed it was wrong to ever lie to children. Making up a story was betraying their trust. After being told once that a child had died jumping from a tall window because of the supernatural powers of Superman, he devoted a full week of programs to the topic of safety and teaching the difference between the real and the imaginary. He also thought it important to talk openly about death and grief and anger, always reminding children that they were safe to be themselves, but that often adults were just as confused as they were. In the film, a black and white TV interview from the '60s shows Rogers stating that all the world can be explained by "love or lack of it."

The core belief of the show, I believe, is that all people have value. Biblically, if you prefer, all people have a light shining inside of them. The songs say it, "You're Special to Me," "There's only one of you in the whole world." This has become a surprisingly-polarizing opinion in a modern culture that seems to increasingly believe that the problems of the world have been caused by too much self-esteem, rather than too little. That alternative movement to devalue defenseless children can be explained by admitting to ourselves that it's all a well-orchestrated ploy to excuse greed and selfishness, and to perpetuate a reckless and often violent, but profitable, economic and social system of winners and losers.

Fred Rogers the performer, writer, and philosopher is a person we need today for guidance, but he's no longer with us, dead of cancer in 2003, and it's hard to have confidence that we will see his likes again. Furthermore, it's difficult not to believe that, collectively, we have failed Mister Rogers. And done so badly. He instilled in us all that we needed when we were children, but the tide against him and us was overwhelming. Human compassion today hangs by a thread. We were called upon by him to be prophets and peacemakers, but we have been calculating and cruel instead. We forgot who we were back in his neighborhood. We forgot each other. We forgot our friends. We forgot that we have no meaning here except for what and who we are to each other and to the least of ours. My favorite video image from the series is displayed briefly in the film but is not alluded to specifically. I invite you to look for it yourself. A child piano player, likely a prodigy, is playing the piano for Mr. Rogers in his television home, and Mr. Rogers looks at this talented younger person, as he was wont to do-- with joy and wonder, but he's not looking at the extraordinary hands in motion, he's looking only at the child's face. In fact, he never breaks contact with the face and he is smiling. He's not looking at what the boy is doing, he's looking at who he is. That child is his neighbor and his friend.

posted by CM @ 8:11 PM