Why They Want Us to Forget What Mr. Rogers Taught Us

The radical power of empathy in a culture of cruelty

Hello! This is my first post on Substack! *cue the confetti and pop the bubbles!* 🎉 I’ll be using this space to talk about joy, justice, and the fight to stay human in inhumane times. I hope you’ll join me. You can also find me on Instagram @laurenlehmancarter

I’m a glimmer hunter, a joy seeker, a sunset chaser. I’m a slow cup of tea in the morning with birds singing in the background. But lately, I want to throw my phone to the floor and crawl back under the covers, before I drag myself to the coffee pot and fill my “I dissent” mug, featuring an illustrated RBG flipping the double bird. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of waking up to notifications about yet another middle-of-the-night vote that harms children.

Bullies are running the government and they’re afraid of empathy.

“Look for the helpers.” - Fred Rogers

Mr. Rogers was the OG teacher of how to hunt for glimmers. Was it not enough for the GOP to take away healthcare funding of 37 million children and gut the department of education? They had to come for wholesome kids’ TV programming, too. But I guess cutting PBS funding is a smart move when you are actively teaching people that empathy is just liberal brainwashing. MAGA trolls regularly show up in my comments to mock empathy itself. They are so committed to “owning the libs” that they’ve traded their souls for cruelty. They’ve become the very thing that every childhood story for generations warned us about, just so they can feel powerful by tearing other people down.

Anyone who leads with empathy is a threat to those who want to sow division, because we are more powerful when we recognize humanity in one another. In May of 1969, Mr. Rogers spoke in front of congress to illustrate the importance of funding PBS. Just eight days later, he used his platform to make a powerful statement, during a time when Black Americans were violently being removed from public swimming pools. Fred Rogers invited François Clemmons to join him, cooling down their feet in a kiddie pool. By 1993, I had mostly outgrown my PBS era, but when Mr. Rogers and Mr. Clemmons recreated that moment, it still left an impression. They used one of the most powerful techniques for teaching, not by telling, but by showing. They took a simple moment and modeled what the world could be.

This is what they’re afraid of. Fred Rogers and François Clemmons in 1993, recreating their quietly historic Civil Rights protest in 1969.

Gutting PBS and the Dept. of Education isn’t just politics as usual.

Authoritarian leaders can’t rule with an iron fist over an empathetic and educated population. They don’t want critical thinkers or culture that celebrates our humanity. They want obedience, outrage, and just enough confusion to make people stop trusting their own instincts. That’s why they gut education funding. That’s why they attack books, teachers, public broadcasting, and any tool that teaches kids how to think rather than just obey. They tell people what to believe and want their followers to take their marching orders without complaint. Empathy is dangerous to authoritarians, because when people care about each other, they are harder to control.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” - Mark Twain

I’ve seen social media posts from people in my community who are outraged that the followers of MAGA are being compared to Nazis, but they don’t seem to recognize that there is historical context for those comparisons. It’s harsh because it’s accurate. One of the earliest moves by the Nazis was controlling education and purging schools of “undesirable” ideologies. In 1933, the regime passed laws to fire Jewish and “unreliable” teachers. By 1936 almost every teacher in Germany (97%) had joined the Nazi Teachers League and education was heavily propagandized. They didn’t just rewrite schoolbooks, they took over the airwaves. Public media became a mouthpiece for the Nazi regime, flooding homes with propaganda and erasing the possibility of independent thought and silencing dissent. We are now in an age of book bans, teacher censorship, “alternative facts,” attacks on vulnerable communities, cruelty for sport, and the erosion of First Amendment rights. If you’re waving flags, wearing hats, and cheering for the people who are taking away kids’ access to healthcare, education, and Sesame Street, the problem isn’t your neighbors who notice the harm. It’s the leaders taking a chainsaw to our country.

If we learned anything from our childhoods, bullies might seem like they’ve got the upper hand, but they never win in the end. In the meantime, we will keep chasing sunsets and modeling what it looks like to honor the humanity of one another.

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