I was born in 1965. Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) was president. I was not ever interested in LBJ until I became an adult.
I can remember seeing “ESEA-I-66” written on the sides of televisions, projectors, record players, and in some books when I was a student in the Union County Schools. The Arabic and Roman numerals would sometimes change, but “ESEA” stayed the same. I used to wonder what those letters stood for.
I found out a bit about those letters when I was a college student. I learned that ESEA represented the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a federal law that provided funding for school districts, in particular to assist in education of the economically disadvantaged.
When I became the Supervisor of Federal Programs for the Union County Schools some twenty years ago, I learned more. Federal Programs supervisors were trained every year on how to administer the expenditure of those funds in compliance with federal law. Dr. Julie McCargar, then Executive Director of Federal Programs for the State of Tennessee, began her training each year with a brief recap of the history of federal programs. ESEA was signed into law in 1965, the year I was born, as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty.
Hearing this tidbit of history over and over for several years, and realizing that LBJ was responsible in great part for my present employment, increased my interest in his presidency. ESEA periodically has been reauthorized, and many Dear Readers might remember when it was renamed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2001 during President George W. Bush’s administration.
Several years ago, I was on vacation with my brother when we visited the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. On permanent display there is the Boeing VC-137C used as Air Force One on which President Lyndon Johnson was inaugurated after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Surprisingly, I was almost moved to tears to realize that I was standing on the very spot on which LBJ stood with John F. Kennedy’s widow of only a couple of hours as he was sworn in as President. I was overwhelmed by history as almost never before. I was privileged to stand on the very spot on which the very man who signed into law the conditions that created my current employment had stood.
In recent years I have read about LBJ. Some are complimentary, a lot are not. I am currently reading Doris Kearns’ Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976 New York, Harper & Row). Following is a quote from this book that caused me to ponder:

“I am,” he announced in 1958, “a free man, a U. S. Senator, and a Democrat, in that order. I am also a liberal, a conservative, a Texan, a taxpayer, a rancher, a businessman, a consumer, a parent, a voter, and not as young as I used to be nor as old as I expect to be—and I am all these things in no fixed order. . . . At the heart of my own beliefs is a rebellion against this very process of classifying, labeling and filing Americans under headings.”
To require precision is to create division: “The people of this country,” Johnson asserted, “are tired of the kind of political thought that divides Americans into blocs. . . . I doubt whether the carpenter who built this rostrum thinks of himself only as a laboring class. And I doubt equally whether the man who paid his wages thinks of himself only as part of the managerial class. They think of themselves first as American men and their wives think of themselves as American women. And they are perfectly right in doing so.” (156-7)

I think LBJ was on the right track. So much of the conflicts in American history resulted from a focus on differences. A study of American history seems to show a sense of unity to a common cause during the Revolutionary period when our country was being established. That unity eroded to the point that in less than 100 years sectionalism had developed between the North and the South, resulting in a civil war. Even after the country reunited after the Civil War, sectional and racial issues continued. Surely in part to allay this contention, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Ironically, in later years successive reauthorizations of ESEA have drawn divisions among America’s students by dividing them into subgroups, comparing the performances of the different subgroups to each other. It was sarcastically observed by some that No Child Left Behind left every child behind.
There is possibly a great deal of truth in what has become a cliché, “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” Hopefully the day will come when we see each other as Americans, citizens of the United States, not as members of a majority, minority or subgroup. I don’t believe the Scriptures have a plan for a disaggregated Heaven.

ANSWER TO QUESTION OF THE WEEK # 56
What does Godzilla eat for breakfast? (ANSWER: A restaurant.) What does Godzilla eat for dinner? (ANSWER: Another restaurant.)

QUESTION OF THE WEEK # 57
How did the fireworks know they were in love? (See next week’s article in historicunioncounty.com for the answer.)

FOR THOUGHT
I could name you a few things that offend me, but I don’t expect a building to be torn down or a book burned to prevent others from learning from the past and being enabled to form their own opinions.