Beautiful Amanda Gorman has exposed Ron DeSantis - or D.Santis- as a failed politician

DeSantis’s shameless defense of the Amanda Gorman poetry fiasco is. revealing of a man who is pandering to a minority just because he can.

Beautiful poet Amanda Gorman read The Hill We Climb, a poem she wrote and read at President Joe Biden's inauguration.

Echo opinion published in The Washington Post by Greg Sargent.

At this point, it should be obvious that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s culture-war directives are designed to encourage parents to indulge in book purges for sport. Precisely because removals have become so easy, lone right-wing actors are feverishly hunting for offending titles, getting them pulled from school libraries on absurdly flimsy grounds, sometimes by the dozens.

A new turn in the explosive saga involving the poem that Amanda Gorman read at President Biden’s inauguration underscores the point. DeSantis is now defending a Florida school’s decision to restrict access to “The Hill We Climb” — a move that has become a national controversy.

"It was a book of poems that was in an elementary school library,” DeSantis told a convention on Friday, though it was in fact one poem. DeSantis insisted the school district in question merely “moved it from the elementary school library to the middle school library,” and ripped “legacy media” for calling this a “ban,” complaining of a “poem hoax.”

That’s a shameless but revealing characterization of what happened. It’s true that Gorman’s poem was removed from the elementary school section of the library at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes and that access was preserved for middle school students. But this came in response to an objection from one parent.

That parent’s complaint, which was obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, was that the poem has indirect “hate messages” and would “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.” 

In reality, Gorman’s poem calls for bridging our divides to enable our country to live up to its promise, declaring this an incomplete project. The idea that this represents hate and indoctrination is farcical.

If anything, the poem offers a dramatically different message from racial discourse the right usually objects to, i.e., that our white-supremacist past and continuing structural racism render our country irredeemable. The poem says our nation “isn’t broken but simply unfinished.”

DeSantis (or is it "D.Santis"❓ What is his name? 😏) objects to calling what happened a “ban.” But the book was placed beyond the reach of elementary school kids for no reason whatsoever. What message does it send that a school went along with the idea that the poem read by the young Black poet at Biden’s inauguration is inappropriate for children, on grounds that it constitutes hate and indoctrination?

It’s also important to note that in response to complaints from that same parent, the school removed two other titles about Black history: “Love to Langston” and “The ABCs of Black History.” Her main objection to these books? They are “CRT” — meaning critical race theory.

That’s preposterous❗ Those books were written expressly to introduce kids in lower grades to these topics. As Stephana Ferrell, co-founder of Florida Freedom to Read, told me: “The books celebrate Black history, culture and famous voices in a way that connects with elementary school students.” Isn’t that what we want?

Finally, it’s absurd that all this happened due to such specious objections from one person. The school’s rationale for removing the books is that they’re age-inappropriate, but it doesn’t even say why they’re inappropriate for elementary school kids. It’s obvious that the school tried to split the difference, not removing them entirely but still seeking to make this one parent happy.

This is happening all over Florida. In another county, a single right-wing activist persuaded officials to pull 20 books by Jodi Picoult and eight by Nora Roberts from school libraries, citing vague directives from the DeSantis administration as their rationale.

All this confirms that the fever-pitch climate created by DeSantis is maximizing the impact that lone parents can have. That’s because it has encouraged officials to err on the side of caution and remove targeted titles rather than brave right-wing anger, which incentivizes parents-turned-activists to sweep ever more broadly in their efforts to ban as many titles as possible.

This is what DeSantis wants. Rather than seriously consider whether one out-of-control parent drove the process off the rails in the Gorman case, he leapt at the chance to engage in more culture-warring, this time casting the “legacy media” as the cultural enemy. DeSantis’s obvious relish of this moment shows he believes having an army of lone parents out there stirring up cultural controversies wherever possible can only help him in the 2024, GOP presidential primaries.

In a little-noticed local interview this week, DeSantis’s education commissioner, Manny Diaz, defended the Gorman saga. “The process worked,” Diaz told WLRN, noting that “a parent has the right to make a complaint,” and as a result, the poem is now available only to the “right” grade levels.

Diaz is wrong. The poem — a historical document and a paean to unity — should be available to all grades. But he’s right in another sense: The fact that one parent could exercise her right to make this unhinged complaint, resulting effortlessly in such an absurd outcome, did show the process working exactly as DeSantis intends.

The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman

When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?

The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is

Isn’t always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one
And yes we are far from polished

far from pristine
but that doesn’t mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
but what stands before us

to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious
Not because we will never again know defeat
but because we will never again sow division
Scripture tells us to envision
that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid
If we’re to live up to our own time
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms

to one another
We seek harm to none and harmony for all
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious
Not because we will never again know defeat
but because we will never again sow division
Scripture tells us to envision
that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid
If we’re to live up to our own time
Then victory won’t lie in the blade
But in all the bridges we’ve made
That is the promised glade
The hill we climb
If only we dare
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation
rather than share it
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy
And this effort very nearly succeeded
But while democracy can be periodically delayed
it can never be permanently defeated
In this truth
in this faith we trust
For while we have our eyes on the future
history has its eyes on us
This is the era of just redemption
We feared at its inception
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs
of such a terrifying hour
but within it we found the power
to author a new chapter
To offer hope and laughter to ourselves
So while once we asked,
how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was
but move to what shall be
A country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold,
fierce and free
We will not be turned around
or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children’s birthright
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one
We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west,
we will rise from the windswept northeast
where our forefathers first realized revolution
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states,
we will rise from the sunbaked south
We will rebuild, reconcile and recover
and every known nook of our nation and
every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
ESERVED.