My fellow Americans ...

In contemporary good guy-bad guy lore, a common story device has the villain take over all broadcast stations to issue a sinister message to helpless citizens.

Some people might characterize President Barack Obama’s planned speech to students on Tuesday the same way. Across the nation, there has been an uproar from parents and pundits who see Obama’s speech as an underhanded move to indoctrinate children to his administration’s “socialist” agenda, with the National Education Association delivering the nation’s youngsters on a silver platter.

Have we really fallen that far into the abyss of suspicion and fear?

What we have is a sitting president who hopes to address public school students. It’s not unprecedented — Ronald Reagan sent an address to schoolchildren in the spring of 1986, and George H.W. Bush did the same five years later, in 1991. We don’t recall a public outcry prior to those broadcasts. They simply passed by unnoticed.

We haven’t seen the text of President Obama’s remarks, but it’s a good bet there’s no mind control involved. And as far as his administration’s “socialist agenda” goes, it may be instructive to compare our nation’s public education system and compulsory attendance laws to one of the tenets laid out by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto: “Free public education for all children.”

Students in Dothan’s public schools may not even be aware of the speech; there is no mandate that the broadcast be shown, and local school officials report that no classroom teachers have planned to show students the president’s address.

Perhaps they should. There has never been a president — or any politician, for that matter — who has been universally embraced. Any elected official and the ideas and philosophies they espouse will be criticized and even vilified by roughly half the population.

That’s part of the beauty of a free society. Ideas should be scrutinized, debated, defended, criticized and improved or thrown out. But it starts and ends with the availability of information — whether we agree with the information or not.