Just remember this: grown-ups don’t know everything

Published 1:30 am Saturday, May 9, 2026

DEAR READER: My favorite poet is Walt Whitman, who had a keen ear for overheard snippets of beauty and wisdom. In “I Hear America Singing,” he wrote of the “varied carols” wafting his way most every day:

The delicious singing of the mother,

or of the young wife at work,

or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else …

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

Last week, on a sparkling spring day along the birdwatchers’ boardwalk at Bowerman Basin, I encountered flocks of grade-school kids and their teachers. Children’s joyful voices blended with birdsong. Sandpiper Trail is an oasis of serenity from our discordant world.

I paused to eavesdrop several times, impressed by how much the kids already knew about the annual bird migration — and how much homework their teachers had done.

“You sure know a lot of stuff,” one kid told his teacher.

“Thank you,” she said. “Just remember, grown-ups don’t know everything.”

I wanted to hug her. But I just smiled, entered the exchange in my back-pocket notebook and continued on my way, uplifted.

Lately I’ve been thinking grown-ups don’t know anything, and how much better off we’d be if sixth-graders were eligible for Congress. For that matter, the average American sixth-grader is better behaved and more objective than the president of the United States. And infinitely smarter than the comic opera buffoon strutting about as “Secretary of War” with a flag hankie in his suit pocket.

If falsely accused, the old saying goes, you can at least expect a fair and impartial trial from “a jury of your peers.” I’d trust the average sixth-grader to be more circumspect about the rule of law than the grown-up voters who can’t be bothered to do any critical thinking — just social media rumormongering.

When my daughters were growing up, there was a poster in the hallway between their bedrooms. It featured the priceless advice from Robert Fulghum’s best-selling 1988 book, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” which has been translated into no less than 27 languages. One would think these truths, like those enumerated in the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, are self-evident:

“Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. Be aware of wonder. Take a nap every afternoon, and think what a better world it would be if we all had cookies and milk about 3 o’clock every afternoon. …”

BACK TO REALITY: There’ll be no cease fire any time soon in the tit for tat gerrymandering wars after the allegedly conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When the Democrats were in control, Republicans bemoaned the appointment of “activist” judges. Now that they’re in control, their activist judges are dismantling a half century of settled law.

Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a centrist Democrat from Texas, the Voting Rights Act prohibited racially discriminatory redistricting and outlawed the literacy tests widely used in the South since the 1880s to discourage Blacks from voting. Section 2 of the act closely followed the language of the 15th Amendment, which prohibits “the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color.” A year earlier, the use of poll taxes in national elections had been abolished by the 24th Amendment to the Constitution.

When I was in Mississippi in the 1960s with the U.S. Air Force, Black airmen told me their relatives had been turned away summarily at the polls or administered difficult voter literacy tests at a time when the average white Southern voter couldn’t have explained the difference between the Bill of Rights and a bill of sale.

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on the Voting Rights Act resurrects one of Jim Crow’s most powerful weapons: Redistricting.

A longstanding interpretation of the law is that majority-minority voting districts are required “when feasible” to ensure equal rights. As a practical matter, that caveat pales in comparison to the loophole the Supreme Court just created. States are now free to engage in partisan political gerrymandering “unless it can be proven that they did so on the basis of intentional racial discrimination,” notes Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor. “Since Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democratic, that will be impossible under the guidelines the court laid out.” In other words, “a state legislature can simply assert that the intent of its gerrymander is to favor Republican candidates, not white candidates.”

I’m reminded of a memorable moment on the campaign trail in 1968 when Nixon and Agnew were assailing the Democrats as weak on “law and order.” Slade Gorton, a Republican legislator from Seattle, was running for attorney general. “I have always been for law and order,” Gorton told a news conference, “but too many people today use the phrase when they really mean ‘Keep the n*****s in their place.’”

HAPPILY, our state is unlikely to join the escalating partisan battle over redistricting, with MAGA Republicans intent on redrawing districts to preserve and enhance their control of Congress in the mid-term elections and Democrats equally intent on saying “Two can play this game.”

On November 8, 1983, Washington voters passed the 74th Amendment to our state Constitution, mandating that a bipartisan Redistricting Commission oversee the redrawing of congressional and legislative districts after each federal census. Reconvening the commission earlier would require a two-thirds majority in the state House and Senate.

Rather than cleaning up their own mega-MAGA mess, the Trumplicans here are intent on undermining voter confidence by spreading the lie that our state’s vote-by-mail process is fundamentally flawed, never mind that the reforms were championed by five Republican secretaries of state, notably Ralph Munro and Sam Reed.

I wish, dear reader, that I could buy you cookies and milk this afternoon. But I’m economizing. Gas is pushing 6 bucks a gallon in greater America because too many grown-ups flunked kindergarten.

John C. Hughes was chief historian for the Office of the Secretary of State for 17 years after retiring as editor and publisher of The Daily World in 2008.