Eventually, every young student has this conversation with a teacher he trusts.
Perhaps you were in the third grade when the sensitive topic came up.
Possibly, you were a precocious child who raised the delicate question earlier.
You can only imagine how the dialogue is shaping up in classrooms across Idaho this week.
TIMMY: Mrs. Webster, can I get lead poisoning from a pencil? Congressman Russ Fulcher told my parents Friday here in Lewiston that “anyone who writes with a No. 2 pencil has got lead. We get it from China.”
MRS. WEBSTER: No, dear. Pencils are made from graphite, wood, rubber and metal ferrules to hold the eraser.
Graphite and lead are entirely different substances. Graphite is a nontoxic form of carbon, which you can see on our Periodic Table of Elements has an atomic number of 6. Lead is a heavy metal. See it on the Periodic Table? It has an atomic number of 82.
TIMMY: Were pencils ever made from lead?
MRS. WEBSTER: Not since antiquity. Here, let’s look up the website pencils.com. See what it says?
l 1564 — A large graphite deposit was discovered in Borrowdale, England. It was used as a writing instrument, first wrapped in string and then in wooden casings.
l 1662 — Pencils were first mass-produced in Nuremberg, Germany.
l 1812 — Cabinet-maker William Monroe of Concord, Mass., launched pencil-making in the United States.
TIMMY: But Congressman Fulcher says we don’t make pencils in America anymore because of environmental regulations. He blamed the shutdown of lead production. But is he right? Are all pencils imported from China and everywhere else?
MRS. WEBSTER: You see that No. 2 in your hand? It may have come from pencil plants in Georgia and Tennessee as well as Mexico, India and China. Ask a corporate executive and he’ll tell you where pencils get manufactured is based on economics, not environmental regulations.
TIMMY: But Congressman Fulcher said a lot of other things.
He said I can’t trust the FBI, the CIA or the National Security Agency because they are “acting outside the law.”
He said he wants to censure House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff for exaggerating what President Donald Trump said in his shakedown telephone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Yet my mom says the congressman garbled what Trump said by implying the president did not use the language suggesting he wanted a “favor” from Zelensky. She showed me the White House transcript. On it, the president said: “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.”
My mom said that when somebody pointed that out, the congressman said: “I’ll have to go back and check, but I don’t know that that word was used.”
What goes into a pencil is pretty simple. If he can’t get that right, what about the rest of what Congressman Fulcher said?
MRS. WEBSTER: I remember Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage. Somebody once asked her why she didn’t take the plight of Idaho’s imperiled salmon runs seriously. She replied: “How can I, when you go in and you can buy a can of salmon off the shelf at Albertsons?”
Then there was Congressman Bill Sali, who took the floor of the House to propose his bill to reduce gravity by 10 percent as a way to combat obesity.
And don’t forget Congressman Raul Labrador, who thought he knew more than an emergency room nurse and bellowed: “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.”
Dear, it’s time you knew: The people we send to Congress often say silly things.
TIMMY: But Mr. Fulcher is a member of Congress. I look up to him. He’s what you adults call an authority figure.
Dad says his appearance Friday was a town hall meeting paid for by the taxpayers, not some campaign rally. Dad says his job was to inform us, not try to repeat some political talking points. What’s a talking point?
Dad says Mr. Fulcher is in Washington, D.C.
We’re not.
He has access to legislative aides and expertise.
We don’t.
He can call up the Library of Congress to get the facts any time he wants.
We can’t.
MRS. WEBSTER: Timmy, maybe he’s just not the sharpest pencil in the box. — M.T.
