How to show children that democracy doesn't work

It's a South Dakota story.  A woman and her children returned to their Aberdeen apartment from a family vacation in the mountains and found an eviction notice on their door.  The issuer of the notice claimed the woman hadn't paid her rent.  She went to the building manager with her bank account statement to show that her rent check for the month had cleared, and to make preparations to move. However, upon checking her records the manager found that the rent was in fact paid up.  Just a mistake, she said.

The children did not accept that easy dismissal.  They regarded the eviction notice as an attempt to put them out on the street.  No dismissal or apology or cajoling from their mother could change the malice and menace that it represented to them.  So now they live in a place they hate because, they think, its managers intended to get rid of them. To the children, it signifies the kind of world they live in, a world that poses constant obstacles for them.  Children see the world as it treats them, not through the prisms of justification that we adults do.  

The single mother of the children says she will probably move to settle down the children, but to do so will be expensive and disruptive to their lives.  The kids have developed an adverse attitude toward the place; they don't want to live in a place that has indicated it doesn't want them.  Teachers note the perspicacity of children.  Kids see the realities and motives of the world,  and they don't believe or trust adult efforts to brush them aside or placate the children. They say many of their students confront realities and see through the artifices we erect to disguise the malevolent  attitudes and cerebral incompetence of adults.

To be lawful, evictions must be processed through a court, but South Dakota is notably partial to landlords in applying rules governing rental property.  The execution of an eviction is supposed to be done through an order of the court.  While the rules mention guaranteeing due process for renters, they don't specify how to implement that process.  Obtaining the court sanction to evict seems to be a routine, mechanical process.  The mother said in this case the landlord did not seem to have followed the procedure.  She simply asserted her authority, and in this state, no one challenges it.

I do not know the family involved personally. I know of the situation through a civil rights organization I have worked with and supported over the years.  It is monitoring the case.  The children's teachers observed how disturbed the children were and the school informed social workers about them, as they were so distracted that they couldn't concentrate on their school work.  

Civil rights leaders' concern about incidents like this eviction notice are based on the effects they have on children.  For kids to acquire respect and appreciation for American liberty, equality, justice, and equal opportunity, they have to be shown in their daily lives how those qualities of life work.  They have to have the principles of democratic beneficence applied to them.  The children in this family feel menaced by a legal procedure, although it was withdrawn.  They are wary about a threat that seems to lie in wait for an opportunity to strike again.

To those children, the adult world is not something that can be trusted.  That kind of distrust does not portend well for the future of our republic.  What they believe in the future will depend on how carefully the principles of our democracy are applied to them now.  Even evictions must be carried out in a spirit of good will.  Taping an eviction notice on a door expresses ill will.  And that is an expression of our society.