The Razor

In seventh grade, I got quite sick with a rather serious case of strep throat leaving me bedridden for about two weeks. I had lost my father two years before, my mother’s sister was killed crossing the street near her home a few months after that, my sister’s fiancee died in a car accident, my favorite sister lost a child during birth, and two months later my niece with Down’s Syndrome, so special to me in ways that bring a tear to the eye just thinking about her now, would die on the operating table. Needless to say I wasn’t the most emotionally stable 13 year old. When I returned to school, I noticed immediately something was wrong. As I climbed the stairs kids were looking away from me, not catching my eye. As I reached the top of the stairs and opened the double doors several boys met me. “Welcome back Kirwin,” one said, then sucker punched me in the face. I fell backward through the doors onto my back.

Before I had gotten sick I had written a list of 10 people I didn’t like called my “Sh*t List”. This list contained the names of popular boys, jocks who called me names during recess and boys who pushed me around in gym – guys I didn’t like. I remember I added the last name, a boy I didn’t have any trouble with but who hung with the guys I didn’t like, simply because I needed to round up the list to 10. I don’t know why I did it, and it wasn’t the last time my writing would lead to trouble. I made the mistake of telling my best friends about this list that I kept in my desk (another mistake), and one of them, a transfer from another Catholic school, decided to take it out of my desk and betray me to those on the list in order to score points with the popular kids.

The last two years at that school were hell for me because of that list and the betrayal. I lost all my friends at school and was shunned by everyone. I remember standing alone in the corner of the playground playing a mental game with the digital clock at a bank across the street, seeing if I could judge when the minutes would change simply through feel without counting, desperate for recess to be over. Outside school my best friends including my personal Judas would hang out with me, but at school I was alone. For the rest of my tenure there I was at the bottom of the social ladder. Those wishing to climb it would push me around to appear tough, boosting their appeal with those at the top. To the girls of the class I was a non-entity, a weakling of no consequence.

My mother was devastated by the same losses I was going through, and she tried everything. We spoke to my teachers, the principal and the pastor. None could offer much help. The principal suggested I could transfer to another school, but then followed up the suggestion with the observation that the bullying and ostracism would follow me there. When my Judas gave me the nickname of the Italian slang word for “penis”, and all the kids in the class started calling me that, my mother suggested I call him the Gaelic word for outhouse. Nice try mom.

The only thing she didn’t try and which I was too scared to do at the time was encourage me to fight back.

Being bullied changed my life. It pushed me onto a deeply destructive path throughout my teens and twenties that finally culminated 13 years ago in the choice of sobriety or a life alone in the gutter. Before the bullying I was a stellar student taking advanced math classes dreaming of a life in Academia. Afterward all I cared about was Oblivion, doing almost anything to achieve it. My grades cratered. I sought the extremes of subcultures and the solace of artists and the drugs and alcohol they called their muses.  I suffered flashbacks, waking up with the faces of my 13 year old tormentors in my twenty-something year old mind. It took years of bitter experience, counseling and therapy to finally let go of the anger, the hatred of my tormentors, and the loss of my childhood brought about through Fate and the brutality of children.

With the birth of my son I put my personal experience to work. When he came crying to me about being bullied, I comforted him but I also told him, “Next time, fight back.” As he progressed through school I realized that fighting back against bullies was being discouraged. Teachers and school administrators would punish both children for fighting, refusing to make the effort to determine who was right and wrong, who was the victim and who was the victimizer. I learned an important lesson about public school systems: they always follow the path of least resistance and especially the path of least effort. If a fight broke out they had to have authorities who were nearby and paying attention to what the kids were doing. It’s far easier to not expend the effort to be vigilant and be alerted to a fight after one has started then simply punish both sides.

Imagine cops being called to a domestic violence situation and arresting both aggressor and victim because they didn’t want to take the time to investigate what happened, deciding it’s easier to throw both in jail. Will this deter the batterer next time? No but it will deter the victim from screaming too loud and alerting the authorities.

This is a terrible lesson to teach kids.

What prompted this little bit of soul exposure on the Internet? Bookworm Room’s post, Schools and parents who teach children to become chum for bullies. Bookworm writes, “I cannot believe that a mother told her child to be a punching bag for bullies.  Moreover, I cannot believe that a mother told this to her girl child. One of the primary lessons women learn in every self-defense class is this:  if you fight back against someone who is assaulting you, you are likely to suffer physical injuries, but you are also much less likely than the passive victim to be raped or killed.”

In adolescence I told my son, “Don’t worry about the School. I’ll take care of them. You just make sure that if you can’t avoid a fight, you inflict as much pain on your tormentor as possible.” I knew this from experience. A busted lip will disappear in days; shame lasts a lifetime.

Bookworm agrees:

 

Ever since my kids hit school, I’ve given them a single message: Never be the one to start a fight but, if someone else starts the fight, you make sure to end it. And don’t worry about the school’s subsequent response. If you had to use physical force to defend yourself, and if the school attempts to punish you, I will take the school on if I have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. I’ve never had to make good on this promise, since no one has ever physically attacked my kids. I suspect that, with my instruction ringing in their ears, they don’t walk around like shark bait.

 

I made the Kid a promise. If he gets in trouble for defending himself he has nothing to fear. I would hire lawyers to turn his principal into a Cinco de Mayo pinata in court. I would own the trailers his bullies called “home,”  have them moved to our property, set them on fire and roast s’mores in the flames. I’ve backed this up with personal appearances at the principal’s office whenever there was a whiff of trouble. He knows I have his back even when I’m not there, and that confidence itself has deterred trouble. Bullies smell weakness like sharks smell chum. The personal losses I suffered between 1977-1980 weakened me. Had Fate been kinder I suspect I would not have become a target and suffered such life-changing torment.

But the lessons of standing up to bullies go far beyond the school yard. My experience has made me extremely suspicious of authority, whether small town cops, multi-national companies or the Federal Government. It has driven me to stand up to bad bosses and quit jobs rather than suffer torment in the workplace. When a company pisses me off I will fire off letters or even go to court. Neighbors have tried bullying me and received letters from attorneys then been forced to reimburse me for my trouble.

Bookworm Room writes, “I always back up this instruction to my kids by telling them that, had Jews not been conditioned by centuries of oppression to avoid arms, put their heads down, and try to appease authorities, its likely that the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened.  Please understand that I’m not blaming those victims.  First, no one could ever have imagined what the Germans intended to do.  Second, the Jews’ behavior wasn’t a conscious decision.  It was the result of a thousand years of conditioning.  Israel, thankfully, while not blaming the victims, nevertheless learned the lesson.  Like my children, Israel won’t start a fight, but she will finish it.”

We should be teaching our children to fight back and not be victims. Bullies don’t disappear at age 20; they will always be with us so learning how to confront them should be taught as a life skill in our schools.

My elderly mother waits for a bed in a hospital hallway, an oxygen line in her nose, and her 92 year old body racked with fever. “I don’t know why the good Lord won’t take me,” she sighs to my older sister and her husband. My sister had to call in sick from her teaching job because she and her husband were awakened in the middle of the night by my mother’s frightened calls from her bedroom where she has lived for the past 8 years. “Men are banging on my head,” she shouted, the fever causing hallucinations as well as headaches. Another trip to the ER, another long wait for a medicare hospital bed, looking at cell phone screens and tattered magazine covers of healthy, young celebrities as the minutes slip into hours and the sunlight waxes then wanes in the window at the end of the hallway. My sister dials my number.

Seeing her number on my screen I immediately steel myself for the worst, as if such a thing is possible. Is mom gone I wonder as I fumble with my new smart phone, presenting me with multitude of choices (“Ignore call? Send a text? Shop for phones at Amazon.com? Decide quick because I’ll cut over to voice mail in 3, 2, 1.  Swipe right to answer?” Seriously?) I answer her call. “We’re at the hospital,” my sister begins, and explains mom’s latest scare. She’s tired, weary from seemingly endless trips like this that turn her day upside down. I hear it in her voice, and have learned to simply let her talk. “Mom told me to call you,” she said.  “I haven’t told anybody else.”

I’m about 1000 miles away in a different time zone. The others, three other sisters and a brother, all live within 20 minutes of the hospital yet I am the one called first.

At the age of 16 I saw my future, and I rebelled against it. As the youngest of six children I had gone from the earliest memories of family gatherings with everyone in attendance, through the death of my father to spending Christmas Eve at one sister’s household, then Christmas Day visiting another’s, ending with dinner at my brother’s house. When one sister needed help, my mother expected me to help. Baby sitting. Grass cutting. House repairs. I became my mother’s agent in her effort to keep her family together. At the same time I saw my mother’s love for me had no boundaries. She would do anything for me, at any time, and this scared me to death.

At 18 I moved to Chicago. Ten months later my mother drove all night and rescued me from an abusive relationship, bringing me to safety back home. A few years later I embarrassed myself and she was there, picking me up and cleaning up my mess.  At age 21 I tried again and have been gone since. I had to leave because I knew that if I ever got in a jam, she would get me out of it. I had to fail on my own. I had to clean up my own mistakes, not rely upon my mother to do the dirty job for me. I knew if I stayed I would never be strong enough to resist her seemingly boundless love. The temptation would be too strong to take advantage of her. Escape was my only option, and I took it.

First it was to California, then it was on to Japan. Then it was to Africa. She went an entire year without hearing my voice, receiving only the occasional letter regaling her of my adventures in the Bush. Then it was back to Japan and phone calls that were brief and infrequent. I had the excuse that they were expensive and she accepted it graciously, pleased just to be hearing from me. I told her about the Japanese and the strange food. She told me about the latest birth of a great-grandchild.

Then back to the United States with my own little family, but bypassing St. Louis to live 900 miles away among the Wife’s family in Delaware. Even though I lived closer to her, the calls were still infrequent, and the visits were only a few days once a year. Her health declined and she ended up living with my sister “Just until I recover,” she said. That was eight years ago, and one of my nephews now lives in her home. She’ll never go back. There are too many stairs and no friends or family nearby, the neighborhood now filled with refugees from Bosnia who speak poor English. They are decent people but the neighborhood that my mother knew in the 1970s and 1980s is gone.

I have learned that guilt is inescapable, and as I have aged I no longer run from it. I still only visit once a year but now I call twice weekly. I tell her about my chickens and my dogs, and she tells me about the deer my brother-in-law feeds in their backyard. When she’s sharp we talk about family history; when she’s not I listen to her tell me about her chronic back pain and her health.

My sister tells me that she has tried convincing my brother to stay at her house the three days she and her husband have to go to attend their son’s wedding in West Virginia in December. “He says he’ll think about it,” she spits. I’ve told her that a nearby nursing home can provide a short stay for our mother while she’s gone, but it’s clearly a last resort. Our eldest sister has to care for her husband who has been incapacitated by a stroke for 9 years. Another sister has the responsibility of caring for her grown son with Downs Syndrome. That leaves my brother and my second sister.

As the family genealogist whenever I visited my mother I came with a small video camera and recorded her talking about the past. My brother’s heart condition and my second sister’s rebellion against the family cover everything like shadows. I ask my mother what she was doing when she heard JFK was assassinated, and she frames her answer in the context or my brother’s illness. “It was November and he always tended to get sick that time of year,” she said on video taken two years ago. Of the hours of recordings I have taken over the past five years nearly half touch upon in some way the trouble my parents had with my sister and my brother’s heart condition. In 1966 he received open heart surgery, but that didn’t end the trouble. After that he constantly fought with my father, forcing my mother into the role of peacemaker or at the very least, peacekeeper. They hadn’t spoken to each other for at least a year when our father died a decade later. “It’s a terrible burden he has to live with,” my mother once said. And he bears it very well, I remember thinking at the time, having had a successful career in the Defense Department, married with three children.

This past Summer my mother ended up having a stroke and was in recovery at a local nursing home. I flew in to St. Louis with my son, and I spent as much time as I could manage with her. My brother found out I was in town and wanted me to come to his house or meet somewhere for dinner. I suggested he come to visit us at the nursing home. After several calls and messages back and forth he ended up visiting the nursing home, spending 15 minutes speaking to my son at the foot of our mother’s bed, before going back to “work” – a job he took after retiring from the government with a gold-plated retirement package. He also spends hours during the week at the hospital where he had his heart surgery, volunteering and tending the families with children in similar straights as ours was 50 years ago. I’ve heard he’s well liked and appreciated by the families there. I’m sure he is.

Then there’s the second sister. She married well, and turned her back on her family early on. She had two children, both of whom have also married well, and several grandchildren as far as I know. I haven’t seen any of them in nearly 20 years. She spends her time volunteering at a nursing home, where I also hear the patients love her. She never visited our mother during her eight week stay in the nursing home just 15 minutes away from her house.

The irony isn’t lost on my sister, as I listen to her cry her frustrations over the phone. There is nothing I can offer, not even “She’ll reap what she sows,” because honestly my second sister has lived a charmed life. She turned her back on her family, has made my mother cry countless times, and has suffered no consequences. From what I’ve been told my mother even took a beating or two from our father over her. No karmatic backlash for my sister’s behavior, nothing like “just desserts” or anything. Instead she has prospered and apparently succeeded beyond her wildest teenage dreams.

The call ends with “I’ll keep you updated throughout the day. Love you,” from my sister. She’s the one I used to point to the sky and say her name whenever an airplane flew overhead because she was a TWA stewardess. While the memories of my childhood aren’t the best, the good ones usually involve her. The trips to IHop with her and her boyfriend, the 45 singles of bands she thought I’d like, the birthday cards with more exclamation points and underlines than words. She is my “special sister” and has become all the more so because of the sacrifice she has made for our mother decades later.

It’s only occurred to me recently that my mother’s only failure as a parent was raising selfish children. These have gone on to raise even more selfish grandchildren. I hope that when her life comes to an end whether today or tomorrow or sometime in the future that she never realizes that. It would break her heart, and she has known too much of that in her lifetime.

I suspect that instead she will hear my beloved niece shout “Nana!” as she envelopes in her a warm embrace, my father, her siblings and her parents looking on, and she won’t care about our selfishness. Because of her sacrifice we, her children, have all turned out well. And that’s all she ever wanted. It will be our duty as her children to make our peace with that.

I love American football. As a kid I loved playing pick-up games of it in our suburban backyards and touch versions in the street. Our city was cursed with the St. Louis Football Cardinals who eventually took their stinking-on-ice team to Arizona where they still suck, and most of my friends were from outside the area so I took to supporting their teams. My friend Ron H. was from Philadelphia, so I started rooting for the Eagles. But this was the era of the Steel Curtain, so I found myself cheering for the Pittsburgh Steelers as well. In fact I liked almost all the football teams except for my hometown disappointments.

After my bohemian period during which I thought American football was jejune and bourgeois, I had fallen in love with a woman who rekindled my interest in the Philadelphia Eagles after we moved into the area. I’ve rarely written about the sport because I have nothing to say beyond the usual “Go Birds” and the attendant “Cowboys Suck!” that comes with being a Philly fan. After moving south of the Mason Dixon, I have paid hundreds of dollars to watch the Eagles and other NFL teams play on DirecTV every season.

But every season the game seems to lose some of its appeal. Maybe there are too many penalties in an attempt to make the game safe. Maybe it’s because I’m growing older and have seen some pretty bad things happen to people. Maybe it’s because I’m just turning into a big pussy. But there’s only so many times I can see a player get hit and lay motionless on the ground while holding my breath before I begin to think something is wrong both with the sport and my enjoyment of it.

I love the sheer athleticism on display. I revel in the impossible plays just like any other fan. And yes these men are paid millions to destroy their bodies, but does the lucre they are paid free us fans from guilt? We are being entertained by men damaging their bodies in ways we would not do ourselves, or allow our children to do. I didn’t let my son play football even when he expressed interest in the sport. At the time I was more worried about a broken neck or ruined knees. That was before CTE, Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disease that destroys the brain and is specific to the sports boxing and football. Soccer players don’t exhibit it, nor do baseball players or lacrosse players. CTE does not wait until players are in their 70s or 80s to exhibit signs; it has been found in the brain of an 18 year old football player.

I am no nanny. If you want to kill yourself with drugs or whatever, fine – do so just not in front of me because I have a conscience and I will intervene to stop you. That is the way I was raised. For the past few years my conscience has been stirring when I watch American football, and seeing this program on PBS pretty much seals the deal. The NFL has denied the existence of CTE the exact same way the tobacco companies denied cancer caused by smoking. Recently the league has pushed the problem into the future by calling for “more study” just as the cigarette companies called for further research on lung cancer when the Science behind the causative link between smoking and lung cancer was unequivocal. What they’ve done is criminal but not surprising given the amount of money league owners have invested in the game.

Many of my friends have turned to European football known as soccer here in the States, and while watching the game seems about as exciting as watching a cat lick itself, at least I can watch it without my conscience stirring.

Perhaps technology can someday come to the rescue. Imagine: no penalties, no guilt, and as violent as we can make it. We could watch a true Steel Curtain descend on the opposing robot team and pulverize them, sending bits of plastic, steel and oil flying. Then, and only then will I be ready for some football.

The text message came soon after the Wife arrived at work. One of her patients, a 17 year old boy, was in the ICU of a large hospital in a nearby city. She would be late tonight since she was going to make the hour long trip into the city to visit him. Details were scant. He had been in a dirt bike accident with injuries severe enough to warrant being airlifted from his rural home to the city. He is a good kid, right around the age of our child who happens to own a dirt bike.

The typical reaction to such stories is to blame the victim for his (and it’s invariably a “he”) stupid actions that resulted in the accident. But who hasn’t done stupid things as a 17 year old? And whose 17 year old has never done stupid things? Stupid things are what our children do, and most of the time they get away with it.

But sometimes they don’t and when they don’t very bad consequences follow. Nightmarish consequences for us parents.

The dinner will be cold when the Wife returns, and that’s okay. Better for her to share some warmth with her patient and his parents right now. She’s a doctor; it’s what she does.
———————————
She arrived at the hospital to the clipped sounds of a helicopter arriving, and by the time she made it to the ICU only a minute remained for visiting hours. She explained she was the boy’s* doctor, and apologized for arriving so late. The nurse smiled and led her down the hall to his room. She explained that over the weekend there had been six motorcycle accidents, six mangled bodies that had arrived along with the boy’s. Only two others besides him remained alive. His prognosis, she asked?  Several surgeries ahead of him. Worst of all likely paralysis.

She walked into the room and the first thing she noticed was her name on boy’s vitals monitor as his primary care physician. Pasted on the monitor was a Fox sticker, a brand of popular off-road clothing and accessories. Then her eyes fell upon her patient, and the lump where his left leg should have laid under the covers was flat. The rest of his body was swathed in various casts with leads and tubes dropping from his body. From beneath it all he smiled and said, “Ah, it’s my doctor.”

His grandmother stood up and welcomed the Wife into the room. She was a stern, strong looking woman who like many men and women her age had been forced to raise not just one but two generations of children. She explained the accident. The boy’s father had given him the bike years ago as a Christmas present, and as he had gotten older he had begun taking it on the road. He knew that dirt bikes were not made for the road. The knobbed tires were made to grip the sides of muddy hills but provided little traction on asphalt. But he had done it so many times that he had lost the sense of danger, giving him a false sense of safety. Early on a foggy weekend morning he took the dirt bike on the road as he had done many times before. This being haying season, large tractors are often found on roads throughout the day, moving from farm to farm to cut, spread and bale the hay eaten by the livestock in the state. By the time Brian saw the tractor it was too late. The bike slid out from under him but caught his left leg, flipping several times before dragging him under the tractor. The shaken farmer called 911.

The wife made small talk with her patient. They talked about how things, and she asked him how much he knew about his condition. He knew it was bad but like a typical 17 year old he knew he would come of it okay. He talked about getting back to school, seeing his friends, who already had begun to appear at his bedside, making the long trip from town. He had a future, and he was going to meet it. She said she’d check in on him in a few days, and left his bedside to speak to his grandmother in the hallway.

The grandmother was not as confident about her grandson’s future. Unlike him she knew what lay ahead, and so did the Wife. She began to cry, and so did the Wife. She is a mother after all too.

She left to the sound of chopper blades landing on the building rising above her, bringing more broken people, mangled dreams, and tears. Would the boy overcome the consequences of his stupidity? She had seen it happen before and would likely see it again. She kept that thought with her as she made the long journey home.

 

*Names and other identifying features and events have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.

There’s a neighborhood K-5 public school in the middle class suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. This school employs 18 teachers and 3 full time teacher’s assistants. It also has a staff of 2 full time special education teachers to help integrate special needs children with everything from autism to Down’s Syndrome into classes. So the 300 students who attend the school will be taught by 20 full time teachers and 3 teachers assistants.

This school also employs a librarian, a social worker, a guidance counselor, an occupational therapist, a speech therapist,  an assistant principal and a principal. I have ties that I still wear that are older than the principal who makes $130k a year, and the assistant principal probably makes $20k less.

Assume for a minute that all the teachers make the same, ignoring that there is some variation due to experience, skill-set and gender, but the teacher’s assistants make only minimum wage so we’ll ignore them for now. Let’s make the teacher salary a unit called “teacher“.

With some variation the librarian, a social worker, guidance counselor, occupational therapist, and speech therapist all make the same; assume each makes the same as a teacher, so that’s 5 teachers. The principal’s salary is the equivalent of more than two teachers salaries but the assistant principal’s salary equals less than two teachers salaries, so they balance out to two teachers each, making 4 teachers.

There are also four child psychologists based at this school. These psychologists do spend time at other schools, but those schools also have their own psychologists, some of whom visit this neighborhood K-5 public school. These psychologists are all Ph. Ds with each earning about 1.5 teachers  for a total of 6 teachers.

I’m sure non-teaching professionals provide some value to students, but it’s impossible to determine exactly what since there is no external pressure on these jobs. When budget cuts threaten, the principal doesn’t lose her job the music teacher does. One might think the vaunted teachers’ union that is such the bugaboo of the Right would protect the teachers from such cuts, but they don’t because the union leadership swaps out with school administrators in the district, so they don’t rock the boat because they don’t want to lose these positions when they come open. And although I personally love libraries, I recognize I love the idea of libraries. I devour books the way anacondas devour unlucky villagers, but I haven’t bought a book printed on paper in several years. More importantly, I haven’t used a library as a general reference resource in over a generation. Don’t get me wrong, as a genealogist libraries are crucial, but  few K-5 kids are pouring over baptismal records on microfilm from 150 years ago. If the school employs a librarian, does it also employ a blacksmith and cooper? If not, why not?

So we have 20 teachers that actually teach, and 15 teachers who don’t. Out of the 35 teachers the taxpayers of this community pays for it only receives 20 teachers, a loss of more than 42%. And that doesn’t even count the overhead of the school district, a vast sprawling enterprise that consumes a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer revenue each year serving 22,000 students.

That’s $11,364 per student. The school also has a teacher-student ratio of 1:15, yet no teacher earns the $170k that ratio would suggest but the superintendent earns much more than that himself. In terms of actual pay the teacher-student ratio should be 1:5. Why is it three times higher?

While the school’s teacher-student ratio is publicized, what is the school administrator-teacher ratio? I understand that some support personnel are needed for teachers and students, but what keeps this school district from hiring too many, and if the system becomes top heavy with administrators, how does the district rebalance this teacher-administrator balance? What prevents a school district from demanding hire property taxes then using that money to hire a “self-esteem co-ordinator“, another school psychologist or perhaps a pay raise for the superintendent?

In the private sector when a company’s middle management gets too big it is reorganized and people are fired. This pressure comes from shareholders who vote with their money; when the firm is doing well it is assumed to be well run and the stock rises. When a firm does poorly shareholders assume it’s not well run and drive the price down resulting in restructuring and layoffs. When a firm is poorly managed it usually becomes a takeover target the way a wounded seal becomes a meal for a shark.

There is no pressure like this in public education (or medicine – which is a future topic), so how can the taxpayers make a school run efficiently, guaranteeing that their money is used to educate children instead of paying for Caribbean vacations for principals and their spouses?

One of the elite private K-6 elementary schools in St. Louis costs $15,822. That’s less than a $4,500 difference with much better results and a teacher-student ratio of only 1:7. Part of this difference could be made up by disbanding the US Department of Education and applying it’s $70 billion yearly budget to students in the form of a voucher. More savings could come from disbanding Missouri’s educational department. It’s difficult to calculate what that savings would be because some of the State’s money helps fund individual school districts, but for argument’s sake let’s assume that the savings cut the $4,500 difference down to $3,000.  Would it be too much to ask parents to come up with $3k a year to pay for their own child’s education?

$3,000 is $250 a month. That’s a lot in some households, but somehow these same households manage to have cell phone service, cable, high speed internet, and various tattoos and piercings some of which cost thousands of dollars each. “That which is free is abused,” is one of Life’s great truisms, and forcing parents to pay for their children’s education, in the same way that Obamacare compels people to spend money on health insurance, makes them take a personal stake in their child’s education, one of the great problems all teachers face today. As for parents who have more than one child, most private schools offer discounts for multiple enrollments, and besides, why should the rest of Society pay for someone’s personal choice to have a large family? I own a large plot of land by choice, and I pay for that through higher property taxes and a bigger mortgage. I do not expect any type of relief from Society even though I am protecting the land from development and providing a sanctuary for wildlife on an important watershed in America’s Southeast. Now that I think of it, perhaps I should…

God save the (future) king!

 

While waiting for a video to start at YouTube I was subjected to an ad that I couldn’t escape. Normally when forced in such a situation I open another browser window and minimize the window running the advertisement until it’s over, but something immediately caught my eye in this commercial so I kept watching it. I quickly realized I was watching History being made. Here’s the ad:

 

For decades Madison Avenue has treated men as buffoons in the laundry room and the kitchen, barely able to put two words together in a sentence without their wive’s condescending help. It’s as if advertising agencies are stuck in the 1970s while the rest of America has moved on.

In my household I do all of the cooking and most of the housework. I also did most of the laundry until I passed the task onto my teenage son when I got tired of doing midweek loads so that he could wear his favorite shirt twice in one week. And I happen to be extremely brand loyal to only a handful of products, and Tide happens to be one of those brands. I don’t think I’ve used another laundry detergent since returning to the States from abroad 16 years ago.

I’ve spoken to other men who have taken on what has been traditionally considered “woman’s work” for a variety of reasons. Some like me have done so because their wives work longer hours. Others do it because they like the independence that comes with keeping a household functioning. Still others, including myself, view it as yet another expression of a man’s mastery of his world. If I can replace the heating element of the clothes dryer, why shouldn’t I be able to properly launder the clothes that go into the appliance?

In the YouTube comments a commentator sees this advertisement as the continued feminization of men, but I don’t see it that way at all. I see a father sharing the joy of raising a child and building a bond with her that will last a lifetime and embodying the qualities of fatherhood. I see a man showing the masculine trait of being comfortable within his own skin and not worrying about what others think. I see a man who by extending the definition of manly to include what was once considered the domain of women underscores the independent spirit laying at the heart of what it means to be a man.

Being a man doesn’t mean taking on a role which has traditionally defined the sex; it means extending that role into new areas of living that prove the creative and positive nature of masculinity to women and to the boys who look up to them asking themselves what being a man in the 21st century means. It’s not switching gender roles with women but moving our identity to encompass new ground, and doing so quietly, with humility and confidence.

Yes it’s just a commercial, but its presentation was so different that not only did it keep me watching it in amazement, but served to give me hope that while men have been devalued and derided so often and for so long, perhaps attitudes are beginning to change. I’m cynical enough to not hold my breath, and in the meantime I’ve got to move a load of laundry into the dryer.

I was in the mood for stir-fry and decided to hit the local food market that seems to have everything you need even though the store itself is tiny, and I wasn’t going to let a heavy rain stop me from getting some fresh vegetables. On my way to the market I turned on a rural highway that runs quite straight between a secondary road and a small town where the market is. The rain was pretty steady, and even though I often take that straight-away at least twice a day and rarely drive the speed limit, the rain makes the road slick, and there is quite a bit of on-coming traffic because it is one of the main thoroughfares through the county.

Ahead of me the driver caught my eye because the road is straight yet the car weaved into the oncoming lane. At first I figured he or she was avoiding a puddle or a down tree branch, but then he did it again, and again. I’d come upon the wet tire tracks and they were clearly as much as half-way into the on-coming traffic lane.  The car was a late-90’s model Nissan, tan with a faded butterfly sticker in the center of the back window. I began to pay closer attention but I continued to make excuses. Perhaps she (because what man, at least in rural North Carolina drives with a butterfly sticker on his car) wasn’t paying attention because there was no on-coming traffic at the time, but that theory was blown when she stayed in the opposite lane while a black truck appeared at the top of the hill. I sped up and flashed my lights at her and the truck, hoping that either one of them would respond and avoid a collision. She swerved back into her lane a few instants before coming upon the truck, and I was pissed.

On this very rural two-lane highway my elderly neighbor lost her daughter in a head-on crash 15 years ago. Rural roads like this, two lane highways with only a double yellow line separating drivers moving 55-75 mph in opposite directions, are some of the most dangerous roads in America, and why rural driving is responsible for more fatalities than city or suburban driving. As the parent of a 16 year old in a rural area I am perhaps a bit more sensitive than others when it comes to the topic, but fear is only a problem when it’s unwarranted.

I sped up and hoped that I could at least get her license number, but I couldn’t safely catch up to her and see through the rain. As we approached the small town the speed limit drops in 10 mph increments until it’s 35 mph at the edge where a gas station and the food market sit, but she ignored the speed drops continuing on in the rain at 60+ mph, swerving several times along the way. The local police often hang out at the gas station, but of course today they didn’t, so her flying past it at 25 mph above the speed limit went on noticed by the Law. So much for also cornering her and confronting her personally if she pulled into the gas station or the market.

I debated calling 911. I’ve done so in the past but usually in places and at times when the police are more of a presence. Sunday afternoon in a small town in the rain with no license number nor a good description of the vehicle other than a butterfly sticker isn’t going to likely lead to her being pulled over. Thankfully someone pulled in front of her and at least made her slow down as she headed into the center of town, and so I pulled into the food market feeling frustrated and not very hungry anymore.

I don’t think she was drunk; drunk drivers usually don’t veer towards one particular side of a lane the way she did, but instead drift from side to side as likely to run onto the shoulder as cross the center line. She was too far ahead of me to see exactly what she was doing but I suspect that she was texting, looking down at her phone then looking up and jerking the wheel and over-steering. Even if I had confronted her in the parking lot I doubt I’d have done much good. I’m a middle-aged bald guy, making it impossible to leave any impression on people half my age or less. I’m pretty sure I’m invisible to them even if I am steaming mad.

So instead what I really wanted to do was talk to her dad, a man likely close to my age. On the way home with my bag of veggies I composed this to him.

I’m a complete stranger to you but there is something that binds you and me together. We both have a kid, and chances are you love your daughter almost as much as I love my son. What I saw today would have made your blood run cold because it sure scared me. The rain was heavy, the road slick, but your daughter was driving as if it were dry pavement seemingly more interested in something other than the 1 1/2 tons of plastic and sheet metal she was flying down a 35 mph road at 65 mph in.

Did you get her that car for her 16th birthday? Was it a graduation present? When you visited the car dealer and she was excitedly checking out the car that you would buy for her, did you imagine her lifeless body collapsed inside of it? Did you imagine me, a complete stranger pulling over and dialing 911 in a panic before running out and trying to pull her from the twisted wreckage?

Or how about the black truck she made a bee-line for at speed. What if she hadn’t looked up and corrected her driving? What if you not only learned that you had lost a daughter but that she had taken someone out with her, someone else’s child or a young family? You hear the local news; you know what goes around here. Things like this happen all the time. Those crosses and flowers along side our roads don’t get put there and tended for no reason.

But today you got lucky. Your daughter made it home and you’re none the wiser about what I witnessed this afternoon a few miles from my home where my teenage son is texting his friends about the cars he’s looking at. Ignorance isn’t bliss when every time that girl grabs the keys is a dice roll. For men like you and me the dice we throw have many more sides; the odds are in our favor. But those our children throw are much smaller with fewer sides, and the likelihood of our nightmare becoming real is much, much greater. Your daughter’s odds aren’t very good judging by what I saw today. I don’t know whether the failure is yours, or your wife’s or the state of North Carolina for handing that girl a license. But whomever is to blame the crushing pain that lays in your future will be yours alone to bear.

I can only hope – no pray and I don’t do that much given my beliefs – that you somehow see what I saw today for yourself, and get those keys away from that girl for her own sake, yours, and mine – because next time that may not be a black truck she heads for it might be my son’s, and in an instant we won’t be complete strangers anymore.

 

I usually don’t review books, let alone children’s books, but every once in awhile something comes a long that deserves my admiration.

Cannon the Brown Bear: An Illustrated Children’s Fable is a very simply story about a bear who begins free and happy and who provides for himself. But then he starts to receive food handouts and even his den is dug out for him, and he begins to find himself unhealthy and bored and unhappy. So one day he takes back his independence and begins to rely on his own resourcefulness to provide for himself, and his life is much fuller because of this.

I enjoyed the book very much. Some may find this message to be political which is a shame. Maybe it’s because I’m old but I didn’t find the message very “political” at all. Is it right wing to teach children the value of reaping what you sow? Is it Republican for children to read fables that could have been read 2,500 years ago by a Greek like Aesop? Since when is learning to provide for yourself a political act?

And I particularly enjoyed the fact that the illustrations were done by a child. As a fan of the classic illustrators like the Wyeths, I appreciate the artistry of the medium, and seeing it done with a child’s hand adds authenticity to the work.

If you are looking for a book for those in the 3-7 range, consider this one. It’s Kyle’s first work, and honestly, it’s one of the better first books I’ve read as of late. Kudos to Michaela for a job well done illustrating the work.

Measles cases have soared in the UK, making it second in Europe behind only Romania in the number of cases. Last year the UK had 2,000 cases and so far this year it has had 1,200, putting it on track for another record breaking year. Of those sickened, about 20 have been hospitalized with serious complications including pneumonia and meningitis. In 1998 a paper published by Andrew Wakefield and others suggested there was a link between the measles vaccine and autism. As a result, measles vaccination levels plummeted in the UK, from 90% of children down to 54%. The measles epidemic now hitting the UK is a direct consequence of this failure.

I had a child when the scare hit, and I sympathize to a degree with the parents who thought they were doing right by their children by avoiding the vaccine. The parental instinct is to protect your child, and exposing him or her to dangerous agents intentionally, trusting faceless authorities to have done their due diligence and provide a safe vaccine isn’t easy, especially while no vaccine has zero side effects and every instance of those who did experience them gets press while nothing is written about those vaccinated and exposed to measles who were protected from the disease. Wakefield’s paper and the press he received from it fed into a natural suspicion people have for authority. Skipping the vaccine seemed sensible, especially since doing so had no immediate effect as herd immunity offered some protection for the unvaccinated.

Around my hometown of St. Louis there are several high schools and colleges run by Christian Scientists, a religious sect that believes in the power of prayer instead of the science of Medicine. While this may seem quaint or irrational to those of us in the 21st century,  at the time Mary Baker Eddy founded the group in the late 19th century Germ Theory had yet to become orthodoxy in Medicine and it wasn’t until the 1920’s that going to a doctor offered any benefit as opposed to staying at home. In fact hospitals at the time were good places to get sicker. Students at these schools are not vaccinated, and measles outbreaks are common and deaths from the disease are not unknown. Either God had an ax to grind with the Christian Scientists or measles vaccination was a pretty good idea. Perhaps the Brits would have benefited from the presence of this sect on their territory to see what happens when children aren’t vaccinated, but it’s doubtful. The specter of Autism is pretty powerful, especially when authorities have been wrong so often in the past.

But in this case they weren’t wrong; Dr. Wakefield was, and kids are paying the price for his mistake and their parents’ bad decisions.

 

Last night the wife and I were outside on the deck, listening to the spring peepers while allowing her to decompress from her stressful day as a rural family physician. That often includes brief deprogramming sessions after she listens to NPR on the way home from the practice. During the drive she heard a story about the shooting death of a young black girl in Chicago who had performed at the President’s inauguration. I am lucky to be married to one of the smartest people I’ve ever met who doesn’t realize it, so she already knew that the gang violence behind the murder of Hadiya Pendleton had nothing to do with lawfully owned guns or “gun culture”.

She recognized as an intelligent person and doctor in one of the poorest parts of the country that gun culture isn’t the root of the violence, something else – something that when said leads to knee-jerk charges of racism even though the vast majority of poor patients my wife attends to are white. Douglas Ernst, writing in the comments section at the Colossus of Rhodey, says it best: “I’ve said for quite some time that we don’t have a “gun culture” ... we have a “having kids out-of-wedlock” culture.”

The Wife also happens to have a degree in anthropology. She couldn’t think of any culture that has been studied that allows boys to grow up without fathers or father figures. She believes, and I agree, that raising a boy without the guidance and discipline of an older man in his life is like letting a wild animal loose on the streets. Like stray dogs, these children eventually form into packs and establish a hierarchy of their own, but one parasitic on society instead of contributing to it. The gang takes the place of the father, the grandfather and the uncles.

I come from a broken home myself, but one that was broken by a massive heart attack on the job site. For years I drifted and experimented with things I probably shouldn’t have – and wouldn’t have had my father been around. But I was lucky: I was white and geeky and attending Catholic schools where the only gangs were of the nun or Jesuit variety. Had I been another color and in another place I could easily have ended up differently. Still, growing up without a father made me swear that I would never subject my child to divorce. I even cut out tobacco and later alcohol because I wanted to stay around to provide guidance to my son that I had lacked from the age of 11 onward.

If we want to stop gang violence or the violence of young men that gun down innocents for no reason, then we need to face the reality that there are limits to single parenthood and consequences that are borne by everyone. We have created, and even celebrated the single mom in media even though a child born to a single mother is more likely than any other to be born into poverty. I realize there are good, solid reasons for divorce, but we need to recognize and admit that we are raising a generation of “wild boys” without morals or conscience and then setting them loose into society where they end up in prison, unemployable and marginalized by society before entering an early grave.

A generation ago the fictional character Murphy Brown became pregnant and was lionized by the liberal media elite as a brave example for American women to follow, even though unlike the fictional character most women had a fraction of Brown’s earning power. The family values crowd was pilloried mercilessly for their criticism of the character. Now we have entire cities where the majority of boys are being raised by their mothers, grandmothers and aunts. Maybe, just maybe, the family values crowd was right after all.

Where the family values crowd is wrong, though, is on abortion. After all, single mothers who carry their children to term are lauded by the family values crowd. One would think that society would benefit if these mothers had opted for abortion instead; it’s hard to argue that the world would be a better place had the thugs who gunned down Hadiya Pendleton ended up in a medical waste incinerator. The family values believers would retort that fighting abortion is simply the first step on a path that ends up in marriage and a stable family, but such an argument is hard for me, one of their sympathizers, to understand and find possible in modern society. I simply think we’ve gone too far away from the traditional family to return to it.

Is there anything that could replace it?

There are cultures where the saying “it takes a village to raise a child,” is more than an empty slogan. Some traditional cultures in the Amazon and in Africa live communally and boys are raised by all the men in the village not just their fathers. Similarly in Scandinavia I’ve learned of unrelated people who live in separate apartments but share common spaces such as kitchens and living areas. In such an environment it could be possible for boys to be raised by completely unrelated men. What’s important is not bloodline but that a man serve as a role model for a boy while helping to set expectations and responsibilities for him in the general community to give him a place within it and to create within him a sense of belonging. Such a sense is only found in criminal subcultures today in the US, Russia and other nations suffering from “having kids out-of-wedlock culture,” so it’s worth considering any situation that could make boys into productive men in society.

But first we must recognize our society’s failure, that by encouraging women to have children out of wedlock and brainwashing them into believing them they can raise boys just as well as girls, we have created an entire caste of maladjusted young men who are violent, narcissistic and parasitic. This has nothing to do with race, but it has everything to do with half-baked psychological theories, ill-conceived but often well-intentioned government policies, topped off by a post-feminist culture that views men as a disease that needs to be drugged with Ritalin, predators that must be jailed or helpless oafs to be brainwashed until they are infantilized.

Free to good home: 16 year old boy. Requires high speed Internet, unlimited video games, designer clothes, food made to his exact specifications on demand, latest generation of iPod, no fixed bedtime, no chores around the house,  unlimited canned soda. Demands respect without providing any in return, drivers license without practicing driving because he knows everything at his age including how to drive. Unfortunately this knowledge does not translate to his grades which include a “D” in Spanish. Madre de Dios... Also unable to follow commands such as “Do your homework,” “Clean your room,” or “Hurry up, you’ll be late for school.” Excels at making his mother cry. Housebroken.

At the ripe old age of forty-something I’ve discovered motorcycles. A few months back I bought the kid a 125cc four stroke Yamaha dirt bike to have fun with over the summer. He ended up riding it for a few hours before he resumed his routine of skyping and playing multiplayer Minecraft. Now I’m the one riding the thing all the time.

I’m also a lifelong NFL fan, and I miss the old days of smashmouth football when big men used to collide into bigger men carrying an odd-shaped ball and yellow penalty flags were rare. Today I’ve become so accustomed to penalty flags that when I watch a baseball game and someone crosses home plate I wait to see if there’s a flag on the play. Seriously. I was also bored stiff half the time I watch baseball, hoping the basemen charge the mound and sack the pitcher. Yes the months are indeed long between Super Bowl and the pre-season.

I’ll admit I don’t wear any helmet while riding the dirt bike on my property. I recognize it’s extremely dangerous and because of that I have yet to put the bike down or fall. I’ve had a scare or two as recently as last night when I took a turn too sharp and braked too quickly, nearly catapulting myself over the handlebars. My son, on the other hand, has wrecked a few times but does so wearing gloves and an expensive motocross helmet. I realize it’s silly to generalize using such a small sample size as two, but I’ve talked to my son and watched him on the bike and it’s clear to me that he pushes the bike too far and takes a lot more risks wearing the protective gear than I do without it. Is it possible the same thing occurs in other sports like football?

In the Seattle-Chicago game on Dec 2, Seattle’s Sidney Rice took two shots in the head (video), one by Bears’ defender Major Wright and another when his head banged the ground as he scored. Now imagine the same play with both players wearing little or no protective gear. Would Wright have tackled Rice in the same way? I doubt it. Earlier in the game Chicago’s Earl Bennett got hit by two Seahawks and cartwheeled into the end zone. He walks away without apparent injury, but  given what we are learning about concussions in the NFL the damage does not come from a single hit but results from repetitive hits each of which may seem completely harmless at the time.

American football is a multi-billion dollar industry. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people rely on it for their income. But the more I watch it the more I wonder how long it will be around. The murder suicide of Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jevon Belcher is no surprise for NFL sports fans who have become numb at the high price paid by players of the game. According to the New York Post, Belcher struggled with pain, prescription drug abuse, and alcoholism caused by his playing the game, and he eventually snapped. Bob Costas used his position on the air and blamed the 2nd Amendment instead of the nature of the sport that pays his multi-million dollar salary, nor the fact domestic violence resulting in death doesn’t always involve guns. Belcher was 6’2” 228lbs. He probably was twice the size of his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins and could have killed her with his bare hands had he wanted to. Bob Costas has a lot of nerve airing his liberal opinion about guns all the while collecting paychecks from the blood sport.

Courtesy: Instapundit

Is the problem prevalence guns or the nature of the sport? American football is unique in sports due to the amount of physical contact between players. Baseball players rarely run into each other, rushing home plate being the exception and the concussion danger of this play is now increasing calls to ban it. Hockey has a lot of physical contact as well and Canadian neurosurgeons are calling for a ban on body checking to protect against concussions. I simply do not see how we are going to be able to make football safer for players without making it a non-contact sport.

In the meantime people excuse the danger by saying players know the risks and are paid handsomely to take them. That’s little comfort to Belcher’s mother who watched her son kill himself or to the parents of Kasandra Perkins. The NFL will add penalties and increase pads, and the players will do what my son does when he’s on the dirt bike, push themselves even further to the point where injury is inevitable. I would like to see teams at least try to play the sport without all the protective gear to see whether linebackers and tackles dialed it back a bit before sending somebody into next Tuesday, but I’m not hopeful that would end the danger either.

So we will see men kill themselves off the field quickly like Belcher or on the field slowly all for our amusement. I enjoy the sport but my conscience is stirring and I won’t be surprised if my lifelong love the game turns into a remainder of life regret for the carnage I’ve witnessed on countless Sunday afternoons.

To put it crassly, nothing motivates a man better than getting laid, especially when that man is in his late teens through late thirties. Men will do anything, risk anything, pay anything for a piece of tail – just ask Gen. David Petraeus, former Congressman Anthony Wiener and President Bill Clinton. I have followed women across continents, done deeply embarrassing and stupid things, and even built a career and sobered up because of a woman. Women are great motivators, or at least they were. Now I’m not so sure.

I look at the women in Generation Cupcake, the latest generation to follow the selfish Baby Boomers, the cynical and sarcastic Gen-Xers and the Millennials (what are they known for other than coming of age after Y2K?) and I feel sorry for straight young men today. No wonder they aren’t having sex as some studies have found if women like Sandra Fluke and Senator-elect/Squaw Elizabeth “Whines with Fist” Warren represent the state of feminism these days.

I’ll admit I’m old fashioned. I expect women to work and make at least as much as I do if not more. They don’t have to handle the housework, cooking or child rearing I’ll handle that – as well as spider-removal duty, fixing anything that breaks around the house and maintaining the cars. I realize that while men are smart enough to cook women are obviously not mechanically inclined as proven by number of great chefs and dearth of female mechanics and pest control workers. But a woman can whip up a Gantt Chart just as good as any man, and lawyering and doctoring? Well I’m married to a doctor – a good one I might add – and have hired female attorneys who were just as much sharks as mob defense attorneys.

But I am a feminist of sorts. I was born in a household full of women; there was so much estrogen in the air I’m still amazed I made it out of the house straight. To me feminism means independence and self-reliance two attributes that were missing from the traditional view of women. Yet while these attributes are key to adulthood but have evidently been lost by today’s women. Instead of independence they have become dependent on their parents and the government for support. Likewise self-reliance is lost and they are forced to doing what any kid does when he wants something that he can’t get himself: he whines.

Sandra Fluke whined for someone to buy her the Pill; Warren whined for a senate seat. Both got what they wanted and are content for now, but both lack the ability to set a goal and reach it independently. They will want something else and they will whine and stamp their feet until someone provides it to them.

Is this what the suffragettes fought for? Is this what the thousands of women who worked in munitions plants supporting their sons and husbands fighting in World War 2 suffered for? Is this what women want, to be coddled by proxy-parents like rich men or the government?

That isn’t freedom, it’s living in a cage albeit a gilded one where your parents buy your wine and your government pays for your pills. It’s like the most selfish generation of people unleashed on this country, the Baby Boomers, have spawned a generation even worse than them. Luckily I’ve raised a son who got so turned by women that he’s found other pursuits that aren’t “psycho” or “selfish” the way he puts it. The neuroticism and selfishness displayed by girls his age is good news for a parent who isn’t keen on seeing his son sexually active at a young age, but I can’t help but wish that women his age were a little more free and “normal.” Women can be inspiring creatures when they are mature and sane, but the women of Generation Cupcake clearly are neither.

The Kid and I are driving back from a trip to the mall and other various errands in the City. I’m driving into the darkness of the setting sun on a North Carolina road with Pandora streaming alternative hits from the ‘80s on the stereo. We talk about bad drivers since he will soon cross another line separating him from childhood, and he makes a joke that makes me laugh. He is becoming a man, independent from his parents, and will sooner than I want will be on his own, chasing his dreams, and driving roads I will never see. I glance at the clock, 7:23 pm, and for a moment I wish we are driving into the night together talking and laughing forever. As all moments must it passes into memory, but if I could stretch out a moment from an instant into an eternity, it would be this one.