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Archives for Category "General Musings"

November 8, 2007

Too Many Choices

The Washington Post Magazine (a pale and rather provincial shadow of the NYT Magazine), recently had an issue on public schools and private schools in the Washington Metro region and the agonizing choices parents have to make. What a nightmare. On the one hand, some of (even the good) public schools sound like fascist little teach-to-the-test drilling regimes, and on the other hand, the private schools around here are full of over-privileged, rich brats who believe their lives are just terribly, terribly stressful and it's so unfair that those poor kids get a break on admission fees to colleges. I did like this statement from one mother who sends her kids to public school:
within reason, a certain amount of rough and tumble prepares children for a world in which they will have to advocate for themselves and find the inner resources to rise to adversity.

It's human nature to adapt quickly to the pleasures and conveniences of privilege, and, soon after, we can start to feel entitled to them because we believe we are somehow better than others who are less advantaged. I've observed that it's easier to slip into this trap if you grow up in the cocoon of private school. This was made especially clear to me recently at a friend's potluck, when I overheard a group of private school kids bitterly and unselfconsciously complaining about what they perceived to be the unfair admissions advantage given African American students at elite private high schools and colleges. At first, considering the economic and educational advantages these kids had experienced, I thought they were kidding. When I saw that they weren't, I couldn't help but look upon it as an unintentional parody of privilege.

Surrounded by peers from such a wide variety of backgrounds, my children know pretty well that their comfortable circumstances simply reflect the luck of the draw.
Time enough, perhaps, to settle into the comfortable arms of privilege at the elite colleges and universities? I was talking with a somewhat older friend of mine who has children in Montgomery Country and who also grew up in Maine. He related how it's very different in urban/suburban areas where there are numerous choices as to what school to go to (and, sometimes, where to live to ensure that) versus where we grew up where you in District X which had its one high school and one middle school and that was that.

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November 4, 2007

Remembering Often Makes me Cringe

Xeney just put up a post noting, among other things, that she's been online-journalling for 10 years. She writes:
I do read my own archives, not often, but at times when I need to. And sometimes they make me cringe, but more often they make me nostalgic, like looking at bad photographs from ten years ago: at the time you want to burn those photos because you look fat or you have bad hair or you can't believe you ever wore that plaid thing, but years down the road you just marvel at how young you were, at how much you still had to learn. Years later you cut yourself some slack and wish you'd gone a little easier on that girl.
I don't think there's ever been a time in my life when I didn't look back 5 years and just cringe at myself. It's why I tend not to read my archives, actually, or look at old pictures, or reflect much at all, because I just end up embarrassed with myself. (Of course, I'm the type who can still remember things that happened in 5th grade and be embarrassed about them.) Things I wish I'd done differently, not done, or thought to do. It's almost never about what clothes I wore or car I drove or anything like that - it's usually some interaction or way of doing things that I just wish I'd been smarter, smoother, or more mature about. Probably the people who were the other parts of those interactions don't remember at all (I can hope, anyway), but if I think back too much, I start remembering all sorts of crap I wish I'd done differently or better. TheGuy would say that I'm altogether too hard on myself and that's probably true on a level. It's a hard, hard habit to break, though.

<=> | Comments: 1 | in: General Musings / Journaling / Weblogs & Citizen Writing

October 17, 2007

Quote of the Day

Quote of the day (one of my favorites from B5, which I'm re-watching of late):
The avalanche has already started; it is too late for the pebbles to vote.
-- Kosh

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October 13, 2007

Many Open Tabs

I have many open tabs on both my iMac and my Powerbook and many things I'd like to do real weblog entries about, but somehow I just can't summon up the energy. Work is kicking my ass again and draining the life right out of me. Whee! A few bulletpoints instead, just to have something down.
  • The author of Real Live Preacher found out that his book was remaindered, bought the leftovers, and is now selling them to his readers. He's including a note and little gifts with each one he ships. Since I'd had his book on my AMZN wishlist for ages, I went ahead and ordered one directly from him.
  • Bob Herbert writes about Gore, Bush, and that fascist Giuiliani. Here's a nice summary of Dubya's accomplishments:
    We’ve paid a heavy price. The president who got such high marks as a barbecue companion doesn’t seem to know up from down. He’s hurled the nation into a ruinous war that has cost countless lives and spawned a whole new generation of terrorists. He continues to sit idly by as a historic American city, New Orleans, remains wounded and on its knees. He’s blithely steered the nation into a bottomless pit of debt. I could go on.
  • I thought this article by Sam Harris, "The Problem with Atheism" was excellent. It's long, but thought-provoking. Definitely worth reading the whole thing.
    Well, rather than declare ourselves “atheists” in opposition to all religion, I think we should do nothing more than advocate reason and intellectual honesty—and where this advocacy causes us to collide with religion, as it inevitably will, we should observe that the points of impact are always with specific religious beliefs—not with religion in general. There is no religion in general.
    On a related note, I attached a little Flying Spaghetti Monster to the new car. (Think of it is an obscure version of the Darwin fish.)
    There are other bumper stickers and such on the car - those are visible to friends and family at flickr, but I'm not posting it here to avoid ye olde weblogge stalkers.
  • I have a much longer rant inside of me related to this post from Ezra Klein the other day.
    It's not about your ideas, or your personal vision of the world, or your purity. Contemporary politics is not a landscape awaiting your morality plays and exhibitions of ethical decisiveness. It is not yours. It is the impact of your ideas, and your commentary, that matters. That's all that matters.
    Pieces of the rant burst out from time to time, but I don't have time to write up a decent essay. The short version is: it's the policy stupid. I don't care what you believe or how you judge other people for doing or not doing the right thing in your eyes -- I care when you start encouraging the making of policy that affects other people's lives based on those beliefs. It's why I know I tend to be an annoying conversationalist sometimes. It goes like this:

    Them: I don't think people should X (where X is: send their kids to daycare; be a working mom; be in a same-sex relationship; buy a large house; whatever..)

    Me: Hmmm... well, but the reason current policy allows/encourages (or disallows/discourages) X is because of [various complicated factors]

    Them: Well, it's just my opinion!

    Drives me bananas. It's not just your opinion if you vote based on that opinion. It means you're trying to affect local, state, or federal policy to accord with your belief about X. And once you do that, then you're in the murky and complicated territory of how policy gets made, what underlying values and principles your proposed policy supports or detracts from -- and sometimes I make the mistake of jumping to the underlying value when responding to the statement about X... that's a bad idea; lay people hate that -- and whether it's feasible to implement your proposed policy. See, most people hate these conversations. I say 'lay people' because the people I work with - they love 'em. It's what we do all day -- up and down and leaping around the abstraction ladder.

    Ultimately, if you have any opinion about something that matters, then there's a policy question you're raising. And if there's a policy question you're raising, then I want to understand what exactly you propose be done, since you don't think moms should work out of the house, or whatever your X is. If you just think chocolate is better than vanilla, then fine. Not so weighty. But most other things bear on what kind of civilized society we're trying to have here. Like I said, people find me annoying sometimes. I know - shock! I try to restrain such debates to work and to TheGuy (bless 'im), but whenever I hear a strongly-held point of view about something that matters, believe me when I say my brain is immediately leaping to all sorts of policy implications that flow from that opinion - even if I don't say anything about it. Hmm. That was a longer rant than I intended, but still isn't fleshed out enough to get at what I really mean. Sigh. Anyway...

<=> | Comments: 2 | in: General Musings

August 18, 2007

Hate Must be Taught, After All

Hate must be taught, as the saying goes, and it's not just children who can be taught to hate. A little while ago Rick Perlstein wrote an all-too-familiar lament about his older relatives being fed a diet of viciousness and hate through avenues such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and being taught to hate ... people like him.
She was sure that beyond its threshold lay dragons: far-far-far leftists out to steal her Social Security; turbaned terrorists just itching to fly a jet into the First Wisconsin tower a few blocks to the south; quisling Democrats itching to help them do it; grandma-gutting criminal marauders just outside her door.

I'd look out of [my grandmother's] eighth floor picture window, down at the scene she saw every day, half expecting to find that nightmare landscape before me. Nope: same as always, the brightly colored sailboats on Lake Michigan, kids and their parents feeding the ducks (Grandma used to take me to feed the ducks), happy, strolling Milwaukee couples—paradise. Where was she getting these fantasies?

One evening's visit, all became clear. She gestured at the blaring TV set. The excruciating grandma-volume was even more excruciating than usual, because she was visiting with her best TV friend. She told me how much she adored Bill O'Reilly. My wife and I cringed. Watching our latter-day Joe McCarthy on TV every night, she had learned, late in life—for this development was entirely new—how to hate her fellow Americans. I almost cried, because one of the people she was learning how to hate was me.
A little while ago I was sharing a related lament with one of my relatives and something occurred to me. Not only do we live in one of most prosperous nation-states in one of the most prosperous times that has ever been, with luxuries inconceivable just a century or two ago, we also live in a time where the most sophisticated and most effective propaganda machines ever to be constructed are at work every minute of every day. Most of the time these machines are aimed at reinforcing capitalist myths and emptying wallets, but a significant sliver of this newly-developed propaganda capacity is in the service of an ideology focused on fostering divisiveness and contempt for others. So, while I am appalled at the unthinking repetition of insidious wingnut memes that I hear all too often, I'm also sympathetic. It is very difficult to resist the propaganda even when it's transparent ("buy this beer and beautiful blonde women will have sex with you"), and much more so when it is meant to fly under the radar (see Frank Luntz's entire life's work, for example) and masked in a veneer of patriotism.

Sara over at Orcinus had more to say about the grandma-snatchers and a proposed solution:
Perlstein's article has prompted a flood of comments, here and elsewhere, from anguished progressives whose mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents once instilled them with their liberal values -- but are now estranged from their families and lost to the right-wing airwaves. It's as though, while we weren't looking, the body-snatchers snuck in through the pipe and made off with their votes, their brains, and (occasionally) their money.

[...] America's elderly have been frightened by media fearmongers for as long as there's been TV -- and possibly (for those familiar with Father Coughlin), for as long as there's been radio. This is a fine old tradition, the natural outcome when the elderly are left alone too many hours each day with only a box for company. But it's not inevitable. There are things we can do about it.

[...] Most of us are very cautious and circumspect about leaving our children's developing minds to the tender mercies of the media. Those of us who care about the elders in our families might be equally vigilant about their media diets as well. We do not have to take the political hijacking of our seniors lying down, or assume that's just the way it is. We just have to do what we do with our kids: make sure they've got consistent access to appealing, age-appropriate media that gives them hope, confidence, and truly balanced ways of seeing the world.

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