Here it is Christmas morning and I should be diligently getting my Christmas dinner preparations underway, but I just had to spend a few minutes posting a link to this wonderful Christmas story again – Steve McCann’s, “Saved By Christmas”.
Category Archives: Food for Thought
Control of the Home Roost
This post will surely anger, irritate, and cause many parents to call me ignorant of their child’s “problems”, but since this is my blog and my opinions – feel free to disagree and find a nice cozy “support group” for other parents like you – the millions of parents who drug their young children as a first course for behavioral problems, rather than exhaust changing your parenting techniques. I’ve been reading about and talking to parents for over 26 years about this subject and my mind is made up on the matter. Americans love creating new “medical maladies” for bad behavior, from early childhood all through adulthood it’s easier to create serious-sounding ailments and dole out drugs to treat the “symptoms”, when the truth lies that in most cases the ailment is nothing more than a bad behavioral “choice”. We’ve turned alcoholism and drug abuse into diseases and worked our way back to creating psychiatric conditions in need of medical intervention as soon as children start interacting with their world. Pharmaceutical companies responded with a boon of pills to pop and we’ve got an entire society in need of a cold turkey detox from this vicious, free fall collapse of morality and dependence on “experts” rather than taking responsibility for our behavior and the behavior of our children. G. Murphy Donovan tackles the larger picture of our cultural lunacy in a piece at The American Thinker yesterday, “The Psychobabble Bubble“.
Long ago (26 years ago), I took my second son to an Army medical facility for a well-baby check-up. He was 2 years old. Now, this son was child number three and I was used to caring for my own babies and since I grew-up out in the country within a large family and even larger extended family, I had spent my life around lots of children. I worked as a babysitter from the time I was 13 years old, I got stuck with the youngest preschoolers during vacation Bible school at church in summertime as a teenager. Small children, with their varied behavioral challenges were nothing new to me. I knew my son was perfectly normal. Mind you this was a “well-baby” visit, so there I sat for a very long time in the waiting room and then longer still in the actual examination room awaiting the pediatrician. My son was tired of sitting on my lap so long and once we were in the examination room, I let him get down off my lap and move around. He loved to run and explore everything, but he still conformed to living by my rules and yes, I had set mealtimes, set nap time and once I weaned my kids off of the bottle they learned the rule of sitting at the table for snack time and drinks. I didn’t allow my kids to wander around the house with food and drinks and this rule held into their teens. I constantly told them, “We eat at the table!” – it wasn’t optional. I taught them how to set the table and basic table manners by consistent reinforcement – that’s how you train dogs and that’s how you train people too.
So, there we were sitting there waiting, waiting, waiting and finally the doctor entered the room, so I scooped my son back onto my lap and he squirmed and wanted to get down and run some more. That minute or so of him squirming led to the pediatrician telling me my son was “hyperactive” and should be medicated for this – to avoid future problems. My first reaction was “Oh no, there’s something wrong with him”, which was swiftly followed by the rebellious thought, “I know my son and this man has been around my son a couple of minutes, what the hell does he know about him.” Mind you my son wasn’t screaming, he was just squirming a lot and when the doctor told me to set him down, my son took off running around exploring the office. He insisted that my son is hyperactive, but I sat there watching my son and his behavior seemed like normal two-year old behavior. So, I politely told this “expert” that we like our son just the way he is and that we were here for a well-baby check-up. I refused medication.
My son always busily explored the world around him and once he learned to read, he explored books as actively as the world. He loves to take things apart and try to put them back together, after he figured out how they work. When we first got a PC, he quickly became the family tech support expert. Now, this son is the only one of my kids who was shy like me and he kind of hangs back and listens when in a crowd. He doesn’t like competing with other people, because he’s so busy with his own personal quests. He sets a lot of personal goals – this supposedly hyperactive child spent years reading through 800+ page computer manuals, exhaustively learning everything he could about computers – hardware stuff and software stuff. He loves math and signed out calculus books during one summer vacation as a young teen (long before he studied calculus in school), because he said, “Calculus is fun!”
We urged him to go to college right out of high school, but he didn’t want to do that, despite having excellent grades. He enlisted in the Air Force and worked on electronic systems on fighter planes. He deployed to Iraq once and did well in the Air Force, with his commanders urging him to consider attending the Air Force Academy, but he had other plans. He finished his four-year stint, came home and went to college. He graduated summa cum laude with a degree in physics and although he wanted to go to grad school immediately, he changed that plan upon marrying a girl here. She didn’t want to move away from her family, so he decided to find a job here. He landed a good job doing software design for a company that does a lot of contract work for the Air Force and then moved on to a better job working for an aeronautical corporation as a software engineer – despite taking not a single computer class in college – he is self-taught. He still plans to go to grad school and pursue theoretical physics research, which he got hooked on in college, working for the head of the physics department as a research assistant. He attended several American Physical Society meetings around the country with this professor, who presents his research there too. We’re very proud of him and I often remind him that long ago some doctor wanted us to drug him into submission, but I am so glad I told that doctor we like him just the way he is.
This isn’t meant to sound like I am a great a parent or my kids are so great, because I have another son who has problems. He also is a brilliant, talented young man too, but he hit some roadblocks and hasn’t figured out how to move past them and as a parent, these roadblocks are frustrating and filled with anguish. For this post I want to stick to the ritalin generation topic.
A few days ago, America’s paper of record, The New York Times, ran a front page story,“The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder”, decades late, but at long last a counter-movement to this insidiously destructive epidemic of medical malpractice seems to be gaining some traction. Dr. Keith Connors, an early advocate for drug therapy for childhood ADD now looks back at the statistics and states:
“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”
These statistics which so alarm Connors, quoting from the Times piece, “that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990” and he considers these numbers “a national disaster of dangerous proportions”. When I look back to how my son could have been a part of that statistic, I am always so thankful that my mother, a dedicated registered nurse, refused to buy into so much of the mental health industry’s push toward the Oprahization of medicine, where creating national awareness using flimsy “experts” converted America from a self-reliant culture to a self-absorbed culture where the national pastime centers on investing extraordinary amounts of time into self-awareness and self-empowerment, with the requisite prescriptions of medication to soften the ride, toward finding yourself.
Around the Army, we moved frequently, our kids had to leave friends behind, start over at new schools and make new friends constantly. My husband spent large amounts of time away from home training with the Army. The central focus in my life, being a stay-at-home mother, was making sure my kids had a set routine and adjusted to these changes. Sure, I learned as I moved more often, but my kids adjusted well and of course there were a few instances of small problems here and there, but my kids thrived in school and they made friends quickly. Now, my son mentioned in this post had a small issue when we moved back from Germany after 5 years living there. His teacher (4th grade if my memory serves me) called me one day early in the school year to discuss my son’s reading “problems”. She told me he does not know how to read, which stunned me, because my son was an excellent reader. I asked her how she determined this and she said when she called on him to read out loud he couldn’t read well and stumbled over most of the words. I told her that he is very shy and he doesn’t know any of the kids or her. I assured her that he was an excellent reader, as his school records from his previous school could affirm. I urged her that with some patience he would become comfortable in this new classroom. He did and he was an excellent student there too.
I met many parents around the Army who didn’t spend much time focusing on their kids and the kids got shuffled along, while the parents indulged in their own self-absorbed activities, leaving the kids to run wild. You combine frequent moving, absent parents, and lack of structure in the home and it’s no wonder the military rates for these so-called behavioral maladies are much higher.
Here’s one of those home truths that Army commanders and the support agencies that deal with Army families know, but won’t ever articulate – way too many young Army families have a “welfare mentality”, which the Army perpetuates by sloganeering stuff like, “we take care of our own” or you’re part of the “Army family”. A fortune is spent on providing services for families in the Army and since I dedicated a lot of time to helping in Army family support activities and I lived in Army communities, I feel qualified to say this. Efforts have been made to work toward teaching “self-reliance”, but when you encourage dependency through your messaging and then expect self-reliance when soldiers deploy, you’ve set up your support agencies to be bombarded. If you live in an environment prone to disorder, like moving all the time, creating stability in your home becomes even more crucial to children’s welfare. If you show me a kid with ADD, I’ll show you a home where there is either a lack of structure and routine, a lack of consistent discipline or both. Kids are like dogs – some are easier to train than others, but all except a very minuscule fraction are beyond training.
We’ve got way too many parents who have never learned any self-restraint, self-discipline or how to follow a routine and then you stick kids into this chaotic mix and naturally the more disordered the home routine, the worse the kids behave. Set some rules and a routine and the vast majority of kids thrive and kids with problems benefit the most from a structured routine and consistent discipline. We all thrive if there is order in our lives.
In recent years the “experts” have grown their list from ADD to ADHD and now it’s autism and Asperger’s syndrome too. I walk away when parents start regaling me with this crap, because in most (maybe even all) of these situations, I look at the parents and then I have my answer as to “the real problem”. The problem runs deeper than bad parenting, it runs to men and particularly women buying into other people’s ideas on parental roles and how to view these roles – with the push toward women pursuing careers in lieu of staying home full-time with children. Fathers latched onto the feminist push out the door and way too many play peripheral roles in their children’s lives rather than playing a central leadership role in the home. A home is a place where civilization is nurtured and if we abandon that, our culture suffers. Mary Eberstadt penned an excellent piece at National Review Online today, “Why Ritalin Still Rules”, leaving this prescient observation on the rampant drugging of American children – “In the ashes of the sexual revolution, someone has found a gold mine.”
You want a simple solution – Quit buying into other people’s bullshit! Think for yourself! Quit listening to so many celebrity experts, mental health experts, and commercials selling magic pills. Make your family the central focus of your life. Start by learning to live by a routine and some rules yourself, then expand out to getting some organization in your family’s routine. American culture is in chaos, because American homes are in chaos – it’s way past time for American women to regain control of the home roost.
Filed under Culture Wars, Food for Thought, General Interest, Military, The Media
Stuff
In the mad rush during the past couple days at work, many thoughts crossed my mind, with being caught up in the raging sea of mindless consumerism. Working in retail, being so dependent on constant face to face interaction with people, usually presents many challenges, but when these Black Friday sales hit, let’s just say it’s like being caught in a tempest. So, here, in random order are the things I thought about at work the past few days.
American consumerism, in all its meticulously researched and sales-tested, naked state, ranks as mindless, base, disgusting and deeply disturbing. Why do people who complain that they can’t pay their bills or don’t have enough money for the basics, squander their very limited resources for intrinsically useless stuff rather than hold on to it for the necessities?
On a day devoted to thanking God for the many blessings in our lives, it seems repugnant (to me at least), to rush to stores before the day is even done and push, shove, even taser your way to grab stuff, as if your very life depended on its acquisition? Oh, yeah, it’s all about acquiring this stuff for gifts for others – yep, it’s for Christmas…. where we celebrate God sending us a Savior (a gift). Where I work, the Marines set up a large drop box for donations of toys, which they hand out to needy children every year. The box at my store was empty when I left work late Thursday evening. We had a few scuffles with unruly customers getting physical in their mad struggles over sales merchandise, nothing that made the news, but still disturbing when considering each year the stories that do make the news get more violent and absurd. Where I work the scuffles are usually over cheap junk items, not over TVs or some pricey item – fighting over some cheap set of bed sheets and that type of under $10 merchandise.
Of course, I noticed more than one shopping cart filled with small children, with their bare feet dangling (not even socks on their feet) or a jacket on their back, in the cold (it dipped below freezing here), yet these parents madly rushed about to fill their shopping carts with assorted toys, although I noticed not a pair of socks or a warm coat among their purchases.
As I watched the throng race to and fro, in mindless pursuit of stuff, well I thought about all the stuff I already have and decided I need to start paring down rather than acquiring more stuff, which I don’t need and start worrying about the stuff in my life that does matter. I thought we would be so much better off if we put this kind of energy into the stuff in our lives that should matter, our relationships, helping others, trying to improve ourselves. And on the material front, the stuff I do have, well, I would like to find time to work on my needlework and crafting, and even I gave a thought to buying some lovely specialty yarns they had in a big bin, but I resisted. I bought some last year at this annual sale and still haven’t used it. Of course, I notice there were no books included in the sale and anyway, if you want to find the one spot, where any time, day or night, there’s never a crowd, go to the books section of my store… yep, America, the land with plenty of stuff…. just not the right stuff.
Filed under Culture Wars, Food for Thought, General Interest
Why America needs gentlemen…. and ladies too
The other day I posted a link to a blunt article on feminism’s ruinous effect on boys written by Fred Reed (here), so now I’d like to take a few minutes to wax on about manners and child-rearing, which maybe, is the one topic where I have some real credentials, after spending 18 years as a homemaker. Children come into this world completely dependent on adults to care for all of their needs and they also come devoid of all those finer virtues, upon which civilization depends.
The ancient Greeks kept their cardinal virtues to four: temperance, prudence, courage, and justice, but with the advent of Christianity, the list grew to seven: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility. Of course, many other cultures and religions around the world offer up some varied assortment of similar virtues, although there are some examples, if you care to be an honest observer, where the cultural norms seem to be a mishmash of extremes, allowing barbarism to return and life for the weak in these places becomes a precarious struggle, fraught with danger.
Being the mother of two sons and two daughters and spending many, many hours amongst babies and small children (my own and many others) let’s agree that despite all the feminist bullshit to the contrary, boys and girls are very different and not just in the obvious anatomical sense. Boys and girls react differently to the world, they play differently and they think differently.
I abhor violence and I refused to buy my sons toy guns when they were very young, thinking that teaching them not to fight is a good thing. Well, how did that work out? My sons, even as toddlers, turned everything, even their sister’s Barbie dolls into a weapon of some sort, gun or club, it mattered not. Boys like actively interacting with their world, often in surprising and destructive ways.
Quickly, I realized my idea had little real merit and as they began to play with other children, it dawned on me that sometimes fighting is the right course of action, especially when confronted by barbarians who lacked parenting and behaved like bullies. So, my “no fighting” idea needed some refinement and the trickier moral lessons weren’t as simple to teach as I had originally thought.
Sometimes you should fight back. Finding this point on the scale, between complete pacifism and barbarism, where civilized behavior holds culture’s high ground position and barbarism falls to an outcast behavior, reviled, shunned and unaccepted by the majority of citizens, isn’t etched in stone, but we must agree on a small range on this scale for civilization to advance (or survive in our own sad case). The sociologists refer to this informal, commonly accepted range of acceptable behavior, as social norms. –>
Filed under American Character, American History, Culture Wars, Food for Thought, Politics
An afternoon in the doctor’s waiting room
We’re approaching that American holiday that’s come to symbolize two diverse cultures, American settlers and American Indians, oops Native Americans or whatever is the PC-approved term, sitting together to share a meal and offer thanks to God for a successful harvest. Agrarian societies through the ages have held similar celebrations at the end of the harvest season. The unique component of our Thanksgiving rests heavily on our national self-image of a melting pot of cultures living in harmony, where Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a place where we will “sit down at a table of brotherhood” evokes a national yearning for the America we hope we can someday be.
The more enlightened our intellectual and political elites become, the further removed from this dream we seem to be drifting. We’ve allowed our educational experts to confuse, conflate and completely confound our language into a mass of hidden meanings, ripe with rhetorical landmines, so that we hesitate before speaking for fear of offending someone, somehow, in some way through word choice, inflection or even failing to see some mysterious allusion. Just when you think this insanity can go no further, along comes a news report to prove, yes, “educated” people really can twist concepts beyond any recognizable bounds of reasonable meaning. Who knew the simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich should be avoided in classroom discussions about food, because it’s emblematic of “white privilege” and therefore a racist symbol. Yes, really, according to a Portland school official, where they’ve had lengthy discussions on this pressing topic (here). That educators in this school actually sat around having serious discussions about racial implications with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches speaks volumes about why our children keep falling further behind when compared to other children around the world. No one spoke up about the idiocy, but instead they collectively, as good followers do, centered their attention on being more aware of “white privilege”.
The other day I had a long wait at the doctor’s office, where a lovely old lady entertained me with a lively conversation about everything from homestyle cooking to motorcycle riding. This lady told me about her daughter, a school teacher, who brought a problem to her attention that she wasn’t aware of and it sure wasn’t about the racial overtones of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She stated her daughter and other teachers noticed a lot of children coming to school Monday mornings very hungry, due to food insecurity at home. This lady talked about a program to provide food for school children on Monday mornings that her son’s church started and how hard he works as a young pastor. Unbeknownst to me, Mondays bring an influx of children who haven’t eaten hardly anything on the weekend and whose primary food source is government-funded meals at school during the school week. Yes, here was an old, Southern white lady telling me about the children in need in our own community and about a problem, which I knew nothing about.
We discussed holiday meals and she informed me that in recent years her daughter does the main cooking, while she provides a few dishes that her family requests she make. One recipe she mentioned is shoe peg corn salad, which I plan to make soon. She talked about how her grandchildren frequently request that she make her special hamburgers, that according to them, are the best hamburgers ever. I inquired what her secret ingredients are for the best hamburgers ever. She said she chops up onions and stuff fine, like she would for meatloaf, then adds breadcrumbs and an egg. Her mother-in-law taught her to make hamburgers like this and she said, “You know why she added the breadcrumbs and stuff?” Coming from a large family, it seemed obvious to me. She added the breadcrumbs to make the meat stretch farther to feed more people. This is the common sense stuff, that the type of people who devote time to discussions of the racial overtones to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, will never acquire.
An afternoon chat in a waiting room provided me with a memorable meeting . I’ve been looking for a church to join for a long time, after spending decades avoiding organized religion and her’s son’s church might be worth checking out. Yes, this old lady dared to mention God in our conversation too. Her uncomplicated dedication to putting real time and hard work into community service seemed to me, to be exactly what we need more of in America. Whenever you rely on stereotypes, like the “educated types” who wax on about “white privilege”, you erect barriers to ever reaching the very goals you think you’re working to achieve.
It’s not about making race the central theme at the dinner table, but to learn to make a seat at the table and feed as many people as possible that will lead us to the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream. Only by taking the time to get to know people, can you ever find out who they are. People will surprise you, if you let them. She told me that she won a motorcycle in a raffle recently, but she traded it in for a new Harley-Davidson trike. She ended our conversation by telling me, her husband doesn’t have to ask her twice if she wants to ride, because she has always loved to ride motorcycles.
Filed under Culture Wars, Education, Food for Thought, Politics
How to fend for their young
This post will be one of those nostalgic trips down memory lane about my family again, so I’ll warn you up front and you can abandon it quickly if you’re looking for straight politics. G. Murphy Donovan’s childhood story, “The Cranberry Rumble”, which I mentioned a few days ago, sent me down memory lane thinking about holiday meals. I couldn’t think of one where anything remarkable happened like the Thanksgiving in his story. Our family holiday meals were relentlessly boring and I remember when I was young we would go to my maternal grandmother’s for Christmas, but we spent Thanksgiving at home with our immediate family. In my grandmother’s small kitchen, the table could not hold the families of aunts, uncles, cousins, etc, so my grandmother set the table for the children first. The adults got us corralled and seated, where we ate our fill and then went outside to play. Any family get-together ran the same course, where the adults made sure to fix the children’s plates first and get them seated and fed. Children came first in my family.
My mother, whose birthday fell on Veteran’s Day, passed away in 2001 and she served as the shining example of an independent spirit for American womanhood, long before feminism ever came along to enthrall the whining female masses demanding “female empowerment”. My Mom never considered herself a feminist and she found their selfish, endless carping repugnant, yet she could put almost any of them to shame with her ability to handle manual labor, domestic tasks, juggle a nursing career and six kids with never a complaint or expectation of help from anyone. She knew the best way to be an independent person is to be self-reliant. She worked harder than any person I have ever met. Mom loved to fix things and she repaired everything from our TV set when it went on the blink to chipped china, to all our many scrapes and more serious injuries. On top of all that she was a superb cook and baker, kept the house immaculate, insisted on rules and routine more efficiently than a drill sergeant, yet found time to be our most faithful cheerleader and moral support when we needed it most. The kitchen table, or wherever families gather for meals, serves as the civilizational center, around the globe and my Mom, like generations of mothers before, knew this instinctively.
My oldest sister always veered toward gourmet type cooking, leading to many bumping of heads in our small kitchen at holiday time, where my Mom insisted on traditional PA Dutch food and my oldest sister would argue and plead for us to expand our culinary horizons. Mom let her bake some different desserts occasionally and she excelled at making things like braided loaves of bread and fancy rolls, but the rest of us liked plain old store-bought brown and serve rolls best. My next older sister avoided the kitchen, except to eat and she rarely got roped into any part of cooking any meal. She had a knack for breaking any small appliance she touched, so it was best to exclude her from the kitchen work space. Odd thing that somehow she perfected making pie dough and became the family’s best pie baker in adulthood, despite being a less than great cook (one of her signature dishes was veal parmigiana – frozen breaded veal patties smothered with overcooked spaghetti, jarred sauce and Parmesan cheese from the green shaker, tossed in a casserole dish and baked). My biggest contribution to any meal was to be the reliable, food prep person – just tell me how small you want the vegetables, chopped, diced, minced and I will happily cut away. Oh, you want someone to stand there and stir that pot non-stop until it reaches a full boil, that’s a job for me. I follow instructions well and any tedious task in the kitchen suits me perfectly. My youngest sister could be relied upon to help with any task too and she served as the one to smooth over the personality clashes that inevitability arose with so many strong personalities working in such a confined space.
As I thought about holiday meals, none stuck out in my memory, but a very ordinary meal popped into my mind. My youngest sister possesses one of the calmest, most agreeable personalities imaginable. Unlike me, who loved to get on my soapbox about any issue I felt strongly about and also had a penchant for allowing my cousin, Randy, next door to goad me into doing things where I knew I would get in trouble. The usual taunt, “you’re too scared to do X, Y or Z!” led to my declarations that I wasn’t scared, whereupon I’d charge forward with whatever the dare was. One time he picked up some crumpled, old pack of chewing tobacco at our small local ball field that looked like it had been in that parking area for years. Randy told me that he knew I was too scared to try it and of course I took a wad and chewed it. I might note, he didn’t try it. My sister (the less than great cook one, who also became a state trooper), ever the reliable narc, couldn’t run fast enough to tell Mom what I had done. I had beat her into the house and raced in the bathroom to rinse out my mouth, but Mom came charging in there and there I stood with brown tobacco juice dribbling down my face. I lied and told Mom I hadn’t done it and learned that brazen lying wasn’t the way to go with her.
I got into trouble frequently by allowing Randy to use that same, “you’re too scared” tactic and my narc sister got into plenty of trouble too, but my youngest sister had the most pristine character and she never did anything wrong. We all adored her, because what’s not to adore about someone who is always nice, always kind, always good. So imagine our shock when the perfect child revolts at of all places the supper table, sitting right next to Pop. It was an ordinary supper and Pop always ate way too much bread with his meals and he liked to slather butter and either strawberry jam or grape jelly on his bread. We all talked a lot at the supper table, so when Pop scolded my youngest sister, you could have heard a pin drop in the kitchen that night. There sat my youngest sister, defiantly arguing with Pop that the reason she put a large glob of grape jelly on her potatoes was because she had asked for the butter more than once and no one listened to her. Pop told her that she had to sit there and eat those potatoes. Who knew that underneath that calm, lurked a pretty impressive temper. My youngest sister is retired from the Air Force and served in Afghanistan in the early years, shortly before her retirement. Several years ago, through the family grapevine, I heard that the local pastor was making political commentary about GWB and the war stuff and that Sunday, my nephew had insisted they sit way up front in church. My serene sister got up and walked right out of church in the midst of the sermon that morning. My kids were shocked when they heard this, but I knew that underneath that calm is a strong well of righteous anger.
My three sisters rank as a very talented group of women who have had successful careers, pursue many hobbies and can be expected to do the unexpected. For the past few years, they decided that Thanksgiving will be the traditional holiday meal and during that get together they vote on a foreign country, which will be the themed cuisine for Christmas dinner that year. Then they research that ethnic cuisine and decide on which dishes to make. They had Chinese Christmas dinner one year and I sure wish I lived closer and could have been there for that one. Had my Mom been around for this new Christmas tradition, I feel certain she would have liked the idea, although Pop would have reacted like he did when he came to Fort Bragg to visit one time and we took my parents to a Japanese restaurant. Pop only ate a few bites before deciding he didn’t like Japanese food and as we were leaving that restaurant Pop asked my husband, “Are there any steakhouses in this town?” When my parents visited us in Germany, my Pop decided after his first German meal that he didn’t like German food, which struck me as bizarre considering he was PA Dutch and ate German food his entire life. So, as we traveled around Germany, all meals had to be planned around finding American fast food places or eating on a US military installation. My Mom loved trying different types of food and exploring new places. She once told me she wouldn’t mind getting on a plane and going anywhere in the world, because wherever she ended up she’d find something interesting.
At holiday time it’s common to reach back into those nostalgic childhood memories of holidays gone by, but I feel fortunate for having enough good memories of my parents and childhood to warm me any day of the year. The other day my youngest sister emailed me to remark upon Mom’s birthday and she said it best, “Nearly everyday there is something that I wish I could ask her advice about or share with her. She was a very wise person. She was good at helping us pick ourselves back up, dusting us off and making us try again.” So many people today won’t even try the first time, let alone try again when they stumble or fail.
We had the first cooler days this past week here in this Southern state where I now live. Over the years when visiting, my Mom angrily talked about how many young mothers she saw around the Army who didn’t have the sense to properly dress their children for the weather. I had morphed into my Mom, as I had to bite my tongue more than once as I saw young Moms bundled up in winter coats and boots with babies in the shopping carts – with not even socks on the babies’ feet or jackets on them. Hooray for liberating women from the bounds of motherhood – I am sure your children (if they survive infancy) will be so proud of you…. I find it doubtful these kids will be remembering their Moms, like my siblings and I remember our Mom.
Now for the political commentary, my youngest daughter lives in another state and she decided she wanted to be a “Big Sister” in that program. Her “little” adores her, but earlier this year my daughter and son-in-law moved to another city. My daughter’s “little” called her a few days ago to tell her that her step-dad is in jail for beating her. The teacher saw the bruises and called the police. This girl’s prize mother has a few kids with this piece of garbage and is pregnant. Last year when my daughter brought her “little” to her home to bake cookies, the “little’s” mother came over too and she waxed on about how she’d like to bake cookies at her house, but she doesn’t have cookie sheets. My daughter gave her the very nice cookie sheets I bought the year before. After many adventures with the “little’s” family, like the cockroach infestation that had my daughter wondering if she should call child protective services, now there’s this one. My daughter called me distressed, because her “little” told her this isn’t the first time he’s beaten her. Last year at Christmas when my daughter gave her “little” a Christmas present, this girl unwrapped the present carefully. She told my daughter she wanted to keep the wrapping paper and rewrap that present, so she would have a present to open on Christmas morning, because her loser parents didn’t have money to get the things they had put on layaway at a store. Whenever you hear about a child like this “little”, rest assured there’s a litany of abuses, neglect and trail of tears that follows.
Bad family situations aren’t something new, but despite more information, more opportunities for women, more material wealth, our ability to do the basics, like feed our kids properly and shelter them from the cold, seem beyond the grasp of way too many American mothers. In the mix of all this female empowerment claptrap, there’s a glaring absence of something that most mothers used to know – how to fend for their young. If my daughter’s “little” were a rarity it would still be sad, but behind all those impersonal statistics on children in America, are way too many in situations like hers or worse. Those politically in tune feminist mouthpieces won’t be there to take in any of these children falling through the cracks, nor do they see them as they travel among the elite “educating” women on women’s rights. Laura Bush, a kind-hearted woman, attended an event at Georgetown, along with Hillary Clinton, America’s premiere champion of women and children, and John Kerry yesterday to talk about women’s rights in Afghanistan. It’s sure easier to focus on the plight of women and children in some far off country than to peek beneath the surface and see so many American children in need. Civilization begins with the family gathered together to share meals – if we fail at that simple task, we can’t possibly survive. You want to rescue America, try to teach young men and women to be responsible parents and for crying out loud, sit down together and share meals, not just during the holidays, but throughout the entire year.
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And in regards to women in Afghanistan, hello, President Obama is pretty much handing that country back to the Taliban and the drug warlords when we pull-out, so having Hillary and John Kerry lamenting the plight of Afghan women seems hypocritical in the extreme. So besides being clueless on how to bake cookies, Hillary’s also not even very good at understanding foreign policy either. Laura Bush means well, but the political situation we leave on the ground there will erase most, if not all, of the gains made by Afghan women. John Kerry, well who knows why he showed up at Georgetown for this event and depending on which way the political winds blow, he can reliably be for or against any political situation or cause. He’s a man for all political seasons. Now, that I got all that off of my chest, I can think about my Thanksgiving menu.
Filed under Culture Wars, Food for Thought, General Interest, Politics, Uncategorized
“Love and Peace”
Often the thought crosses my mind, “I wonder what foreigners think of America watching American TV shows, movies and reading the stories that make front page news?” Even closer to home, I’ve often wondered what immigrants to America think about us and for the purpose of this post, I’m not going to veer into the political hot potato illegal immigration patch. Instead, I want to talk about immigrants, people who move to our country and don’t know us yet.
Working in a big box store offers an opportunity to meet all sorts of people and years ago when I worked in the fabrics and crafts department, my store utilized recent immigrants to handle the floor-cleaning and overnight maintenance. We had a Bulgarian cleaning crew of three people, a couple and one other very tall man. They worked diligently with never a fuss, starting before my evening shifts ended. They avoided eye contact as they passed through the fabrics and crafts area every night. One evening I decided that I was going to meet them, so I began a halting conversation with the very tall gentleman. His English was not good. I don’t know any Bulgarian and through a few words I realized he spoke Russian, but I couldn’t remember more than a few words from my high school Russian classes. He quickly introduced me to the couple and I began chatting with them whenever I saw them in the store. The couple had been professional people in Bulgaria and they had a middle school age daughter. The tall gentleman, Lubomir, had been a Soviet-trained Bulgarian army officer. He was saving up money to bring his wife and son to America and besides working on that, he was studying English and studying to be able to become a truck driver, which would pay more and offer more opportunities to reach his goals. Often, I watched in dismay as some ignorant co-workers would mock his halting speech and ask him what his name was and treat him like the village idiot. He would patiently tell them his name was Lubomir and invariably they would ignore that and call him “Big Lou”. Lubomir seemed surprised that I knew where Bulgaria actually is, as most times when he told my co-workers that, it was met with, “Never heard of it!”
As Christmas drew near I decided to bake an assortment of Christmas cookies and take it to the apartment where they lived. I love baking, so I happily mixed and baked away and I had a large round metal Christmas tin can awaiting my cookie assortment. Then one of my sons came in the kitchen and I chattered away about how I was going to take Christmas cookies to my Bulgarian friends from work. Quickly, he started casting doubt on my gift idea. It started with questions like, “Mom do you realize that Bulgaria has quite a few Muslims and you don’t even know if these people are Christians?” He went on to fill me in on all the reasons why I shouldn’t presume they celebrate Christmas. I began doubting my project. Finally I told him I am not trying to convert them, I’m merely giving them a gift to let them know I value their friendship. His stream of over-thinking a simple goodwill gesture permeates how American society operates though, but he did have me wondering if my cookies might offend them.
I drove over to their apartment and the young daughter answered the door. She told me her parents were sleeping, which I expected as they worked the overnight shift in our store. This young lady possessed gracious manners, spoke impeccable English and offered the warmest smile when I told her I was friends with her parents at work. I didn’t want her to wake up her parents, so I just handed her the can of Christmas cookies and she said with just the slightest accent, “Thank you very much!”
Several thoughts struck me as I drove home. I thought about how we brag about how by the second generation immigrants assimilate and mainstream into American society and this young lady seemed well on the way toward that. Then I thought, why do we settle for the second-generation of immigrants assimilating – why not make it a commitment to assimilate new immigrants to America and turn as many of them as possible into American success stories. Why accept that it’s natural that the first generation toils away on the outskirts of American society, never really finding their way to being a real part of American society? I’m not talking about new federal programs, merely suggesting we start noticing the immigrants in our own communities, try to get to know them and treat them like neighbors. Assimilation into a community doesn’t come about through federal programs, it comes by making friends and accepting people into your group. It doesn’t even have to cost as much as a can of cookies – it can be as simple as talking to people and letting them know you’re willing to help them.
That conversation with my son came to mind last night when a friend mentioned cutting off aid to drug addicts and turning our backs on them until they clean up their act as part of the remedy to deal with that problem. As one who doesn’t think federal hand-out programs solve problems, I have no problem with eliminating many of these programs, as they fuel dependency and vicious cycles of poverty. In our communities though we, especially those of us who do celebrate Christmas, still need to try to find ways to help people in trouble, even though it would be easier to cast them aside as not part of our neighborhood. And on a lighter note, my Bulgarian friend’s name, Lubomir, means “love and peace” and if that wasn’t a good sign that my Christmas cookies would be welcome, I don’t know what is;-)
Filed under American Character, Culture Wars, Food for Thought
On the march with some old Romans
Here is the quote I was looking for on restoring a republic, from “Discourses on Livy” by Niccolo Machiavelli, Book III, Chapter 1:
“A republic may, likewise, be brought back to its original form, without recourse to ordinances for enforcing justice, by the mere virtues of a single citizen, by reason that these virtues are of such influence and authority that good men love to imitate them, and bad men are ashamed to depart from them.”
Machiavelli goes on to list some illustrious Romans of great virtue, who changed the course of the republic by virtue of their upstanding characters, so it’s not like he’s spouting idealistic theories.
For more inspiring Romans, I always turn to “The Meditations” by Marcus Aurelis, which begins:
“From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.
From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character.
From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.”
Now if that doesn’t demonstrate the timelessness of family values coming from the second century (161 AD or I guess CE is the preferred method now), I don’t know what does.
Now just when you think you’ve heard as much about the Romans as you might wish to know, here’s the Roman connection of my hero, George Washington to Cincinnatus, the Roman general called from his retirement as a simple farmer to once more lead the Romans to defeat the Aequians. Right from the Mount Vernon website (here), “For Romans and Americans alike, Cincinnatus represented the ideal republican simplicity, an enlightened poverty that spurned luxury and cultivated a simple nobility of spirit.” This comparison of George Washington to Cincinnatus led to the formation of the Society of the Cincinnati, composed of former Revolutionary War officers, with naturally, Washington being the first elected president of the society. The Mount Vernon website states the society adopted the Latin motto, Omnia reliquit servare rem publicam (“He gave up everything to serve the republic”) alluding to the story of Cincinnatus.
If all these Roman names are a mystery to you, spend a few minutes googling, but as most of my readers seem to read more history than me, that probably won’t be necessary. I have mentioned this book before, but since here’s another opportunity to wax on about a book that makes learning about the Romans fun. Yes, really this book is written tongue-in-cheek and it will bring a smile to your face and you’ll be anxiously wanting to sign up to be a legionary too. The book is called, “Legionary; the Roman Soldier’s (Unofficial) Manual”.
Filed under American History, Food for Thought, History, Military
Where every child really does count
Yesterday my post highlighted a Thomas Sowell article on the race-hustling industry in America and today he presented the second part, “Race-Hustling Results: Part II”, at Townhall.com and it’s also on National Review Online with a different title, “The Business of Being Offended”. He offers one of the most honest takes on the results of decades of grievance politics, determined initiation of programs to keep minorities enslaved to state programs and aligned to the political hand that feeds them, and a culture that gravitates toward the lowest rather than aspiring toward the highest. This paragraph sums up where we are at:
“Young blacks are especially susceptible to the message that all their problems are caused by white people — and that white society is never going to give them a chance. In short, they are primed to resent and hate individuals they have never seen before and who have never done a thing to them.”
All sorts of studies abound about the racial divide and from decades of this area being a political tinderbox, for every statistic purporting one fact, you’ll find some determined politically motivated folks conjure up statistics stating the exact opposite. The one thing, numbers aside on black women compared to black men in college, that is irrefutable is the large number of black men in prison. Beside that trend is the irrefutable fact that more than 72% of black children are born to single mothers and this leads to a large number of women and children trapped in a cycle of poverty and government dependency.
It’s very easy for white middle class and above people to cast judgments and get behind all sorts of broad-stroke welfare reform programs, like drug-testing before benefits or making welfare dependent on seeking employment, but few people want to look at this national problem close-up and personal and actually see that these are individual Americans, whose potential seems destined to be unrealized from birth. We should commit that every American child should be able to reach for the stars.
For some reason in America, we always look to government solutions for problems that require committed social action (being good neighbors), that finds expression in community action and used to be most commonly found in our churches. Unless and until we get enough people to stop dividing America into raging factions, where the only ones who benefit are the race-hustlers and politicians, we will never be able to bridge this gaping cultural divide and have one America, where every child really does count. This type of commitment starts at the most basic level – one on one communication and building trust. It starts with one person daring to offer a helping hand.
Gladius is a committed conservative, but what he emailed me a couple days ago goes beyond politics, it cuts to the what is ailing America – a lack of moral courage:
“Bottom line is that nothing occurs in a vacuum. It is a cliché but it is true: If we have strong individuals, we can have strong families; with strong families we can have strong churches; with strong churches we can have strong communities; strong communities beget strong states; strong states a strong nation. We are at a loss for strong individuals. Moral courage has been trained out of too many through a corrupt and liberal education system. Principles are deemed narrow-minded bigotry rather than honorable. Greed is rampant. And, through it all, the rot of individual integrity is sapping our strength.”
Dr. Sowell and Gladius expressed the problem a little differently, but they both traced it back to the roots – a breakdown of our communities, because our families have fallen into disarray. While it would be nice to believe that money can solve this problem and that with a few more determined social-engineering programs and millions more in tax dollars tossed at the problems, we would have our solution. Decades of widening income and social gaps, decimation of largely black urban inner-cities, sky-high incarceration rates of young black males, so many single black moms trying to go it alone clearly show that governmental band-aids can’t stop this hemorrhaging. It’s going to take lots of committed helping hands to pull people up in communities all across America, resuscitating an American spirit that seems to be almost on it’s last breath.
We need to focus on helping individuals in our own communities, mentoring, truly being good neighbors and investing the time to make sure we don’t forget to rescue those who keep falling through the cracks. To even begin the process takes finding a way to talk to each other as neighbors first, not as political opponents. Our out-of-control politicization of every issue in America, which often seems deliberately motivated by various factions, will end up destroying our Republic, unless we commit to a drastic course correction. I’ll harken back to President George Washington’s Farewell Address to our young nation on the dangers of letting political factions burn out of control;
“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection”
For more on George Washington’s timeless advice to keep our Republic strong and united and how he helped me form my American character, here is my “The duty of a wise people” blog post from back in May. I’m searching for the Livy (that old Roman historian) quote on how the virtues of a Republic can be restored by the example of one man and will add it to the bottom once I locate it, because it speaks to where we are at with our own Republic.
Filed under American Character, Culture Wars, Food for Thought, Politics
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