Today I read about the ugly aftermath of the recent election that will bring the first African-American president to power in the United States. The Associated Press reports that the number of death threats against President-Elect Obama far exceeds the usual number that follow an election. In Snellville, Georgia, Denene Millner reported that a boy on the school bus told her 9-year-old daughter the day after the election: "I hope Obama gets assassinated." Second- and third-grade students on a school bus in Rexburg, Idaho, chanted "assassinate Obama," a district official said.
I've been thinking about these incidents because I've been increasingly upset about a directive I received from other parents the day after the election. I had driven nearly three hours to pick up my son and other 4th graders from a camp where they had been staying in Coloma, California, the town the originated the 1848 Gold Rush.
"There's to be no election talk. It's absolutely verboten," one mother told me in the bathroom as I prepared to pack up the car for the return three-hour trip. "They're absolutely obsessed with the election," she added, but then informed me that we weren't to tell them who won. "They can't handle it."
"Says who?" I thought to myself, furious that I was receiving this information from another parent rather than from my son's teacher directly. When I signed up to drive for this field trip, I certainly didn't sign away my first amendment rights at the car door, and I felt both foolish and resentful as I rushed to cover the morning papers I had placed on the front passenger seat.
Of course, the kids saw the headline that proclaimed Obama's electoral victory. And why shouldn't they see it? Why should I have to feel guilty that I had the morning's newspaper on the front seat of my car?
No one had informed me in advance that election talk was to be absolutely "verboten" in a private car, or asked me if I agreed to that policy before I agreed to spend six hours in my car, chauffeuring kids on the day after the election.
And of course, the kids were obsessed with the election. So was every American citizen and just about everyone else on the planet. Why shouldn't they be excited about one of the most historic elections the world had ever witnessed? And why should they be denied the right to know the outcome of that election? Or to discuss the election freely with one another?
I disagree absolutely that nine and ten year olds are not prepared to handled the discussion of an American election, especially one that changed history. Properly mediated by a responsible adult, there is no better occasion for children to exchange views, respectfully, civilly, but also openly and truthfully, with one another.
Yes, somebody's feelings may be hurt. But this is not about emotion but about teaching children how to back up emotion with fact and reason. All three recent presidential elections have been hotly contested and left hard feelings for those who lost, whether those feelings were warranted or not. The salient point is that the United States has successfully passed the reigns of power peacefully for over two hundred years, and where there have been questions of electoral misconduct, those questions have been referred to the courts, and the majority of Americans have accepted those court rulings, even if they disagreed with them.
I feel very strongly that we do a disservice to ourselves and to our children if we censor their discussion of a hotly contested election. If there was ever a "teachable" moment in history, this election was one, and not to address it openly and frankly, in my opinion, is an act of cowardice.
Yes, people are angry that Barack Obama won, but those children who chanted, "Assasinate Obama," will not become more reasonable or rational, if they are simply censored rather than engaged. This is the moment to ask those kids, "Why are you saying this? Why do think it's okay to encourage someone's death because you disagree with his policies or don't like the color of his skin?'
Racism will never go away if we simply force people to suppress rather than encourage them to express feelings and then engage them on a rational level.
I remember my own fourth-grade teacher, who is a man I still respect above all others. He spoke to my class after the resignation of Richard Nixon. We were a class of nearly all Republicans with one lone Democrat in our midst. "Don't believe everything your parents tell you," he said to us. "Learn how to think for yourselves."
I know that as a fourth-grader I was ready for this message of encouragement to think for myself. I am furious with myself for letting other parents intimidate me into stopping my own fourth-grader and the others in my care during that long car ride home from finding out just how much history had changed and expressing their views about it.
If you truly believe in free speech, you know that there's no such thing as too much speech. Keep talking and eventually you will find that the answer to hate is simply more speech and more speech and more speech.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
The Twilight Saga, or Why We Keep Trying to Censor what Teens Read
In carpool a couple of weeks ago, a fourth-grade girl I've come to think of as a surrogate daughter, mentioned that her mom didn't want her to read Twilight, the teen vampire love story that's been such a huge publishing success and will soon hit the big screen.
“Oh, my son Tomas read that,” I told her, and “I read it too while I was recovering from a bad fall.” (And I didn't feel capable of reading anything too complicated, I thought to myself, but I didn't say that out loud.) “There's nothing bad in it,” I said to her, "and if you want me to tell your mom that I've read it and that I think it's okay for you to read, I can do that,” I promised her.
“Oh, could you?” she asked hopefully. “I told her I'd rather read Twilight than get my own cell phone and that tells you how much it means to me.”
“It sure does,” I laughed, and then I started thinking to myself about the perennial question of why we as parents get so worried about what our kids read that we want to censor certain books.
So I started asking people – okay, other moms--what they thought about Twilight. [If I'd asked any dads, they would mostly likely have give me blank stares, but that's another blog topic.)
My sister told me that the book was a source of controversy at her daughter's Christian school. I found out that the mom of my would-be-Twilight-reader wasn't nearly as worried about the book as her college-aged daughter was because her oldest daughter thought that the heroine wasn't a “good role model.” “What I think really upsets her,” my friend told me, “is that wanting to read this book shows that her little sister is growing up too fast.”
After all Twilight does touch on all those adolescent issues that raise parental (and big sister) hackles: falling in love, wondering about sex, having relationships (platonic or otherwise) behind a parent's back, having your daughter getting involved with wrong kid of guy (where “vampire” stands in for any race/class/religion/or other difference that makes you uncomfortable).
For my friend's older daughter, Twilight also seemed to send the wrong kind of message to her little sister: in it the heroine spends a lot time wondering if she's good enough for the guy; he tends to be controlling, even bullying on occasion, and his outrageous good looks, material wealth, and “I know more than you do, little girl” attitude isn't quite enough to offset his equally out-sized angst about how he might endanger her or even worse give in to the temptation to turn her into a vampire like himself.
But the real question that lingers for me about the Twilight phenomenon isn't so much about whether it's a “good” book or a “bad” book, but why we worry so much about what adolescents, and especially adolescent girls, read.
I'd be the first to admit that I share my friend's oldest daughter's concern about her little sister reading books that start to erode the boundaries of childhood. There are good reasons for having “children's sections” in public libraries in order to provide a rich, age-appropriate environment in which young people can begin to explore their world, including its darker sides.
Yet children's books like Holes, Are you there God? It's me, Margaret?, and Bud, Not Buddy treat topics that a generation earlier we might not have considered “safe” for children: including abuse, abandonment, puberty, and the juvenile justice system. However, the authors of these same books write about these experiences in a way that children and adults can understand without being psychically threatened by them.
One of the hardest transitions we experience as parents is watching our children move from the relative innocence and wonder of childhood to the increased worldliness and skepticism that they begin to feel as young adults. If there's anyone I identified with in Twilight it was the well-meaning but easily fooled father who has no idea what's going on in his daughter's head or taking place in her bedroom where a vampire spends most evenings watching her sleep and trying to protect her from other vampires.
Perhaps what bothers parents most about what their teens are reading is this realization that we can no longer fully protect our children from the world and all its dangers.
In a strange way, it may seem more feasible to us keep our children safe from the fictional dangers contained in the pages of a book than to have to face our own limitations in keeping them safe from the world at large. Censorship can seem to offer a certain comfort to a parent, even if we're just like the father in Twilight, futilely trying to ward off threats we can't even see.
As the mother of three sons, two of whom are over the age of fifteen, I confess I've largely ceded the battle of trying to protect my adolescent children from any and all “negative” influences of media, video, books, music, pop culture, and their peers. I also have to confess that I might be a little less laissez-faire if I had a daughter. I just don't know what difference gender might make.
But what I have realized is that all I can really do at this stage of children's lives is to give them the skills to ask questions about what they hear, what they watch, and what they read.
They're going to read what they want, not necessarily what I want them to read. But I also know that if I'm willing to take the time to read some of the same books, we can at least start a conversation, even an argument, about what those books mean and why we value them differently. And that's one good way to recognize their passage to young adulthood.
For more good discussions of Twilight, see The Christian Science Monitor's "Chapter & Verse Blog," "I Don't Want my Kid Reading that Book"
http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/11/15/i-dont-want-my-kid-reading-that-book/
“Oh, my son Tomas read that,” I told her, and “I read it too while I was recovering from a bad fall.” (And I didn't feel capable of reading anything too complicated, I thought to myself, but I didn't say that out loud.) “There's nothing bad in it,” I said to her, "and if you want me to tell your mom that I've read it and that I think it's okay for you to read, I can do that,” I promised her.
“Oh, could you?” she asked hopefully. “I told her I'd rather read Twilight than get my own cell phone and that tells you how much it means to me.”
“It sure does,” I laughed, and then I started thinking to myself about the perennial question of why we as parents get so worried about what our kids read that we want to censor certain books.
So I started asking people – okay, other moms--what they thought about Twilight. [If I'd asked any dads, they would mostly likely have give me blank stares, but that's another blog topic.)
My sister told me that the book was a source of controversy at her daughter's Christian school. I found out that the mom of my would-be-Twilight-reader wasn't nearly as worried about the book as her college-aged daughter was because her oldest daughter thought that the heroine wasn't a “good role model.” “What I think really upsets her,” my friend told me, “is that wanting to read this book shows that her little sister is growing up too fast.”
After all Twilight does touch on all those adolescent issues that raise parental (and big sister) hackles: falling in love, wondering about sex, having relationships (platonic or otherwise) behind a parent's back, having your daughter getting involved with wrong kid of guy (where “vampire” stands in for any race/class/religion/or other difference that makes you uncomfortable).
For my friend's older daughter, Twilight also seemed to send the wrong kind of message to her little sister: in it the heroine spends a lot time wondering if she's good enough for the guy; he tends to be controlling, even bullying on occasion, and his outrageous good looks, material wealth, and “I know more than you do, little girl” attitude isn't quite enough to offset his equally out-sized angst about how he might endanger her or even worse give in to the temptation to turn her into a vampire like himself.
But the real question that lingers for me about the Twilight phenomenon isn't so much about whether it's a “good” book or a “bad” book, but why we worry so much about what adolescents, and especially adolescent girls, read.
I'd be the first to admit that I share my friend's oldest daughter's concern about her little sister reading books that start to erode the boundaries of childhood. There are good reasons for having “children's sections” in public libraries in order to provide a rich, age-appropriate environment in which young people can begin to explore their world, including its darker sides.
Yet children's books like Holes, Are you there God? It's me, Margaret?, and Bud, Not Buddy treat topics that a generation earlier we might not have considered “safe” for children: including abuse, abandonment, puberty, and the juvenile justice system. However, the authors of these same books write about these experiences in a way that children and adults can understand without being psychically threatened by them.
One of the hardest transitions we experience as parents is watching our children move from the relative innocence and wonder of childhood to the increased worldliness and skepticism that they begin to feel as young adults. If there's anyone I identified with in Twilight it was the well-meaning but easily fooled father who has no idea what's going on in his daughter's head or taking place in her bedroom where a vampire spends most evenings watching her sleep and trying to protect her from other vampires.
Perhaps what bothers parents most about what their teens are reading is this realization that we can no longer fully protect our children from the world and all its dangers.
In a strange way, it may seem more feasible to us keep our children safe from the fictional dangers contained in the pages of a book than to have to face our own limitations in keeping them safe from the world at large. Censorship can seem to offer a certain comfort to a parent, even if we're just like the father in Twilight, futilely trying to ward off threats we can't even see.
As the mother of three sons, two of whom are over the age of fifteen, I confess I've largely ceded the battle of trying to protect my adolescent children from any and all “negative” influences of media, video, books, music, pop culture, and their peers. I also have to confess that I might be a little less laissez-faire if I had a daughter. I just don't know what difference gender might make.
But what I have realized is that all I can really do at this stage of children's lives is to give them the skills to ask questions about what they hear, what they watch, and what they read.
They're going to read what they want, not necessarily what I want them to read. But I also know that if I'm willing to take the time to read some of the same books, we can at least start a conversation, even an argument, about what those books mean and why we value them differently. And that's one good way to recognize their passage to young adulthood.
For more good discussions of Twilight, see The Christian Science Monitor's "Chapter & Verse Blog," "I Don't Want my Kid Reading that Book"
http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/11/15/i-dont-want-my-kid-reading-that-book/
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Finding Your Real Friends
It's a truism that that you only find out who you're real friends are when you're in a crisis. Now that many Americans are losing homes, losing jobs, even losing their faith in themselves, many people are testing that truism in real time.
I returned home to California in August and discovered how much friendship meant. When my husband and I needed a place to park two large moving vans until our tenants could move out of our house, we had friends who let us leave the trucks outside their homes, despite neighbors' complaints. We also had friends on vacation who said, “Stay in our house as long as you need,” so we didn't have to camp out with sleeping bags among boxes and disassembled furniture. Friends offered us meals, welcomed us back, said those sweetest of words to a returning family, “We really missed you.”
Since those late days of summer when we were heady with the excitement and joy of returning to a place we love, my family has also experienced the downside of a rapidly deteriorating economy. I'm not finding a job as quickly as I had hoped. My husband just lost his, and we have to plan carefully how we will use his severance and our savings to start a new company in a business climate where starting a new venture seems crazy to most people.
But we aren't crazy, and we aren't cock-eyed optimists. We have creativity, energy, and vision, and most of all we still have real friends – people who are there to share ideas and advice, to give a referral when we need it, and to listen when we have a down day.
Of course, there are always people who offer to help you network, or to meet you for coffee, and then never follow through, or who listen politely but with barely concealed skepticism to your dreams, or who promise to help in some way but make it clear that you are way down their list of priorities. Those are the people you cull from your mental list of “friends,” often with some pain, but also with the realization that you've tested a relationship and found it wanting.
Sadly, some of the friends you may test and find wanting may be members of your own family, but even so, you can take courage and hope from the unexpected expressions of friendship that come from people you never thought would be willing to come through for you. And even more valuable are the people who hoped you could depend on and who proved that your faith was warranted: those are the friends worth keeping – in good times and in bad.
P.S. Since posting this blog, something kept nagging at me, and I realized that I don't actually "cull" friends as ruthlessly as I seem to imply. If did, I would have written off my best friend and the man I married over twenty years ago. He was one of the major testers of my definitions of friendship. I wrote him a letter the summer he took a bus from New Haven, Connecticut to Portland, Oregon after having been hospitalized for severe asthma. I just wanted to be sure he got home okay, but my well-intentioned letter received no response, and I returned to school the next fall determined not to have anything more to do with him. Fortunately, he made a determined effort to win my good will back, and he's not the only one on the list of people who don't answer emails for six months or return phone calls for years etc. that I've welcomed back into the fold of those I call friends. After all, you're not really a good friend unless you can forgive a breach of friendship.
I returned home to California in August and discovered how much friendship meant. When my husband and I needed a place to park two large moving vans until our tenants could move out of our house, we had friends who let us leave the trucks outside their homes, despite neighbors' complaints. We also had friends on vacation who said, “Stay in our house as long as you need,” so we didn't have to camp out with sleeping bags among boxes and disassembled furniture. Friends offered us meals, welcomed us back, said those sweetest of words to a returning family, “We really missed you.”
Since those late days of summer when we were heady with the excitement and joy of returning to a place we love, my family has also experienced the downside of a rapidly deteriorating economy. I'm not finding a job as quickly as I had hoped. My husband just lost his, and we have to plan carefully how we will use his severance and our savings to start a new company in a business climate where starting a new venture seems crazy to most people.
But we aren't crazy, and we aren't cock-eyed optimists. We have creativity, energy, and vision, and most of all we still have real friends – people who are there to share ideas and advice, to give a referral when we need it, and to listen when we have a down day.
Of course, there are always people who offer to help you network, or to meet you for coffee, and then never follow through, or who listen politely but with barely concealed skepticism to your dreams, or who promise to help in some way but make it clear that you are way down their list of priorities. Those are the people you cull from your mental list of “friends,” often with some pain, but also with the realization that you've tested a relationship and found it wanting.
Sadly, some of the friends you may test and find wanting may be members of your own family, but even so, you can take courage and hope from the unexpected expressions of friendship that come from people you never thought would be willing to come through for you. And even more valuable are the people who hoped you could depend on and who proved that your faith was warranted: those are the friends worth keeping – in good times and in bad.
P.S. Since posting this blog, something kept nagging at me, and I realized that I don't actually "cull" friends as ruthlessly as I seem to imply. If did, I would have written off my best friend and the man I married over twenty years ago. He was one of the major testers of my definitions of friendship. I wrote him a letter the summer he took a bus from New Haven, Connecticut to Portland, Oregon after having been hospitalized for severe asthma. I just wanted to be sure he got home okay, but my well-intentioned letter received no response, and I returned to school the next fall determined not to have anything more to do with him. Fortunately, he made a determined effort to win my good will back, and he's not the only one on the list of people who don't answer emails for six months or return phone calls for years etc. that I've welcomed back into the fold of those I call friends. After all, you're not really a good friend unless you can forgive a breach of friendship.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Grace Under Fire
On Tuesday evening, Senator John McCain gave the best speech of his campaign: he conceded victory to President-Elect Obama, and more importantly, he acknowledged the historic nature of that win.
Up until this past year, I had admired Senator McCain, and not just for the obvious reasons: the heroism he had shown in war or the principled stances he adopted on campaign finance reform and immigration. I also deeply respected his decision not to engage in the ugly racial smear tactics that were used against him by Karl Rove in North Carolina in 2000 when phone calls suggested that he had a black illegitimate daughter.
McCain made many mistakes in this campaign and in recent weeks stooped to tactics that were not worthy of him. But he never played the race card. There was no Willie Horton in this campaign, and for that I continue to respect him.
But I was also moved and saddened by the emergence of his former self in his concession speech. In the past few months McCain has seemed uncomfortable in his own skin, perhaps regretting his moves to the right to court the Republican base, perhaps unnerved and disheartened by the bigotry displayed at his own campaign rallies from people who called Obama a “Muslim” and a “socialist” as if those were two of the seven dirty words you can't say on the air.
On Tuesday night, McCain hushed the boos from the audience; he took full responsibility for his loss. “The failure is mine,” he said, but not before he had alluded to the seismic change this election represents in American history.
In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.
This is the John McCain who believes in the power of American democracy and not just winning elections, the man who can recognize that the expansion of the electorate and the record numbers of Americans who cast their votes, many of them for the first time, was something to celebrate and not something to try to suppress, the man who can acknowledge the “special pride” of black Americans who know that the United States truly is a land of opportunity when a man who might not have been able to vote freely a half century earlier in the American south can now lead this country as its President.
I appreciate Senator McCain's long service to this country and I hope to see the real John McCain, who exhibits grace under fire, continue to serve in the United States Senate for many years to come.
Up until this past year, I had admired Senator McCain, and not just for the obvious reasons: the heroism he had shown in war or the principled stances he adopted on campaign finance reform and immigration. I also deeply respected his decision not to engage in the ugly racial smear tactics that were used against him by Karl Rove in North Carolina in 2000 when phone calls suggested that he had a black illegitimate daughter.
McCain made many mistakes in this campaign and in recent weeks stooped to tactics that were not worthy of him. But he never played the race card. There was no Willie Horton in this campaign, and for that I continue to respect him.
But I was also moved and saddened by the emergence of his former self in his concession speech. In the past few months McCain has seemed uncomfortable in his own skin, perhaps regretting his moves to the right to court the Republican base, perhaps unnerved and disheartened by the bigotry displayed at his own campaign rallies from people who called Obama a “Muslim” and a “socialist” as if those were two of the seven dirty words you can't say on the air.
On Tuesday night, McCain hushed the boos from the audience; he took full responsibility for his loss. “The failure is mine,” he said, but not before he had alluded to the seismic change this election represents in American history.
In a contest as long and difficult as this campaign has been, his success alone commands my respect for his ability and perseverance. But that he managed to do so by inspiring the hopes of so many millions of Americans who had once wrongly believed that they had little at stake or little influence in the election of an American president is something I deeply admire and commend him for achieving.
This is the John McCain who believes in the power of American democracy and not just winning elections, the man who can recognize that the expansion of the electorate and the record numbers of Americans who cast their votes, many of them for the first time, was something to celebrate and not something to try to suppress, the man who can acknowledge the “special pride” of black Americans who know that the United States truly is a land of opportunity when a man who might not have been able to vote freely a half century earlier in the American south can now lead this country as its President.
I appreciate Senator McCain's long service to this country and I hope to see the real John McCain, who exhibits grace under fire, continue to serve in the United States Senate for many years to come.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
A Day to Celebrate for All Americans
A Day to Celebrate for All Americans
I have just witnessed history. Tonight America elected its first African-American president.
I supported the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama because I felt that he was the best candidate. But I am also proud to have cast a vote for him as a white woman because I feel that his election is an important symbolic and material step towards the healing of America's racial wounds and the ugly legacy of slavery.
Today is a first for me on many levels:
I know that tonight is a moment of disappointment for many Americans, not least of which are many of my family members, who have been Republicans for generations. But I hope that they will join me in my hope that the election of Barack Obama is a moment of healing for America's racial divisions and a step towards the recovery of America's reputation as a leader on the world stage.
Barack Obama's campaign brought millions of new voters to the electoral process, especially young voters, Hispanics, and African-Americans, and whatever your party affiliation, we all can only benefit when the number of register voters expands and the number of registered voters reaches historic highs.
Whatever anyone feels about the outcome of the election, this voting experience is historic on so many levels, and we should all celebrate an election in which so many of us participated and so many could see tangible evidence that another barrier to the Presidency crumbled to the ground.
I have just witnessed history. Tonight America elected its first African-American president.
I supported the candidacy of Senator Barack Obama because I felt that he was the best candidate. But I am also proud to have cast a vote for him as a white woman because I feel that his election is an important symbolic and material step towards the healing of America's racial wounds and the ugly legacy of slavery.
Today is a first for me on many levels:
It is the first time my oldest son cast his vote in an American election.
It is the first time in my lifetime that I can face my children and say candidly, “Anyone can grow up to be the President of the United States.”
It is the first time that millions of voters cast their vote for the first time and joined me in the privilege of exercising the right to vote in one of the world's great democracies.
I know that tonight is a moment of disappointment for many Americans, not least of which are many of my family members, who have been Republicans for generations. But I hope that they will join me in my hope that the election of Barack Obama is a moment of healing for America's racial divisions and a step towards the recovery of America's reputation as a leader on the world stage.
Barack Obama's campaign brought millions of new voters to the electoral process, especially young voters, Hispanics, and African-Americans, and whatever your party affiliation, we all can only benefit when the number of register voters expands and the number of registered voters reaches historic highs.
Whatever anyone feels about the outcome of the election, this voting experience is historic on so many levels, and we should all celebrate an election in which so many of us participated and so many could see tangible evidence that another barrier to the Presidency crumbled to the ground.
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