Venangoland TEA Party

(News-Herald, April 16) As a fake journalist I occasionally take on a story that can’t be covered from my home. Someone invited to the TEA party, so Tuesday night I hightailed it over to the Rocky Grove Fire Hall for the big tax protest meeting.
The tea party rallies have been a growing phenomenon over the past several years. This year the American Family Association either decided to help or co-opted the business, depending on who’s talking (there’s a small internet tempest among some disgruntled “original” Tea Party organizers). They clearly didn’t hurt; there were thousands of these rallies this week.
Venangoland’s tea party was an AFA affair. I disagree in the extreme with some of AFA’s behavior and beliefs, but I also believe it’s dumb to assume that if someone is wrong about A, I should assume they are wrong about B through Z. Since I don’t think an American tax revolt has a lot to do specifically with God or gay folks, I was happy to listen to some political rhetoric.
A wide variety of folk showed up. I saw Christian bikers and Libertarians, jean jackets and faux leopard furs, a variety of office-holders and office-holder wannabes. There were plenty of flags (traditional American and “Don’t tread on me”) and signs ranging from the direct (“Don’t put our grandchildren in debt”) to the obscure (a man holding up a small grave marker for the Federal Reserve). Inside, tables set up by WAWN/AFA handed out materials and Constitutions. Outside it was spring-in-Venangoland chilly and wettish.
Some of the content of these rallies is pretty predictable. There is the reading of the Declaration of Independence, noting that some of the offenses of the 18th century Brits are being replayed today. This routine was first employed during the Lincoln administration and has been trotted out regularly ever since.
Which is not to say that protestors don’t have a point. The government spends way too much imaginary money on stupid things and sticks its nose in many places where it causes more harm than help. This is just as true as the cold and mud of a Western PA spring; if you are surprised or shocked by either, I can only assume that you have been living in a cave.
Plenty of rallyers were against spreading government involvement and spending and socialization and a congressional process that thwarts the thoughtful involvement of all representatives. The cynical side of me wonders where these people were for the last eight or fifty years.
Of course, wasteful government spending is money the feds give the other guy. Ed Scurry, Venangoland’s eternal Democrat, was there with a sign that read “I love Medicaid, Department of Defense…” and a host of other federal programs.
But I nit pick. If you’re finally at the party, I guess it doesn’t really matter how long it took you to get there. And Jane Richey and her crew provided a well-crafted tea party.
She is a smooth and capable speaker, and she had clearly come prepared to work a mixed crowd. She kept her own presentation largely non-partisan, and though she ended with a prayer, acknowledged that not necessarily everyone would want to take part in that portion. She even handled unscripted interruptions (hint: what can’t you ignore in the RGVFD parking lot at 7 pm?)
Other speakers appeared by tape. Rev. Peter Marshall Jr. offered some history of grass roots revolts (the crowd’s attention wandered during the lesson). Wingnut Alan Keyes observed that the government can now control the will of its citizens. He talked about “these people” and how they are overthrowing the system of constitutional government so that “this is no longer a government in which the people are sovereign.” His line “if it [the government] is really broke, throw it out and start over” was the first big applause line of the night.
Some familiar foes were invoked (the media, and whoever it is we need to Take Back Our Country from—other voters who imagine they’re Americans, too?) and folks were given a chance to sign a Declaration of Dissatisfaction. Jane observed that we don’t have money problems so much as moral problems in this country and that people should actually do something rather than counting on others to guard their interests. Lots of folks stayed to sign the Declaration. Throughout, a videographer circulated to capture footage to be made into a Youtube video (I’m pretty sure nobody did that during the Lincoln administration).

Easter with Thoreau

(News-Herald, April 9) You remember Henry David Thoreau. Went out and lived in a little cabin next to Walden Pond. Wrote a book about it. That’s about as much as most folks remember. If they remember much else, it’s the picture of some monk-like stick-in-the-mud anti-social fuzzy-headed philosopher.
This is at least partly the fault of those of us who inflict Henry on our high school English students. Sometimes we get more wrapped up in the highlights instead of the important details. So if Henry is mis-remembered, I have to take some of the blame myself.
It’s unfortunate, because Thoreau’s work strikes me as strangely relevant once again. But let’s clarify a few points before we get into that.
Walden Pond was not in the wilderness, and Thoreau did not cut all human ties while he lived there. He was about twenty minutes from town, which he visited often. He had parties. He grew beans and sold them. He delivered lectures about the experience even as he was having it; audiences found them witty and fun.
Thoreau’s move was not some sort of philosophical wild impulse. It was a response to his own situation and the state of the world at the time. He had gone to the big city to try to break into professional writing, and found the big city a tough nut to crack. He had worked as a handyman and au pair for his buddy Emerson, his days filled with looking after other people’s families and property.
The state of the world? In that pre-Civil War period, the country was in the grips of a tremendous economic downturn. Unemployment was high, prospects poor, the great experiment of capitalism apparently collapsing under its own flaws. Boy, just imagine a country in that kind of mess!
So Thoreau’s action was not an attempt to escape the world and rise, unencumbered by ordinary life, into some cerebral mental plane.
It was, instead, an eminently practical attempt to come to grips with the world. It’s not a reality escape—it’s a reality check. For himself, he was seeing if it was possible to do the work he wanted to do with just enough space to focus easily. For the country, it was almost a dare. So you think you can’t have a life without a pile of money and a big house packed full of stuff? Let’s see if that’s true.
The parallels to our own time seem obvious. The economic mess is, well, a mess. But it’s also a reality check. Last week a headline said “$500,000 home sold for $200,000.” Well, no. If the house sold for $200,00, it was a $200,000 house. Whether a McMansion, a hovel, or a box of beanie babies, any commodity is worth exactly what someone will pay for it. Pretending it has some other monetary value over and above that is invitation to disaster.
We’ve run headlong for a while now, our list of things we Must Have getting longer and longer. I don’t want to suggest for a moment that real human beings aren’t suffering real hurt in this mess, but as a country and a culture, we’re forced to deal with some perhaps overdue questions—how should each of us go about making a life in this world? Thoreau didn’t suggest we should all live in tiny cabins. He was suggesting that we all ask ourselves what parts of our lives we should really care about.
It’s an appropriate question for Easter week. The events of Easter capped a revolution that was far less, yet far more, than people had been looking for. People had clamored at God for generations with a long list of Things We Need From You To Make Life Good. I like to think that Jesus’s story is God’s way of saying, “Look, let’s talk about what you can really afford and what you really need. Let’s talk about what you really want your life to be.”
Thoreau’s intention was to live deliberately, to do things on purpose, which seems like a simple enough goal. Yet most of us are content to flop through whatever hoops are set before us by accident and habit. Thoreau believed that any day could be the day that we begin the life we choose to create for ourselves instead of one we drifted into, seduced by the world. Times can be scary, but as it turns out, we can lose much of what we want and still have everything we need.

Unplugged Progress Report

(News-Herald, April 2) Last fall I decided that it would be a good idea for me to save some of the money and time that television cable was sucking away. I’ve now been living without cable for six months and I’ve already learned some lessons about life unplugged.
The very first thing I learned was how much company I have. A surprisingly large number of Venangoland residents stopped me in the store or sent an e-mail to let me know that they, too, had disconnected. Apparently plenty of people live full, rewarding lives without that steady stream of electronic marketeering.
There have been a few things I’ve missed—the Macy’s parade, the occasional news story, the—well, you know, I remember missing some things at the time, but as I sit here and try to conjure up the list, I’m stumped. And that perhaps is one of the surprising parts about life without cable—how quickly I’ve stopped missing things.
I did have a handful of shows that I watched regularly, and I figured I’d miss the habit. I fully expected to be hurrying online to stay current with many shows, but it hasn’t happened.
I thought I might miss tv news as well, but reading is a great substitute for getting bombarded with short, quick, ill-created blasts of tv news-like substance. I read the News-Derrick in print, several other newspapers on line, and I swear I actually feel smarter than when I absorbed the tube-based fast food news.
I never said I was going to go all cave man. I still have a television, but now it’s hooked up to a dvd player. I am a major Netflix fan, and I have watched my way through the complete run of a few series, both modern and classic. I’ve watched a slew of movies, and lots of fun documentaries.
But the biggest change is that I have become more deliberate in my tv choices. I used to just turn the tube on for background noise and company—now I don’t watch anything that I don’t purposefully put in the dvd player myself. Watching tv this way forces me to consider some of my tastes in viewing (I must, for instance, confront the fact that I have turned out to be one of those people who thinks documentaries are fun).
I watch way less television than I ever used to. And that means that I watch far less advertising than ever before.
Watching a modern tv series on disc, one can’t help noticing that an “hour” show actually runs about 42-44 minutes. In other words, watching a program on “regular” tv means spending about 1/3 of your time being bombarded by ads.
When I encounter “regular” tv, it’s the advertising that I find most striking—the show is interrupted so often, and for so long! And so many of the ads are sooooo bad (really, whoever’s spending money on “Rediscover Your Oil City” might as well take the money and staple it to the ice catchers).
Many 19th century novels (think Charles Dickens) weren’t really meant to be novels, but the collected chapters of weekly magazine serials. Collected episodes of tv series might also be the birth of a new form, a long rambling narrative that can’t be viewed in one sitting, yet works better as one big work than it does as many little pieces. NCIS, Arrested Development, Lost—all somehow more interesting in large continuous chunks than as weekly bits. Do be careful of the classic shows—they aren’t always as good as you remember (sorry, F-Troop).
Being freed of “regular” tv also means being freed of the clock. The network schedule doesn’t tell me when things stop and start.
I confess that there have been times when I have really missed having something stupid to do while I turn off my brain. For that sort of brain novacain, nothing beats television. But it turns out that with practice, I can get used to having my brain awake and working more hours of every day. And occasional bouts of restlessness sure beat discovering that I’ve just had several hours sucked out of my life by a show so stupid that even the bacteria on the tv screen are insulted by it.
I know there are folks who felt sure I’d eventually fold and go back to “regular” tv. I wondered myself if this would be a short-lived experiment. But between dvds, the internet, books, music, the river and the bike trail, I don’t think I’ll ever go back.

Parental Pride

(News-Herald, October 2002) I had the pleasure of visiting with young Keegan Hoover last weekend (I believe that his parents were in the vicinity as well). Keegan is one of those rare babies who’s actually as cute as his parents believe him to be. Walking him around the yard until he fell asleep in my arms reminded me of how much I liked the whole baby part of parenting.
I still have fond memories of the days when my non-mobile daughter could sleep in an open suitcase. I have equally fond memories of having my son fall asleep lying on my chest. I remain, to this day, a sucker for babies.
I also liked the toddler stage, the stage at which they were so free and open and just a big bundle of raw, exposed heart. At this age everyone can dance; I videotaped my children dancing decorum-free to their two favorite tunes of the time (“Walk the Dinosaur” by Was (Not Was) and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”). The only people who will enjoy that sight as much as I do will be my future grandchildren-- the invention of the home video camera brought a quantum leap in the art of embarrassing your children.
I have always said that as much as I miss the previous stage, and call it my favorite so far, the next stage is always even more fun. In the last six months, I have discovered my children entering a new and even more remarkable stage. You experienced parents may recognize it; those of you trundling along behind me can look forward to it.
This stage involves a change in a dynamic that has existed since birth. That dynamic is simple. Let’s face it; only one baby in a hundred is actually cute. Most newborns range in appearance from “hairless ape” to “mildly alarming” to “cute as a sharpe that’s been squeezed through a garden hose.” But that’s just the objective view, and no one who’s related to the baby takes it. My two children were the most beautiful babies that I have ever seen, and nothing will ever change that.
Parents of small infants don’t need cable because they can sit and watch their progeny’s face for hours. Every expression is exciting, moving, hilarious, touching. Refrigerator art is an unending source of joy because you are seeing the expression, the creation, of your own flesh and blood.
You remember how this small person in front of you once fit between your palm and the crook of your elbow, and pretty much anything they do is astonishing. You are proud of every achievement because that is your child who has done it. Some parents become stuck at that stage and become insufferable (“Junior was the best looking person in the police line-up!”) though I would rather see that parent than one who simply ceases to feel any pride at all.
Beyond that level of pride lies an even better one.
You notice it first when other people begin to compliment your child. It takes a while to sink in—at first you mistake it for politeness, an effort to praise your child as a kindness to you. But then you realize that these people are praising your child’s achievements for reasons completely unrelated to you. It has become all about your child’s achievement.
So you look at your own children and realize that they are capable, able, admirable human beings in their own right, completely apart from any connection to you.
We should not be slow to feel pride for our children—not the kind of pride that reflects back on us, but which spotlights them. I think it’s a mistake to view young people as threatening creatures that need to be kept off the streets night and day. I have been proud of many people’s children over the years: the ones who traveled abroad to learn about the suffering in other cultures, the ones who learned how to run a successful business, the ones who stumbled and fell and found their way, the ones who grew up strong and good. I am not proud of them because they are somehow mine (they never were) or because I somehow made them better people (they found that in themselves) but because I feel a sort of humble awed pride in seeing what great people they have become.
It has been a great revelation to feel that while looking at my own children, to discover they have grown to be fine people. They have grown into people I would be proud to know if I had just met them today. It is the best stage of parenting so far. May all other parents be so fortunate.

Air Traveler Dysfunction

(News-Herald, March 26) My daughter came home last week, having completed the great trans-continental commute once again. My family has logged more air miles in the last couple of years than in all the preceding decades.
When I’m at PIT it’s usually to meet someone who is coming in after 11 at night, which means there are only a couple handfuls of flights arriving at the same time. PIT late at night is a quiet, quiet place. I made better-than-average time on my late-night cruise to the Pittsburgh airport, so I had plenty of opportunity to think about air travel as I rattled around that empty slice of concrete realty.
The effects that rippled out from 9/11 have been discussed at great length, but I’m not sure we’ve heard much about one group that must have been hurt badly in these high-security years—the people who built shops and restaurants on the wrong side of the security fence.
PIT has a great little mall. How many families must have dropped a bundle waiting to see someone off in the old days? Now those days are gone.
Some airports have been hit harder than others. If you’re a traveler, PIT and Philadelphia and Denver are all pretty nice on the inside with plenty of good places to eat and shop. Denver looks a lot like the inside of Pittsburgh, only strung out in one long cardiac-inducing stretch. Chicago has a really cool light sculpture underground. Las Vegas has a nice view and plenty of gambling right in the terminal while you wait, just in case you don’t feel the airlines have sucked up enough of your money.
No airport I’ve seen has been ravaged as badly as Los Angeles. LAX has been turned from a neatly-arranged airport complex into a mess of seven separate terminals. Heaven help you if you are connecting through LAX and have to change airlines—you must leave the airport and come back in through security which, depending on the airline, can be a horrific mess.
Airline service can be as predictable as a roll of the dice. Last Friday we waited with my daughter’s fellow-travelers as the luggage was unloaded by, apparently, one arthritic old gentleman whose prosthetic arm was nailed to his wooden leg.
One would think that baggage handling has become a simpler line of work since travelers now routinely try to jam the contents of a small U-Haul trailer into the overhead compartment, the better to avoid the additional costs for checking any luggage larger than a toothbrush.
The attempt to avoid checking luggage has led to larger loading stampedes. Everyone’s seat is already assigned, but there is only so much room in those overhead compartments, and travelers are determined to get every last family jewel jammed into that space.
Airports are not the place to see the milk of human kindness rise to the surface. Air travel seems to give an extra boost to that part of the human brain that believes that other people are not real and need not be considered. It’s no wonder that terrorists can blend into an airport crowd; on an airplane, almost everyone is a possible sociopath.
My son is large and imposing-looking and in his trips other travelers seem reluctant to mess with him. When they traveled together, he was the one-man flying wedge that carried his sister and himself to the next gate through crowds of people (unconscious, as only a terminal-dweller can be, that the space they occupied had any purpose other than for them to stand and stare blankly). This is good, because my daughter, who is now a graduate student, has been mistaken more than once for a high school freshman (“Aren’t you brave to travel alone,” cooed one kind elderly lady just last week.)
The rudeness of fellow-travelers, combined with the odd combination of frantic rushing with tedious waiting, can be a great economic booster for the flying biz. Getting home a few hours later can seem like a great way to save money until you are sitting in a terminal for interminable hours over a brain-numbing paperback novel—that’s when an extra fifty bucks to get home at a decent hour seems like a wise investment.
I can imagine the perfect marketing strategy for flights out of Franklin. After someone drags the car to PIT, parks it and contemplates the cost of leaving it there, struggles through security, and is jostled through that massive concrete cave by surly selfish travelers—that’s the time to hit him with the sign saying, “NOW does it seem too expensive??”

Teacher Strikes

(News-Herald, March 19) We’ve heard a long series of rumblings out of Cranberry School District about the state of teacher contract negotiations. Nobody likes to think about a teacher strike, but from out here in the cheap seats, it doesn’t seem unlikely.
Cranberry’s approach to teachers has always been puzzling. Given the most robust tax base in Venangoland, CASD could easily declare that they were going to become the premiere district of the region, a drawing card for new residents and growing economy, by upping their teacher pay just enough to outbid every other area district for the best teacher talent. Nobody sells a community with, “Come here. Our schools always get the last pick of teachers looking for jobs.”
(Before anyone asks why I pick on other school districts while never going after the one where I work, the answer is that my bosses and I are contractually bound to avoid picking on each other in public.)
I’ve some experience with the strike route—I was the president of the Franklin Teachers Association when we struck in 2002—so I can pass on a little of what I learned.
Teachers do not strike easily. As a group, we are big on behaving ourselves and following the rules. Yes, there are always some out front of the pack looking fairly agitated. But before anyone hits a picket line, there are many many meetings involving a hundred variations on “Isn’t there something else we could do instead??”
As with any high-charged time of stress and conflict, you have some choice about your opponents, but you can’t choose your friends. This is often unfortunate for both parties.
Some folks are surprised that teachers take some of this stuff personally. Those folks should not be surprised. Teachers identify closely with their jobs; for most of us, “teacher” is part of our identity. It’s not a suit of clothes we put for work; it’s our skin. If you say things like, “That’s just not a very important job,” we take it personally.
For many teachers, the hardest part of tough contract negotiations is confronting how little some people think of our lives’ work. It can be tough to be told repeatedly that your job is stupid and unimportant, or to face someone who is angry because you won’t just do as you’re told, as if you’re an unruly servant who insists on speaking even when not spoken to.
At the same time, teachers can get so caught up in our own work universe that we forget the universe that surrounds it. Invariably some teacher will trot out a comment like, “Do you know how much a teacher is paid in Mount Lebanon?!” The only appropriate response to that is, “Do you know how much a house costs in Mount Lebanon? Or groceries?” Venangoland-style teacher pay and benefits are not great compared to other corners of the universe, but we don’t live and work in other corners of the universe. We live and work here.
Every contract dispute gives rise to teachers who want massive raises plus ice cream on Sundays, as well as taxpayers who think that teachers should be paid no more than a fast food cashier. Both groups need a reality check.
A board may try to splinter a union into warring factions, or agitate the community. Sometimes it works. But it’s a short-sighted tactic; once the contract is settled, that splintered staff has to work with each other and the community to keep schools successful.
Both sides can get too heated. During our strike, we picketed board members’ homes. Heat of the moment and all that—I won’t make excuses, and I can only speak for myself. But that was a mistake; that was wrong.
And that great old line “This is our final offer” is just dumb. The final offer will be the one that both sides sign.
Teachers need to use PSEA expertise and experience, just as boards need to use PSBA. But those groups can only advise, and they will never know your community—where you will still live and work after a contract—as well as you do.
An unsettled contract is not a contest to be won; that’s why the best solution is a contract that both sides have reasons to dislike. An unsettled contract is a problem to solve, a problem that they share. The most important thing for all parties to remember is this: when the contract is eventually settled, everyone will still have to live and work together.

Lenten Reflection

(News-Herald, March 12) We’re now in the midst of Lent, a season that the Christian church has observed since almost its very beginnings.
Of course, people are commonly familiar with Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) as a celebration of pre-Lenten excess. The idea is to indulge one last time before entering a season of self-sacrifice. In typical human fashion, we have an easier time remembering the over-indulgence part.
The term “lent” comes from the old Germanic name for springtime, and while many of us are a little fuzzy about the purpose, the general list of Things To Do includes fasting, penitence, simplicity, and self-denial in an attempt to grow in faith, a little spiritual spring cleaning. It’s not supposed to be like a New Years resolution with an expiration date.
When Lent is observed by folks who don’t put much thought into the whole business, it ends up being like the worst relationship therapy session ever.
Therapist: We’ve agreed that the relationship between the two of you is kind of a mess, and I thought today we’d talk about how far you’re willing to go to set things right.
God: Well, I thought I could take the form of a mortal human, setting aside my power over all creation, and then suffer a horrible death to pay for sins I never actually committed.
Mortal Human: I figured I could go a month without eating Twinkies.
I’m not sure you get any big credit for giving up things you shouldn’t be doing anyway. “I gave up robbing little old ladies for Lent,” doesn’t sound all that virtuous. Likewise, no fair giving up things that you haven’t actually gotten around to doing. I get no points for a Lenten decision not to sleep with Carmen Electra.
And we’re not just supposed to give something up. Part of the Lenten tradition is almsgiving—contributing to charity, helping the less fortunate. If I take all the money I would have spent on Twinkies and buy a few cases of Ding Dongs instead, I’ve missed part of the point. That Twinkie money should go to a good cause.
Not everyone is a fan of Lent. Many hard-core Protestant denominations find the whole business entirely too Catholic Churchy, while in modern times many churches rejected the season as too heavy on guilt and sin and just generally too much of a downer. The ashes of Ash Wednesday are about 1) being mortal and destined to die and 2) being sorry that we have behaved so poorly in our brief lifetime. Neither observation will make you the life of the party.
Which may be why this is a good year for remembering Lent—there’s not much of a party going on right now. I don’t have any deep analysis of the current mess other than economic messes are always hard to sort out because they involve some hard-to-quantify combination of real problems pushing people over the edge and people just freaking out and jumping.
Nor am I fan of cheery sayings like “Tough times don’t last; tough people do.” Too chirpy, too glib, and not always true. But I do like Easter, and one lesson I take from Easter is that life can get pretty rotten and scary, but that’s no excuse to stop trying to be a decent human being.
Lent provides a nice prelude to that, a chance to remember that we can give up some of our toys and still be ourselves, maybe even more so. Take away our uber-expensive stuff, and it turns out we’re the same people we ever were. Just with less stuff.
Occasionally circumstances can snap us out of our privileged complacency. We see people who suffer real catastrophes or catastrophic lapses in judgment. Watching people soldier on through disaster reminds us that A) mostly we suffer not at all and B) there but for the grace of God…
But there’s no reason to wait for circumstances to remind us of our humanity. A good dose of pancakes and ashes can be an occasion to remember that other people exist, that we all share some troubles, and we could stand to get over ourselves. The oddly encouraging thing about remembering that we aren’t all that great is realizing that we aren’t all that bad, either.
I don’t mean to suggest that real suffering isn’t hard and painful. But forty days of self-denial can help us rediscover gratitude, strength and empathy for our fellow strugglers.

Winter Sports Champion Season

(News-Herald, March 5)It’s championship season in PA high school sports, the season that captures the most attention from local fans. I like the winter sports. By which I mean the high school versions. I still occasionally try to enjoy professional sports, but endless seasons of contests between squads of over-privileged millionaires battling in allegiance to whoever is writing their next fat check don’t really send me. I know that there’s a trickle down effect, that some high school athletes are already motivated by dreams of future big fat paychecks of their own. But mostly high school sports can show you a lot about the human heart, striving and pushing to achieve.
I like basketball because of the team factor. The most exciting teams are just that—teams. It’s a fast-paced version of the part of life that is all about fitting together, working together, finding a connection and rhythm as a group.
There’s also a certain random suspense. Whether the team is hot or cold, fast or slow, in synch or out—on any given night, just about any team can beat just about any other team. And because you can have a direct effect on your opponents, it reveals character—how far will you go? Will you fight with class, back down, or become a thug?
Swimming, on the other had, is interesting because of the absence of those factors. Swimmers are great students of each other. Basketball players may have game films, but swimmers go on line day after day, checking results, looking at records, memorizing times. When a swimmer steps into a pool, he already know exactly what his opponents are capable of—and there isn’t a thing he can do to stop them.
So the best swimmers know how to dig down and extract every last molecule of grit, because the only obstacles they can control are the ones inside themselves. Swimmers know more ways to play mental tricks on themselves than any other athletes.
The sport I don’t attend as often as I ought to is wrestling. And I’m not the only one. Wrestling is the most woefully under-appreciated high school sport we have.
The physical demands are enormous, and they are immediate. Swimmers have no direct combat with their opponents at all. A basketball player has to fight an opponent for control of a ball and some space on the court. A wrestler has to fight another person for control of his own body.
That’s not easy. Spectators often question why the wrestler didn’t just hook his foot back a bit farther, or grab the leg that was right there. What you forget, if you didn’t have a larger sibling or at least haven’t been beaten up by him in a few years, is that it’s hard to know exactly where everyone’s arms and legs are when all you can see if the floor that your face is mushed into.
Wrestling has enormous mental demands as well (the common assumption is that wrestlers are the dim bulbs in the scholar-athlete chandelier, which is just not right—Franklin’s Cory Ace, for one, was as smart as any student I’ve ever taught). There’s no hiding on the mat, nothing for the crowd to see but you. Other sports certainly have moments of solitary struggle, but for a wrestler, that’s all there is. Other sports offer a full field of spectacle—in wrestling there are just two guys out on the mat.
And while outcomes aren’t as clearly fore-ordained as in swimming, many wrestlers have to walk onto that mat knowing that they’re facing someone stronger who is likely to make them look helpless in front of a full gym. Certainly guts, commitment and heart can be important in all high school sports, but I can’t imagine how a wrestler could hope to succeed at all without them.
Maybe that’s why more people don’t go to wrestling matches. In basketball, there a hundreds reason to lose. In swimming, the action goes on separately, impersonally, side by side. But wrestlers lose in each other’s faces. It’s raw. Watching a wrestler get badly beaten can be like seeing a singers step forward for a big solo and botching it badly—your gut twists in embarrassment, even when you know there’s nothing to be embarrassed about.
The unfortunate part of post-season play is the guarantee that most athletes play until they end their seasons, or careers, with a loss. Even so, I hope each athlete (and families and friends) take the opportunity to look back at the season with pride.

Facebook Primer

(News-Herald, Feb 26) Facebook turned five years old this month. If you aren’t sure why you should care, this column is for you.
Facebook started out as a simple college project. Colleges have long collected high school pictures from incoming freshmen and slapped them together into a book that newly arrived students could use to answer burning questions like “Who is that hot girl in my chem. Class?” One young whiz realized that this was a perfect task to feed to a computer. At first the site was used by a few colleges and allowed only students and family. Then it opened the doors to the world, and now facebook is the pre-eminent social site on the net.
Is that successful? Well, the creator of facebook has reportedly been offered as much as a billion dollars for his slice of website heaven. Clearly some folks are impressed.
There are two fundamental differences between facebook and the previous cybersocial champ, myspace.
The first is that myspace is ugly. It’s messy ugly, as if a five-year-old threw some neon paint, glitter and monkey innards in a blender, hit puree, and tossed the results at a computer screen.
The second and probably more important difference is that myspace was designed to let you make new friends with a bunch of total strangers. Facebook is designed to let you stay in touch with people you already know, and that removes a whole layer of stalkery weirdness that myspace includes.
But what do you actually DO there?
Facebook lets you stay in contact with people. It lets you know what they’re up to, and it lets you tell the world what you’re up to, all in whatever level of detail you prefer. You write updates; all your friends read at will.
For instance. Charlie and I don’t talk all that often. But I knew when Charlie’s divorce was final and also when he started dating again, as did all of his facebook friends.
I also knew when Mark was getting over a cold, when Beth was having trouble sleeping, how Julie’s writing project is going, the time and date of Rick and Deb’s choral concert, and where George and Melissa live now.
I know what my old college friend’s kids look like, not in the one stiff portrait at Christmas way, but in the dozens of photos in the family album way.
Facebook provides, basically, the same sort of surface intimacy and steady detail that you get from living or working next door to someone.
For families this can be great. My daughter is an awesome photo queen who greets each occasion with camera in hand. There are thousands and thousands of her pictures on her facebook pages, and I can look at them any time I want to and leave comments. My son has an exceptional skill at locating online clips and sites, all of which he can share with me through facebook. I can look at them, send some back, and it’s like we’re sitting and surfing together. And none of this daily sharing has to be affected by the three hour time difference between us.
Find this kind of transparency more scary than heartwarming? Your facebook only includes what you put there, only shows what you want to be shown, and you have complete control over who your facebook friends are.
There are always caveats. The smart user assumes that anything on the internet is forever, and facebook is no different. And while you may be wisely discrete, there’s no controlling your friends. One of my former students has a facebook group started by her college friends for everyone who was ever a victim of her projectile vomiting.
Though indiscrete collegians still abound, we oldsters are the fastest growing part of the site’s boom (though in odd patterns—my college class shows almost 100 facebookers, but my high school class shows two—counting me). It’s easy to read, easy to understand, and there’s neither special freakish jargon nor bizarre social customs to learn. You don’t have to bare your soul and you certainly don’t have to use any of the extra bells and whistles and games that are available.
Those on dial-up are at a disadvantage (again). But this is an easy way to stay in touch with old friends, far-away family, and people you just generally don’t want to lose track of. Maybe it’s lazy, but I see nothing wrong with an easy way to make the world a little smaller, to give us all a few more close neighbors.

Googling Venango

(News-Herald, February 19)Every few years I report back to you about how the Venangoland web presence is faring. Googling “venango” is uniquely instructive because it is a very unique name. “Oil City,” “Franklin,” and “oil region” all turn up a gazillion hits that have nothing to do with us. I have not yet solved the mystery of the Venango’s in Kansas and Nebraska, but they are mere drops in the Venango-related ocean.
As a side note, I think it’s also cool that there are streets named venango in both Philadelphia and Los Angeles. And I am really intrigued to discover that “Venango” also exists as a surname. But I digress.
When I first reported on this almost a decade ago, googling “venango” only turned up a few thousand hits. Three and a half years ago (hey-nobody said I was on a regular schedule for this) we found 1,350,000 hits. I’m not prepared to interpret my newest results, but today’s google actually turns up fewer hits—a mere 1,140,000. This may have as much to do with increased google efficiency as with actual internet shrinkage.
If quantity is down, quality is up. The county website now sits at the top of the heap. This official website continues to be a model of how it’s done, with actual services like dog licenses. You can follow links to the “Invest Venango” campaign, a push to shift business spending back locally. And there even video of the latest commissioners’ meeting. Most local agencies are equally well-represented.
Also close to the top of the googlepile are the ubiquitous wikipedia entries. Wikipedia is a great idea, an encyclopedia that anyone with a computer can edit; once I finish this column, I plan to add the story of how my great-grandfather, Wallace R. Greene, personally discovered the Ark of the Covenant under the Eight Street Bridge. I think the whole wiki-world needs to know.
Some groups need to get up to date. The Venango Museum of Art, Science and Industry had almost caught up to the present, but still provides a list only for events in 2008. For those who are particularly nostalgic, their other website, last updated in 1996, is still on line. Meanwhile, the “next meeting” for Focus on our Future is in January of ’08.
If I were interested in looking at birds (well, actually, I like birds, but I bribe them with assorted seeds to come close where I can watch them, so I guess I qualify as a extremely lazy bird watcher) I would enjoy Gary Edwards site, which provides a great deal of info.
That site is a rarity. Google is so well-organized now that you have to dig way down to find the curiously quirky sites, like the one that tells you which parts of the county get fluoridated water (fluoridation is no longer a Communist Plot, but part of the Corporate Global Pollution Conspiracy).
Googling also reveals that some developer nears Mars, PA, has poached our name for an apparently gated community down by the intersection of the Turnpike and I-79. Venango Trails offers ponds, acres of woods, bike and walking trails, and lovely Victorian homes. In other words, even as people carp and complain about how awful it is to live here, elsewhere people are spending buckets of money to build a replica of our area. I suppose there are two significant differences—theirs is much closer to crowded commercial urban sprawl, and way more expensive.
But I digress. It’s much easier to actually get things done on line than it used to be. You can find plenty of local real estate listings (including foreclosures). You can go to the Humane Society site and see what animals they have awaiting adoption. You can find a lawyer, oddly enough, with much greater ease than you can find a doctor. You can do a great deal of genealogical research, including searching through an increasingly large number of old books that have been placed in their entirety on line.
You can make local hotel reservations, and you can get involved in the sport of geocaching, an activity I promise to look into as soon as the ground is not cold and hard (say, June). This is, in fact, part of the beauty of being able to do so many things on line, because I just got my heating bill for February and if I’m going to spend this much money on warm air, I plan to stay right here and enjoy every last molecule of heat.

In Praise of Anorexia

This column scared me a little bit when I did the original research for it four years ago. I did a quick search before re-running it here, and see no reason to believe that it is any less true today than it was back then. If anything, the pro-ana sites have gotten more subtle and clever in their non-disclaimer disclaimers.
(News-Herald, January 2005) I should tell you up front that this week’s column is absolutely straight, that I am making up nothing, exaggerating nothing, inventing nothing. What I’m writing about is not news, but it was news to me (and so may be news to you) until one of my students showed me the extraordinarily scary world of pro-ana.
You’ve heard about anorexia and its cousin bulimia, eating disorders in which people (mostly women) slowly starve themselves in an attempt to erase what they see as gross, fleshy excess.
There are numerous theories about the cause of the disease—cultural worship of size 0 models, an irrational compulsion to be perfect, physiological chemistry gone haywire. Karen Carpenter is perhaps the most famous fatality, but I’ve known students who struggled with it all the way into their adult lives.
This is a behavior with deep roots. Only the ignorant would suggest, “Well, they should just eat and get healthy.” Sure. And if every single one of your senses says that you’re on fire, you stand still because someone else says you’re not.
Treatment is hard. The Harvard Eating Disorder Center says that of those treated, 50% recover, 30% make partial recovery, and 20% have no improvement at all.
Into this comes the pro-ana movement. Pro-ana’s and pro-mia’s (that’s for bulimia) reject the notion that anorexia is a disorder and that anyone needs to be treated. They assert that it is a lifestyle choice; one site calls is a spiritual path and discipline. Treatment is just society’s attempt to control and dominate the ana’s.
This is another movement that the internet has helped connect and power. A google search on “pro ana” turned up 32,200 hits. Many of those are “anti’s”—people who are speaking out against the pro-ana movement. And many sites disappear quickly, because web hosting services often remove them upon discovery. But the ones that are pro and still there, well—it’s stunning.
Here are some real quotes (often called “thinspiration”) from real sites.
“Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.”
“Food hinders your progress.”
“One day I will be thin enough. Just the bones, no disfiguring flesh. Just the pure clear shape of me, bones. That is what we all are, what we’re made up of and everything else is just storage, deposit, waste. Strip it away, use it up.”
“Like a plant, surely the body can be trained to exist on nothing, to take its nourishment from the air.”
They salute and celebrate the strength of will, the enormous control that it takes to keep their food intake to a minimum. “We are the epitome of strength among a population of complacent, over-weight human beings.”
“For me, food’s only interest lies in how little I need, how strong I am, how well I can resist—each time achieving another small victory of the will.”
There are many message boards where ana’s share tricks, words of encouragement. They post thinspirational pictures, photos of fashion models like the barely-there Kate Moss.
One talks about how light and free she feels. Colors are brighter. Her head feels lighter; lights flash in front of her eyes. She has eaten nothing for three days. Other writers applaud her example. Another boasts that she hasn’t had her period in three months, proof that she is approaching her goal.
They share tips. Lists of things to do to avoid thoughts of food are on every site (and I saw sites in at least six different languages). There is advice on how to keep calories under 200 per day. One girl recommends canned chicken broth and another responds that you should buy the boullion cubes, which have 5 calories instead of 20.
There’s more practical coping advice. “Lie in fetal position and curl up. It helps your stomach stop hurting.”
There’s lots of advice for hiding anorexia, not because of shame, but because the rest of the world won’t understand, will try to control you, will try to break your will. There’s a continuing theme of becoming a shelled-up person, open only other ana’s. One site sells three-strand red bracelets as a sign of solidarity with other ana’s.
It’s tempting to take the hard line. I’m sure there are people that say that
if these loons want to destroy themselves, the gene pool is better off without them. I’m sure that none of those people are the parents of an ana.
I can’t imagine how scary it would be to discover your daughter suffering from this. The only thing worse would be discovering people cheering her on.

Rendell's School Consolidation Plan

(News-Herald, Feb. 12) Last week, Governor Rendell declared his intention to make 400 school districts vanish. Now, I’ve said that Venangoland needs four school districts like an octopus needs extra arms. But the governor’s announcement does not have me clicking my heels.
First, as seems to be typical of Smilin’ Ed’s proposals, there’s no hint of details about how this might actually work (see also: gambling money tax relief and I-80 toll). So this plan could be a real winner or a massive disaster.
The stated consolidation aim is to reduce administrative costs, but I have my doubts. Imagine four lemonade stands, each with one manager. I consolidate them to save money on managers—keep one, fire three. Only now with no manager on the sites, I hire a manager for each branch. And to get the benefit of buying lemons bulk, I need a procurement manager. And a secretary for the top dog, who now has to interface with his command structure. By consolidating badly, I go from four lemonade administrators to seven. Savings? Not so much.
In the ed biz, it’s potentially worse than that. Sometimes when a district administrator can’t do his job, he just hires assistants and consultants to do it for him. Savings? Even fewer.
Another key factor in consolidations is that they are usually coordinated by the people that we are supposedly going to winnow. Combine school districts, lemonade stands, or even, say, hospitals, and all the high-priced administrators stick around with new titles. When it’s time to cut payroll, it’s the worker bees that are shown the hive exit. Savings? Small. Loss of services provided to customers? Larger.
Different districts could feel different impacts. According to state figures, Cranberry Schools are 377 out of 500 districts in size, but 50 out of 500 in Administrative Cost Per Pupil (Greater Nanticoke SD is #1, with less ACPP than anyone else in the state). Franklin is 256 for size, 365 for ACPP. Oil City is 239 for size, 333 for ACPP. Titusville is 253 in size, but a whopping 404 for ACPP. Valley Grove is a teeny 428th in size, but ranks 243 in ACPP.
The most consolidated school district hereabouts? County-sized Forest SD comes in at 492nd place in low administrative costs per pupil.
The wild card in many districts is transportation, but since that’s a rural issue, I don’t expect any of the suited dopes in Harrisburg to get it. In some cases, such as Franklin/Valley Grove and Cranberry/Oil City, transportation is part of what makes a merger sensible. But if four out of every five school districts are going to be merged away, some serious transportation problems are going to emerge. All those massive administrative savings are going to be spent on buses (plus therapy for the students who will ride them for four hours every day).
School sports will become prohibitively expensive, given the amount of travel needed to get to the next nearest high schools. But Philadelphia schools will be happy to wrestle for money with 99 other districts instead of 499.
The biggest problem with the governor’s proposal, beyond its use of a broadsword solution for a scalpel problem, is that it puts the broadsword in the wrong hands. The best people to handle school consolidation in Venango County are not Harrisbugian suited dopes who couldn’t find Venango County if they were hungry dogs and we were a pile of sausage.
Smilin’ Ed offers other concerns. He figures that the 80% of PA districts that have fewer than 5000 students raise “questions about the diversity of courses offered to students.” I wish the state were this concerned about educational diversity when they’re suggesting we stop teaching everything except the material on the PSSA tests.
Consolidation is a good idea. We should do some. But a top-down mandate slapped together out of arbitrary ill-considered numbers backed up by no real plan is not my idea of how to do it. Want to save some administrative costs? Cut the PA Department of Education budget by 90%.
Not that what I think matters—nor anyone else, either. This plan has one more thing in common with some of Smilin’ Ed’s brainstorms. The state legislature will have a chance to vote on it. And if they vote it down, the State Board of Education is directed to go ahead and do it anyway.
Still, some have embraced it. In fact, my sister-in-law likes it so well that she suggests merging some states. Think of the money we could save by getting rid of a few governors.

Jesse Reno

Mike Dittman at Venangago-go a few weeks back posted a reference to local war hero Jesse Reno, which reminded me of this piece that saw print ten years ago. It[‘s reprint time!
(News-Herald, May 1999) My friend Richard brought to my attention the book Remembering Reno by William F. McConnell, recounting Jesse Reno’s life and military career. Reno was born in 1823 and raised in Franklin. His West Point graduating class (1846) included George McClellan and Stonewall Jackson.
24-year-old Lieutenant Reno was part of Winfield Scott’s force attacking Vera Cruz, Mexico, in March of 1847. The war with Mexico trained many young officers; Captain Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant distinguished themselves against Santa Anna.
In 1853, Reno surveyed a road to run roughly 280 miles from Sioux City, Iowa, to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Upon completion of the nearly three-month trip, Reno submitted his report to U. S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.
Reno was thirty before he was able to marry. He and his wife settled into a fairly cushy posting at a Philadelphia arsenal for a few years, but then Reno was called up when Pennsylvania’s own President Buchanan decided to sic the US army on the Mormons.
The tension had been building since the 1846 settlement by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Utah; the Saints were determined to maintain control of their territory, while some other portions of the country were unwilling to admit a polygamous state to the union.
President Buchanan attempted to remove Brigham Young as governor of Utah; Mormon fanatic John Lee reportedly incited a band of Native Americans to kill 120 settlers bound for California.
Reno was part of the federal force sent to get matters back under control. The whole business might have turned ugly (or uglier, at any rate) except that commanding officer Colonel Alexander dithered until the troops were forced to dig in for the winter and devote all their energy to staying alive, far away from any remotely grumpy Mormons. By the spring thaw a peace had been brokered, and Reno could return to his family after nearly two years.
When the Civil War broke out, Reno was jumped from captain to brigadier general in order to serve under old friend Ambrose Burnside, who was serving under Reno’s old classmate McClellan. Reno’s first work under Burnside was successful; unfortunately, he next served under Pope in the Union’s disastrous defeat at Bull Run.
I can’t look at the Civil War without being struck by how many men faced familiar opponents. Reno found himself battling Stonewall Jackson, former classmate and good friend, three separate times in his last months in battle. They would cross paths one more time. John Greenleaf Whittier immortalized Barbara Fritchie, a 90-year-old Union supporter in Frederick, Virginia, who waved her flag at Jackson’s troops. When one raised his musket to shoot, the poet gave her the line, “Shoot if you must this old grey head but spare your country’s flag.” Two days later, Reno passed Fritchie’s home and was invited in for a glass of homemade currant wine. Upon departure, the widow presented him with the large bunting flag from her window. It was that flag which would cover his casket at his funeral.
Shortly before the Battle of South Mountain, Reno met future President Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes. It was not a particularly pleasant meeting; the terms “sons of bitches” and “court martial” both came up.
A week later, while traveling up a line of troops, Reno was shot. At the rear he was greeted by old friend and classmate Brigadier general Sam Sturgis. “Hello, Sam, I’m dead,” said Reno.
Reno was thirty-nine years old when he died.
His wife never remarried; she died in 1880. Of their five children, only two lived to adulthood. Conrad was a prominent Boston lawyer. His brother Jesse was an engineer who perfected a plan for the construction of subways in New York City and invented the escalator. The brothers also supposedly introduced Dwight F. Davis to the game of tennis; you may have heard of a small cup named after him.
Reno, Nevada, was named after Jesse in 1868. Reno, Pennsylvania, was dedicated to his memory in 1865. According to Hildegarde Dolson, the Pithole to Reno railroad hired as its head engineer Reno’s old classmate and commander, Ambrose Burnside.
Reno is a good reminder of how much soldiers sacrificed. Not just the premature death in battle, but all they gave up before then: the opportunity for a home, a stable family life, the emotional cost of being pitted against old friends in battle. I think that all deserves at least a moment of silence before we light the charcoal on Memorial Day.

Good-bye, Midnight

(News-Herald, February 5) I didn’t have my first dog until I was an adult. She was a humane society dog. We named her “Buffy” as a not-particularly-imaginative tribute to her color.
Buffy was eventually stricken with a condition that made her unable to process food (it has a fancy name, which I’ve long since forgotten). A shot would bring her back to normal for a week or so, and then food would pass straight through and she would lie there miserable, essentially starving to death. I don’t really remember how many times I put her through that process; I hope it wasn’t as many as it seems. I believe I had some vain hope that she would magically get better. One of the last great kindnesses that my ex-wife did me was take Buffy to the vet the last time. It’s funny the euphemisms we use to make our responsibility easier; not just “we put him to sleep” but “we had to put him to sleep.”
Soon I brought Midnight home from the Humane Society. He was a peppy, friendly dog, two or three years old, a collie-shepherd-mystery dog mix.
Midnight was not an indoor dog. He viewed walls with suspicion, even outright dislike if they weren’t decorated properly. He hated floors and would search in vain for a place to put his feet down that didn’t bother him.
He liked the outdoors and was inclined to explore the greater Hannaville area. He was no dummy—he would get off his line, wander abroad and then come back and sit in his rightful place, wagging his tail. “Who? Me? Were you looking for ME? Clearly I am right where I’m supposed to be?”
We acquired a humane society cat. The cat taught Midnight how to catch chipmunks. When he was excited, he jumped straight into the air, like a kangaroo or mutant bunny. He ate grass. He liked to burrow and push his nose into fresh dirt. Midnight seemed to have some species identification issues.
He had two basic barks. One was his challenge, a “who the heck do you think you are” bark. This might have been helpful had he used it on strange humans, but he never met a human he wasn’t glad to see. This bark was reserved for unfamiliar dogs who ventured into his territory (defined roughly as “Planet Earth”). Once we moved to town, he used this bark on me when he caught me taking off in the kayak. His other bark was the Bark of General Distress, reserved for moments when he had gotten himself stuck.
He liked snow. He wasn’t so crazy about water. He hated the Fourth of July, or at least the fireworks portions; he would climb into the burrow he’d dug under his shed and stay there until the next morning.
He consented to walk the bike trail with me, despite my unwillingness to stop for proper underbrush inspection every two feet. He didn’t mind having me sit and read with him outside, though at times he was concerned that if I stared at the book for more than two straight minutes, I might forget he was there.
He found the neighborhood entertaining. The geese and ducks, the neighborhood dogs, the neighborhood children—he was happy to lie in the sun and watch all of them.
He had steadily mellowed with age, but last winter he finally started to slow down. I bought a space heater for his shed. The neighbors contributed some straw and he had more cast-off blankets than a Salvation Army collection box.
This last year he could no longer climb into his burrow under the shed. His back hips began to stiffen. He ate as much as ever, but seemed to be losing weight. He had trouble getting up. He was uncharacteristically easy to sneak up on; he either couldn’t hear or didn’t care.
Ten days ago he finally couldn’t get up at all. I took him to the vets, who gently suggested it was time (human doctors should all take bedside manner lessons from veterinarians). I wasn’t prepared. I almost didn’t have the nerve to stay with him, but it’s good I did. Anything I could have imagined would have been worse. It’s comforting to consider how easy his passing was, terrifying to contemplate how simply life can be gone.
It’s a hard call for every pet owner; when is it too soon, too late. Midnight was 16 or 17 years old. He was a good old dog. I’m sorry he’s gone, glad I knew him.

Newer Self-Esteem Issues in Schools

(News-Herald, January 29) I recently read yet another columnist complaining about the self-esteem movement in public education.
On the one hand, I agree completely with the arguments that lay a host of ills at the altar of self-esteem worship. On the other hand, complaining about the self-esteem movement in schools is like complaining about disco music on the radio. It’s not that criticism isn’t well-grounded—it just doesn’t have anything to do with what’s going on today.
There’s no question that the cult of self-esteem was seriously misguided. It’s not that self-esteem is worthless—people usually make sure that they get what they think they deserve in life, and when they think they don’t deserve much, they can make a mess out of themselves. But studies have also shown that lots of street criminals have extra-super self-esteem. Large egos are not always good.
It has been years since I’ve heard any teacher seriously suggest that a student should receive special kid-glove treatment or manufactured success in order to preserve that student’s self-esteem.
True, education is still haunted by fake success and systems that are jiggered in order to make sure that little Johnny has only happy moments. But this no longer has anything to do with Little Johnny’s self-esteem. The average school is not worried that Little Johnny will feel bad—they worried that Little Johnny’s parents will feel bad. So bad that they’ll call their lawyer.
Years ago we heard about schools where there was no valedictorian because the administration didn’t want the also-rans to take a hard blow to their fragile self-esteems. Nowadays schools can expect phone calls from the also-rans’ moms and dads, threats of lawyers to follow.
Cut a student from the team? Expect a call. Send a student to the office for cheating? Expect a call.
A student in California was suspended from all school activities after he was convicted of fraud in federal court. He sued the school for cutting him from the ball team, claiming he had a future in pro sports.
In Florida, an 18-year old student mooned his teacher at a school event. The school gave him a suspension; his parents are suing the school.
In Connecticut, a student is suing a teacher who woke him up by making a loud noise in class. And there are more lawsuits than I can count filed by students and their parents against teachers who gave them failing grades for plagiarizing or not completing assignments.
One of my favorites—a student was caught hiring a hit man to kill his teacher. The school district expelled him. He sued the district.
Now, I’m a fan of accountability. As a teacher, I assume I ought to be able to justify anything I’m doing in my classroom.
I’m also a fan of parents sticking up for their children. Parents should advocate for their children. After all—if your own parents aren’t in your corner, who will be?
However. Advocating for your children sometimes means making sure that they learn some lessons for life. A basic lesson is that actions have consequences, that you can be forgiven for messing up, but you still have to suffer the outcome of the mess-up. Ten years from now, you don’t really want to be saying to your kid, “Look, stealing that car wasn’t really your fault. The police are just picking on you, and if you’re convicted, we’ll just sue them.”
School districts, for their part in a perfect world, should both make sure their actions are justified, and then steel their backbones. Too many schools suffer from a sort of pre-emptive paralysis, a search not for the right action, but the action least likely to provoke an angry parental phone call. A handful of belligerent parents make schools fearful of all the other good ones.
We have an advantage in small districts—we know which parents assume Johnny’s eternal innocence and who keep the lawyer on speed dial. If Little Johnny sets a classmate on fire, we know that giving Little Johnny a detention will just be picking on him. The down side of that is we will sometimes bend rules to avoid Dadzilla; some day we’ll get sued over that, too.
Venangoland is filled with good, decent, responsible, rational, loving parents, who must sometimes wonder what keeps us from taking some seemingly obvious steps. But I can assure you—we stopped worrying about the self-esteem of students years ago. Nowadays, it’s parental self-esteem we have to worry about.

Investing with Dopes and Crooks

(News-Herald, January 22) The folks who manage my investment portfolio sent me a nice note at the beginning of the month.
Actually, when I say “investment portfolio” I mean the little wad of money that I’ve been squirreling away in the teacher equivalent of an IRA. I confess to not being a great money manager, a confession that does not come easily because, like many people, I have a vague sense of shame floating over the monetary portions of my life. It embarrasses me that I am not, somehow, in better financial shape.
I have never undertaken a large financial transaction in which I did not lose money. My personal financial planning and cash flow management skills are slightly more impressive than a magic eight ball. I don’t want to be rich; if I can just get one more kid through college, it won’t bother me to eat macaroni every day until I retire at age ninety. But I will be embarrassed.
I started the retirement account years ago, and figured I had at least done that part right. Turns out I would have been better off burying the money in the back yard, and somehow I feel ashamed of that as well.
My retirement fund is run by one of those companies that somehow makes money move in and out of thin air, represented locally by a nice man who gets ahold of me every few years or so to make sure that, I don’t know, I’m still alive or something. They periodically send me little letters to tell me about the thin air that my money moves in and out of.
Now, given the economic meltdown, I expected that this newsletter might contain a little something extra like “Ooops” or “Sorry” or “Really, don’t freak out.” Instead, this newsletter included puff pieces on the order of “How to make the most out of family time” or “Our friend, the amazing toaster oven.”
Maybe they just weren’t sure how to proceed in the midst of financial chaos. Maybe they didn’t want to disturb me. Maybe it’s hard to type up the newsletter with everyone crowded together on the window ledge. I don’t know. But I feel moved to write them a note to help them with this daunting task.
Dear Nameless Investment Firm:
Perhaps you’re unsure what to tell me at this point in your charming quarterly communications. Well, here’s what I need to know.
See, even out here in the cheap seats, we’ve been able to get a vague sense of the causes of all this mess, and they seem to boil down to two things—people in the financial industry who are crooks, and people in the financial industry who are dopes.
So what I really need to know is, which are you?
Did you figure to make money trading in things that were, at best, shady and, at worst, unethical?
Or did you get involved trading in “instruments” that were created by the crooks and traded by people too lazy, dumb or unimaginative to see the signs of impending disaster?
Please pick one. Please note that the “We just didn’t know this could happen” defense means you’re choosing “dope.” The “We knew there were potential issues but we figured we could skate past them” defense means you’re choosing “crook.”
I understand that it’s hard to spin either choice. There’s no easy way to say, “Yes, we’re run by a bunch of crooks and/or dopes, but you should still entrust us with your retirement fund.”
It could help to follow that up with something along the lines of “Lessons we have learned from this.” But maybe you haven’t learned any yet other than “Welfare is only for people who make a really REALLY big mess out of their business.”
Still, you’ll have to trust me when I say that I can be forgiving.
After all, I haven’t been doing any due diligence, either. I didn’t study up on you, follow up on your work, or insist that your local representative talk to me more than twice a decade. I have been a lazy dope, too, so I can relate. True, it’s not my chosen profession to pay attention to these things, but it is my money and my life, and I handed it over to you, grateful, frankly, not to have to think about it any more. I know that I have to do better. It would just be comforting to hear that you know that you do, too.

Time for a Cardio Stress Test

This is from January of 2005. I reprint it here mostly as a reminder to myself that I should probably go get one thing or another checked up.
Here at the News-Derrick, we like to probe the frontiers of modern medicine and bring back updates for our readers. Or, to put it another way, last week I went to the doctor for a stress test. For those of you who’ve always wondered about that experience, today is your lucky day.
My trip was prompted by an informal check of my blood pressure at a handy grocery store blood pressure chair. I came in somewhere between “Yikes” and “Dial 911,” so I decided it was time to see a real doctor.
I don’t call the doctor often. I did not inherit this trait from my Grandmother Binmore, who believed that illness sprang into existence because a doctor examined you. My problem is that my Puritan New England upbringing leads me to believe that any illness or injury I have is because of some misbehavior. Going to the doctor feels a like some shameful combination of having to admit that I’ve messed up and asking someone else to fix it for me.
I’m old enough to know better, so I call the doctor when I should. Well, mostly. Okay, the last time a medical professional had taken my blood pressure was nine years ago.
After calling I read up on hypertension. Big mistake. As near as I can tell, hypertension has no symptoms, except that eventually it makes all of your internal organs squirt out your nostrils. Maybe I read that wrong, but it was too late. I was soon imagining that every headache signalled the collapse of my eyeballs.
My doctor is Will Fee, because you have to trust a doctor who sings. Will has a remarkably pleasant and personable staff. I am always impressed that medical folks can spend their days surrounded by sick people and stay pleasant.
The whole process involves chatting over some fine conversational points, like my dead ancestors and their medical problems. There’s no place like a doctor’s waiting room to meditate on your mortality.
The test itself involves a great deal of waiting. They take some pictures (I sat with my arms strung up in the same slings that Sea World uses to cart Shamu), and inject some dye into your veins.
Injecting is always an adventure for me—I have small weaselly veins that have been known to burrow and hide behind internal organs. A very nice woman apologized for having to stick and restick me, but she actually did very well. I still have unpleasant long-ago memories of some trainee who inserted the needle and ground it around as if he was trying to work a few scoops of Baskin-Robbins out of the crook of my elbow.
Once the dye is injected, I sat. Actually, stress testing involves a great deal of sitting. I read about 150 pages of a fine biography of Alexander Hamilton (by Ron Chernow—fine gift for the history buff). You’re also supposed to drink roughly a few gallons of water. If you’re scheduled for this, I suggest you bring your own; I love Will, but the water in his waiting room tastes almost as bad as Franklin tap water.
Eventually I arrived at the main event. A nice lady attached some electrodes to me, and then put me on a treadmill. Then I had elevate my heart rate. I’m not sure what the formula is—five times your mother’s age or something. Everyone congratulated me on being in fine shape, but all that meant was that the treadmill was inclined so that it pointed at the ceiling and the speed was set at “very frightened gerbil.”
Then, once I was shooting sweat waves out of my head just like in the cartoons, and my calve muscles were screaming that they intended to secede from my legs, I was notified that I needed to just skootch to the front of the treadmill and hold my chest against the picture taking equipment. This procedure requires three medical people—a doctor and nurse to holler encouragement and a technician to put her hand in the middle of your back and shove you the rest of the way forward. Then the treadmill is set back to “collapse in heap.”
I got to sit down, and Will asked me some questions that seemed odd at the time; on reflection, I suspect he was checking to see if my brain was, in fact, still getting any blood.
Then more waiting (another thirty pages) and a trip back to the Shamu seat for final pictures. My favorite part was discovering I would be radioactive for 24 hours. The picture taking is done with gamma rays. I waited the rest of the day for signs of turning into the Hulk. No such luck.

Franklin Needs a Mayor

(News-Herald, January 15) As you may have noted in last week’s paper, we’re in the market for a new mayor in Franklin
Mayor Heller did a nice job, and I’ll be sorry to see him go. It’s hard to find a good mayor for a small town, and I’m not exactly sure where we should turn for our next one. Retired folks might have more time for mayoring, but employed folks might be more in touch with the current flow of life. Age brings experience, but youth brings vitality and an eye on the future of the city.
I’m not convinced that we need someone with governmental experience. We have professionals to know about the nuts and bolts of keeping the city functioning. For mayor we need someone who can run a meeting and who can be the voice and face of the city. It would be nice to have someone who is positive and upbeat about Franklin, even nicer to have someone who has some vision about our future. In Venangoland politics we settle too often for people whose vision is to just kind of keep doing more or less what we’ve been doing. That’s not really enough any more.
I’m not sure who might step forward at this point, and really, why should we wait. Let’s draft someone for the job. I have a few thoughts.
Toby Saltarelli would make a fine mayor. He already knows a large percentage of the population of Franklin. His long years with Joy put him in touch with the business sector. His long association with Franklin Civic Operetta, particularly in managing and overseeing the building of the Barrow, put him in touch with the arts. His wife’s years working for the county put him in touch with that sector of government. And his years as a church choir director put him in touch with, well, Presbyterians, anyway.
On top of his many qualifications, I confess that I also like the idea of being able to walk into Leonardo’s most nights of the week and say hi to the mayor and his family at their table. That strikes me as small town in the best sense of the word.
I’d also be happy to draft Jeri Gent. She did exceptionally fine work for years heading up the Chamber of Commerce. She knows who to see to make things happen in Franklin, and she knows how to get things organized and promoted. She has a background that includes some big city expertise plus solid roots in our own community. She’s articulate, experienced and already knows a giant chunk of the local population, but she also has lots of connections to the surrounding areas that would be a bonus to Franklin in these days of intra-municipal cooperation.
I know I said No Government Professionals, but I would make an exception for Gary Hutchison. Gary’s experience as a county commissioner would give him a solid background in the business of navigating endless bureaucratic bologna, particularly state-level bologna, which I imagine is an all-too-present part of governing any city in the commonwealth.
Gary would inherit the fine old Franklin tradition of teacher-as-mayor (tip of the hat to Bob Olson). He would have the disadvantage of being a Democrat, which means that if my dog ran against him as a Republican, my dog would win (though I should note that my dog has declared that he has no interest in running for mayor).
But I’m not even at the end of my short list. Judy Grandelis has been a successful local businesswoman several times over; she knows how to organize and get things done, plus she knows the community inside and out. And while, decades ago, she and I were about the same age, I’m pretty sure while I got old, she did not. So she has the whole youth thing going for her.
Or Lou Slautterback, who can do promotion and motivation like nobody’s business. Lou knows every Franklin citizen who ever spent a day in elementary phys ed, and he knows every foot of street where someone might have ever wanted to buy a snow cone.
And every one of my candidates raised kids in Franklin, so they have that perspective as well. Oh, and the other thing they have in common is that I haven’t consulted any of them about tossing their names into the ring. This is a fun game anyone can play. Call someone and tell him or her to run for mayor today!

Mistreating Employees

(News-Herald, December 2003) There are many reasons not to treat employees badly. I’m not talking about moral or ethical considerations. If a manager doesn’t already understand those ideas, it’s probably too late to educate him. I’m talking about practical, business functionality type reasons. Treating employees badly is bad business.
First, there’s the whipped dog principle. You can beat a dog into submission, but the dog that you train to cower before you will never give you a warm doggy welcome, is never going to rush to your aid of its own free will. Some day you’ll need it, and it won’t come. And if you’ve failed to crush every molecule of its spirit, someday it will find a way to bite you in the butt.
Managing your employees by breaking them simply gets you spiritless, miserable employees. This is a particularly large drawback if your business deals with people; I can always tell when I’m in a store that’s managed this way because the service is lousy.
Other bad management techniques have more subtle ill effects. These bad management techniques get one simple message across to employees—management can’t be trusted.
Maybe a manager makes clear through his actions that he has more important things to do than help employees do their jobs. Maybe he proves himself erratic and unreliable. Maybe he simply turns out to be a liar.
Employees will probably cut the manager some slack, even beyond the honeymoon period. They may view his decisions with a raised eyebrow or a questioning glance. But eventually, once he uses up his slack, things will change.
People will put up with a lot from someone that they believe means well. That’s one of the foundations of a functioning marriage. You know I’m committed to our future together and that I love you very much, so when I bring home the gas-powered wall-mounted deer-intestine stretcher, you find it annoying, but not a serious threat. And I know that you love me and want the best for us together forever, so when you yell at me for buying that monstrosity, I know that I may have to sleep on the couch, but this will still be my home.
But once that belief in the good intention is gone, the world looks different. If I no longer believe in your commitment, everything is suspect. If you want to pick out vegetables by yourself in the grocery store, I start wondering if you’re also cruising the yellow pages for a good divorce lawyer.
The same principle applies in the workplace. People who don’t believe that the boss wants what’s right become more difficult to manage.
It doesn’t have to be this way. I can believe my boss’s plan to achieve his noble goals is stupid; he can chew me out for what he feels is an error on my part. Those things can happen without my losing faith in his good intentions.
But once I no longer believe that my boss wants what’s right, once I stop giving him the benefit of the doubt, the whole work environment changes.
With the benefit of the doubt, employees back their boss’s plays. If a deadline suddenly requires extra effort, if plans fall through, if problems arise, employees just shrug, say, “Well, stuff happens” and pitch in.
But without the benefit of the doubt, employees start to scrutinize everything with suspicious eye, wondering if they’re being set up or stabbed in the back. Maybe the plan fell through because he wants an excuse to phase us out. Maybe that deadline requires extra work because he wants to teach us a lesson and put us in our place. Maybe it rained today because he’s trying to stop our picnic.
Hours are wasted on piddly complaints and what should be minor issues. Average bosses are simply annoyed by silly employee complaints. Really good bosses hear the real hurt and dismay behind those complaints. Really lousy bosses think that employee discontent is proof management is doing a good job.
Every little issue is perceived as a twitch on the trigger of a gun pointed straight at the employees. The workplace becomes tense, testy, cranky. Less gets done, and it gets done less well. It’s all well and good to tell people that they should stop feeling that way. You can tell someone hanging by his fingers from the side of a cliff to be more cheerful, too. But when people don’t feel safe, they don’t feel safe. You can’t order someone to have faith and trust.
Faith is reserved for God; imperfect humans are incapable of deserving it. What we have for each other is trust, which is lost or gained based on behavior, and once it’s gone from a workplace, it’s a long hard road to earn it again.

The New Year with Walt and Tila

(News-Herald, January 8) The down side of Christmas ’08 was that my son’s Hollywood bookstore job kept him from celebrating with my daughter and me. The up side was that my gift was a personally autographed copy of Tila Tequila’s book from a signing at his store.
Ms. Tequila is one of the new brand of celebrity, a young woman who has made herself famous simply by repeatedly insisting, via myspace.com and other media, that she is famous. It’s emblematic of our age; if you simply insist repeatedly and loudly that you are the greatest waffle juggler in Montana, eventually many people will take your word for it.
I received this treat in person because daughter Barbara and I made the trek west to join up with son Thomas for some family holiday face time. Family holiday gatherings are always fraught, but I have the advantage of two children who love and like each other. And despite the jet lag, busy schedules, and time-squeeze pressure, we had one other secret weapon—Disneyland.
I’ve never been to any kingdom, Magic or otherwise. And like a good curmudgeon, I was fully prepared to poop on Walt’s party, to be unmoved by Disney, the great plasticizer of pop culture product. But I liked it. It was fun. And not just post-modern ironic I’m-too-cool-for-this fun (the kind of fun you have with Tila Tequila’s book).
I’m not going to shill for Disney—they have that covered. But I noticed several lessons that any operation interested in tourism (such as, say, the Oil Heritage Region) can learn from Disney operation.
Total commitment. Nothing in the Magic Kingdom is just good enough to get by. For example, one tiny part of one minor attraction, with a handful of questions, tells you which Disney character you resemble. It is a simple computer program that could be housed on a pedestal next to a water fountain, but Disney puts it in the Beast’s library, a fully realized set from floor to ceiling.
Point is, nobody decided to make something that sort of kind of suggests the idea of the library without trying too hard. It is easy in any job to define “done” as “whenever I’m tired of working on it.” That is not a definition that leads to success. A good excuse is not the same as a good result.
It’s a mistake to do things halfway. The successful festivals in the area (Applefest, First Night) succeed because a group of volunteers makes a commitment to do what it takes. The not-so-great festivals flounder because there’s nobody behind them making that kind of commitment (“Yeah, we can, uh, put a couple of codfish on a card table and call it Codfest”).
Give the people what they want. And not what you want to give them. One of the great banes of small town attractions is people who plan based on what they want people to want. (“So what if people don’t like codfish. They should, so we’re only putting codfish on the table.”)
Simple example: People invariably want to eat. That’s why the combination of Franklin On Ice and a chili competition made sense. Yet there are some local events at which people cannot get food. That’s a mistake. At Disneyland, there is always food.
Details matter. The attention at Disneyland is mind-boggling, right down to artistically coordinated shingle styles on the lovingly constructed faux buildings. Disney’s world may be fake and plastic, but the difference between a cheap cartoon and a real creation is attention to detail. Again, Applefest and First Night are models, with attention paid to getting the little things right. I have heard too many planning processes involving phrases like “Oh, I’m sure someone will take care of that. It will just work itself out.” This is never a good sign. (If you’re a church group, substituting “God” for “someone” doesn’t help.)
People matter. The people doing the work, that is. At Disneyland, every person I dealt with treated me like someone they were glad to see, even people who didn’t have to “notice” me. And local employers-- if employees are grumpy and treat customers poorly, the fault lies not with them, but with management. (Hint: threatening and belittling them will not improve their performance.)
Can Venangoland be Disneyland? Bradensburg Road in an ice storm makes a lousy thrill ride, and the County Commissioners will never pass for Mickey, Donald and Goofy. But we can always learn from people who do the job as well as Disney.

Making a Difference

(News-Herald, January 2) Resolution season often raises the question of futility. Not just the futility of changing our own nature (“I will climb off this couch and become an Olympic athlete”), but the futility of individual action. People may feel this year, because of one mess or another, that in the face of economic collapse and general governmental bollixation, there is nothing one person can do.
There is a standard uplifting shiny sweet answer to “What difference can one person make?” Big groups of people are made out of single individuals, and if just one person brings along just one more person, then it grows and grows and suddenly we can all hold hands and change the world together. Cue the violins.
It’s not that I think that notion is wrong, exactly. I just think it’s beside the point. To debate whether or not one person can make a difference is like debating whether or not a person is going to breathe.
If you are alive, you are making a difference. The question that matters is “What kind of difference are you making?”
Every day you make choices. Every choice you make has consequences. The fact that these consequences don’t alter the course of Civilization As We Know It does not make them any less real.
If you choose to shop at one place and not another, that has economic consequences. If you choose not to shop at all, or to shop with a bunch of money you don’t actually have, that has economic consequences, too. Whatever you choose to do with your money, it has consequences, both for you and for other people. I remain endlessly amazed at people who do not spend money in a local store or restaurant, but who complain when it closes.
It’s not just economics. Organizations throughout the area go begging for volunteers, for people to help out. There is this notion that sitting on the sidelines is a neutral act, that it doesn’t make a difference. That’s wrong. If you could have stepped up and you didn’t, you have made a difference, and not a positive one.
Circumstances put choices in our paths. Sometimes we had some control over the circumstances, and sometimes we find ourselves unexpectedly plunked down in the midst of them. But wherever we find ourselves standing, we are making a difference. We can’t help it. We just have to choose the difference that we make.
Choosing to wish really hard that we didn’t have to choose—well, that’s a choice, too. But if you have the power and skills necessary to deal with the situation in front of you, then the choice is yours. Saying, “Well, what difference could I make, anyway” is a cop-out. Circumstances and your own capabilities have determined that you will make a difference. What kind of difference is it going to be? If you can step up, you must step up.
In a way, I’m defining responsibility. Some people try to duck their responsibilities. Some try to trade them for responsibilities they don’t really have. Some can see their responsibilities, but pretend those mountains just can’t be climbed. “That would be hard,” they say. The world is filled with people who simply aren’t doing their jobs, and every one of them is making a difference. Just not a good one.
In the course of most days, you meet people, even just to walk past them. At each meeting, you will make a difference. If you smile and are pleasant, that makes a difference. If you are gruff and cold, that makes a difference. If you ignore the person and act as if he doesn’t exist, that makes a difference. It won’t alter the course of that person’s life, but it will affect how he views the world, his life, or you. You can’t avoid making a difference.
It’s possible that, living in the small environment of Venangoland, we make a proportionally larger difference than someone who is one among millions. I don’t know. But I do know that how we handle the circumstances and moments and people that we encounter makes a difference, whether we want it to or not, whether we believe it will or not.
It’s typical at resolution time to reach for something outside the normal, to add some new element to our lives (“This year I will definitely go hang gliding”). But I remain convinced that there is more than enough material and challenge in our daily lives to make for a year’s worth of new resolve and positive difference.

Christmas Odds and Ends

(News-Herald, December 26) I am one of the few remaining people I know with an actual live (well, previously live but now dying in a seasonally picturesque manner inside my house) Christmas tree. The market must be shrinking because it has gotten progressively harder over recent years to track down a chunk of non-artificial holiday lumber in Venangoland.
After years of bouncing between road-side vendors, I’ve been driven to Home Depot. Apparently I’m not unusual; according to the Associated Press, Home Depot is the top seller of yule foliage in the US, with anticipated sales of 2 million trees. That doesn’t seem like a large number, but last year there were only 31.2 million live trees sold nationwide.
Other tree facts from the National Christmas Tree Association: In 2007, there were 17.4 million fake trees sold. Of the real tree sales, 23 percent were at chain stores, 21 percent at cut-your-own farms, 20 percent at garden/nursery centers, 12 percent from some lot, and 15 percent from “other.”
The NCTA wants you to know that real trees take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, that real trees are biodegradable while fake trees are not, and that there are more than 4000 US Christmas Tree recycling programs. They also helpfully note that almost all fake trees are made by impoverished Chinese laborers out of materials that may include poisonous lead. And on top of that, fake trees were first marketed by the Addis Brush Company, whose usual products were toilet bowl brushes. Or, as the NCTA website puts it, “the first fake Christmas trees were really just big green toilet bowl brushes.” I want to root for the real tree guys, but they do sound just a tad desperate.
I am not sure how a recycling program for trees would work. Old friends of mine would occasionally leave the tree up till it had dropped every needle, then repaint the remainder white and call it an Easter tree. I have never gone quite that far, by which I mean that I have never painted one of my dead, nude trees white. As far as recycling, I find the tree makes a nice June campfire.
Before you start mocking those of us who keep festive trappings up, I will remind you that Christmas, properly observed as a religious holiday, consists of twelve days (sound familiar?) of which December 25 is merely the first. Christmas is not over till January 5, so I will leave my lights up for a while yet, thankyouverymuch.
According to the federal agricultural census, if you want to rank states’ Christmas tree-inees by number of trees or number of tree-yielding acres, Pennsylvania is #4. By number of farms, we are #1. Alaska, Nevada, and Arizona bring up the rear in all three categories.
I like my live tree, though I can’t offer much of a rational explanation for it. I suppose that’s also true of the date. While most of us know of December 25 as a date co-opted from pagan celebrations, I have actually seen a theory for a more Christian background. Some ancient Jews believed that the prophets of Israel died on the day of their conception. So early Christians could have worked from the widely believed March 25 crucifixion date and come up with December 25 as Jesus’s birthday.
Neither chopped up fir foliage or dates of dubious origin serve as the oddest of seasonal factoids. Researchers claim that the holiday season is a peak time for making holiday whoopee, a claim supported by a reported spike in September births.
And no holiday tradition beats the Spanish habit, particular in Catalonia, of including a caganer in nativity scenes. For those who are unilingual, “caganer” translates roughly as “pooper.” Since the 17th century, folks in Spain (and parts of France) include one, off in the corner somewhere being indelicate. Children apparently enjoy this tradition as a nativity Where’s Waldo game.
Since 1974, American Christmas has also been marked by large gatherings of tuba players; Tuba Christmas has cropped up in over 200 cities with peak numbers of over 450 players.
Do we humans become ridiculous at this time of year? Perhaps, but I like to think that it just highlights our humanity at the same time that we are remembering and honoring the Divine. Tradition is also useful because we don’t have to argue about what we want to do or who’s in charge or what it all means; just smile sweetly and follow what we already understand.

Holiday Online Timewaster

I don't do a lot of site recommending here, but this is solid gold for television fans Of A Certain Age (i.e. over five). Virtually every tv theme ever, including openings and endings and , in many cases, variant forms from different seasons. When you need a break this week, here's a quick killer of time:


TV Theme Music and Songs

Christmas Stress, Wars, and Spirit

(News-Herald, December 18) The final stretch before Christmas is a time to settle back and really think about the meaning of stress.
Usual Christmas stress is a personal thing. It’s one of those take stock type of holidays that can make us panic, like learning that the News-Derrick is coming to take pictures of all the rooms in our house. There’s nothing like a holiday built around idealized images of home and family to help us really remember how non-ideal our actual homes and families are.
That kind of personal stress is old hat. The last decade has added a sort of community stress. It’s not enough to make sure that our own Christmases are perfect—now we have to make sure that everyone else is celebrating properly as well.
The so-called Christmas wars are only the most ridiculous manifestation of that. On the one hand we have retailers desperately trying not to alienate anyone (or their money) and behaving as if Holiday Season were a natural cultural event when it’s simply the result of ever-expanding marketing ploys, only slightly more deep than Swimsuit Season.
On the other hand, we have People of Alleged Faith insisting that Jesus deserves a place of honor in the appliance aisle. The notion that a Christian nation would throw itself into the celebration of Christmas would appall our most pious founders. The Puritan’s handled Christmas celebrants by putting them in the stocks, chastising them severely, and throwign them out of town.
I suspect that some people desire to have Christmas recognized commercially to salve the conscience. Maybe a lot of religious-ish signage will help me feel as if shopping for plastic doo-whingies actually has something to do with the birth of Christ.
But this year, even mindless economic activity is an uncomfortable pursuit. Just as we were (mostly) applauding ourselves for the coolness of Democracy, along come brutal reminders that much of our fate is in the hands of people that we don’t get to vote on. There is no election for stupidly stubborn corporate executives or selfishly dimwitted financial wizzes, and yet these bozos have put our collective future on the line without so much as a by-your-leave.
So the usual joyous spending spree is overshadowed by a vague financial uncertainty, adding more soggy fuel to a sputtering fire.
I have talked to people who, in the face of all this, despair of finding any joy in the season. Eternal optimist that I am (really, stop snickering), I believe it can be done.
I believe it can be done because, first, I believe we have rarely actually done it in the past. Too many people, when discussing the Joy of Christmas are talking about a fake plastic joy, a childish belief that we can have it all and pay no cost.
We like to talk about how this is the season where everyone can show love and kindness to his fellow man. Baloney, say I. Mostly it’s the season in which folks strike a short-term deal: you will act as if you like me, and I will act as if I believe you.
And then someone inevitably says, “If only it could be Christmas all year round.” Well, if it were Christmas as we Americans celebrate it all year round, we could raise the stock market back up on the strength of prozac sales alone.
But let’s turn that notion around. Instead of a hopeless wish to extend the imaginary state of manufactured Christmas grace to the rest of the year, let’s imagine what we really wished the rest of our year looked like, and then plant the flag of THAT bold conquest in the soil of this one day.
Do you have hopes and dreams for what you wish your life looked like? Don’t focus on what you fear it should be like; make this the season that you commit to those hopes and dreams.
Do you have relationships you want to mend or strengthen? Make this the season for starting the real work instead of faking it.
We can spend this season stressing about what we’ve lost, what we don’t have, where our world comes up short. Or we could focus on what we can build, how we can grow. When the plastic wears out, we have a chance to go for something real. This is the part of the story before the manger, in which conditions are far less than ideal, but nevertheless, there is still a beautiful new life waiting to be born.