The Meitivs live in suburban Montgomery County, Md., which is a bedroom for many Washington bureaucrats who make their living minding other people’s business. The Meitivs, to encourage independence and self-reliance, let their ten- and six-year-old children walk home alone from a park about a mile from their home. For a second time, their children were picked up by police, this time three blocks from home. After confinement in a squad car for almost three hours, during which the police never called or allowed the children to call the Meitivs, the children were given to social workers who finally allowed the parents to reclaim their children at about 11 p.m. on a school night. The Meitivs’ Kafkaesque experiences concluded with them accused of “unsubstantiated” neglect.
Today’s saturating media tug children beyond childhood prematurely, but not to maturity. Children are cosseted by intensive parenting that encourages passivity and dependency, and stunts their abilities to improvise, adapt, and weigh risks. Mark Hemingway, writing at the Federalist, asks: “You know what it’s called when kids make mistakes without adult supervision and have to wrestle with the resulting consequences? Growing up.”
Increased knowledge of early-childhood development has produced increased belief in a “science” of child rearing. This has increased intolerance of parenting that deviates from norms that are as changeable as most intellectual fads.
“Intensive parenting” is becoming a government-enforced norm. Read “The day I left my son in the car” (Salon), Kim Brooks’s essay on her ordeal after leaving her four-year-old in the car as she darted into a store for about five minutes. Writing in the Utah Law Review, David Pimentel of Ohio Northern University notes that at a moment when “children have never been safer,” government is abandoning deference to parents’ discretion in child rearing. In 1925, the Supreme Court affirmed the right of parents “to direct the upbringing and education of children.” Today, however, vague statutes that criminalize child “neglect” or “endangerment” undermine the social legitimacy of parental autonomy. And they ignore the reality that almost every decision a parent makes involves risks. Let your child ride a bike to school, or strap her into a car for the trip? Which child is more at risk, the sedentary one playing video games and risking obesity, or the one riding a bike? It is, Pimentel says, problematic for the legal system to enforce cultural expectations when expectations, partly shaped by media hysteria over rare dangers such as child abductions, are in constant flux.
Time was, colleges and universities acted in loco parentis to moderate undergraduates’ comportment, particularly regarding sex and alcohol. Institutions have largely abandoned this, having decided that students are mature possessors of moral agency. But institutions have also decided that although undergraduates can cope with hormones and intoxicants, they must be protected from discomforting speech, which must be regulated by codes and confined to “free-speech zones.” Uncongenial ideas must be foreshadowed by “trigger warnings,” lest students, who never were free-range children and now are as brittle as pretzels, crumble. Young people shaped by smothering parents come to college not really separated from their “helicopter parents.” Such students come convinced that the world is properly devoted to guaranteeing their serenity, and that their fragility entitles them to protection from distressing thoughts.
As Penn State historian Gary Cross says, adolescence is being redefined to extend well into the 20s, and the “clustering of rites of passage” into adulthood — marriage, childbearing, permanent employment — “has largely disappeared.” Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Cross says that “delayed social adulthood” means that “in 2011, almost a fifth of men between 25 and 34 still lived with their parents,” where many play video games: “The average player is 30 years old.” The percentage of men in their early 40s who have never married “has risen fourfold to 20 percent.”
In the 1950s, Cross says, with Jack Kerouac and Hugh Hefner “the escape from male responsibility became a kind of subculture.” Today, oldies radio and concerts by septuagenarian rockers nurture the cult of youth nostalgia among people who, wearing jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers all the way, have slouched from adolescence to Social Security without ever reaching maturity.
Category: Parenthood/family
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No comments on The devolution of parenthood
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… then you can appreciate my past ironic week.
For those who don’t know the musical references, let’s begin your day with some classical music from Gustav Holst …
… Ralph (pronounced “rafe” for some reason) Vaughan Williams …
… and the classical composer named Leckrone (who?):
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Meanwhile, back at the White House, BizPac Review reports:
President Obama’s lack of self-awareness was on full display when he spoke at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit at Georgetown University today and criticized people who send their kids to “private schools” and “private clubs.”
Obama laments that people start sending kids to private schools, working out at private clubs, separating themselves from the public
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) May 12, 2015
A panel including Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government and Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute were discussing ways to overcome poverty.
Obama stated that those who have economic advantages are withdrawing from societal common areas. He claimed those who socially separate themselves are contributing to a sluggish economy that lacks opportunity.
The hypocrisy was not lost on social media users who were quick to point out Obama’s glaring hypocrisy. …
If only we could think of someone like this, someone maybe who is the actual person saying it. https://t.co/nmc6c1Tv7c
— Sarah Stevenson (@sarahrstevenson) May 12, 2015
@charliespiering last I checked, Obamas & Clintons don’t send their kids to public schools or golf at public courses https://t.co/UMR8lFEj5m — The Right Wing M (@TheRightWingM) May 12, 2015
@charliespiering Does he not send his daughters to (private) Sidwell Friends? Generally, parents want best opportunities for their children.
— ReynardFou (@ReynardFou) May 12, 2015
Wait, didn’t Obama attend Punahou and send his kids to Sidwell Friends?https://t.co/KkOOwqhaJO — Mr. X (@GlomarResponder) May 12, 2015 …
If only we could think of someone like this, someone maybe who is the actual person saying it. https://t.co/nmc6c1Tv7c
— Sarah Stevenson (@sarahrstevenson) May 12, 2015
@charliespiering last I checked, Obamas & Clintons don’t send their kids to public schools or golf at public courses https://t.co/UMR8lFEj5m — The Right Wing M (@TheRightWingM) May 12, 2015
@charliespiering Does he not send his daughters to (private) Sidwell Friends? Generally, parents want best opportunities for their children.
— ReynardFou (@ReynardFou) May 12, 2015
Wait, didn’t Obama attend Punahou and send his kids to Sidwell Friends?https://t.co/KkOOwqhaJO — Mr. X (@GlomarResponder) May 12, 2015
This all comes from the president whose net worth has magically reached eight digits since he became president. That’s rich.
To be fair, if I were president and had school-age children, I would not sentence them to the D.C. public schools either. But I wouldn’t criticize parents’ educational choices for their children, nor would I work to sentence them to the bad educational status quo in order to mollify teacher unions.
Breitbart also reports that Obama said this:
Obama scorned Christians at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Tuesday, twisting the words of Jesus Christ into an insult against the Savior of the believers he was addressing.
“It’s important for us to guard against cynicism and not buy the idea that the poor will always be with us and there’s nothing we can do,” Obama said. Lest leftists and liberal Christians say his comment was “taken out of context,” but here are his full remarks:
“One of the things I’m always concerned about is cynicism,” Obama said. “My chief of staff, Denis McDonough, we take walks around the South Lawn, usually when the weather is good. And a lot of it is policy talk, sometimes it’s just talk about values. And one of our favorite sayings is our job is to guard against cynicism, particularly in this town. And I think it’s important for us to guard against cynicism and not buy the idea that the poor will always be with us and there’s nothing we can do, because there’s a lot we can do. The question is, do we have the political will, the communal will to do something about it.”
Obama’s quotes Matthew 26:11 in a manner that’s utterly contrary to the verse’s meaning.
Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper, There came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat.
But when his disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.
When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always. For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her.Far from heaving a resigned sigh, Jesus is reminding the disciples that poverty, like death or the pain of childbirth, are constants in this fallen world that can be attended to but never wiped out. The Complete Commentaries of minister Matthew Henry affirms this:
“Observe his reason; You have the poor always with you,” Henry writes. “Note, 1. There are some opportunities of doing and getting good which are constant, and which we must give constant attendance to the improvement of. Bibles we have always with us, sabbaths always with us, and so the poor, we have always with us. Note, Those who have a heart to do good, never need complain for want of opportunity. The poor never ceased even out of the land of Israel, Deu. 15:11.” [For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.]
Twisting the words of the Gospel to push unjust, disastrous government programs robbing Peter to pay Paul? For shame.
Given that Obama has been nothing but rude and dismissive towards Christianity, why do Christians keep falling over themselves to give him a platform to rip their faith? It’s understandable for those who reject Christ to call him the “next Messiah,” but Christians ought to know better. From Matthew 10:16: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”
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Time (because I decided it was) for some family photos, beginning with the newest member of the family …
… Max, who is either the World’s Biggest Basenji (they are supposed to be the size of beagles; he certainly is not) or what we call a PitBasenHerd. He appears to mostly be Basenji, though he is supposed to be part pit bull and, we think, part German shepherd. The combination makes him this fierce:
We got Max from his original owner across the street, in part because Max kept letting himself out of the house. It turned out Max wasn’t supposed to be in the house at all (lease conditions can be such a pain). We heard his owner was looking for a new home for him, so on Sunday we left a note on the door. We heard nothing until Saturday when I was on my way out the door for a basketball game, when she came up and asked if we were still interested in the dog (then named Peanut). I told her to talk to the people inside. I left, and we had one dog and one cat, and when I returned, we had two dogs and one cat. (Now just two dogs, but you knew that.)
Max is a challenge. We were, shall we say, misled about his age and the degree of his housebrokenness. He also chews everything in sight, including, last night, a baseball. He has helped himself to food on the kitchen counter, and he helped himself into our bed at night, where he defines the word “inert.” And yet he’s cute and he’s very affectionate, he displays most of the characteristics of the unique Basenji, and he angers the fat chihuahua, so he’s got that going for him.
As for the human children …
… this is Michael the Fire Explorer, which means he hangs around the busiest unpaid people in town, the Platteville Fire Department.
This is Shaena and Dylan, during the last college basketball game of the year. I’m sure you’re shocked that Dylan is into acting.
You may recall I spent most of the winter announcing basketball. UW-Platteville had a White Out Night against UW-Whitewater (Whitewater 65, Platteville 64), and so in that spirit I figured out how to wear all white — white jacket borrowed from someone (I used Marty Robbins’ “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation” as bumper music), white shirt, white tie, white pants and black and white basketball shoes — to participate. The season included the last endless road trip to Superior, which as you know is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alma mater, so of course I had to go into one break saying “Ah’ll be bock,” later saying that Superior was going to say “hasta la vista, baby” to the rest of the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference when it moves into a new conference. When Superior came to Platteville it was Alumni Night, so I thought about what I was doing when I was in college, and reused the white blazer to achieve this sort of Miami Vice/Terminator look, I guess.
(You may notice the scar on my forehead, the result of my finding out that a bridal shop’s diagonal bars, on which to hang dresses, was the perfect height for my head. The doctor who put my face back together has been very pleased with his work.)
Up next …
… this disreputable looking quartet is your non-humble writer (second from right) and his father (far left) and his two friends since approximately grade school. (In fact the two wearing Brewers stuff were born in the same hospital within days of each other.) For the second year in a row we went to a Brewers game (remarkably we got let into Milwaukee County), but unlike last year, the Brewers won, prompting some wit in the parking lot to note that we had seen one-third of their wins that day. (Now it’s down to one-fifth, I believe.) -
Yesterday’s blog item about Barack Obama’s wanting to tax college savings accounts lasted one day, reports Breitbart:
Facing strong opposition from parents and both political parties, Barack Obama is abandoning plans to tax college savings accounts, also called 529s.
In making the announcement, the White House also said it will “keep an expanded tuition tax credit at the center of his college access plan.”
The decision came just hours after Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio demanded that the proposal be withdrawn from the president’s budget, due out Monday, “for the sake of middle-class families.” But the call for the White House to relent also came from top Democrats, including Representatives Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking member of the Budget Committee.
While the WH sought to portray the initial plan as taxing the wealthy to benefit the middle class, analysis indicated that a large number people who are far from “wealthy” were benefiting from the ability to put money away for their children’s higher education without fear of it being taxed.
Both current House Speaker Republican John Boehner and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi came out against Obama’s initial plan.The New York Times reports:
The contretemps over college accounts held broader lessons. For one, tax reform and “simplification” have great appeal in the abstract, but many specific provisions of the tax code have large and vocal constituencies. In addition, Americans’ concept of the middle class is far more elastic than that of economists.
“That’s as middle class as it gets,” Representative Marlin Stutzman, Republican of Indiana, said of 529 college accounts.
Which prompts the Chicks on the Right to observe:
Gee…the whole “demonize the wealthy thing” didn’t work out for him this time…since it’s MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE who are actually being demonized. Too bad it’s taken SIX FREAKING YEARS for some of the lobotomized lemmings out there to wake the heck up.(Insert eyeroll here that can stab my brain.)Because that’s obviously what it takes. Getting people RIGHT in their wallets.You know what this has shown me?That every single person in this country should have to WRITE A PHYSICAL CHECK every month for their taxes. None of this ridiculous have-taxes-taken-out-automatically crap. No way. Every American should have to WRITE A CHECK. Every month. To the government. If everyone had to physically do that, and we were all completely aware of what we had to pay out of our paychecks every single month…we had to PHYSICALLY WRITE THE CHECK TO THEM – Republicans AND Democrats – I bet folks would be voting waaaaay differently at the polls. Because let’s face it – it was both parties that came together on this 529 thing and said, “HELL NO!”They both took a conservative approach on this, y’all. They came together and said “UP YOURS” to the government. And that’s a beautiful thing.I bet that if folks had to physically write a check every month for their social security, FICA, and everything else in between, we’d start seeing a major change of political affiliation by some folks in this country. I stand by that bet. Because conservatives are the party of fiscal responsibility and LESS GOVERNMENT. LESS TAXATION. But people are too distracted by social issues – because liberals are masters of distraction, as you well know.If people had to write the checks instead of having taxes taken out automatically, they’d have to think about it. It’d be more painful. There’d be no out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Their wallets would be visually affected every month. They’d SEE it. (You know, like the rest of us who are already painfully aware and already vote conservative). -
As part of his plan to “simplify the tax code”, President Obama wants to revoke the tax-exempt status of 529 investment accounts. For those not familiar, 529’s are “Educational IRA’s”–usually run by states–that allow parents to save money for their children’s college education. Under current law, if that money is used for school expenses, the parents don’t pay taxes on the distributions. If parents start when a child is born and save religiously, they are rewarded with not having their kid saddled with student loan debt upon graduation.
But the Obama Administration–and economists on the Left–think the “wrong people” are taking advantage of 529 plans. They believe that most of the seven million accounts are held by parents who “could afford to save for college anyway”–and that the 529 is just a tax-shelter. They may be right–the average 529 investor probably doesn’t have a $400 smartphone sitting next to a $400 tablet with the same purchased apps on both of them, or subscriptions to ten different streaming video services, or the largest broadband internet package for freeze-free gaming, or unlimited data plans, or two $6 Mocha Grande Lattes every day and can “afford” to save for their kids’ college. What those “experts” fail to realize, however, is that by making 529 distributions “regular income” they also will cost middle class families money in financial aid for which they will no longer quality because they “make too much”.
The fight over 529’s is just a prelude to the real target of what will be President Obama’s liberal successors in Washington–Roth IRA’s. There is $217 billion dollars currently held in 529 accounts. But there is over $1-TRILLION sitting in Roth IRA’s–all of it growing tax-free–and waiting to be distributed tax-free. The President–again to “simplify the tax code”–is proposing a cap on the value of Roth’s at $3.4 million dollars. (That is apparently all the Government believes you should be allowed to save for retirement–so don’t invest TOO well young savers). Meanwhile, the calls are already coming from those at the Liberal think tanks to revoke the tax-free status of Roth’s and tax the distributions not at the lower capital gains level–but again as regular income to “maximize Government revenues”. The argument being–again–that those who have been saving in Roth IRA’s could have been putting that money away in other ways and don’t “deserve” the tax break.
But there is still another pool of money that dwarfs even the Roth IRA sum–and that is the $12-TRILLION in wealth that Baby Boomers will be handing down to their Generation X and Gen Y children over the next couple of decades. Economists are calling the “greatest transfer of wealth in human history”–and that isn’t sitting well with those on the Left. Remember, they want to “redistribute wealth”–not transfer it. And that is why calls for increasing the inheritance tax and reducing the amount that is exempt from inheritance tax are already building. And it’s why Liberal pundits are sharpening their vocabulary with terms like “Genetic Lottery Winners” to describe those poised to get something from their dead parents.
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If you’re a parent, you know that weekends are not time off any more than weekdays are.
This weekend was ridiculously full. I announced two volleyball matches Saturday, one day after doing a football game, and four days after doing another volleyball match. (In between, I got to be a parent at a Parents Night for the first time. I have sat through more than 100 Parents Nights for games I’ve covered or announced, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to participate, since we have a freshman soccer player in the house.) We also had our church’s annual St. Francis Day pet blessing, after which I went to a silo fire fought by seven fire departments.
Sunday, our daughter made her world debut as an acolyte, before her practice for a role in “The Nutcracker.” In between, an historic moment in the Prestegard family, or extended family:
This may be the first touchdown a Prestegard has ever scored in organized football. Had this been on the radio, my call would have been something like “Handoff to Prestegard on the end-around … and Prestegard to the 30, around the corner to the 20, down the sidelines to the 10 … tooooo the end zone! Touchdown for Dylan Prestegard — 34 yards on the end-around! And the Herd [team name, hence the green jerseys for Marshall] start the second half with a bang, and take the lead, 12 to 6!”
I feel like I should re-edit the video in slow motion with some NFL Films music, like …
Or, knowing popular music today, he’d probably prefer something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPnkzTa-rrM
A football game I announced earlier this season did involve a Prestegard child … in the marching band. That too is a family first. So yes, the marching band got airtime. I have yet to announce a game where one of our kids is a player … yet.
This week, I have games to announce every night from Wednesday to Friday, plus Saturday afternoon. A Neil Young song says it’s better to burn out than it is to rust.
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Matt Lewis writes:
Many of my fellow conservative columnists have lamented in recent weeks that the troubling trend of Western men voyaging to the Middle East to become terrorists has its roots in the stultifying boredom of life in modern capitalistic society.
TheWeek.com‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty’s explored the topic in a post called “How the West produces jihadi tourists.” The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat ventured into similar territory in his “Our thoroughly modern enemies.” National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke was on board, too, in a post titled “Sadly, totalitarianism is exciting.”
“One reason that liberty can be difficult to preserve is that it so often lacks the romance, the heroism, and the sense of involvement that so many appear to crave,” Cooke wrote.
The suggestion that was implicit in each of these columns is that this American life is kinda boring. That’s troubling, and a little like saying marriage is boring. Yes, too many marriages are boring, but that’s often a failure on the part of individuals, not an inherent flaw in the institution. If we do it right, our marriages and lives should be full of purpose and romance. We could say the same for modern life in the West. The fact that our society is too often absent adventure and excitement, that too many lives are bogged down by mundanity and routine, is due to a failure on the part of individuals, and is not necessarily an indictment on the system itself.
Look, people have an intuitive — some would say God-given — drive for purpose. They want to be called to something big. Some of us are lucky enough to experience that, at work, at home, or elsewhere. For others, life fails to deliver on their big dreams. Most learn to accept it. But a terrible few are driven to extremism. That might mean following a charismatic cult leader like Charles Manson, or it might mean becoming an Islamic terrorist.
This lack of purpose is a real problem, and popular American culture has long been all too content to offer the masses bread and circuses rather than purpose and meaning.
This isn’t dissimilar to the phenomenon that drove the 1960’s counterculture movement. As Baylor University Professor Barry Hankins notes in his book, Francis Schaeffer And the Shaping of Evangelical America, the famed evangelical leader believed that
once a society has jettisoned a Christian worldview and any notion of ‘true truth,’ as he called it, there was nothing left but personal peace and affluence. From time to time he said that the hippies of the 1960s looked at their parents’ lives and saw only these two values instead of answers to the deep longings of humankind. With no hope of real meaning and only personal peace and affluence to look forward to, the hippies dropped out of mainstream middle-class culture and turned to drugs or joined the New Left in a violent revolt against mainstream society. [Francis Schaeffer And the Shaping of Evangelical America]
People have an inherent drive for meaning. That’s why George W. Bush was so criticized for not summoning Americans to make big sacrifices after 9/11 — people wanted to do something, and they wanted it to matter. But we live in a me-me-me world where politicians don’t want to ask us to make sacrifices. Our churches don’t want to ask us to make sacrifices. Even our parents don’t want to ask us to make major sacrifices. Doing so seems antithetical to the “do what makes you feel good” culture that seems evermore pervasive in the West. But for many, that life ends up feeling meaningless. …
Sometimes asking people to do things that are hard fills them with purpose. But we rarely do that in modern America.
Going back to ancient times, young men have craved honor and glory. But when there’s no communal higher calling, and no Wild West frontier for those afflicted with wanderlust to conquer, they’re left empty. Playing video games isn’t enough.
It’s not that my fellow conservative commentators aren’t largely correct about why so many angry young men are fleeing the staid comforts of the West for the violent excitement of the Middle East. It’s only to say this: The American Dream needn’t be inherently boring. Ours is a society build on a sense of destiny, sacrifice, and adventure. If we’ve gotten away from that, well, maybe we as a people need to figure out how to get excited again, to recapture the exploratory adventurers’ spirit and national spirit that so animated Americans in generations past.
But even if our American life is kinda boring these days… well, maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. Comfort, routine, steadiness — this lack of excitement should not equate to a life of quiet desperation. A people who believe in shared values, who have a deep faith, who care about their community and fellow citizens, who work hard to take care of themselves and their families, and who believe in the concept of being good neighbors, employees, and citizens — well, it needn’t resemble Revolutionary Road.
Some of this sounds like dialogue from two scenes of a first-season episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation“:
CAPT. JEAN-LUC PICARD: A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We have grown out of our infancy.
RALPH OFFENHOUSE: You’ve got it all wrong. It’s never been about possessions. It’s about power.
PICARD: Power to do what?
RALPH: To control your life, your destiny.
PICARD: That kind of control is an illusion.
RALPH: Really? I’m here, aren’t I? I should be dead but I’m not. …PICARD: This is the twenty fourth century. Material needs no longer exist.
RALPH: Then what’s the challenge?
PICARD: The challenge, Mister Offenhouse, is to improve yourself. To enrich yourself. Enjoy it.(For those readers who roll their eyes at this self-satisfied morally superior dialogue: This is actually from one of the best episodes of TNG’s generally poor first season, if you can get past the pseudosocialism of the second series at all.)
I tend to squirm when I start hearing of calls for you to sacrifice by those who have no personal stake in that sacrifice. It seems to me that 13 years after 9/11, Americans have sacrificed a lot of their freedom, both in personal and economic ways (gas prices are more than double what they were in 20o1), and not for good reasons or with good results. (Three letters: TSA.) It wasn’t clear to me then, and it’s not clear to me now, what kind of sacrifice George W. Bush should have called on Americans to do. It’s also not clear why Americans should sacrifice to make up for politicians’ past bad decisions. I notice no member of Congress voluntarily giving up their salaries and lush benefits in response to our $16 trillion in debt, for instance.
Said calls for sacrifice always require a followup question: Why? Because we use (someone’s definition of) too many resources? Because Americans are arrogant (by someone’s definition of that word)? Because our freedoms make someone who doesn’t have those freedoms feel bad or angry? Here I thought Barack Obama was supposed to deal with that American-arrogance thing. Apparently those who voted for that were mistaken.
It’s been fashionable for several years to institute some form of national service requirement for young adults. The first response I always have, because this proposal usually comes from people who never did military or any other national service, is: Great idea! You first. (And, by the way: Now, not 40 years ago.) This is supposed to inculcate some drive for service within the mandatorily volunteered. (On the other hand, most drafted servicemen of the Vietnam War era are not likely to have fond memories of their mandatory service, whether or not they went to Vietnam.) Nothing prevents someone from joining the Peace Corps or local volunteer efforts on their own, without the mandatory service hammer.
There is some blame for what Lewis describes upon society as a whole in one specific area, though who knows when this began. This society of ours is increasingly risk-averse. Read the online depictions of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s — you know, kids’ playing all day all over the neighborhood until the streetlights came on, drinking water out of garden hoses, etc. — and 2010s readers wonder how anyone survived a world without air bags in cars and bike helmets. If, as is claimed by quoted authors, young men have a natural drive for adventure and need for meaning, our safety-obsessed society, which reinforces on a daily basis that the world outside your property line is a dangerous place, has worked hard to squelch it. At the same time, our societal obsession with children’s self-esteem at the expense of actual accomplishment has a role too, because that emphasizes that you’re a great person just as you are, with no expectations that you do better and not do the wrong things.
(Here’s an example: Christians are condemned as judgmental when they point out someone’s sin. Their critics say that Jesus Christ didn’t judge, so Christians didn’t either. Those critics have a selective reading of the Bible, because in the cases they bring up — for instance, the woman about to be stoned for adultery — Christ’s statement to the sinner ends with a statement like “Go and sin no more.” Somehow that gets omitted in the story.)
More than anything else, though, if young men are doing bad things, other than blaming their bad decisions on themselves, it’s probably their parents’ fault. I’m not referring to the problems of single-parent families and the crisis of absent fathers, though that has a huge role in our society’s problems.
Parents are their children’s role models, whether the kids want to admit it or not, and their children’s first and longest lasting teachers. Consider what we get from religion — a sense of belonging, a sense that the world does not revolve around you, and, yes, a call to serve others, to use three secular examples. Kids don’t get any of that if they don’t go to church. And, yes, parents must sometimes do the hard thing and force their children to do things the kids may not want to do. If “sometimes asking people to do things that are hard fills them with purpose,” and that’s not being done by society or government, then it’s up to the parents to teach those lessons.
It’s also not an accident that the diminishing interest in the Boy Scouts has a role here. Parents of boys: Which of the 12 parts of the Scout Law — trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent — would you not want your sons to emulate? Or, for that matter, the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” and slogan, “Do a good turn daily.” And yet, thanks in part to the Scouts’ ban on gay leaders, but also due to men having other things to do, Scouting is on the wane nationwide. There is nothing good about that trend.
Parents are supposed to teach their children to do the right thing(s) because those are the right things to do. But parents need to teach by example. No lesson, except a lesson about power, is taught by telling a child to go out and shovel someone else’s snow. A lesson is taught when children see their parents helping a neighbor or even a stranger. A lesson is taught when children see their parents going out and doing things outside of work, particularly for the benefit of others, instead of sitting in front of a TV or computer being mindlessly entertained.
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I took this photo (untouched) with my new smartphone in Kieler, Wis., at my oldest son’s baseball game last night. The temperature was in the 70s. I was wearing one of my 32,754 polo shirts and shorts. The only problems were the gnats, which are nasty enough this year to carry off someone.
The weather is expected to be similar today, when I travel to Cassville to cover a baseball regional final game between the Comets and their archrival Potosi (one of the state champion teams I’ve gotten to cover, back in 1993). The game comes on at 4:45 p.m. on http://www.theespndoubleteam.com.
After the craptacular damnable winter we lived through, I think we deserve this.
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Right Wisconsin’s Savvy Pundit could have opened with “Please allow me to introduce myself,” from the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”:
Hello, my name is Evil. I know I am not a welcome guest at your societal garden party. I know most of you like to ignore me or pretend I simply do not exist. I know acknowledging me makes a lot of you queasy because it runs counter to the polite, oh-so-politically-correct, anti-absolutist, relativistic fantasy world you have created for yourselves.
But let me warn you, and state this unequivocally: I will not be ignored.
Oh, I know you’ve tried. I concocted shootings and drugs and gang violence. You relegated these occurrences to “news in brief” or ignored them completely as if I didn’t even exist that these were just normal byproducts of urban life and not clear evidence of my presence. How rude of you.
Since you callously wouldn’t acknowledge my presence when the killings and shootings were merely one thug on another, I upped the ante and brought an innocent 10-year old on a playground into the mix. Surely that would get me noticed.Instead, you gave the credit to others. You blamed the gun used. You blamed poverty. You blamed race. You blamed Scott Walker. (Seriously, isn’t that becoming a little cliché? What, George W. Bush wasn’t available? You’re embarrassing yourselves.)
But as I noted, I WILL NOT be ignored. And so now I give you the Slender Man stabbings. Who or what are you going to try to blame this time?
Race? Ha! Whites
Urban male culture? Try again. 12 year old girls.
Guns? Nope, A knife.
Gangs? Don’t insult me! A pajama party sleepover.
Poverty? Better luck next time: Middle class.
Milwaukee? Try Waukesha.
Poor, underfunded, failing schools? Not a chance. Just to drive that point home a little more clearly I even used the modern-day mark of an affluent school – the school-issued iPad for every kid – as part of my play on this one.
And yet you continue to resist admitting my tangible existence. You cling doggedly to your relativistic claptrap. You live in a constant state of denial concerning the state of human nature. You try to wish away the Hobbesian reality, even after I give you example after nasty, brutish and short example of unfettered individuals living in their own state of nature. You believe that trying to constrain behavior by declaring the existence of any absolute of right or wrong makes you “intolerant,” something that you seem to believe is literally a fate worse than death. You believe that your children are blank slates of creative virtue and it is society’s role not to besmirch them with judgment, rules or absolutes instead of realizing that from birth they are self-centered bundles of depravity for whom virtue is an inherently unnatural act that can only be instilled in them intentionally over time by patience, persistence, and discipline.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 