Narrowly Reined Silence

I dread that day. I know I will be required to call upon every grown-up, rational bone in my body to hold back my Mommy protective nature, to be the bigger person, to scrape a life lesson out of one of life’s realities. I dread that day–the day when one of my sweet children comes home crying, hurt by hurtful words spoken about him.

They’re all too young to care right now.  They are blissfully absorbed in their own worlds with their own thoughts and their own stories, unaware of how they are perceived by others around them. I dread the day one of them realizes someone doesn’t like him because of something out of his control–like where he lives or the color of her hair or the style of his blue jeans or the accuracy of his pitch. It makes me sad to even think about that day. I dread them not having the favor of someone, a friend or a teacher or a playmate, whose opinion for however fleeting a moment matters to them.

Perhaps it will be Little Drummer Boy who realizes for the first time someone is laughing AT him and not with him.  It could be Squiggle who realizes someone is running AWAY from him rather than alongside him. Maybe it will be Baby Girl who, for the first time, hears that her smile isn’t as beautiful as we’ve always told her.  I dread that day. It will be the day my heart breaks. And, it will be the day I must take a narrowly reined vow of silence–the day I rely on God’s Spirit and will-power to hold my tongue, to keep myself from lashing out in anger at someone else’s child or some child’s parent or this world in general. It will be another chapter in a series of many lessons I attempt to teach them about where their true and lasting worth lies, and the bittersweet rewards of being who you are. But, it will break my heart nonetheless. For, on that day, they will have lost (if only for a moment) that carefree indifference to what others think. On that day, they will have lost the innocent belief that all the world values them as we do.

Sadly, that day is a reality. It’s coming. Our penchant for hasty judgements and cruel words is evident all around us, and it’s often revealed in surprising ways at surprisingly young ages by surprising people.  Today, I read of a boy, Carl Walker-Hoover, who took his own life less than two weeks ago because of the daily teasing he received.  The accusation: he “acted gay.” Carl would have turned 12 years old today. His mother said in an interview with Essence magazine that being gay had never presented itself as an issue because Carl had not even experienced puberty yet. He was interested in soccer and basketball and football and school and Pokemon.

Today, April 17, also marked the National Day of Silence, an initiative sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) that encourages students to take some form of a vow of silence to raise awareness about school bullying based on perceived or actual sexual orientation and about the silence many students who’ve chosen a LGBT lifestyle feel they must keep to avoid harrassment. Many conservative groups have denounced the initiative as simply a vehicle for promoting and indoctrinating students in the homosexual “agenda”.

But, I am not writing about the “agenda.” And, being gay or straight wasn’t on Carl Walker-Hoover’s radar. And, whether my little ones are accused of being gay or prudes or rednecks or poor white trash or nerds, it’s the same kind of speech that will require my narrowly reined silence as a protective Mother one day.  So, today, I’m writing. Because I don’t want to be Carl Walker-Hoover’s mother.

The problem I have with the conservative approach to so many social issues (including the gay one) is that so often our so-called righteousness is used as a weapon. Our own speech, the names WE call, reveal our refusal to see a created soul of infinite worth to a Creator God. We see what God calls sin, and we name it such.  Yes, but we are blind to the fact that “sinners” are souls. And this is not the way of the Savior I know. The harshest words Jesus spoke in the New Testament were reserved for the religious leaders of the day. The smallest chunks of time in his schedule were given to those religious leaders. Most of his time was spent with prostitutes and cheaters and working class, the uneducated, the disloyal, the confused. And, the time he had with them, he spent slinging, not insults and accusations, but bread and wine and conversation, and more often than not forgiveness.

In the conservative movement I see, we’re running away from ourselves. We run alarmingly close to creating a culture that promotes the kind of stigma and bigotry and soul-blindness that made an 11-year-old boy’s topic of teasing so unbearable. In that culture, it’s better to be dead than to be called gay. That’s not the Savior I know. It’s not the salvation I know.

500 or 15: Television

More parenting videos on JuiceBoxJungle

500 words or 15 minutes (whichever comes first) on my topic of the moment. This moment is…
Television. Aaargh. I love a couch potato moment as much as the next gal, but this latest Juice Box Jungle video got me thinking. How do I “use” the boob tube with my kids? And, is it intentional? Or, do I just default to their love of Elmo and my own need for THEIR entertainment.

My boys love their movies: Charlie Brown, Dora, Elmo, Barney, Winnie the Pooh – the academy award nominees of toddler land. Every day, they take turns choosing the first “movie” to watch when we get home from day care. I’ve found this hour or so of DVD time to be a great way for me to keep my sanity at the dreaded “transition hour.” You know the one, the hour between work and home, daycare and home, hungry and filled, outside and inside and so forth.

When everyone comes home after long (and mostly fun) days, there is sometimes no rest for weary Mommy and Daddy, so our solution has been a little DVD time. We alternate who gets to pick the movie first and they all settle in to bean bag or chair or couch with juice and milk in hands. Sometimes they stay there glued to the action and sometimes they opt for cars and trucks and random storytelling with the show in the background. And, sometimes even Hub and I come running not to miss our favorite funny parts. But, the movies give the grown-ups a chance to say “how was your day” and give the Mommy a chance to get dinner started with maybe a little less multi-tasking. Mind-numbing qualities aside, to the credit of kid programming producers everywhere, the experience really has taught my bunch a lot about everything from how toilet paper is made to who Abraham Lincoln is to how to act like a monkey. (Wait, we didn’t really need any training for that. They popped out with the knowledge already in hand.)

As for regular TV programming, realistically we don’t watch much at our house, at least not the cable and network kind. Being that I have one big sports fan and two (or three, lest we ignore Title 9) little sports fans in training at my house, ESPN does get some air time as well as Fox Sports South and whoever else might be broadcasting live baseball or SEC football.

The main thing that keeps us away from the standard programming and the big concern I have with even sports broadcasting is the commercials. They regularly confuse and scare my just-shy-of-4-year old while my just-shy-of-2 ½ year old is blissfully unaware, at the moment. When we watched the Super Bowl this year, we COULDN’T watch it for reassuring Little Drummer Boy. We finally ended up turning it off. (You can experience my sleep-deprived rant on the issue here.) I’m all about mastering the remote for programs that show my kids things I don’t want them to know until they’re 30, but even with sports or kid-friendly programming, advertisements are still the wild-card.

So at our house, sometimes it’s a toss-up between our favorite dinosaurs and monsters or our favorite teams, and we’re all slowly learning that since we “only have one TV,” (I know, it’s shocking!) “we have to share!” When dinner’s on the table and it’s time for family time, usually there’s a rush to see who can turn OFF the tube first. I guess that’s something.

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CultureSpeak: “SMALLey”

Cultural Context: Today, FoxNews.com chose to feature one of it’s opinion pieces in which the unknown author compared President Obama’s so-called “apologetic” foreign policy approach to the philosophy of Saturday Night Live’s fictional Stuart Smalley.  The story was introduced by this statement…

In contrast to Bush’s ‘cowboy diplomacy,’ Obama administration’s apologetic foreign policy tone seems to be based on Stuart Smalley: ‘Doggonit, people like me.’

And by this doctored camera still from Saturday Night Live showing Al Franken dressed as his Stuart Smalley persona with the president’s picture in his mirror reflection.

Warning.  The following has rant qualities.

Normally in this column I would insert a link to the story here, but honestly, I just can’t bring myself to send any more readers than necessary to that dismal attempt at “fair and balanced.”  If you really want to find the article, go to the opinion tab and use the search feature–key word: ridiculous.

I’ll admit it.  I regularly check in with FoxNews.com and sometimes CNN.com or NYTimes.com or LATimes.com throughout the day while I’m at work.  I like to take a look at the day’s news and keep myself informed of what’s going on outside the Mississippi borders.  But, my browse of the Fox News website this afternoon so annoyed me that I’m seriously considering banning them from my Safari bookmark bar.  Because today, I’m convinced that saying Fox “News” is quite a charitable description.

You see, at the risk of being redundant, I go there to check out the news.  I said NEWS.  Unfortunately, once again I was subjected to another one of the network’s attempts at being clever in an opinion piece masquerading as a top news story.  The opinion was linked from the doctored image you see above which was strategically placed in their look-at-me-I’m-important-news spot in the top left corner. It was the largest non-advertising photo above the virtual fold, rivaled only by the very orange AT&T ad spot. [I'm responsible for the big ol' "X" on the image because I don't want the casual web page skimmer to mistake this poor excuse of an "analysis" for something I'm actually endorsing.]

When I clicked through to the actual article editorial, I was particularly annoyed that there was no byline, only an annonymous “Foxnews.com.”  If you’re going to put this out there and call it the afternoon’s top story, the least you can do is own it.  The article begins with the statement, “Call it your daily affirmation.”  Aside from Stuart Smalley, what does that mean?  To Fox News, I mean.  Because I know what it’s affirming to me, almost daily–the fact that this conservative mouthpiece has increasingly turned into a sensationalist, attention-hungry, joe-cool, journalism school amnesiac.

Fox News, take this down.  Opinion does not equal news. New media or not, headlines do not equal respect.  Please begin to report the news.  Please stop your incessant attempts to channel TMZ.  Please refrain from presenting your cultural metaphors as news. Your “Smalley” opinion was not top news.  It was SMALL.  And, by that, I mean it was small.  Journalistically itty bitty. A pitiful excuse for a thinking-conservative’s slant.  A don’t-quit-the-day-job attempt at humor.  A skirt-the-issue-by-making-fun cheap shot.  And, probably a copyright or intellectual property violation.

Times are tough. The issues are serious. Please stop telling the president to get real on terrorism and nuclear weapons and the economy and the tax burden and AIG — and START getting real on terrorism, nuclear weapons, the economy, the tax burden and AIG.

500/15 on Equality

This morning, I’ve been following the coverage of the California State Supreme Court hearings on the constitutionality of Proposition 8 – the California gay marriage ban that passed by a 52% margin of the popular vote in November. The arguments, protesters and media are a world away from my office lunch break here in Mississippi, but the debate is inescapable. The common relevant phrase today is “marriage equality” and it has me thinking about the nature of equality itself. I saw a Prop 8 protest badge on a blog earlier in the week (the blog you didn’t know I was reading–a post on that later): “Equality should not be put up for a popular vote.”

It begs the question: Is equality a popularity contest? Equal is one of those words (like unique) that is or isn’t. It’s, by definition, a mathematical absolute. Something can’t be nearly equal or slightly equal or very equal. People, situations, equations are equal or not. So, is marriage an issue of equality? People are never inherently equal to one another. Our differences are a biological given. Since marriages are made up of people, is it even possible to seek that kind of “equality” in a meaningful way? Is it right to try?

In the tweet coverage of the Court arguments, I see many references to “inalienable” and the question of whether the “right” to marry (or form a union) is an “inalienable right” that falls somewhere in the realms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In that grand list, we read that the truth of equality is “self-evident.”

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

All men are created equal—declared by a bold ownership of independence and freedom, the freedom to choose our own way. No, we are not all equal in our abilities. We are not all equal in our choices. But, we are all created with an equal ability to make those choices. And, much to the chagrin of our manifest destiny mentality and our conservative bravado, neither the Declaration of Independence nor the California constitution bestows that equality and ensuing freedom of choice. God, the Creator, is the originator of the concept.

Do I believe gay marriage is “right”? No. Would I choose it for me and mine? No. Do I think we need a law on the books banning it? Is God’s law enough? Can I as a person or we as a society rightfully deny a choice God has given? Even if that choice is opposed to His expressed desire? Can I reach out to those in the protest line and respect a common equality despite the differences in lifestyle choices? Can we find ourselves on equal footing as people, as mothers, as citizens? Despite a slight majority, can we somehow equal more than the mere total of our numbers? Those questions require more than 500 or 15.

For a brief history of the California Proposition 8 story, visit the LA Times chronology.  Be forewarned: LAT officially endorsed a “Vote No” stance on Prop 8 on November 2, 2008.

MIPOTW: Sixth

The Most Interesting Phrase of the Week for 022109 was delivered to my radar via an alert from Super FaceBook Guy upon loading my feed this week…

More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren’t just a document that protect our rights; it’s the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world.

…thus introducing a hasty retreat by FB honchos after a recent change to their terms of service bootlegged ownership of any photos, etc posted on the site.  Yep, a coup d’etat was narrowly averted.

A couple of thoughts (actually 3):  1) Super FaceBook Guy has really earned his super hero cape this week, since I’m sure all 175 million received the same alert; 2) 175 million!  I mean [!].  This ain’t no measly Gotham, Super FaceBook Guy; 3) Is there anyone out there who actually assumes that when you post something online, it remains yours and yours alone forever and always, and nobody but who you say can see it or use it?  The only way to keep it totally yours is to put it in one of those nice photo boxes or albums and lock it up in your house and throw away the key.  And then, it’s really only yours for about 70 years or so at most.  It’s a small world after all.