As much as I’m a student of history, I’d like to see us turn our gaze forward, and not obsess on that history and not accept its conventional wisdom. That said, I think it is still important to understand the historic currents that are the basis of those conventions before one sets out to consider challenging elements of that wisdom.
I’ve just finished slogging my way through a dense 800+ page book, From Dawn to Decadence, by Jacques Barzun. It is a cultural history of the Western World during the past 500 years. Between working, writing, and family, it has taken me some eight or nine months to get through it. Continue reading →
Category Archives: Context
A Dad Learns to Thrive on the Mommy Track
In the 23 years since our kids were born, I have made a conscious choice to lead a more balanced life, including a primary focus on wearing my parent hat. This choice led to a strategy of trying to carefully choose my jobs and career path to minimize work hours and job stress, while attempting to also maximize the flexibility of my schedule. Based on the common nickname for this sort of work strategy, I was a male parent on the “Mommy track”. Continue reading →
The Devil in the Anatomical Details: Putting Gender in its Place
As a parent who has watched his two kids, one male and one female, grow up among their peers, I have witnessed much of that adult obsession with gender focused on children, and youth culture. Sure… part of a kid’s developmental process is to gender identify. But from my experience as a kid, and later experience watching other kids, most of that developmental process has nothing to do with whether you are a boy or a girl. Being “all boy” or “daddy’s girl” are adult inventions, romanticizing to point of fetishizing gender identification. The reality seems to be that most kids quickly and easily gender identify and don’t need all these vicarious expectations and other baggage heaped upon them. Continue reading →
The Devil is in the Details
In Islam, according to Wikipedia, “The primary characteristic of the Devil, besides hubris, is that he has no power other than the power to cast evil suggestions into the heart of men and women.” The Islamic Devil is a trickster who uses smoke and mirrors to confuse you as to what is really important. Though I do not believe in deities, good or evil, I think this version of the Devil is a useful metaphor and archetype, certainly more right on than the Christian version, which is profoundly malevolent and has the power to control souls, even against their will, if they are not determined and skilled in their resistance.
As I plunge into this stream of thought and attempt to capture some of it in this written piece I have to acknowledge all the complexities, connotations and resulting imprecision of language, particularly written language in the case of this piece, that revolves around words that might mean one thing when we write (actually in my case type) them with an initial capital rather than lower-case letter. But that said, the complexities, connotations and imprecision reflect the richness of our common experience and our ongoing struggle to fully grapple with it. Continue reading →
To our Son Eric’s Health
Our son Eric turned 23 in January and is no longer covered under my partner Sally’s family health insurance, which continues to cover her, our 20-year-old daughter Emma and me. Eric is still wrapped up in that classic, compelling, entrepreneurial American struggle to make a small business successful, now 18 months into that effort with the outcome still in doubt due in large part to launching the business just half a year before our current severe recession took full hold. As is often the case when one launches a business, Eric is taking little or no money out of it to pay himself, and is therefore living on a shoestring, which now includes living without any sort of health care coverage. Continue reading →
Once More in the Company of Women
As an older youth and a young adult, some of my most productive developmental times came when I had a compelling mentor and also a good circle of peers connected with that mentor. I think it is an ideal state for learning, whether the context is in or outside of formal education. To have a mentor at any point is a blessing, but the affect is amplified by having that circle of peers, as it were in academic terms, the “lab” that goes with the “lecture”. The wisdom of sought out authority (the mentor) is best integrated by using it to develop the agency that one can find in a circle of peers. This I see as different than most conventional classroom situations where the teacher administers and the students conform, and do not have the opportunity to become a “circle”, that is a self-governing group exercising power-with (rather than power-over) and choosing to give authority to their common mentor. Continue reading →
Stress Relief for all Ages
I think many of us adults these days spend a fair amount of time playing computer and other video games as an escape and a stress reliever, yet a number of us complain about youth spending time playing their video and computer games instead of doing homework or “going outside to play”. I wonder if this disconnect exists because while freely acknowledging that our adult lives are very stressful, we aren’t willing to acknowledge that we have created a highly stressful environment for our kids at school, after school and with all those logistically complicated structured activities (sports, classes, etc.) on the weekends. Continue reading →
Dangerous Venues for Youth?
It seems that since I was a kid, American public spaces have become, or at least believed by many parents to have become, dangerous venues for our youth. When I was a youth in my Midwestern college town, I could hop on my bike after school or on the weekend and go where I wished – the playground, the library, the toy store, a friend’s house – and my parents were okay with that. Thirty years later my kids never went any of these places without me or their mom coming along, functioning as security and transportation-captain, and making the excursion more of a planned logistical event than it ever was when I was a kid. Continue reading →
On the Occasion of the Passing of Uncle Joe
I never myself called him that, with my shyer demeanor and being of a younger generation more likely to address him with the honorific “Uncle”. But with his family in town this weekend for his burial service last Friday in Culver City, “Yoseph”, aka “Uncle Joe”, got what seemed to me like a pretty good sendoff… full of remembrance, songs, tears and a fair amount of smiles and laughter too. Continue reading →
Thoughts on Universal Health Care
On the occasion of his 23rd birthday earlier this year, our son had yet another coming of age ritual in our culture, losing his family health care insurance. Our daughter will make that transition as well in three more years. As their parent, I can’t acknowledge those milestones without reflecting on our health care system and all the issues that swirl around it in terms of liberty and our social covenant.
First I think it is appropriate that I confess (or at least share) my own context, my own journey to where I am now in my thinking generally. I grew up pretty much inheriting the liberal values of my parents and the university town milieu I was raised in. Those values involve a strong commitment to liberty and freedom, but balanced with an equally strong stance that in the name of equality of opportunity for all, certain liberties and freedoms need to be restricted. The larger community (represented by our elected government) has the right to set and enforce certain policies to promote if not ensure equal access to health, education and welfare (interestingly enough, the old name of the federal agency that morphed into three current ones), even at times at the expense of personal liberty, in the name of a larger good. Continue reading →