Facing reality

My children frequently get in situations over their head without realizing it or, if they do realize, without knowing how to swim to shore (or sometimes even recognize where the shore is...but that's a different story.) Like journalists who report stories about how too much emphasis is given to polling in an election and only minutes later report on the latest poll, they seem caught without tools to evaluate our understand the contradictions in their lives.
When I was a child, I had a reality show. The entire world watched while I sang, danced, and went through the everyday drama of being 8 years old. When I was 9, the show was cancelled: I knew it was stupid.
I would hate to grow up in my children's future, where reality is much more slippery. But the truth is, I'm already there. My son's thinking that he is invincible and can drive a car to the limits of its control on a windy road is not so different from thinking that the election before us won't change our life one way or the other. When our debates become reality show contests, with winners and losers and all of us already knowing who we like best without giving the others a chance, we allow ourselves to be distracted from the real reality: that politics is about one thing only: power. The air we breathe, education we receive, jobs we are allowed to have (or not to have) and health care we access are not coins in a game of poker--they are real.
Reality.

Racing to the bottom

When Rick Santorum famously called Obama a snob for espousing the right to a college education, it reminded me back to when adolescents started wearing torn, homeless-people clothes and the bling and low-slung jeans of the ghetto. Although Santorum would cringe at the analogy, the message was the same: I reject your right to tell me what's good for me, even if it really is. It's a normal stage of adolescent development; in adults, it's embarrassing.

Over the years, children slowly learn the value of putting aside childish things, like calling names, bullying when they don't get their way, or not listening to people who have more reasoned ideas about things. Santorum's arrested development serves him well--he is rewarded with publicity, and has successfully worked people up who agree with him on a gut level and don't really want to think about it too much. There are a lot of people out there who firmly believe that education is elitist, who are sanctimonious about their firmly-held, uninformed, gut beliefs. I have met people like this--you cannot argue with them because they know what they know, but they don't know why because they haven't really thought about it.

I have seen enough political craziness in my lifetime to know that this man could, in fact, one day be our president. At least the kids will be happy.

Ode to Noam Chomsky

On a frigid January evening, a line of maybe a few thousand people stretched around the campus auditorium. Many had never heard of the aging professor who was there to speak, but they knew he was a big deal--the Washington Post headlined him in their "to do" pages as the voice of anti-capitalism, as someone whose ideas had definitely reached their time.

The crowd was diverse: college students who wanted to see what the buzz was about, aging hippies, people who had taken the Metro from the Occupy encampment, professors, suburbanites. More than half the crowd would be turned away, without seats or even standing room.

I like to think that many of them were like me--people who had spent way too many years feeling out of touch with a country they no longer recognized. People who had not only suffered through Bush, but also through Reagan, who had a vague feeling that things would never be right again, that even "hope and change" weren't enough. I like to think that there is a groundswell of people who want what they're not now getting--justice, fairness, sane policies toward our health and earth and each other.

In the end, I wasn't in line soon enough to hear Professor Chomsky's thoughts on "anti-capitalism." I hope I get another chance. What I took away from the hour I spent in line waiting, however, was just as thought provoking. And, maybe, even more hopeful.