FIRST DRAFT

Elspeth Reeve Wins the Internet

For writing this, about the horrible link-bait PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE READ US story in Time magazine about how All Kids Today are horrible: 

Millennials are the "ME ME ME GENERATION," writes Joel Stein for the cover of Time magazine, which is apparently a marked departure from the Baby Boomers, who were the plain old "Me Generation" (one me, no caps) and who created the "Me Decade" in the 1970s, and who coined the phrase, "But enough about me…what do you think about me?" in the 1980s when they were raising the next narcissists, Generation X. Sometimes you get the sense that these magazines' cultural writers have very little experience with the entire American culture, and prefer to make their grand analyses based on what people they know in the gentrified parts of cities like New York and Los Angeles were talking about at brunch last weekend. The type of young person that magazine writers come across most frequently are magazine interns. Because the media industry is high-status, but, at least early on, very low pay in a very expensive city, it attracts a lot of rich kids. Entitled, arrogant, spoiled, preening — those are the alleged signature traits of Millennials, as diagnosed by countless magazine writers. Those traits curiously align perfectly with the signature traits of a rich kid. Have you seen your intern on Rich Kids of Instagram? If so, he or she is probably not the best guide to crafting the composite personality of a generation that fought three wars for you. 

Maybe this is me remembering how enraging it was to have everything I said discounted because I was young (and a girl, but it was my age old men cited more often in not listening to me), and to be told constantly how much more I would understand when I got older. By which they usually meant I'd become more conservative (no), more interested in talking about things like how Kids Today suck (nay) and more inclined to "settle down" in some giant house somewhere in the country (we will never be able to sell this condo).

It made me want to hit things. It certainly didn't make me want to listen to anything else THEY had to say. This generational-warefare stuff is damaging, to all of us, because it cuts us off from one another, makes us unwilling to learn, and it lets older folks off the hook from having to continue to be great. It tells kids that they're only as good as we say they are, instead of as good as they can be by the standards they invent, which are the only standards that will exist for them. It lets us make the conversation about what the younger generation is doing for us, and compared to us, rather than talk about what we're doing now right now right fucking now today. 

As if we don't have any work to do anymore, and can just hand the whole world off and then bitch about how the next generation is caring for it. 

A. 

Stop Having Asses, Girls, They are Distracting

Ugh, this again: 

You'll have to pardon me for thinking here (after all, I'm just a girl, what do I know?), but wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to sit the boys down for a talk and tell them to cool it? Not only would it save the parents of every girl in the district from having to revamp their kids' wardrobes, but it would prepare the boys for what will happen when they walk out into a dress code-free world where women walk around flaunting bare ankles and even, gulp, showing their knees!

I don't have a son; I have a daughter. In my house, she's being taught to wear clothing that makes her feel comfortable and is "classy," but that's as far as we will go. We aren't going to teach her that she needs to change herself to keep boys in line because, frankly, that's not her job.

Granted, I think skinny jeans are hell inventions, but that's just because I'm OLD AS FUCK, and cannot wear them. Are we done with this trend yet? I mean, can we please? This trend, and the 5-inch platforms, and the way every fucking dress lacks sleeves? IT'S COLD OUT EIGHT MONTHS OF THE YEAR I NEED SLEEVES.

(I'm not saying girls should cover up, I'm saying I want to cover up, and find it difficult because we are in a short, tight, slutty place in fashion right now and when you're poking 40 with as short a stick as I am it's either boobs OR legs, not both.)

But it is not in any way my job to wear anything so as to make men behave a certain way. Men are going to behave the way they're going to behave. My wearing a burkha isn't going to make somebody who's about to be a creep stop creeping. Instead of putting your daughters in convents maybe teach your sons that girls are people. 

A. 

Hey Look, It's Entitled High School Me!

Seriously, I think I wrote something this snippy and spoiled in high school, but it's still in my diary (I TOLD YOU TO BURN THAT, MOM) and not in the pages of the Wall Street Journal: 

Like me, millions of high-school seniors with sour grapes are asking themselves this week how they failed to get into the colleges of their dreams. It's simple: For years, they—we—were lied to.

Colleges tell you, "Just be yourself." That is great advice, as long as yourself has nine extracurriculars, six leadership positions, three varsity sports, killer SAT scores and two moms. Then by all means, be yourself! If you work at a local pizza shop and are the slowest person on the cross-country team, consider taking your business elsewhere.

What could I have done differently over the past years?

For starters, had I known two years ago what I know now, I would have gladly worn a headdress to school. Show me to any closet, and I would've happily come out of it. "Diversity!" I offer about as much diversity as a saltine cracker. If it were up to me, I would've been any of the diversities: Navajo, Pacific Islander, anything.

Yeah, this is how I used to think, because nobody but nobody is put-upon like a girl born white to middle-class parents in America, for serious. How dare I not be able to get into Harvard? How dare I not get everything I want? It's almost JUST like being gay or Asian! CRAZINESS. 

Here's some shit I learned in the intervening 20 years: 

1. Your ethnic background isn't a goddamn costume. You can't put it on to look good for the admissions committee and assume you'd be able to take it off at all other times. Like when you get used as a zoo exhibit in class, sent to a shitty school to begin with, held back unfairly, called names all day long, and presumed to be either an idiot or a credit to your idiot race. 

2. The assumption that all admissions committees are slavering for high-achieving minority candidates is a tough one to make stick anyway. You'd be far better off being born to a congressman than to a Native American, as far as who's guaranteed a slot in the school of your choice. 

3. Another assumption: That everybody starts from the same place, and you all end up at the admissions process having worked equally hard with equal advantages, at which point the minority candidates get some kind of massive unearned leap forward. Not in any way true. 

4. Yet another assumption: That you, the lovely hard-working white lady, do not benefit in any way from living and learning amidst diversity. For example, it might teach you something about what the education system is actually like for those who aren't you. 

5. There is nothing incompatible about working at a pizza shop and having a shitload of extracurriculars. I knew a kid in college who pulled a 4.0 with two jobs and a minor in RUSSIAN. As long as we're assuming the plural of anecdote is data ... 

6. I know of no college that tells you to be yourself. If you want to underachieve and free-spirit about, there are plenty of places and ways to do that. They're not in the Ivy League, FYI.

7. This entire thing is just an extended lament that this person is not more fascinating. Which is not anybody's fault but hers. 

To those claiming that I am bitter—you bet I am! An underachieving selfish teenager making excuses for her own failures? That too! To those of you disgusted by this, shocked that I take for granted the wonderful gifts I have been afforded, I say shhhh—"The Real Housewives" is on.

Adorable. 

The overall problem here is not that she wrote this, by the way. Resentful children of the privileged are a dime a dozen. It's a mystery to me why the Wall Street Journal published it. I've seen it described around the Internet as "satire" or "tongue in cheek," which ... not original, and not funny, and with just enough meanness in it to sour the joke. Why, WSJ, would you not choose to run something from one of the high-achieving minority students this young woman disparages? Why reinforce every stereotype of Kids Today that exists? 

Oh, right. WSJ. Official newspaper of the status quo. 

You know, on behalf of all the college kids I know who work like crazy and don't front off in the papers about how the world owes them stuff, for serious, get out of their generation. You're making it look bad. 

A. 

More on Patience

Because you are all brilliant and are keeping the comment thread going on John Kass's column*, there's something I want to ask, in all sincerity: 

Is there an age after which you no longer have to grow and change and work and learn? 

Because like 90 percent of the frustrating conversations I have with my fellow rapidly-approaching-middle-age humans revolve around how they've never learned a skill or changed an opinion and they think it's cute not to have done so. 

I'm not saying you have to WANT to text, or code, or spend all day playing Candy Crush on Facebook (fuck you, Doc, for sucking me into that game) or do deep thinking about politics or whatever, but the thing that drives me absolutely up a goddamn wall all the time is this idea that not growing, not learning, not changing, is in and of itself a virtue that age allows you to claim. 

I used to tell the newspaper kids I worked with that I was too old to text, just call me, my fingers don't work like that. Well, that was not, shall we say, a sustainable viewpoint if I wanted to communicate with the world in 2013. So now I text. Badly, but I do it. 

And maybe I just know too many people who are in their 7th and 8th and 9th decades, who have never seen discrimination as a permissible thing, who have always embraced new ways of doing things, who when faced with something they don't know about have dived into it, who have not wished for the world to wait for them but have hurried to keep up with the world. Maybe that's skewing my view here. Maybe we all get tired. Maybe I will too. But I hope not. 

I'm asking. 

A. 

*I'm predicting, right now, that the next column is nothing but quotes from people calling him a horrible bigot, and just proving his point. Would love to be wrong. 

I Have An Active Heterosexual Lifestyle, Right?

For God's sake, if you mean "fucking," just say "fucking:" 

University of Portland is a Catholic institution that allowed students to form an official Gay-Straight Partnership in 2008, but not everyone was happy with the decision. As conservative site LifeNews wrote at the time:

Although the Gay Straight Partnership has made pains to state that it will be adhering to Catholic teaching on sexuality, experience has shown pro-family advocates that such alliances typically result in the push to normalize and to affirm as morally acceptable an active homosexual lifestyle amongst university students.

That’s exactly what the students campaigning today want: A campus where all students feel safe and supported, regardless of their sexuality. 

Which, naturally, is interpreted as "everyone must have gay sex all the time." An "active homosexual lifestyle?" I guess that means anything other than pretending to be aggro-straight while secretly spanking it to nude photos of Lorne Greene? I don't know what it means.  

Being actively heterosexual seems to mean arguing with Mr. A about whose turn it is to clean the litterbox and do the laundry. Is that what Catholic universities are so scared of? Homosexuals taking turns cooking dinner for each other?  

This idiocy comes amid a great story about how the kids are all right, even if the administrators at Catholic universities have their heads firmly up their asses: 

University of Portland President Bill Beauchamp told the student newspaper that the school had already made a gesture toward LGBT students and faculty by adopting a “statement of inclusion” in 2011 which committed the school to not discriminate based on sexual orientation. But, he said, if the school adds sexual orientation to its official non-discrimination policy, it could mean the university condones sexual practices not accepted by the Catholic Church.

Yes. You are either in favor of discrimination, or boy-on-boy rimjobs on the altar during Easter Mass. There is NO MIDDLE GROUND. If you de-legalize harrassment and bullying, make it grounds for firing someone, it will be nothing but same-sex handies from here to the football field. Because gay kids were waiting for this before they got it on. God, I hope not. Life is short, kids. Be safe, but Jesus, life is short. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow. 

What Catholic universities are really afraid of is putting anything in writing that could allow the Holy See to bring the hammer down on their asses for being insufficiently theologically obtuse. Which, if they'd just say that, instead of this mealy-mouthed nonsense about approving of something called an active lifestyle, I think we could all get on the same page and direct our attention where it needs to be, on the collection of fusty old fossils in Rome who want a leave-it-to-Beaver trip back to the 1550s while Kids Today would just as soon get on with their lives. 

I'm sorry, their "lifestyles." 

A. 

Have These People Ever Met a Teenager?

My teen years are fully two decades behind me, and I can tell you with absolute certainty what nonsense like this would have made me want to do. Here's a hint: It wouldn't be shutting up: 

The students, some wearing duct tape over their mouths and carrying signs, were protesting an announcement at the beginning of the day, in which Strongsville High School Principal William Steffen asked the children to refrain from posting on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Steffen said he's been trying to tell students since yesterday- when several videos, Tweets and Facebook posts depicted disorganization and unruliness at the start of school March 4 -  that, when they post things online, they're there forever and that has the potential to be seen by the entire nation.

"I've told them that some of the rumors that they're putting out there are putting our students and our school in a bad light," he said. "We had a student tell the students on announcements to keep it classy."

If you want the young'uns to refrain from doing something, the best way to get them to do that is to shout orders at them from a great height, right guys? Franklin Delano Roosevelt Christ. And what a passive-aggressive bullshit way to go about it, too, all "we're not telling you not to say anything, just to be VERY CAREFUL about what you say." 

Not for nothing, but I would suggest to Mr. Steffen that what is "putting the school in a bad light" is having a teacher strike in the first place, not students talking about it. The description of a thing is not the thing itself, and outrage over what's being said should never exceed outrage over what's been done. 

Via dan_ps. 

A. 

What's the Best Way to Prevent Domestic Violence, Republicans?

Have schools teach girls to shoot their attackers: 

Meanwhile, a bill under consideration in Maine — which has drawn support from Gov. Paul LePage (R) — would add an optional gun safety course, potentially paid for by the NRA’s “Eddie Eagle Gunsafe Program.” The Maine bill sponsor Rep. Paul Davis (R) claimed this course would manage to prevent domestic violence, by giving would-be victims firearms training. “In these situations, these victims [of domestic violence-related slayings] did everything the law provided,” Davis said. “I have to wonder if they knew anything about guns. I don’t think they did. However, if they did and they wanted to protect themselves, what would have happened?”

While I am all about powerful girls, and not anti-gun in the abstract, and think if you're teaching boys to shoot you should teach the girls as well, this is a big unsorted basket of socks that all have OH FUCK NO embroidered upon them. 

First, it's lousy time management. If you have a limited number of days on this planet, and the school day is even more limited, a much more expedient way to teach domestic violence prevention is to TEACH BOYS NOT TO HIT WOMEN. If all the focus is on how girls can defend themselves from male predators, all you're teaching the boys is that girls are prey. 

Teaching boys not to treat women like dogs, that grown-ups don't behave like that and that rape and other types of assault are not hilarious or excusable no matter who the perpetrator is would go a lot longer towards making victims safer than would a firearm, because if you want to ensure nobody gets attacked, the only way to do that 100 percent is to make sure there are no attackers. 

Second, making children paranoid about danger all around them is a pretty easy way to ensure they'll actually go off half-cocked, and while we do an admirable job of scaring the shit out of the young'uns already, adding firearms to the mix helps not in the slightest. 

A. 

The Last Adults on Earth

You kids, with your Twitterings: 

Perhaps Twitter will evolve into a form of news communication...

It has.

...especially in the developing world, where independent media outlets are rare.

Holy fuck, are you kidding me? You know, maybe one day, this whole social media thing might have an impact in the third world. Maybe in the ARAB world. In the SPRING. TMQ feels comfortable saying that verily, this may pass. See if you can beat that, Nate Silver!

Twitter and similar services seek to recapture the sensation of childhood. When you are little, your parents wanted to know everything happening to you, everyone you spend time with, everything that was said. Once you are an adult, nobody cares about daily details like where you are and what you are talking about. Twitter creates the illusion that not only does someone else care — thousands of people care! Twitter is all about the person sending the tweet, not those who receive it.

TMQ says: Why not tweet a charitable donation instead? Instead all of you are infantilized assholes who NEVER use Twitter for noble purposes. You are sickening. You are ALL children.

I think people Instagramming their food is weird. I don't get it, like, unless it's a thing that's on fire like Baked Alaska or something, or a birthday cake, like why am I looking at your burrito unless it's to feel bereaved because I have no burrito? I don't get the food pics. When I've made something terribly complicated and I'm proud of it, I'll take a picture then, but I know people who are like, I made a peanut butter sammich and here's a photo! Just eat your damn meal. Preferably nowhere near my DAMN LAWN.

You know what, though? The Internet comes with ALL KINDS of options and ways for me to NOT look at Instagrammed food. And Instagram comes with all kinds of ways to not use its service for those purposes. For example, you can help the NYT document a massive snowstorm. Or otherwise use it to get your message out. 

I hate this thing old people do -- and fellow old people, for serious, knock it off -- where we take the stupidest possible use a tool and use that use to declare the tool itself stupid. This is about as savvy as declaring hammers invalid because some people use them to hang pictures of velvet Elvises. It's just a way to stroke ourselves, and while I'm not opposed to that in itself, to quote Easterbrook, nobody else really needs to know all about it. 

A. 

 

Fuck Yeah, Girls in Yemen!

Turning the lights on. 

SANAA — For Wafa Al-Rimi, Yemen's revolution brought dark days. Though power outages are frequent in the country, Al-Rimi says during the past year's unrest, some days saw less than an hour of electricity.

Attempting to study for exams in those conditions got the 16-year-old and some of her classmates thinking: How could they keep the lights on?

"We were tired of darkness," Al-Rimi says. So, they turned to the sun.

Damn right. 

A. 

How Did You Learn to be a Homo in Your Day?

Apparently they teach Kids Today in school now! 

“So, here you are, you’re an animal and you’re a god! So, what are we going to teach you about in school? Well, we can teach you about sex, we can teach you how to rebel to you[sic] parents, we can teach you how to be a homo! But we’re definitely not going to teach you about the word of God! Amen.”

I'm furious. Not on my own behalf, although it might have been nice to get some lessons in before encountering actual gays in the wild. Mostly I'm furious on behalf of my friends who had to do ALL THIS EXTRA WORK teaching me how to be a homo. 

I mean they had to teach me EVERYTHING. Paying bills on time, applying for jobs, catching the bus, gathering in liquor-serving establishments with friends, going on dates, playing instruments ... it took FOREVER. Some of them took me to movies and bought popcorn to demonstrate how it was done. Hell, a couple of them even had to get married and raise a damn kid together around me. They had a Fourth of July barbecue and all. They bought a house. 

What a tremendous amount of effort. Kids today are freaking spoiled. They don't know how good they have it. 

A. 

It's Always Time to Talk About Shit That Doesn't Matter

I keep going back to this, from the brilliant Cleolinda: 

(Here's my thought on that in a nutshell: Violent movies and videogames do not make people violent. Violent people are attracted to violent media. Of course, so are many of the rest of us, just for different reasons. I ended up watching The Matrix about 46,000 times--at one point on a three-day loop--for the book, and I shot nobody. If you want to talk about warning signs, don't look at the kid's taste in movies or his literary output--look at those two things in the context of his real-life behavior, which was already disturbing his teachers and classmates. Stephen King? A folksy, personable guy in real life. Quentin Tarantino? Full of energy and enthusiasm. Consequently, no one expects them to go on shooting rampages. The bitter, stalkative kid who won't even speak when spoken to, who also writes about bloody murder sprees? For God's sake, keep an eye on him.) 

I would never say we don't need to have a less nihilistic, brutal, violent culture. But we can start working on that by refraining from blowing up so many fucking kids in the world and starving them of food and care here at home. Once we are done with that I will listen to you about shooting hookers in GTA or whatever the hell we think is the problem right now. Once we are done making sure everyone can EAT, we can get on to what disaffected suburban brats are reading these days. 

Once we're done with this: 

The police came quickly and carried my son screaming and kicking into the bowels of the hospital. I started to shake, and tears filled my eyes as I filled out the paperwork—“Were there any difficulties with....at what age did your child....were there any problems with...has your child ever experienced...does your child have....”  

At least we have health insurance now. I recently accepted a position with a local college, giving up my freelance career because when you have a kid like this, you need benefits. You’ll do anything for benefits. No individual insurance plan will cover this kind of thing.

No individual insurance plan, and until the laughably toothless health care reform passed last year which has been called a staggering overreach of government power, few insurance plans AT ALL. The kinds of intensive therapies children need, even with Cadillac insurance, can bankrupt middle class families. Can bankrupt relatively wealthy families. Can, even if there is money to pay for them and doctors to provide them, can quite simply drag a family under with the grinding, every day process of staying level enough with the horizon to buy groceries and go to school. 

It is one of the grand ironies of what little mental health assistance exists that when you need it most, that is when you are usually so far beyond the beyond that accessing it seems like going to the moon. 

But getting back to Cleolinda's wise words up there, what we're not doing very well right now is creating a nonviolent world for any of us. (I almost wrote "our kids," as if adults have no need of peace and decency.) That violence is not, primarily, on screens or in "the media" or anywhere imaginary, but imaginary violence is all we can seem to bring ourselves to talk about when things like this happen. 

It's all we can bring ourselves to try to address, because real violence, real agents of violence, are political, and controversial, and emotional and upsetting and they're going to make dinner conversation awkward and difficult. Everybody agrees that shooting fictional aliens is probably not the most productive use of anyone's time. Almost nobody agrees on the correct number of children that have to be killed in drone strikes so as to properly elevate our national dick, or how much money we spend turning schools into prisons instead of the other way fucking round. 

It's like there's a list somewhere, of Things We Can Address, and it's all stuff like why so many kids have ADHD, and how parents aren't hugging their children enough, and where precisely in the schoolyard we should stick the plaque proclaiming GOD IS LOVE because that'll fix everything. It's how many teachers need to be armed, and how many cops need to be at every entrance, and the opinion that perhaps we need fewer cops in schools and OH SHIT RIGHT FEWER HOLES IN THE SCHOOLS' ROOFS WHILE WE'RE AT IT never quite makes it through the World of Warcraft soundtrack blaring on every goddamned Sunday show.

(See, already there you go, asking why I have to put it just that way. Can't I use nicer language?)

We have limited ourselves to addressing matters that don't need addressing, so as to drown out the screaming of the things that do. 

A. 

That Was the Year I Knew the Panic Was Over

I keep reading things like this and thinking well, the problem is offices in another goddamn state making decisions about what the local papers need and should be doing: 

In Cleveland, as elsewhere, there is a movement to replace some of the basic accountability function of the newspaper with a nonprofit investigative venture. But the venture in Cleveland is just getting organized and only a few of its counterparts in other cities have so far showed the ability to scale up to the size necessary to have a real impact. "Obviously we can’t fill the gap of a daily newspaper," said Lori Ashyk, one of the Cleveland organizers. Cleveland also has an alt-weekly, and an outfit called MedCityNews covers the city's burgeoning health sector. But it doesn't yet have the kind of alternative online sources for daily schools or crime coverage that have been springing up in some larger cities, such as Philadelphia and Washington.

As I see it, part of the solution is going to have to come from outside these cities—from the national media capitals. Even as coverage has been withering in the provinces, it's been expanding in the Acela Corridor, where the likes of Bloomberg, Reuters, Politico and the National Journal/Atlantic empire are vying to provide the most granular coverage of the Beltway and Wall Street. This coverage is surely nearing the saturation point, especially given how much of the real business and political action is happening out in Real America. Which means that the big Beltway players may start to realize that their competitive advantage will lie in doing a better job of covering Cleveland and Columbus and Lansing and Austin and Tallahassee and Chicago. Heck, they might even hire some of those laid off local reporters who know the lay of the land, and where the bodies are buried, and whether a governor's claims about anti-union legislation hold up to scrutiny.

What will take its place? What ever has? Why do we think a hundred years is forever? Why do we think that just because for years there was one paper and that one paper shouldered all the responsibility that if that one paper disappears all is lost? I'm not saying what's happening here isn't devastating. It's also not the end, because here's the thing about people: They will get the word out any way they have to, while we sit around debating how they do it and OMG WHAT IT ALL MEANS. 

I personally think the answer is a combination of nonprofit shops, independently owned papers, digital services, and maybe an expansion of TV coverage. But all of those things require investment, and they require investment from the (relatively) wealthy media stars who like to bitch all day long that nobody values the news anymore. I like Connie Schultz's husband a whole lot, and she's written some fine and funny things herself, but this comment from her makes me rage-y: 

...The union kid in me has felt for some time that we had to learn how to become activists for journalism. We were so used to reporting the hell out of a story and then assuming everyone would value our hard work, our judgment, our take on things. Some of that was arrogance born of habit, to be sure, but there was a humility in that, too. Fewer hotshots, more team players, producing the kind of journalism that comes about when you don't spend every day trying to prove that you're the smartest person in every room. But we should have started promoting the brand years ago. Journalists — certainly Guild members at The Plain Dealer — were discouraged from doing so, but, honestly, we too often turned a withering eye to those who got special attention for their talents. Old story, that one. Newsrooms are tough places. 

Well, if only you had been in a position to do something about it instead of lamenting it now. Maybe you were a little too busy complaining about college graduates with degrees and online comments and how nobody was really really real anymore like in the old days.

A. 

Black Friday

I think I said this last year, but I find the bitching about Black Friday to be almost as tiresome as Black Friday itself. Go shopping if you want to go shopping, but honestly, the carping about how awful it all is just smacks of classism to me. Herf derf, lookit the stoopid poor people trying to get a cheap TV, how dare they?

Um, well, stores are handing out hot chocolate to people in line and advertising "door buster" sales, and allowing people to camp on their property weeks in advance, so you'll pardon me if I reserve my contempt for the people selling the shit and creating the dangerous situation in the first place. 

And the coverage never fails to make me stabby. Here we are, Bob, standing outside a Wal-Mart to interview crazed shoppers, just hoping somebody gets trampled to death for the tail end of November sweeps. It just encourages bad behavior that we can then all soberly deplore in editorials a day later. How's about you stop covering it like it's fucking D-Day? And by the by if I read one more asshole comment about how Kids Today just don't stand in line for anything that matters, I will take hostages. 

Kids Today, and people today, are in fact better than we think they are: 

What is at times overlooked is that Occupy Wall Street was always about mutual aid. The most shared images were of protests and pepper sprays, but the scene in Zuccotti was a common kitchen, a free library, shared living space, a medical tent and endless conversations in which people listened to and learned from each other as they modeled a mutually invested society as an alternative to the culture of Big Corporations…and Big Government. Had OWS found a way to make mutual aid its loudest message, it may have found even more followers from the start.

A. 

All Christians Should Have The Right to Bully You

I will never understand why the greatest defenders of American Christianity seem to need to think that all Christians secretly want to behave like total assholes: 

“Anti-bullying legislation is exactly the same,” Mr. Fischer said. “It’s just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda. No one is in favor of anyone getting bullied for any reason, but these anti-bullying policies become a mechanism for punishing Christian students who believe that homosexual behavior is not something that should be normalized.”

Fischer is complaining about schools encouraging students to "Mix It Up" by sitting with different kids during lunch periods. I remember my first same-sex french-fry encounter, and it changed me forever. He's absolutely right to guard against such temptations among our impressionable youth. 

Seriously, though, what is wrong with these people that they think all Christians really want the biggest opportunity to be bullies and dicks? Fischer is fighting for your right to tell people they're living their lives in contravention to God's will and are probably going to burn in hell for it? Is that what he thinks most Christians should walk around saying to one another? Is that the highest expression of Christianity to which he can imagine aspiring, such that it must be protected so fiercely in math class and now in the lunch room? 

It's not exactly a compliment to his fellow Christians, that this is what he thinks they want.

A. 

Living in the Crash Position

I wrote this, about Laura Roslin and Galactica: 

What's the hardest thing to do after a loss? Trust, again. Hear the phone ring and know it's not a crisis siren, hear the love in someone's voice and know he's not going to die. Fracking getting up in the morning, with all it entails; you'd like to stay mired in your fear and your anger and your very special alone-ness for all of time, but contact is inevitable, leading to information bleed. We have to start over. We have to keep moving. We have to meet each other and change and push and love each other. We don't know any other way to do this. We don't have any other choices. And so she steps forward, into his arms.

And Doc wrote this, about bullying and being bullied: 

He probably found solace in being good at something and eventually realizing that being able to throw a ball for a high school team wasn’t the end all and be all of life. He left high school, left college and began to find himself in a world where different was embraced. He was chosen for a show that celebrates that in its own way and allowed him to create his own power.

The first chance he got to take his skill and his power and give some hope to someone else, he turned into a bully.

I went to my 10th high school reunion a few years ago. I wasn't the most picked-on kid in school, but I certainly wasn't the least, either. I was awkward and over-eager and didn't quite understand how social cues (or fashion) worked for a long time. I always said the wrong thing, too loudly. I always hung around too long. And I had frizzy hair and buck teeth that could open a soda bottle, and kids are assholes, really. 

And even after I had friends, and was making professional progress, and had a life, I still felt a little bit like an underdog all the time, and pushed too hard all the time, and was afraid of failure all the time, and figured it was just a matter of time until the people who liked me realized I was a loser and dumped me for somebody cooler or more fun. These aren't THE WORST PROBLEMS EVAR, like I was born white in America so let's all calm down, but they were things I noticed I was doing as a result of what had happened to me. 

So I went to my 10th reunion intending to be all IMMA SHOW YOU PEOPLE, with my kickass husband and my stories about how I was doing exactly what I said I was gonna do when I lit out of town like my ass was on fire. And I looked around the room, and realized that everybody in that room had been trying to do the best they ever could, and some of us really screwed it up. Some of us had been bullies and some of us had been bullied and some of us had been weak and looked the other way, and absolutely nobody gave a shit about any of our excuses or reasons but us. 

The most pernicious thing about bullying is that the minute you think about it, you're alone with it, with something that happened to you that didn't have to happen, and you have to take that in. As long as you're passing it on, it's just how kids are and it's necessary for their emotional growth and blah blah blah all the shit we throw out there to perpetuate the cycle. 

You have to stop and let it hit you: something happened to you that you couldn't control, that wasn't right, that wasn't your fault. And that you have to be okay with now, in order to get up out of the crash position, and know that when someone offers a hand to you they're not going to turn around and slap you with it a second later. That's the hardest thing in the world to do, because it's the easiest, because it's up to you. 

A. 

The Kids Are Alright

Go you, Daily Princetonian. 

We are firmly against “quote approval” and do not practice such a policy. When I refer to “quote review,” that is a non-binding courtesy we provide to sources in limited circumstances. If they provided factual information that they later found to be wrong (eg “I said five but I meant six”), that is the only instance in which we would consider replacing a quote. If there’s a question of whether the quote was transcribed accurately, that would be addressed then as well. This happens entirely at the discretion of the editors.

To be clear, if a source said it, a source said it. We don’t do revisionist interviewing.

Showing the supposed pros how it's done.

 A. 

Don't Hire Young People Because They're Young!

And stuff: 

2.  They may be focused on their own social media activity. Because of the above, if you hire a young person to manage your social media, you may also need to need to worry about how they’re actually spending their time. Will you need to be monitoring them?

There really is nothing old people like better than complaining about young people. It is like the Olympics for us. 

The entire story is about how hiring stupid people to do stupid shit because you think they're hip based on their ages is wrong. And, yeah. But the problem isn't the people you're hiring. The problem is you, and your inability to hire talented people to kick ass at your company. Though I suppose there isn't much of a market for a story that says, "Don't hire a total moron to do PR, the end" or a column about how being a shallow judgmental fuckwit leads you to make bad personnel decisions.

(Not to mention a lazy-ass manager. Yes, you'll need to supervise them. The way you should be supervising everybody you, you know, supervise.)

Coming from Time magazine, which just suspended a middle-aged plagiarist, this is particularly rich. Maybe the next column should be "don't make your hiring decisions while enjoying a close-up view of your own colon." 

The comments are deliciously full of "fuck you, old man," too.

A. 

Meritocracy Has Made Us Suck

Take it away, David Brooks: 

Over the past half–century, a more diverse and meritocratic elite has replaced the Protestant Establishment. People are more likely to rise on the basis of grades, test scores, effort and performance.

Yet, as this meritocratic elite has taken over institutions, trust in them has plummeted. It’s not even clear that the brainy elite is doing a better job of running them than the old boys’ network. 

Bring back the glory days of keeping the Jews out of the country club! 

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

You see, things were just better when you inherited your privilege instead of working for it. When you work for it, you tend to be less confident in it, and less willing to piss all over the servants just to show that you can. You do desperate things like implode the economy and take steroids in order to play baseball. Because baseball up until now has been a hereditary business? The tits? 

Baseball players get to the major leagues through merit, but then some take enhancement drugs to preserve their status. Financiers work hard to get jobs at the big banks, but then some rig the game for their own mutual benefit.

Lord knows there were no corrupt financiers until recently. In fact the real change that's happened is we didn't once upon a time let those guys run entirely everything on the basis of I'M THE JOB CREATING JUGGERNAUT BITCH and call anyone asking for regulation of the banking industry a screaming Commie. But hey, if we make it all about the characters of the people involved, then we can opine ponderously about the need for Better Humans and not for a system that isn't rigged to fail. 

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

KIDS TODAY IT IS ALL YOUR FAULT. Or it absolutely is not, if you're living in reality.

The difference between the Hayes view and mine is a bit like the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. He wants to upend the social order. I want to keep the current social order, but I want to give it a different ethos and institutions that are more consistent with its existing ideals.

I want to keep white men on top, but I want them to talk sweetly when they're boning the economy, instead of cat-o-nine-tail-ing it while calling its mother a whore. If only our elites were nicer, you guys, it wouldn't be so gross when they did what they did. 

A. 

Not Trying Hard Enough

I'll say: 

Mr Cameron said the existing benefits system was "sending out strange signals on working, housing and families".

He went on: "A couple will say, 'We are engaged, we are both living with our parents, we are trying to save before we get married and have children and be good parents.

"'But how does it make us feel, Mr Cameron, when we see someone who goes ahead, has the child, gets the council home, gets the help that isn't available to us?'

"One is trapped in a welfare system that discourages them from working, the other is doing the right thing and getting no help."

But your fictional couple is getting help. They're getting help from their parents, which makes them lazy and entitled, last I checked in with the world's foremost authorities on self-determination, right-wing politicians of the world. "My dad could afford to give me a start in life, therefore I am completely independent and deserve sole credit for all of my achievements" is a construction I will never understand. 

Then again I suppose we should all have the grace to be born white in a Western country, because I totally remember that choice in the womb and boy am I awesome for having made it. 

A. 

ps. I'm just about done with the state telling people how many children they can have. Either put birth control in the water supply and make people have to apply for a breeding license, or shut the fuck up, because shaming people for having children is like the least effective way to do this. 

Mindless Blare

I worked in a bookstore in college, best job ever, and my boss used to deep-six rude customers who acted like dicks. One got thrown out collar-and-belt. His reasoning was that they weren't there to spend money anyway, they just wanted to throw their weight around in front of powerless people, and we didn't need them as much as we needed our dignity. I loved that boss and would have taken a bullet for him and every other employee felt the same way, and our customers were loyal because of it. 

Mitch Albom would have been kicked to the curb in five minutes. It's just so hard to find good servants these days: 

Is it just me? Or does no one in the service business listen the first time you speak? It seems that any transaction now requires at least one repeat. Sometimes two. Sometimes the person actually walks away, then comes back and says, "Did you say rye toast or sourdough?"

And you say, "Wheat."

"Right. Wheat."

It is not occasional. It is not coincidental. And I know it's not volume, because I have been accused of having a voice that can be heard across a football field. But I still get asked, "Medium or large?"

Twice.

OH MY GOD THE INDIGNITY. 

I personally have never had a problem with coffee/beverage folks not being quick on the uptake. They're caffeinated, after all. And having worked in a restaurant kitchen I feel sympathy for every fuckup but uncooked chicken and that's the only time I'll register any kind of complaint. In my entire life, I have had so many terrible service experiences I can count them on all of one hand (almost all of them at the doctor's office). I suppose I should, therefore, write a column about how wonderful the new service economy is and how polite and well-mannered Kids Today have become when they are serving my needs. 

Gimme a three-book deal and a syndication contract, motherfuckers. 

Oh, wait, there's far more money in being a bitchy old fuck who's angry that the world moves fast right now, who thinks it's just the worst thing on earth that everybody doesn't worship him, and who confuses personal experience with polling data. I swear, has anybody ever so cynically aimed for the miserable middle as Mitch Albom? Has anybody ever so shamelessly capitalized on the people who think that the problem is that the entire world is terrible, rather than that they are assholes? 

I blame TV. I blame video games. I blame the mindless blare that our kids have been weaned on, noise, explosions, blasting music, 100 images a minute. No wonder we can't stay focused long enough to remember soup or salad.

I blame newspapers for giving this column ink and importance, for continuing to pay this fuckmook while reporters get laid off, and for prizing a "brand name" over what he actually says with the space given to him. I blame him for reinforcing the message that we're all subject to "the society" our kids "have been weaned on," as if people don't have choices as to being a jerk or not. And as if that has fuck-all to do with a hardware clerk having a bad day, anyway. 

Stupidity via Deadspin. 

A. 

Being Admired

Adrastos sends me this, to raise my blood pressure today: Ladies, you must cover up, so that boys are not assaulted by the sight of your bodies: 

Tiffant Phan, a junior, says that Assistant Principal Randi Damesek stopped her for what she felt was an entirely appropriate outfit.

“Ms. Damesek took one look at me, sighed, and asked me what I was thinking when I went out of the house that morning. All I wore was a long-sleeved button-down, which was secured by a navy skirt and accompanied by floral cutout tights; I didn’t intend for it to be inappropriate in the slightest. At the moment, I was confused because I specifically made sure that the skirt covering my patterned tights was past my fingertips. She told me that the whole outfit was bad and that I looked like I was ‘going out for a Saturday night, not going to school.’ I think we all know what she was implying.”

First of all, whenever some older person is going on and on about how gross children are with THEY TITTAYS hanging out all the time these days, I have one of these thoughts:

1. It sucks no longer being 20. I look at girls wearing things now that I would never have had the guts to wear when I was their age and thin, and think, damn. I'm 36 years old, and right now it is down to showing off boobs OR legs, not both, and we are in a weird place with fashion right now that makes that almost impossible. I had a fancy party to go to last month and had to have something made because everything was so horrible. I am wearing like three ratty t-shirts from Lands End this summer, and waiting for things to get better for adults.

It sucks looking at stuff in stores remembering how I wasted the years when I could wear a strapless dress and not feel like I was in some sense kidding. However, that bummed-out feeling does not give me leave to life all the young ladies out there who DO wish to take advantage of the current fashion trends available to them, and wish that they would cover up so that I could feel more secure about the state of my upper arms.  

2. Could anything be creepier than some old person telling you how hypothetically, JUST TOTALLY SAYING FOR EXAMPLE, this is how some other old person might look at you if you wear what you're wearing? I can't think of anything that would make me feel more threatened than being called into the principal's office and forced to listen to some thoughts that JUST MIGHT MAYBE be going through someone's mind when they looked at me. Is there a person on EARTH who doesn't realize how that sounds? 

3. Way to teach girls that being admired is terrible. I'm not saying every male gaze is admiring, or that girls should be flattered by being creeped on by creepy creepers, but by saying "you shouldn't make boys look at you" you are also saying that when any boy looks at you, even if you like him and he likes you, it is dirty and wrong.

Being admired for your beauty or even lusted after is actually a nice thing, when the luster/admirer is someone you feel the same way about, but we go out of our way to make women paranoid about it such that accepting desired affection becomes this horrendous minefield of "am I a slut because my boyfriend of six years likes my tits in this halter top?" 

4. NOBODY IS MAKING BOYS LOOK AT THEM. Boys are looking because boys are taught that leering is hilarious and women are not fellow people but aliens from another fucking planet whose customs are strange to us all. Girls are not distractions by existing, any more than boys at practice are distracting the young impressionable females. SHOCKER, yes, high school girls have sexual urges as well, but somehow we never get into a national shit-fit over making baseball uniforms into burqas so that young misses won't sit there and sigh over asses and shoulder muscles. 

5. The kids be fuckin', even if you put them all in Little House on the Prairie costumes. The species has continued through all manner of horrible fashion, short-tight and otherwise. I make burqa cracks, but women wear those and yet people still procreate. People will screw each other no matter what you make them wear. Also, people who are predators will attack no matter what you wear or how you carry yourself. These things cannot be mitigated by turning school into a reverse fashion show with prizes for the least sexy thing worn by a student that day. 

6. OH MY GOD, just shut up. Isn't it hard enough getting kids to learn math and literature these days? Get back to work. 

A. 

An Empty Room

Updated with corrections.

The room was empty. 

I kept telling people that all night, when they were looking at me like I'd lost my mind. People look at you like you've lost your mind when you're wandering around either grinning like an idiot, bursting into tears, or hugging random basically-strangers because they showed up at a party. 

But the room was empty. 

It was the hottest summer any of us can remember to this day, 1995, and our student newspaper had stopped the presses back in February. In that time the people I'd come to regard as not just friends but family were fractious, fighting: Whose fault it was, who didn't see it coming, who could have/should have done more to stop it. Who was doing more to fix it, and who best had earned the right to bitch about those who'd buggered off for bigger and better things. 

As people generally do, when their company goes belly-up, only we were too dumb to know it was time for us to quit. 

We were $137,700 in debt and we had $42.71 in our checkbook. And the room -- a windowless basement in the ugliest building on a beautiful campus -- was empty. 

The Cardinal office always rang with sound: phones, keyboards, arguments, laughter. The Cardinal office was always full. The paper was founded in 1892 and has trained thousands of journalists, thousands of leaders in business and law, thousands of people who for the first time in their lives saw the changes they were capable of making in the world. Our alumni had won Pulitzers, Emmys, Peabodys, Nobels. They wrote for the New York Times, photographed for Life magazine, were elected to state legislatures and altered the face of medicine. They fought in wars from the Spanish-American to the Gulf. They married, had children, and some of those children came back to work for the place that made their parents fall in love. 

They advocated for women's suffrage and equal treatment of minorities long before the rest of the mainstream press accepted those causes as worthy. They walked out on strike in protest of anti-Semitism and assailed a football program for racism. They exposed a corrupt governance board and revealed how taxpayer dollars were intertwined with war and death. 

They did it all in a room, with typewriters and linotypes and C-text computers, cigarettes and beer and more coffee than was good for them, cheap pizza and pretzels and white bread with cream cheese. They did it all beside one another, fighting every day to put out a paper and get to class and in many cases to their second jobs as well, over the objections of family and faculty who simply didn't understand why somebody would spend all that time doing something that a) if it paid at all, paid a pittance and b) actively hurt their grades and social life. 

Trying to explain your passion to someone else isn't easy. Take the thing you love most in the world and make me understand why you love it, and then make me love it, too. Knit it into my muscles and bones, until it thrums like a pulse under my skin and whispers to me in the dark. Explaining why, on the hottest days of the hottest summer anyone could remember, we were inside under the flourescent lights raising money penny by penny to bring back a student newspaper, well, it was like explaining the things of the church, or the appeal of high-stakes gambling, or the feeling of a crowd rising at the crack of a baseball bat. Everybody has something like this, and this was ours. 

And it was gone. The room was empty. 

Every day, no matter how loudly we blasted the Nirvana or George Carlin routines or whatever musical score was wearing out the boombox, no matter how much we few tried to talk while we worked, the silence was always there, and in it was judgment and indictment and hollow animal fear. 

And we ignored it as hard as we could but all of us, at one time or another, felt the weight of all that history and heard the echoes of that noise and thought, "What if this fails?" 

I've been in and out of this blog for the past couple of weeks because I've been planning a party. A big three-day celebration of the paper's 120th anniversary, held last weekend in Madison, with journalism panels and a photography exhibit and a big crazy dance benefit to end the week. I've had a committee of people and an army of volunteers and it was all going very well, 250 people showed up, enjoying the programs and whatnot, and then the paper's current staff held an open house in the same room where Doc and Mr. A and I and a few important others used to sit on those hot summer nights making calls and punching numbers into spreadsheets and trying to figure out how on God's green earth we could ever pull this off. 

And the room was full. 

A bunch of staffers from the mid-1950s were arguing about copy-editing mistakes that had been dust for half a century. A bunch of staffers from the 1980s were re-creating a staff photo taken during their student days and joking about photoshopping in friends who weren't there. A bunch of staffers from the mid-2000s were throwing a football around. And a bunch of staffers from that year were mauling the snacks and showing off their "layout wall of fame" and looking around in wonder at all the people who loved this place just like they did. 

In the corner, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Abigail Goldman was trying to find work of hers from her student days to show her current students at UCLA. She teaches journalism and wanted to show them that she had started out exactly where they had, and struggled with some of the same techniques, made the same mistakes. "There it is," she said, exasperated, pointing at an article in a bound newspaper volume. "Pet peeve number five, right there." 

The artists and editorial cartoonists were comparing heights in the office. Each year before one student editor left and another came in, they signed the wall separating the photo and graphics departments and penciled in their marks above their heads like little kids in their rooms. Despite the fact that all it would have taken was one wet sponge to erase all the marks, no one had ever done so. No one ever thought of it. 

Editor in Chief Robert Lewis, who helmed the paper in 1942 before leaving for war, pointed out the front page from Pearl Harbor day on the wall, its WE ARE AT WAR headline visible from across the room. "That was not trite," he said softly to staffers who were in grade school on 9/11. "We knew war had been coming, and now it was here." 

I believe this the way I believe in gravity: The world gets better when its storytellers are good and true, and you can teach people a million different ways to tell a story but you can't teach them how to want to do it. You can only give them places where they can gather to do that, places where they can learn from one another, push and change and love one another, try for greater and greater connection. Our journalism is critical to us as a country, and for all the time I spend haranguing the punditry and studying the politics and assailing the economics, I know there's nothing more important to the future of journalism than making strong, fearless, unforgiving journalists and that room has always been a place where fearlessness was nurtured and forgiveness seldom given. 

About halfway through the afternoon Saturday, I had to go outside and take a few deep breaths, because when I was at the paper getting to 104 was a forlorn hope that had no chance of coming true and every year just like everywhere there are struggles and the reason we have unlikely victories in the face of impossible odds is that the odds are impossible and the victories unlikely and as much as I say all the time to never give up, I was afraid all the time of not making it that far.

Here was 120, and there is gray in my hair, and the staffers don't know who I am, and that is perfect, that is so ordinary, that is so right. Next year's staff won't have been born when the shutdown happened, which is when I've officially become that guy in the corner yelling YOU DON'T KNOW MAN I WAS THERE, which is also right and perfect. There are still arguments going on at the paper every day, arguments journalism is having too, about new media and how best to use it, about people's reading habits and news consumption then and now, which is just as it should be. 

The most important thing is that that room is full.

And always will be. 

A. 

Are there any questions? Why not?

Spent the past two days talking to a wide array of school-aged kids as part of various festivals, conferences and fairs. Once this post is over, I’ll pack a bag and head off to the Daily Cardinal’s 120^th anniversary celebration, for what is likely to be even more of the same.

I spend a lot of time with college students who are forced to take my classes. This is one of the downsides of teaching a class that is a prerequisite for pretty much everything else in the major. Some students come through and actually care about the material while most try to find a seat that is as close to the back wall as possible and the only question they ask is, “So, is this going to be on the test?” I tend to expect this, and when you add those factors into an 8 a.m. class, I understand that I’m unlikely to get a lot of enthusiastic engagement.

However, this week, I got the chance to work with student journalists at various high schools who were heading to our campus. They paid good money to hear me help them improve their papers and sit in a one-on-one environment. Since they came to me and actually paid to do so, I offered to answer any questions, deal with any issues or address any concerns they had or wanted to talk about first. In other words, let’s make this about you and what you want.

Silence.

They all looked like they were about to get “the rat treatment” from Game of Thrones if they were noticed. Their advisers, meanwhile, were prodding and poking them to say something/do something/breathe.

No dice.

I figured it was because I was and old guy and talking to old guys is uncool for high school students. However, when I checked with my newspaper staff, I found out they had a similar experience in leading the newsroom session. In fact, it was worse, as the visitors sat around and kept checking their watches/phones/personal digital devices.

“One interesting thing happened,” a kid told me in my class that next day, as she pointed at the girl next to her. “There was some 15-year-old kid who was totally hot for her. It was cute.”

Pondering that for a moment… 22-year-old college woman + 15-year-old high school boy = cute. 22-year-old college man + 15-year-old high school girl = criminal charges. Ah… to be young again.

Speaking of young, the last event of the week was Career Day at The Midget’s school. I’d kind of kept trying to blow this off so I didn’t have to go. The reasons were valid, at least in my mind:

1) I teach. They see that every day. That’s like telling people I’m a professional shoelace tie guy.

2) This would be the end of a week from hell, as the Missus was out of town at a knitting camp (don’t laugh… OK, laugh) and I had a list of stuff to do before I could head to Mad-Town for some fun.

3) I’m always afraid I’m going to not notice and say “fuck” or something in front of the kids. If you know me, you know that fear is logical.

Still, the Midget begged me, so I acquiesced. However, I decided to try a different strategy: I’d talk about the newspaper and the newsroom.

I got copies of the paper for them, after furiously reading them over for anything that might merit a call from the principal. What’s acceptable for college students isn’t necessarily acceptable for first-graders. Fortunately, they decided against running the story about the woman who assaulted the cop with a pink dildo, so I was set.

I got some reporter’s notebooks and pens for them and I even printed up “official” press passes that I put into clear plastic holders so they could wear them and be honorary members of our staff.

I packed all this crap into a box and headed over to the school for my 10-minute chat. In, out, on with life.

However, what I found made me smile all day.

As I was waiting for the kids to come back in from lunch recess, a boy about 7 years old, walked to the bubbler, took a drink and then noticed me.

“What’s in the box?” he asked with absolutely no pretense.

“Some stuff for my Career Day talk.”

“Hmm. Like what?”

“Some newspapers and… Do I know you?” I asked.

“Nope.” He walked away.

As the kids started coming in from recess, a good number of them passed me, with at least half of them stopping and asking, “What’s in the box?”

It got to the point that I half expected Brad Pitt to pop up with a handgun and start screaming, “What’s in the box? WHAT’S IN THE BOX?”

Once I got started telling them about life in the newsroom (the sanitized version), things went well. They found out what was in the box and appeared to be thrilled at getting paper, pens and something to wear around the neck.

I did my 10 minutes and left the requisite two minutes for the “Does anyone have any questions?” precursor to silence that would allow me to leave and go get lunch.

Instead, the kids were raising their hands and yelling out questions:

“Can we write stories?”

“What happens if the machine that makes the newspaper breaks?”

“How do you make the pictures get into the paper?”

“Why do you have to write about sad things?”

“Why doesn’t the newspaper paper feel like paper paper?”

On and on it went. About 15 minutes later, the teacher had to cut them off. They all kept their hands up, just in case she relented.

It was a stunning turn of events for me. I found myself wondering where was that unperceivable pivot in life in which we went from asking all the questions to questioning nothing? When did that unbridled joy of finding stuff out stop for us? What age was it that we stopped being forthright and nosy and started being shy or reticent? If my unscientific analysis is anything to go by, it’s somewhere between first and ninth grade and in my book, that’s way too soon.

We got this far as a country, a people and a planet by asking questions. Who says the world is flat? Why can’t we build a flying machine? What if we made people wear too much hair gel and call themselves disparaging pseudo-Italian names on the air? Some answers came quickly, others took time, but they all found a way to the surface because someone decided it was worth it to ask about something.

In social situations, too often we hear people say something that makes no sense and rather than challenge the assumption, ask the question or in some other way make it known that we’re not “with you” on that, we do the “Yeah, I know, right?” thing. I honestly think this is how Scott Walker is able to run ads about how shitty Milwaukee has been without ever being called on the fact he was the COUNTY EXECUTIVE for that area as well as the GOVERNOR for the state in which Milwaukee exists. Instead of saying, “Wait a minute, if Tom Barrett lost all those “Milwaukee jobs,” what were you doing for the county at that point to stop him/restore lost work? Was the county not losing anything?” we mutter and move on or do the “Yeah, I know, right?” thing.

Little kids aren’t afraid of telling you where the bear shit in the buckwheat. If they don’t get it, they don’t get it and they’ll tell you as much. If they don’t eating something, they’re not eating it politely with a “Mmm… Wow… What IS this?” smile. They’re shuddering and coughing like a shitty lawnmower and saying, “I no like this!”

And they’ll remind you of that each time you make it.

And they’ll tell their grandparents what kind of shitbag cook you are as well.

Most of all, they question things because they know they don’t know everything. Somewhere along the way, we figure we’d better know everything or at least not let on that we don’t.

At that point, we allow others who know less to talk more and do horrible things.

Why is that?

Fuck Yeah Norway

How it's done. 

A. 

How Dare You Want Things?

Ugh, this sort of shit is so predictable. 

Parents need to do a far better job in helping young adults understand that the money spent on education needs to be able to be recouped in the form of a real job on the other side. Parents would also do well to explain the importance of hard work, personal responsibility, vision, personal sacrifice and minimizing the sense of entitlement.

Look, people younger than 30 aren't a different species. Young people want stuff to work. They want good jobs and to get paid well or at least fairly for them, they want some sense of security (in no small part because they've watched what has happened to their parents without it) and they want the freedom to figure out their personal lives as they see fit. This shit isn't complicated. They want what we all wanted, what we maybe all still want. And they're scared, like we were, that they won't get it. 

Bitterness toward them and their supposedly unrealistic expectations has nothing to do with those expectations and everything to do with people who, having gotten the shit kicked out of them by life, have decided to turn their anger on anyone who hasn't had all hope of bettter beaten out of them with a hammer. And you know what? This chuckling condescension, this "wait till you get out in the real world, kid," isn't actually a plan or any kind of assistance whatsoever. It's not even advice. It's just smug therapy for the person saying it. 

A. 

 

'A Poor Leader'

The essence of leadership is bigotry and cowardice, apparently: 

A student body president in Alpharetta, Ga., said he was removed from his leadership post after school administrators disagreed with an idea he proposed to make the titles of prom king and queen open to gay couples.

Reuben Lack, 18, was removed from his post on Feb. 8, 2012 for “pushing personal projects,” according a suit the teen filed in federal court.

[snip]

“The student was essentially a poor leader,” Suzann Wilcox Jiles, attorney for the district said in a statement issued to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “He behaved in manner not becoming of student body president including but not limited to rescheduling meetings with little notice, directly going against the instructions of the faculty advisers.”

I am really getting back in touch with my inner 17-year-old girl because adults, seriously, are we doing anything right lately? Turn up the Beastie Boys, fuck authority, all that. Heavens. Rescheduling meetings, this kid was doing. If that got you kicked off a volunteer post for real, there'd be nobody left in America to do anything. 

By the way, what the actual fucking fuck is this about: 

Lack, whose Facebook says he is straight, alleged the suit that administrators at Alpharetta High School violated his first amendment rights when they shut down a student council meeting discussion on modifying the prom king and queen tradition to make it accessible to gay couples.

Whose FACEBOOK says? Couldn't you call him up and ask him, if it was essential that you know if he was behaving like a decent human being out of some Homosexual Hive Mind solidarity? Or were you afraid that his response would be appropriately something like, "What business is it of yours which BY THE WAY IS MY ENTIRE POINT?"

I know this is how things work. People push forward, people push back. I am getting impatient, though. We have a limited amount of time on this planet, guys, and we are wasting it trying to go backward and be less. We are wasting it arguing with kids who get this so much harder than we do. Being a teenager is like ... you're trying on a bunch of things, finding something that fits. Here comes this kid who says, "If being gay fits you, why the fuck shouldn't you be prom kings together?" And it's the adults who are jumping up and down to protect others from this dangerous concept, lest it implode the whole world, and the kids are in no danger from this at all. 

You know what kids are in danger from, besides being shot by paranoid fuckholes who think their Skittles and hoodies are skeery? Besides hunger and poverty and the cost of college and the general fact that the air might not be breathable when they grow up? Besides urban blight and the tap water lighting on fire and drug-dealing gang members and poison in their spinach and how a car could paste them all over the freeway at any moment? You know what kids are in danger from?

They're in danger from fucking adults who are supposed to be their role models telling them that the best they can hope for in life is to avoid upsetting somebody, that the glory raging inside them should be blunted and blurred, that they should only ever ask for what they think they can get, and that they should accept that something called "the real world" is an inevitability instead of something that is the way it is because nobody's been strong enough to change it yet. 

Let's reschedule the meeting about gay prom royalty to never, and get on to the real question of leadership here. 

A. 

Kids Today and Their Post-Apocalyptic Lit

The Hunger Games and our fucked-up future: 

The books have sold some 10 million copies globally — and the author, Suzanne Collins, is the “best-selling Kindle author of all time.” They are a shrewd combination of standard YA fare — another love triangle between a girl and two boys … really? — and pop-culture riffs.  You have the extreme version of reality shows like American Idoland Survivor.  You have the young girl who reluctantly grows into a ferocious killer, which started with Buffy and Nikita (if you have to ask…) and now seems to be found in almost every other movie.

The books also had some fortunate timing for the author in terms of catching the zeitgeist, since perhaps the core theme is the 99% (the 12 districts) vs. the 1% (Capitol), the poor and underfed vs. the rich and overfed.

I've written before about how our culture seems obssessed with the end of the world right now, with what we'd do and who we'd be if everything just caved in. The Hunger Games, the Walking Dead, The Road, the Change series, too many movies to count my favorite of which is this one for its quiet, normal brutality and dread: 

Some of this current obssession is the same wish-fulfillment that's been around since we started telling tales of the hunt around the camptire: Sure, I'm a loser here and now, but when you need somebody to terraform Mars you bitches will be lining up to blow me. Right now my archery skills don't mean shit, but wait till I'm making you scrub my floors for some of the venison. My knowledge of feudal economic structure surely means someday I'll have an army of vassals doing my bidding, not to mention court concubines. 

But some of our present concern about having a plan for the world ending has to do with the fact that the world is, in fact, ending. The economy kids are graduating high school into is one in which fewer and fewer opportunities exist. It's one in which the contributions of young people and especially young women are constantly denigrated: Their generation is spoiled, entitled, lazy, even as they fight for scraps with a determination that should bring us to awe. They are connected to the misery of the world like nobody ever has been before, and the mystery is not how many of them have gone mad from it but how few. And like all kids ever, they have to prove to the world that they are worthy individuals, who are themselves and not their possessions or their parents or their hometowns or their diplomas.  

They can drive through their hometowns and see the burned out factories, the boarded up storefronts. They can sit at the dinner table and listen to their angry, embittered parents talk about how the old neighborhood used to be before all those new peopel ruined it. They can chuck a rock and hit a place that looks just like a science fiction film, just like a song about hopelessness, just like a District beaten into submission for daring to defy the ruling class. 

It's no wonder a story about a girl who stands up and says fuck you to all of that sings loudly in their ears. I'm two decades away from teenagehood and it plays at top volume for me. 

A.