Jump

We begin today’s column with a question:  What is a chair?  Most people would probably say a chair is a piece of furniture on which to sit.  Good enough.  However, what would we then call a chair with a broken leg?  After all, few people would be willing to sit in a chair that they know is broken  Thus, if we define an object by its function, what does it become when it no longer serves that function?  Since we do not sit in broken chairs except for comedy purposes, is it appropriate to still call it a chair?

Let’s move this conversation, now, to the chair’s fat and lazy cousin, the couch.  I once  owned a very nice couch.  Like much modern furniture, this couch was large and squishy and unnecessarily beige.  According to our initial semantic reasoning—that an object is defined by its function—our couch stopped being a couch about a year ago. Now this object can only be described as my son’s springboard to concussion.  He hasn’t actually suffered a concussion yet, but we assume it’s only a matter of time.  Some families have cuss jars where they deposit change for every swear word; we have our ER jar where we put a quarter every time our son takes a flying leap.

And for most of his leaping career, we tried to stop it. 

“Stop it,” we would say. “Stop jumping off the couch.”

So he would stop.  He would stop for a few moments, and then, assuming we were already senile and had forgotten what had just happened before our eyes less than five minutes prior, he would slowly climb onto the couch again, tip-toe to its edge, balance upon the arm like a crazy trapeze artist, and then jump.  THUMP! 

“We said stop jumping off the couch!  Do you want us to put your tractors in time out?”

 “I am just jumping a little bit!” He would remark, all of his pre-school debating skills coming to the forefront.   “Just a little I can jump?”

“No.  That is a couch.  Couches are not for jumping.  Couches are for sitting.  We sit on couches.  We don’t jump off couches.  Sit.”

And he would sit.   For awhile.  Until we went senile again, and he would then jump again, and then we would have to put one of his seventy-five toy tractors in “time out” on top of a laundry cabinet that is beginning to look like a farm estate auction.

And this would stop the jumping.

For awhile.

Fortunately for my son but unfortunately for our furniture, a recent online article in The Atlantic has somewhat adjusted my attitude about couch jumping and his other pre-school parkour.  To summarize, the article basically suggests that modern children are becoming increasingly incapable of functioning on planet earth as individuals because of modern, misguided, helicopter-style parenting.  In essence, our well-meaning inclination toward keeping kids safe in what we see as an increasingly unsafe world has jeopardized one of the main functions of parenting in the first place:  namely, raising people capable of taking care of themselves.

One solution to this trend, the article contends, is allowing children to do things they believe are unsafe or at least physically feel unsafe, such as running very fast, hanging upside down, or even playing with fire under obvious adult supervision. Humans in general and children especially have a developmental need to take risk, to struggle, and to experience the new.  That is how they learn best and that it how they earn the confidence they will need to tackle life’s hardships at a time in the not-so-distant future when mommy and daddy won’t be around to fix things right.

 Therefore, now, in the relative anonymity of our own home, we occasionally allow our son to jump off the piece of furniture formerly known as our couch.  He jumps heartily into the THUD-dampering objects once known as our couch cushions.  We let him climb up and stand upon former chairs, and we don’t get too worked up when he sprints away from his sister down that long corridor thingy we once called a hallway.

Granted, we are all going to the hospital someday.  In fact, he’s just now recovering from his first black eye that he earned for trying to climb up the same tornado slide a little girl was curiously trying to slide down.  When a face meets a foot, the foot comes out on top.  Gravity always wins.  However, it is in his nature to climb, regardless of gravity, so we used this experience to try and teach him another life lesson:  a slide is still a slide when someone is at the top; it is only a climbing wall when no one else is around.

This should postpone our trip to the hospital.

For awhile.

Annex

In 1983, the most highly watched television movie of all time found its way into my family’s living room.  I was about seven at the time, and do not remember if we watched the movie in its entirety or just bits and pieces of it.  What I do know, however, is that this program gave me nightmares.  This movie and the threat it conveyed were launched quite soundly into my childhood brain, right next to Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and vanilla wafer banana pudding.  Some of you probably remember this controversial 1980s classic, “The Day After.”

This movie portrayed what millions of Americans and perhaps billions of people around the world at the time feared most:  atomic war.  The film depicted a nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations before focusing on what life was like for the survivors, hence the name. 

The way many modern children fear school shootings and terrorist attacks, plenty of children in my generation feared nuclear Armageddon between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Although the 1980s was not the height of the Cold War, by that decade both sides had accumulated so many weapons that the fallout from a conflict between the two of them was almost unimaginable.  As the late Carl Sagan once commented, "Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches, the other seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger."

The destruction of the Berlin Wall, then, in 1989, and the Soviet collapse two years later, proved cathartic for Americans in more ways than one.  After all, we won!  The bad guys had not just lost, they had given up.  Communism was on its way out; democratic marketplace capitalism would replace it quite nicely, and we would all live happily ever after.

The optimism was so vivid, in fact, that 1992 saw the publication of a book entitled, “The End of History and the Last Man” by American political theorist Frances Fukuyama.  "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold war,”  Fukuyama wrote,  “but the end of history as such: that is, … the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”  Now, that is some pretty cocky stuff, because in a nutshell the book argued that ever since the American and French revolutions at the end of the 18^th century, democracy had proven to be the superior form of government and represented the apex of human political development.  “Events” would obviously still occur, Fukuyama suggested, such as earthquakes, diseases, and new McDonald’s sandwich ideas, but “history” as a struggle between competing ideologies was apparently on its way out.

Yeah!  And despite many, many critics of the theory, the 1990s kind of played that scene out to a certain extent.  We had our Pax Americana with, ironically enough, angry Seattle grunge music as the soundtrack.  Despite 9/11 and its bloody, far flung aftermath,  proponents of Fukuyama’s theory suggested that even these events did not really contradict the idea that western style democracy would eventually envelope the planet, which was the main thesis behind the book.

A book, clearly, that someone needs to send to Moscow.

Post-Soviet Russia, according to the script, is supposed to be our ally, a burgeoning democracy relieved of its territorial ambitions and political wiles.  It is supposed to be our trading partner, an eager go-between for the United States, the last true super power, and China, the emerging influence in the East.  Russia should be anxious, even, to join the European Union, and should probably defer to us while making crucial decisions on the UN Security Council.

Somebody, however, is not sticking to this modern script.  Sometimes it almost seems like somebody is reading a script from the Cold War or even the dark days leading up to World War Two.  Despite Putin’s bad behavior, however, and despite some alarmist reaction drawing a straight line from Russia’s recent misadventure to 1930s Germany, I personally do not think television executives need to start production on “Another Day After.”

To begin with, Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler.  Hitler was an ideologue willing to wage massive war and commit genocide to achieve his ultimate ambition: the establishment of the Third Reich.  Hitler sought power to achieve his goals; Putin’s goal seems to be power in and of itself.  Granted, annexing small but strategically valuable satellite states is a viable way to snatch power in the short term, but only to a certain extent, and only for so long.

Secondly, the U.S. and its western allies in 2014 are not the same as the U.S. and its allies in 1939.  One reason Hitler waged war was because he thought he could realistically win.  He thought this even after the U.S. became involved. Granted, NATO is not the force it once was, but it’s still a force.   Yes, the Pentagon is suffering budget cuts, but the United States still outspends every other country on defense—combined.   The point is this:  pertaining to military clout in relation to his potential adversaries, Putin is more akin to Mussolini than Hitler, although please don’t tell him I said that. 

            To conclude, I generally don’t do a great deal of cheer leading when it comes to either our federal or state government, but on this one I think the White House is right.   Russia is not really a threat to U.S. security.  The real threat, unfortunately, are all those matches Carl Sagan was talking about, because many of them are missing.