Inertia

Back in February I wrote a column about Donald Trump. Ten months ago, the United States had reached that unsettling clove in the election season where a Trump candidacy was moving from possible, to plausible.  However, although he could win the primary if he kept his momentum, it still seemed politically unrealistic that he would actually end up as the Republican nominee.

Those were good times.

After a year of armchair analysis, it seems to me that the American population has reacted to Mr. Trump in one of three very different ways. 

For many people, the response has been a chunky mix of bewilderment, shock, nausea and remorse.  It is now, and always has been, inconceivable that our nation has somehow conjured up this charlatan to be a legitimate presidential contender.  For these people, the past sixteen months have been part SNL skit, part dystopian graphic novel where every gray panel bleeds with the shaky script, “Where are we, and how do we get out?”

It probably goes without saying that I do fall into that category.  This is not an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, mind you, who has admitted to “mistakes” that would incarcerate many of us.   However, the thought of a Trump presidency is just too astonishing for words.

            The second group of people has responded to Mr. Trump with reluctance.  They will probably vote for him, but they aren’t going to feel good about it.  They will vote for him because, as that lady in Ohio remarked last month, they are “voting for the Conservative party, and if he’s the jackass leading the mule train,” then that’s the way it has to be.  Many of these voters will vote for him because they believe—they hope—that Mr. Trump will make the same choice on specific issues, such as a Supreme Court nominee, as they would.  These are the people who simply pray every day that, if he’s elected, Mr. Trump finds a way to govern without opening his actual mouth.

The last group, though, are the true believers, the ones who honestly think this guy is fit to be President of the United States of America.  These are the ones who voted for him in the primary and who see in Mr. Trump a bold, kindred spirit.  As I mentioned ten months ago, these Americans are frustrated with the status quo and have often offered three basic arguments for Trump as a candidate.

“Trump is unpolished; he’s a straight shooter who says what’s on his mind.”

OK.  That’s all true.  Those attributes also describe my son, though, who is in Kindergarten.  Being profane, candid, and “off the cuff” are all good traits for certain jobs, such as a shock jock radio personality or a professional wrestler.  However, when you are the head of state of a 240-year-old country, you need a high quality filter between your mind and your mouth, at least in the public sphere.

“Trump is a businessman.  It’s time we got a businessman into the Whitehouse.”

First of all, his success as a businessman is both sketchy and moderate.  More importantly, however, success in business does not always translate into success in government.  These are two very different human enterprises, and casually equating them because they’re both full of mature gentlemen wearing suits is about as reasonable as believing that a great soccer player will be a great basketball player because both sports come with a bouncy ball and a set of nets. 

Yes, there are certain athletic skills that will help a person in both sports, such as speed, agility, and endurance.  Certain leadership skills, too, can find tremendous value in both the world of civics and the world of the marketplace.  Leadership skills such as intelligence, temperance, and the ability to make sound, quick decisions based on the best available data can help a person both govern and turn a profit.

The problem is, though, that as far as I have noticed, Donald Trump doesn’t really have those leadership skills.  Ultimately, the guy is a salesman, and, I’ll admit, he is good.  That doesn’t make him qualified, however, to lead the most powerful military on the planet.

Finally, we sometimes hear that “Trump’s ideas are good.”

Uh, no. No they’re not.

You cannot “bomb the __________ out” of whatever bad guy makes you mad, you cannot ban all Muslims or Mexicans or whoever from your modern society, and you cannot overturn an entrenched social program without offering up some kind of replacement.  Donald Trump’s ideas are not good, regardless of how loud he says them, and screaming about what is broken is a far, far cry from offering up policy that might actually fix it.

The reality is, though, that in a democracy, we get the leaders we deserve.  With that in mind, I will close this little diatribe with a deeper reflection on the actual nature of our republic itself.

America is an idea, and at the core of this idea is the belief in a system of self-rule designed to avoid two provocative and dueling political forces:  rule by the mob and rule by the monarchy.

 If Trump wins, one could argue that the mob has won; the loudest, angriest among us have thrashed their man into the castle. 

If Clinton wins, though, one could argue that the opposite is true.  With a former President as a spouse and a political cabal spanning the globe and spanning the decades, are we not electing a kind of queen?

Regardless, another question we should ask in this dark moment has to do, again, with physics.  Is there enough Constitutional inertia to get us another four years down the road?  Do we get another chance?

Can we find some truly gifted candidates that reflect our better natures, as opposed to the vulgarity and corruption waiting for us in the voting booth?

If you’re the praying type, you’ve already been busy.  If you’re not, this might be a good time to start.

Just Pretend

In her early years, my daughter loved ponies. We spent hours in her bedroom, galloping the little creatures back and forth from one magical adventure to the next.  We moved, later, to Disney Princesses.  Barbie came next, along with those frightening Monster High creatures, which actually brings me to the more focused point of today’s column, which is that I think my daughter might be in a cult. 

Like many very young ladies, she seems to be a devoted member of the “Cult of the Teenage Girl,” the weird, spooky little society running rampant in our culture that worships a fictionalized version of the adolescent female.

Now, as a high school English teacher, I am treading on loose gravel with this topic, so, to clarify, the “Cult of the Teenage Girl,” ultimately, is a marketing ploy designed to get my money.  If you don’t have a little girl in your home, let me explain.  A tremendous amount of the toys supposedly designed for little girls are actually miniature adolescents.

While my son gets to imagine he is a super hero in New York saving the planet, my daughter often pretends she is a sophomore in high school saving text messages.   As a teacher of sophomores, this hardly seems fair.

In fact, I’m going to go ahead and call this odd trend the sophomorization of little girl toys.  For example, those My Little Ponies I was talking about earlier?  They’re still around, prancing around on all fours and being precious, but there is also an alternate storyline where a few ponies end up going through some weird dimension portal into a world where they are walking around on their back hooves like human beings.  They exist in a high school, no less, and spend part of their time worried about boy ponies and getting a date for the dance.

The D.C. super heroes, too, have jumped into the mix.  Just a couple weeks ago we watched a very short cartoon in which a bunch of the female D.C. heroes, such as Wonder Woman, end up hanging out amiably with D.C. villainesses like Cat Woman, Poison Ivy, and even Joker’s significant other, Harley Quinn.  Again, they’ve all been inexplicably morphed into teenagers.  Why?  Because I guess being in high school is cool. 

The most peculiar sophomorization came from the Disney Princesses themselves.  About two years ago I was in the toy aisle at Wal-Mart and witnessed Ariel dolls and Cinderella dolls, all decked out with “adolescent” trinkets.  They had been glammed up, I suppose, to make them look more like teenagers. But here’s the thing: Cinderella already IS a teenage girl!  So is Ariel!  Just ask Sebastian the Crab.  Why the impulse to turn characters that are already adolescent more, well, adolescent?

The answer lies not in the age of the character herself.  Peter Parker, after all, starts out as a high school nerd.  But boys aren’t pretending to be Peter Parker.  They’re pretending to be Spider Man.  What our society expects our boys to emulate is much different, and, to a large extent, more admirable.

This brings us to perhaps the most annoying aspect of the whole deal.  Many of these fictional “heroes” my daughter has learned to imitate are often petty, loud, superficial and dumb.  These are hardly qualities I want her celebrating in her final years as an actual child.  To add insult to injury, these companies are selling toys on the mostly false pretense that being a high schooler is totally fun and little girls should pretend to be one in their spare time.

I teach in a real high school and spend about eight hours a day with real, not pretend adolescents. Most of them are well adjusted and pretty pleasant to be around, but they very rarely seem to be having the kind of super fun that would justify turning Wonder Woman into Wonder Girl.  Granted, they are at school, busy with school work, so my analysis is not exactly scientific.

The larger point though, is that with many “boy toys”—and we’ll go ahead and use super heroes again as an example—there is a clear distinction between reality and fantasy.  My son loves Iron Man, for example, but somewhere, deep within his Kindergarten mind, he probably knows that he is not really ever going to be Iron Man.  It’s pretend.  Iron Man is not real.  As he matures, the obviously fictional element behind all the Avengers will fall away from him slowly, gradually, and he will grow into adolescence with the satisfaction that many super hero characteristics, such as bravery, loyalty, the guarantee of a sequel, can translate into reasonably adult behavior without the spandex and laser cannons.

But my daughter is pretending to be a high school girl.  Since she will be a real high school girl much sooner than I want, it’s kind of a big deal to me that what she is emulating is grounded in some kind of authenticity.  Unfortunately, many of the “pretend” high school girls she is supposed to imagine herself as are grotesquely superficial.  They are often portrayed as unrealistically thin, hypersensitive about their social status, and enamored with material objects, like cell phones and high heels.

Does this describe some real sophomores in a real high school?  Sure, but very few of us would pretend as though that’s a good thing.  Very few sophomores, for that matter, would consider those ideals worth celebrating, either.

Thus, my wife and I went out on a limb recently and removed some of the snarkier programming from our satellite package; some of the Disney and Nickelodeon programs that often portray teenagers as loud, vapid, and tyrannical in their own homes.  This decision was met with anger from our daughter and a decrease in our monthly bill; two sure fire indicators that we were on the right track.

It’s a small gesture, I suppose, but in a world where “throwing like a girl” is still often shouted as in insult, every little bit helps.

Reflections on the Last Day of September

Although ultimately a disappointment, exhausting and rough on the nerves, our most recent trip to St. Louis taught us a few important things.

For starters, EATS, (Emergency Annaka Transplant System) works pretty good.  JaLana picked up the call from St. Louis Children’s hospital around 11:30 with the news:  a whole liver was available; would we be able to make it before morning?  After a brief and frantic discussion, we told them we would be there within a few hours.  JaLana called her mom to come watch the kids, and after talking her way out of a speeding ticket, she arrived in nearly half an hour.  Our vehicle was nearly packed by then, and so we poured a couple travel mugs with coffee and headed west, Annaka awake and very interested in our unusual behavior. 

We made it the hospital before the 10^th floor personnel even expected us, but for a short while nothing needed done besides unpacking.  Soon Annaka’s vitals were checked, she was given an E.K.G. and a chest X-ray.  The surgery, if we were ultimately chosen, would take place around ten the next morning.

Annaka was the back-up.  A toddler waited in line before her, but the surgeon was pretty sure the organ would be too small and Annaka would be a more suitable fit.  Regardless, both patients would need to be ready when the time came.  For the next few hours, as we waited for the morning and the news it would bring, we tried to sleep. 

We didn’t really sleep.  Once morning arrived we contemplated how best to let folks know what was going on.  It made sense to post something online, but we didn’t really have any news except that we were waiting for more news.  Then we remembered that Facebook is the same place where people upload pictures of their meatball sandwiches, so we figured a midnight run to the hospital for a potential liver transplant would qualify as post-worthy.

For hours, literally, we paced around the tenth floor with Annaka in her stroller.  It was one of the few ways we could keep her from fussing, as she hadn’t had anything to eat since a little after midnight.  This actually brings us to the next important lesson we learned.

Secondly, Annaka, like every other human ever, gets mad when she’s hungry.  We should have known that, of course, being as we are both humans and have two other humans living with us.  However, due to her condition, Annaka really hasn’t been truly hungry for the last seven months of her life.  She gets fed continuously for ten hours at night and is supposed to drink four bottles a day.  Her stomach, which is already compressed due to the liver damage, is never empty.

So, later in the day, after finding out the surgeons had decided to put the organ in the toddler, we fed her.  She gobbled up a couple ounces, which is pretty good for her.  Ninety minutes later, though, after waking from her nap, she started crying and would not be consoled. 

“You think she’s hungry?”  We asked ourselves.  “She just ate less than two hours ago.”

She was so far below her normal caloric intake, though, she actually was hungry, and increasingly unimpressed.  So we fed her and, guess what?  She stopped crying, allowing us to reclaim our rightful title as “Parents of the Year.”

Finally, we also learned, or were reminded, rather, that this whole transplant business is just heart-breaking.  We were called on Thursday night because a baby died on Thursday afternoon.  That’s the math.  I often use euphemisms when discussing the future transplant to people, telling them that surgeons would prefer a “small organ” or a “young liver,” as this would be best for Annaka’s long term health, but everyone knows what I mean. 

A baby died, somewhere in this region, and that baby’s liver was put into a toddler less than twelve hours later.  That baby’s family is suffering in a way most of us will never imagine. 

Our own hearts broke a little Friday morning when we were told Annaka would be going home without that gift.  The night had been so long; our hopes had been so high.  Someone, though, would have to miss out.  We were, after all, the back-up.  There’s almost always a back-up.  When the day comes and we’re in front, we might still be passed over for various reasons.  (That’s why they have a back-up.) 

We might do this six more times before Annaka get her transplant.  We might do it once.  Only God knows, and that understanding, for now, must do.