Bears

 

After seventeen years of coaching, I have retired from my position as the EJHS scholastic bowl sponsor, and I use the term “retire” because of its connotations. For example, you often retire from things on your own terms. Retiring is more final. It says to the world, “Look, it’s not personal, but I’m leaving. I’ve done what I came to do, and now I’m going to go golf.” Or fish, or play pickle ball, or, as in my case, drive my kids to practice.

            Speaking of children, I’ve decided to also retire from making breakfast for my two oldest kids on school days. It’s dumb. In some cultures they would already be protecting entire flocks of sheep for days on end, yet these two still shuffle into the kitchen every morning like they just woke up at a Holiday Inn.

            “Dad, what’s for breakfast?”

            I don’t know. Captain Crunch? Let me grab you a bowl so you can get back to watching other people play Minecraft on YouTube.

            Nope. No more. I’m retired. Craft your own breakfast. Also, while we’re on the topic, I’m also retiring from deciding which of your socks needs washed and which ones you just dropped on the floor to help you find your way back to your room. That’s it, Hansel and Gretel. I’m retired. We’ll wash Annaka’s clothes—she’s still cute—but you two are on your own.

            This is therapeutic, and so I’m also retiring from “liking” or “sharing” things on Facebook. In light of recent evidence from a whistleblowing former employee and an independently structured oversight committee, it turns out that Facebook is just terrible. Apparently every time we engage with a post the Facebook algorithm, which thrives on conflict and controversy, modifies what we see next. None of us are scrolling through the same feed; none of us are digesting the same information, and we wonder why America is in a cold civil war. 

            So I’m out. You guys can pick your tribe and stock up on military-grade memes; I’m reading the newspaper.

            Finally, I’ve decided to retire from worrying about getting attacked by a mama bear. I know this sounds insane since I live in south central Illinois and no reasonable bear would try to raise their cubs this close to so many deer camps, so, to clarify, I’m talking about getting attacked by an actual human woman who refers to herself as a “mama bear,” as in, “Don’t mess with my kids or you’re going to feel the wrath of this mama bear.”

            In reality, I have never even been growled at by a mama bear. However, reflecting back on my long career as an uncertified life coach, I now realize that I’ve often restrained myself when it comes to helping bear parents when so many of them just need curt and forward advice.

That ends today. So, in closing, let’s take some questions.

Mama Bear One: My kid won’t do their homework and is failing three classes at school. I’m at a loss. What should I do?

Answer: Do they have a smartphone?

Mama Bear One: Of course, they need it to…

Answer: Wrong. Children have been around for hundreds of years without smartphones. Take the dumb thing away until they’re passing. Next question.

Pappy Bear: My kid hates me because I won’t let them go camping with their friends.

Answer: They’re not camping. Next question.

Mama Bear Two: My two oldest children, whom my husband claims should be raising sheep, I think, struggle to get up in the morning. It’s about all we can do to feed them a bowl of nutritious cereal before it’s time for school.

Answer: Hmm, that is a tough one. Maybe they should go to bed earlier so their dad, who is probably exhausted and handsome, can also go to bed at a decent hour. Regardless, do they have a smartphone?

Mama Bear Two: Well, no, but...

Answer: They’ll probably be fine. They seem like good people.

And that’s all the time we have for questions. Fortunately, I will never retire from giving unsolicited advice, so keep those questions coming and be sure to “like” and “share” this column as often as you can.

 

Vivid Season

    One thing that saddens me about this day is that for a short while after 9/11, America was full of Americans. The world, in fact, seemed full of Americans. We had our differences before 9/11, of course, and continued on with them afterwards, but for a short while—perhaps a year or so; maybe just a few months—Americans seemed united in our collective grief, resolve, anger, but also hope. For a short season our leaders were leaders, regardless of their party, and for a short season we followed suit.

            The unity didn’t last long, and over the years and then decades it has decayed to the point that I wonder what it would take to resurrect it. A rogue warhead, for example, could incinerate a city, and within minutes we’d be pointing fingers not at the terrorists who did it but the political party that supposedly allowed it—or, even more grotesque and absurd, the party that financed it as a means to an end.

            Those of you over thirty, maybe thirty-five, can probably remember this very brief season in American history, when we were perhaps not all on the same page but at least skimming the same book. You can probably also remember this season fading away—casually at first but then with increasing toxicity—and  now you’re either part of the problem or you’re not.

            Those of you who can’t really remember a time when we didn’t identify ourselves by our political allegiance, I’m sorry. It wasn’t always like this. Those who lost their lives twenty years ago deserve better, as do those who still mourn. 

Sowing

 

Schools across the nation find themselves in an impossible situation, as they are stuck between increasingly dire medical advice, frustrated parents, and tricky political realities. A school board in northeast Texas, for example, temporarily added facemasks to its dress code to get around their governor’s enforcement ban on them in public places. In Florida, where COVID numbers are surging in large part due to the Delta variant, the governor has threatened to withhold salaries from school leaders if they go against his rule to forbid a mask mandate. Meanwhile, here in Illinois, schools that ignore our own governor’s mask mandate risk the loss of funding, sports, and even accreditation itself.

In our local area, schools that are following the governor’s unpopular mask mandate, as difficult a decision as that was, chose the right long-term decision for their students. I’ll explain my reasoning shortly to give folks a chance to grab the pitchforks, but before doing that let’s try to clarify the main purpose of a school district in the first place.

            A local board of education has many responsibilities, but most of them can be condensed into one basic idea: to offer the students who live in its district the best education that resources allow.

            So, what in the world does that have to do with masks?

            Well, in a normal year – nothing. As a veteran teacher and as a parent myself, I would suggest that wearing a mask on your face would actually be a detriment to education for all kinds of reasons that you’re undoubtedly already very familiar with. In 2021, though, I would argue that masks are an unfortunate necessity to give school district’s the best opportunity at doing their main job, which—again—is to keep the doors open for as many students as possible.

            Masks will help keep students in school because they help decrease the amount of germs that a potentially infected person exhales. Masks aren’t foolproof, of course, and they are less useful for keeping germs out, but multiple studies do suggest that they help slow down the spread of most viruses, including COVID-19.

            Effingham Unit 40, for example, among other schools, kept its doors open five days a week last year with the help of universal masking. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends universal masking in schools, including for those who are vaccinated. Considering that the CDC recommends indoor masking for schools and that area hospitals have even asked local school boards to follow those guidelines, one might assume that the decision to implement this mitigation strategy, particularly for students who haven’t had the opportunity to get vaccinated, would be an easy decision, as it was in many parts of the country.

 Which brings us to my second point.

            Masks will also help keep students in school because if masks aren’t worn, schools might literally have their doors shut. Now, I’m about as much a legal scholar as most folks on Facebook, but I do know that at the end of the day, controversial issues like this are not decided in the “comments” section. At some point courts will decide if the ISBE has the legal authority to do what the governor has threatened to do: cut funding, stop sports, remove accreditation. Punitive governing is not good governing, of course, and Governor Pritzker will likely suffer political consequences for his decisions, but the reality is, those threats are very steep hills to die on.

Granted, if a school district wants to risk those privileges to protect students from what they consider the tyranny of mask wearing or to even make a political gesture toward an unpopular governor, that’s really no one’s business outside the district. By the end of this calendar year, however—perhaps sooner—this may no longer be a hypothetical discussion, anyway. With some school districts throughout the nation masking up and some not, we’ll have plenty of evidence in the form of quarantine numbers, for example, to decide if wearing masks was a good idea. We’ll also know whether or not our own governor is bluffing.

I’ve never been on a school board, but I imagine that sitting down to make masks optional when it’s decided that they aren’t really needed is much easier than sitting down and figuring out how to generate the five million dollars that’s been lost from state funding, or figuring out what to tell the school’s seniors who are trying to apply for college without a diploma that’s recognized by the ISBE. It seems that for the sake of a child’s education—to say nothing of the health of the community at large—we ought error on the side of caution, as annoying as mask wearing can sometimes be.

In closing, this is a hard time for everyone, and it would be easy for me to shrug my shoulders, huddle up with my “tribe” and share memes all day that mock those who disagree.

But that’s useless. It’s careless at this point, and perhaps even dangerous. For the sake of our schools and everyone in them—students and staff—we must ignore the impulse to make this a civil rights issue, because it’s not.

Masking is simply a mitigation strategy we will someday not need; it’s a small piece of cloth that we’re sewing into Fort Sumter.

 

 

Variant

 

Studies suggest that after the family doctor, the most trusted person in someone’s life—after their local radio personality, supermarket cashier, and neighborhood scold—is their uncertified life coach, which is me. Thus, I’ve taken it upon myself to chime in on our nation’s most recent facepalm, which is that we somehow have more COVID-19 vaccines than arms to put them in.

 A year ago, one of President Trump’s biggest concerns was, “How quickly can America develop a vaccine that will help us stop this virus?” Well, now we know, and the answer is very clear: Who cares? 

Although free, safe and effective vaccines have been available for months now, only about half of the eligible American population has been fully inoculated, and, in many parts of the nation, that rate is much, much lower. While that might seem strange coming from the country that cured polio and placed multiple humans on the moon, it is perhaps unsurprising considering that many Americans simply no longer trust those very institutions—medicine, science and government—that helped bring those achievements to light. For these readers, vaccines seem unnecessary at best or dangerous at worst, so, let’s consider a few of their concerns.

Reader Concern One: This whole thing is very suspicious.

Response: Well, not really. Epidemiologists have been warning us about the plausibility of a zoonotic pandemic for years. The question was never “Is this going to happen?” but instead “When, where, and how bad?” Even if it turns out Covid-19 did escape from a laboratory, pandemics do happen on planet earth and shouldn’t be dismissed as pretend, particularly after one has been linked to millions of deaths worldwide.

Since humans aren’t really designed to “social distance” and being asked to wear a mask to decrease the amount of germs we exhale is apparently a violation of multiple Constitutional amendments, our best bet for curbing the virus before it mutates further  into “double secret probation” status is to get people vaccinated. 

Which would have likely worked in 1955, the same year Americans stood in lines for hours to get their kids inoculated from the previously mentioned polio.

Reader Concern Two: This vaccine is just a way for them to track and/or control us.

Response: Regardless of how you define “them,” “they” probably already know more about you than does your spouse, and while that might be a good thing for your marriage, at the end of the day, none of us are all that interesting.

We wake up and we buy stuff.

Thrilling.

This vaccine isn’t going to track anyone unless it’s duct taped to a smartphone.

Reader Concern Three: Hardly anyone my age even gets that sick from this, though. What’s the point? Can’t we just wait for herd immunity?

Response: We could if we were cows, I guess, but since we have a vaccine that works, perhaps the more humane strategy would be to “take one for the team” to help protect those in our community who aren’t so blessed with good health. Besides that, if it keeps mutating—which it will because that’s what viruses do—herd immunity could be years away if it even happens at all.

Reader Concern Four:  What if getting the vaccine is just the first step in getting the mark of the beast?

Response: Although I am no theologian, the idea that God, the creator of the Universe, is in the business of punishing people for the simple act of trying to keep themselves and their community safe, seems a bit off brand. God is God, after all, not some pagan trickster deity trying to con people into eternal damnation. God is love, and it seems that taking an hour or so out of our day to make ourselves less contagious to our neighbor would be a pretty straightforward manifestation of that idea.

Reader Concern Five: Those so called “experts” have flip-flopped on this issue more times than a pancake house on a Sunday morning! Why should we trust them?

Response: Well, now I’m hungry, but yes, the message does keep changing because it’s based on real time data, which is also changing. I would be much, much more suspicious of all of this if the message had been static for the last eighteen months.

Reader Concern Six: My family doctor said I shouldn’t get the vaccine. 

Response: Did they actually tell you that?

Concern Six Continued: Well, I assume they would if I asked. Besides, shouldn’t I wait awhile until more data is available?

Response: OK, that’s a reasonable concern, but keep in mind that over a billion human beings have been fully inoculated at this point and we have months of data to suggest that getting vaccinated significantly decreases your chances of getting seriously ill from the virus or spreading it to someone else. While no vaccine can ever be one hundred percent effective, that's a considerable amount of data.

Regardless, I will reiterate what I said a few months ago: getting vaccinated--or not--should be a choice. As an uncertified life coach, however, and as a fellow citizen, I would simply recommend that you do, in fact, talk to your actual doctor about it. Talk to folks who’ve been inoculated themselves. If you’re a prayerful kind of person, then definitely pray about it.

Yes, these vaccines were branded for “emergency use,” but that’s more of a process protocol than an indicator of their safety, as they will likely be approved for even young children by the end of this year. In fact, we had our twelve-year-old daughter vaccinated recently, and while that might count as child abuse in some circles, please understand that she has not, as of yet, developed any strange side effects. (Unless you count her sudden inability to remember how to clean up her room.) She took the shot with an impressive amount of enthusiasm, as it meant she could start living a more normal version of an adolescent life without being worried she was bringing something home to her immune-compromised little sister.

After discussing the issue with some trusted family doctors, it was a pretty easy decision to make.

A Eulogy for my Father, May 12, 2021

 

About 25 years ago my buddy and I were on spring break, but we were broke, so we were heading over to Vandalia to eat cheeseburgers, and he got the idea we should go off-road in the river bottoms between Vandalia and Bluff City.

I was driving my rear wheel drive Chevy S-10 at the time, so I thought… “Yeah....Let’s do this.”

So...we pulled off the highway...it had just rained so there was plenty of mud...and we went mudding for a good two...maybe three yards before we got stuck in the mud.

Well, in 1995, when you’re stuck you're just stuck. We didn’t have cell phones, so we got out and started walking. I don’t remember if we made it all the way to John Behrend’s house or what, but eventually someone picked us up and dropped us off at home. It was too wet to plant, so dad was around, and he ended up pulling the truck out...I don’t remember if he had to use a tractor or his actual four wheel drive vehicle...and that was that.

At 19, that was pretty embarrassing to have to be rescued like that by my dad, especially in front of a buddy, so later on that evening I thanked him, but I also made sure he knew that was probably the last time he’d have to help fix one of my stupid mistakes. He just nodded and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that too much” and went on his way...took a seat in the recliner, probably watched a Cardinal game on TV, maybe Andy Griffith, and nothing was ever said about the incident ever again.

As it turns out, that was not the last time he helped me fix a stupid mistake. Dad helped pull me out of the mud...literally and figuratively...many times over the last 25 years.

He just helped me with all kinds of things, and it didn’t matter what it was...something serious like driving with me to Pittsburgh to move Annaka back home after her transplant...or something little like bringing over a tiller for my garden...he was somehow able to help me without ever...at any time...making me feel like I was putting him out.

Somehow...regardless of what he was helping me out with...I left the experience feeling as though I...was doing him...the favor.

A father’s job, of course, is to help his children through their lives, and dad was really good at that.

A father’s main responsibility, though, is to lead his children toward their heavenly father...and dad was really good at that, too...by praying before every meal...reading us Bible stories...Getting us to church on time – mostly.

Dad led us toward our heavenly father just by living a solid, Biblical life, showing us what it meant to be a good husband and good neighbor.

Dad showed us our heavenly father most clearly, though, when he helped us with something...because we always left feeling as though he genuinely loved to help us.

 Because he did. 

There will be many people this afternoon and in the days to come, who will ask themselves, “Now what?”

“What am I going to do now that he’s gone?”

“What should I do...when his memory is so heavy on my heart... that I can’t see straight?”

His answer, I think, would be typical Bill Robison, “I wouldn’t worry about that too much... just find someone stuck in the mud and help them out.” 

Teeter Totter

 

I’m biased about vaccines. I get that. As a school teacher, I was eligible for my first Moderna shot in January and got my second one a month later. I have a job where I share a room with twenty-five different students six times a day. Most importantly, my seventy-four-year-old dad is on immunosuppression medication, as is my five-year-old daughter.

So, uh, yeah. I wish all you all would get a vaccine.

But I respect your decision not to.  To each his own.

However, I am a little confused about why governors who claim to be pro-business are so eager to stop private businesses to take a very common-sense approach to, well, stay in business. Just this week, the Governors of Florida and Texas preemptively banned businesses in their states from requiring patrons to show proof of vaccination, which seems a counterintuitive way to demonstrate faith in the marketplace.

Now, if the government itself was requiring vaccine “passports,” or whatever we want to call them, then yeah, I would be a little skittish.

If we were in a situation where we would have to prove vaccination status in order to buy staples like food, gas, or medicine, then I would also be squeamish about diving down that rabbit hole.

But for a business like a concert hall, for example—that functions on the strength of how many people it can get packed into its doors—to require all of its ticket holders be vaccinated against a disease that has a 16-month track record of killing people and making life miserable just makes logical sense. It seems a very obvious strategy to use toward reopening society before the end of this, oh, I don’t know, decade. They are private businesses, after all, that have a vested interest in their patron’s health, and whether that means requiring those patrons to wear shoes, a mask, or be vaccinated, then so be it.

The counterargument to this is almost always “well, that’s just how the holocaust got started.  We’re just one step away from Nazi Germany with these ideas.”

And when I hear that argument, I am very tempted to ask, “Do you actually believe that’s how the holocaust really “got started,” or are you just in the business of retweeting nonsense? Are you so chemically addicted to the “likes” that objective reality no longer serves any purpose?”
          Because I want to explain something: we are always, at all times, about three steps away from Nazi Germany.

We have always been three or fewer steps away from genocide. (In fact, we have often been no steps away from genocide.)

 All societies can get from point A, where they’re not massacring a group of people because they don’t like them, to point Wounded Knee, where they are.

Why? Because humans are often bad people.

However, the historical specifics that led to Hitler getting elected and then marginalizing entire swaths of humanity before invading Poland belong to a very specific moment in 20^th century history.

It’s not a casserole recipe.

I’m not suggesting it can’t happen again, or didn’t, or won’t, but I am suggesting we don’t have to assume every single decision that doesn’t fit into our preconceived schema about how the world should function is going to inevitable lead to us all hiding out in someone’s attic writing in our diaries.

And I’m not trying to minimize what happened in the holocaust. I’m just tired, after years of both political parties calling each other Nazis, of being scared of brown shirt boogeymen whose only function, it seems, is to demonize whatever behavior their political opponent is doing at that moment.

The “slippery slope” argument—the idea that “once we head down this path we’re eventually falling off the cliff”—is not how you govern, it’s not how you solve problems, and it’s certainly not a very healthy way to live out your own individual life.

It’s crippling. It stifles creative thinking because it assumes the worst possible outcome for all decisions.

It’s simply fearmongering disguised as philosophical debate, and it’s really too bad there’s not a vaccine against that.

T.G.I.F.

I think one of the saddest parts of being a grown up is how much time we spend just telling other grownups what day it is. 

Almost everyone already knows what day it is, but we still walk around and say things like, “Well, thank God it’s Friday!” or, “Well, we made it to Wednesday!” or, the saddest of them all, “Monday, huh?”

Just, that’s it… “Monday, huh?”

What is the response to that even? What can I say back to that statement that doesn’t make us both sound like complete idiots? “Yeah, I know it’s Monday, Todd. Saw that on my calendar just this morning. Wasn’t sure, though, so thanks for clarifying. Tomorrow, I’m going to assume, will be Tuesday, and then Wednesday, and then we’ll be able to talk about how this hellscape of a week is half over.”

Whose life is that bad in this country that they seriously can’t wait for the weekend? If you have a job where you even have a weekend, you’re doing all right. Shut up. 

You think homeless people walk around telling other homeless people what day of the damn week it is? It doesn’t matter. There is no day of the week when you’re homeless! Those are the people who should actually be telling other homeless people what day it is, because they don’t have a calendar.

Children know better than to talk like this. Children would never, ever, say to another child, “We made it to Wednesday, Carl. Thank God we’re halfway there because I haven’t had a cookie all week!”

No. Children talk about actual interesting things, like superhero movies or their pets throwing up on the carpet or where they went over the summer. Not calendar dates!

Stop telling other grownups what day it is. We all have calendars in our pockets. No more days! 

Besides that, when you’re a grown up with actual kids in your house, there is no such thing as a weekend, anyway. That’s your job, the kids. Making sure the kids are fed, driving them to swim meets, yard work, house work, telling them to get off their IPADS. That’s the work. Don’t tell me “Thank God it’s Friday,” because I’m not.

No, the reason we say things like, “Welp, one more day,” is because we’ve already said “Good morning,” and it’s not time to leave yet. When it’s time to leave, we can say things like, “See ya’ tomorrow,” or “Have a good evening,” but it’s that middle-of-the-day meeting in the hallway or the break room or whatever that throws us, you know. It’s that gray conversation area, because we don’t have time to have an actual conversation, but we don’t want to be a jerk, so we just spout out random days of the week.

“Whooo. Thursday, huh?”

Seriously?

We’re smarter than this, though, right? We’re adults. We don’t need to be so lame.

So, I propose a solution. After “good morning,” when you see someone at work, instead of telling another grown human what day it is, you say the name of an actor or actress. Then that person has five seconds to respond with the name of a movie or television show that the actor or actress has been in.

If they respond correctly within the allotted time, they get a thumbs up. That’s it. No need for chit chat, small talk, we’re all busy, keep moving. Just a thumbs up.

If they get it wrong, or they can’t make it in five second, you give them a thumbs down and tell them they need to try harder. That’s it. Keep moving. 

No more days of the week. We got this.

 

Pension

 

Dear MCU,

We love your programming, thanks. Countless hours have been spent in our home these last few years just not talking to each other, all enjoying the same show. However, I do have a question about how finances work in your imaginary universe. 

So, to clarify,  Earth’s mightiest heroes, the Avengers, who have saved the world—repeatedly—basically function as a volunteer fire department?

The training, the equipment, room and board, are financed by Stark Enterprises, but there is no paycheck? There is no pension? They get a per diem while abroad, but nothing to put in the bank?

Steve Rogers—who helped saved humanity in not one but two different centuries—can barely afford an apartment in Brooklyn?

Sam Wilson—who was snapped out of existence for a half decade and then immediately returns to action at significant life and limb—cannot borrow enough money to save his sister’s business?

That makes me sad. 

Sincerely,

Someone with Too Much Time on their Hands

O

I have O blood, which basically means I am a borderline superhero…when I share. It had been awhile since I’d donated, though, but today was the day I was going to help save not one life or even two, but three entire lives. (I have no idea how this math works but it sounds good on paper.)

I scheduled myself a 3:45 appointment and spent the day keeping well hydrated and nourished and even scarfed down a bag of M&Ms on the way there just to be safe. I had my temperature checked, answered all the appropriate questions—“No I did not get a blood transfusion while visiting the Falkland Islands between 1980-and last week,”— and passed my iron test with a respectable number I can't remember. Another temperature check and we were ready to go.

“Left arm.” I answered when the nurse asked which one.  I might not be the new faux Captain America, but I was still feeling pretty heroic.

Now, for those who have not donated, the next few minutes, in my opinion, are actually the worst part of the experience. The sterilization, the tying of the arm, the finding of the vein; it’s all so drawn out and a bit nauseating. Once the needle is placed and the blood starts flowing, the experience can be relaxing, in a weird, “I’m losing oxygen” kind of way.

Today was different, though.

Today, the waiting was not the worst part. The worst part, by far, was when the nurse poked the needle into my arm and nothing came out.  Like, not a drop. I watched the plastic tubing, waiting for it to turn crimson, but instead it just stayed…plastic.

I don’t know if she missed the vein or I’m partially dead on the left side of my body, but there was no blood coming out of my left arm.

“Oh, shoot…I am so sorry.”

She called for another phlebotomist, who asked me if I wanted her to try to find a vein that might work on my right arm.

“No…I’m a…I’m going to leave.”

And I did.

Eventually.

But that needle was just kind of sticking out of my arm for another two or three minutes while they canceled everything out.

“Thanks for coming in…feel free to grab some…food and a… a t-shirt on your way out.”

I didn’t, though. I hadn’t earned that t-shirt, or those snacks.

I’ll get another chance though…and five emails a week reminding me to donate until I do.

 

Breaking the Press

 

I had some experiences with my middle child over the weekend that strongly suggest  I need to focus less on conversations based around MCU Easter eggs and more on actual things.

We were removing a pretend telescope from the playset before the neighborhood wasps (not WASPS) had a chance to move in again for the season. The toy was gone, but now remained the screw that had secured it, just waiting to snag someone’s jacket or worse.

“We’ll need to go get the drill to screw that in.”  I suggested.

“Why don’t we just hammer it?”

“Well, it’s not a nail.”

“So? I have the hammer right here.”

“Yeah, but it’s a screw, so we need to screw it, not hammer it.”

“Can I use the drill?”

“Yes.”

Later that morning we were doing some low key pruning, and he asked to use the saw on an already downed branch.

“Sure thing.”

Instead of taking the tool and using it as a saw by, well, sawing, he instead tried to slice the branch in two I guess by just pressing down on it like some kind of martial arts warm up. (I’m still partially convinced this move was designed to mess with my head.) Regardless, I gave him a quick tutorial and the sawing commenced.

It’s my fault, thought. It’s not something they learn in swim practice.

Finally, this afternoon we were watching a debacle of a basketball game on TV, and I lamented the offense’s inability to break the defense’s press.

“Break the what?”

“Their press.”

“What’s a press?”

“It’s a…a defense…thing.”

In conclusion, if your kid doesn't know not to hammer screws or how to break a half-court press, that's on you. 

Nobody said parenting was easy.

Castle Rock

 

We’re finishing up “The Importance of Being Earnest” in my Intro to Lit class, and yesterday we were discussing Oscar Wilde’s thoughts on human nature.

“The more one analyses people,” Wilde writes, “the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature.”

With a room full of seniors only two months away from graduation but seven months into the weirdest school year ever—hopefully—you can imagine that the conversation was, at times, animated.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to analyze humans myself over the last thirteen or so months, and I have made it, finally, to about the same spot Mr. Wilde did over a century ago.

What’s the point?

Humans, in general, usually act like humans.

That’s one reason studying literature is so interesting, because human behavior is usually predictable, whether we’re reading about a cursed king from ancient Thebes or a tribe of insane children on a tropical island or a future fireman having doubts about his profession. The setting and plots may change, but the characters are often chillingly familiar.

For example, I’ve been reminded over the last thirteen months that humans have a tendency to take advice from other humans who happen to share the same beliefs.

Humans seem to listen to other humans who reinforce what they think they already know.

And I’m just as guilty as anyone else.

It turns out evidence and reason are rarely a match for tribal allegiance.

Just ask Piggy.