Sunday, March 15, 2015

Blog Rock

I used to have such interesting debates on the internet. Sure, they often became contentious and descended into personal attacks. But they were interesting.

Then I grew up. 

Now I'm so stinkin' afraid of offending anyone I can't tell anyone what I believe or think without great anxiety.

No, it's worse than that. Not only can't I tell anyone what I believe or think, now even merely considering issues which are highly charged brings to my mind the faces and words of countless relatives, friends, and acquaintances who would think ill of me for misapprehending or dismissing a point about which they feel strongly.

Yet I have this blog, and every now and then I work up the gumption to write something on it. But who wants to read a blog where the person never says anything that could be disagreed with or thought ignorant? I don't, at least. 

Talking with my wife this morning, I compared my predicament to reading a blog written by a rock. Nobody's ever offended by rocks. If you've ever heard a rock give a controversial opinion or state an unpopular idea, you're out of your mind. Rocks don't talk. But rocks don't blog either, and even if they did nobody would read their blogs.

Rock: Day #1 - still sitting here. 

Rock: Day #2 - still sitting here.

Rock: Day #3 - still... sitting... right here.

Rock: Day #4 - someone stepped on me! I wobbled a bit, now I'm just sitting here again.

And so it would go. And no one would read that blog.

But what about family and friends and acquaintances? What about current and potential future employers who can Google your name? What about a possible future dictatorial, totalitarian, repressive regime? There are endless ways what you say on the internet could come back to haunt you.

Are any of those good reasons to not form, hold to, or communicate opinions, though?

The younger me would be disgusted at the thought, and often was when he encountered it. That Garrett railed against cowards and flatterers and wishy-washy people who he felt were spineless equivocators. Whatever happened to that guy?

Like I say - growing up happened. Or did it? 

Read a guy like Matt Walsh. That guy has guts. He ponders, he forms opinions. He has convictions and opinions and (gasp) he communicates them! 

That could be me. I used to be like Matt Walsh. And when I was, there was an indescribable confidence and self-respect in my possession which enabled me to tell you where I stood on issues and questions. There was a boldness and a firmness of resolve. My thoughts and beliefs mattered to me. My evaluations of things were quick and measured. And my faith informed all my contemplation and communication. But it wasn't enough for me to develop my own views on things. I wanted to influence you. I wanted to draw you into a consideration of deep and meaningful questions, to provoke you to live on purpose, understanding the matters at hand. 

So again, what happened?

Well, for starters, a lot of my bold conversation ticked people off. Who did I think I was to have all these views on things? Only someone with delusions of grandeur would dare to grapple with big issues and do so with authority or confidence.

But that's just it. How would the great men of history have done anything worthwhile if they had resigned themselves to quiet, mindless, vacillating? Nothing great or significant would ever have happened in the history of mankind if all men were content with mediocrity and blandness of ideas.

So who cares if someone disagrees with or is offended by what you say? Fear of being ostracized isn't a good enough reason to swear off having, or stating, your views. And, quite honestly, people need to not be so easily offended. 

The Search for a Church

Next month marks one year since my family moved to Sidney, Montana. I suppose it's about time for us to find a home church here.

Don't misunderstand me, we've tried to find a church. As Christians, my wife and I know the Bible says "Do not neglect the assembling of yourselves together" (Hebrews 10:25). And besides just not wanting to disobey a command of the Scriptures, we sincerely do want to belong to a community of believers again.

Before we moved to Montana three years ago, we were very much involved in a seeker-friendly church in Hillsboro, Ohio. Lauren and I both enjoyed our small groups, and I helped out with multimedia, building slideshows for Sunday morning services and running them. When we moved to Glendive, we again got involved in a local church and built relationships, though not as much as back in Ohio due to living half hour away from our church as opposed to up the block.

Since moving to Sidney, we've visited three local churches, attending one of them for several weeks. We just haven't felt "comfortable" with any of our options. 

And I cringe to use that word - "comfortable." Every time Lauren and I discuss the churches in Sidney, I pause before using that word. The Christian life isn't about comfort, is it? Yes and no. It is and it isn't.

If what makes you comfortable is wickedness and self-indulgence, then pursuing comfort is going to interfere with rather than facilitate the righteous life God has called you to in Christ Jesus. If, on the other hand, spiritual torpor and exalting human philosophy and opinion and tradition over God's Word makes you spiritually uncomfortable, it can be 'OK' to let your discomfort be important to you.

But what happens when you're in a town where you don't feel comfortable attending any of the local churches, but you also don't feel comfortable staying home? 

There's the third option of expanding your search radius and attending a more distant church you feel comfortable with, and we certainly have done that before. Indeed, in Ohio we drove an hour each way for a while to attend our seeker-friendly church in Hillsboro, and in Glendive we had no choice but to drive since we were living in the countryside, a half an hour's drive from any church. But I don't feel particularly "comfortable" with commuting long distance to attend a church. The reason being simple - the longer the commute to a church, the harder it is to get involved in a meaningful way in the lives of your fellow believers, which seems, after all, like one of the major reasons to be part of a church in the first place.

If you drive a long way to attend a church you like, but you're not really able to get involved in the lives of the believers there, why are you going? To hear the preaching? There are podcasts galore for that. To check a box legalistically, marking off attendance for the sake of attendance? That seems worse than worthless.

Our three options are each unsuitable and "uncomfortable." So what do we do? That question has been plaguing me for the past year.

To further complicate matters, my schedule for work has me working every other Sunday. And with five young children, my wife isn't exactly keen on visiting churches without me. If our kiddos are feeling ornery and not particularly obedient on a Sunday where she attends and I'm not there, the potential for mayhem and embarrassment is very real. But attending every other week, or visiting new churches every other week - it definitely slows the process down.

Sunday, January 18, 2015

American Sniper: Reflections on the American War on Terror

Last night I had the privilege of watching the just released, highly acclaimed film American Sniper, an adaptation of an autobiography by the same title about Navy SEAL Chris Kyle, "the deadliest sniper in American military history." Sitting beside me were my brother, a United States Marine, and two brothers-in-law, one of them an Army veteran. 

Carmike Cinemas, the theater in Minot, North Dakota was packed full. Were it not for empty seats in the front row, we might not have been able to find any seats. 

Before seeing the film, the four of us visited a local shooting range and got some target practice in, taking advantage of some warmer weather and clear skies to exercise our 2nd Amendment rights. 

But before hitting the range, we visited the shopping mall, wherein lies the theater, and stopped in at Scheels sporting goods store so I could pick up a warmer shirt for wearing outdoors for a few hours. While we were visiting Scheels, right next door to the theater, we were amazed at the long line of people at the ticket counter, stretching across the walkways and around the theater. Everyone and their brother was there to see American Sniper at 2 o'clock in the afternoon on a Saturday. An even longer line was there when we exited the 5:05 showing after watching the film.

Seeing so many people eager to watch this movie was an encouraging surprise to me, somehow. Sure, everything I had read and heard on the radio was positive, to say the least. But at 28 years old, I have seen how the USA transformed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, watched two brothers-in-law join the Army and my younger brother join the Marine Corps. Between the three of them, I've heard stories of deployments to both Afghanistan and Iraq. I have witnessed the surges of patriotism and of war weariness in this nation, and listened to the speeches of presidents, Bush and Obama, and the ceaseless nit-picking and exhortations of pundits and journalists and politicians, telling Americans at first to be proud of their national heritage and character and emboldening them to fight evil, and then later shaming Americans at home and abroad for having done just that, all but accusing the United States of being a worse evil than the murderers who have set their faces against every free citizen. 

Watching the pendulum swing back from ardent support of to vehement opposition to fighting the terrorists in a meaningful way has been personally disheartening for me. No, the valiant and self-sacrificing efforts of our military personnel have not made me ashamed to be an American, but the weak-kneed voices calling for retreat from and appeasement of terrorists has brought me very close, causing me to wonder whether perhaps those voices have come to represent most closely what and who America is now. 

Yes, I was pleasantly surprised and encouraged last night to see so many people lining up to watch American Sniper, a movie which gives a refreshing vignette of the American Global War on Terror, hoping as I do that the loud cowards boldly espousing their lack of bravery, all the while hiding behind claims that they speak for the majority, do not really speak for America.

After reading American Sniper several weeks ago, and now even moreso after seeing the film made from that book, I hope Chris Kyle represents what America has been, is, and will continue to be. I hope the people who not only lined up to buy tickets to see the movie about his life, but who also sat quietly through the credits rolling at the end of this film, then applauded before departing, represent who we really are as a people.

By God, I hope we are still a courageous people who hate evil and oppression and injustice, who will actively oppose wicked men with firm resolve, and who will celebrate and support those who stand in the gap between the innocent and those who would, if left unchecked, prey upon and enslave, if not outright butcher them. I hope we are a nation that promotes and celebrates and honors the sheep dog, and does not and will never submit to the wolf, or justify his actions, or seek to appease him while we tremble and think only of saving our own necks. If we are an America like that, I can be proud to be a citizen of a great nation. If that's what America is and will be, I am proud to be an American, because that's the kind of America I want to live in and be a part of. That's the sort of nation in which I can be proud to have my four sons grow into men.

American Sniper is a war story, no doubt. But hopefully this popularity it currently enjoys at its release is not derived from this society's bloodlust or love of violence. War is not just what happens on a distant battlefield, not just a series of violent actions, not merely a collection of statistics regarding persons killing, killed, and wounded. War deeply affects real people, and not only in physical ways. There are deep traumas which the mind and the soul suffers in partaking of, participating in, and witnessing war. Every warfighter has a mother and father, many have siblings and spouses and children, and all have friends and acquaintances. And war affects all these people, not only when their loved ones are killed and bodily maimed on the battlefield, but also in the inescapable absences from family, community, and society which their deployment to battlefields require.

"Please bring them home safely" is the sincere prayer of every loving friend and family member of a warfighter. But when our military servicemembers do come home in apparent good health, by God's grace, with all their limbs and five senses apparently intact, the wounds that cannot be seen still need mending. And hopefully, by God's grace, we have reserved a place for them in our hearts, in our homes, and in our communities. Hopefully we have not allowed what they left behind to fall into disrepair, abandoning the principles which they left to fight for and defend.

It is a great shame that many American veterans are homeless and jobless. And while we argued and debated back home, with hollow platitudes and vague allusions to what was the most practical strategy, while we went back and forth with one another about whether we should be fighting this or that war, or whether we were fighting our wars in the right way, these men and women were in harm's way, and many of them were harmed. While they dodged bullets and confronted evil men for us, we tended to our private lives and enjoyed the comforts which the Lord Almighty has blessed us with. But have we forgotten those who sacrificed to guard us from those who would rob and destroy us? 

I hope American Sniper brings us back into sober remembrance of and appreciation for the hardships our military and its families undertook on our behalf. Regardless the motives of various politicians and talking heads, these men and women who served did so with us in mind, remembering and loving us from afar, and that is a great and noble thing worthy of our recognition and gratitude.

In the words of our savior, "Greater love has no man than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends." And that's what the best of them did. Politicians and the elite of our country may or may not have been so noble or self-sacrificing, may or may not have taken advantage of crises or mismanaged their responses to them, but the best of these military men and women set aside their private aspirations, hopes, and dreams for a time at least, knowing that they might never return to the lives they were putting on hold. 

We see that in American Sniper, that some men and women were shot and blown to pieces, and that the rest had to watch it happen before going home to try and reconcile what they had experienced. We see those who survived lifting and carrying their fallen brothers from those who would butcher them, driving their comrades to those who would mend their wounds and give them rest.

May we as Americans be those who rescue, mend, and give rest to those who have been harmed, and may we never forget them or leave them behind. So help us God.

Friday, December 19, 2014

As I drive around the North Dakota countryside, checking oil and gas wells, I enjoy listening to audiobooks on Audible.

In the past few weeks I've made it through a number of fascinating titles - Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.; American Sniper; Bill O'Reilly's titles, Killing Patton and Killing Kennedy; The Shadow Factory, a history of the NSA since the September 11 attacks; 1493, a fascinating followup to Charles C. Mann's engrossing 1491, dealing with what the world was like after the Americas were explored, colonized, and conquered by Europeans, and a handful of other historical and biographical works.




Currently I'm enjoying Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts, a 33 hour epic telling of one of the world's most famous figures, and I've been struck as I've listened to his story. Not only did Bonaparte take the world by storm, but he did so at a relatively young age. By age 30 he had installed himself as First Consul of the French Republic.




Alexander the Great, one of Napoleon's heroes, died at the age of 32, having conquered one of the largest empires the world has ever known.




By 30, John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was at the helm of Standard Oil, the largest corporation in America, founded with $1 million in capital.

It leaves me wondering. What have I accomplished at 28?


Sunday, June 29, 2014

Re: Homeschoolers Need Not Apply

I was reading something posted to Facebook this morning (Charisma Magazine Online Article - Fortune 500 Company: Homeschoolers Need Not Apply) regarding NiSource, an Indiana energy distribution company, having decided to commit to not hiring homeschoolers.



As I read the article, an interesting point was made with regards to Common Core in it which a high school friend of mine who is now a teacher herself commented on, explaining that she doesn't see the problem with Common Core, and that homeschoolers shouldn't have any trouble meeting the minimum standards which Common Core lays out. She also asked what home schooling standards are and provided a link to the Common Core website, I presume for the purpose of allowing me to familiarize myself with details about it which are not negative or critical. See below the response I wrote to her:

__________________________________________________

That's the thing. "Home schooling standards" aren't a universal, one-size-fits-all, across the board monolith that anyone can point to and make broad assumptions about. And I can see how that might be argued against by some as being a significant downside to home education, but as I and many others see it, the decentralized nature of home education is a great deal of the beauty and the strength of it.

I honestly am not intimately familiar with Common Core, but I have read articles and heard radio programs that gave specific examples of parents being arrested at parent-teacher conferences for asking questions, voicing their concerns, or for taking umbrage at specific homework or reading assignments, textbook lessons, how certain specifics of the standards were chosen, how their child's progress will be measured and tracked and what it will be used for, etc. When I see parents being arrested for questioning or disagreeing with Common Core, that right there tells me all I feel I need to know to be opposed to the thing.

Don't misunderstand me. I can imagine scenarios in which a parent threatening violence would be justifiably removed from a public event by law enforcement. But the numerous videos I've seen on the internet of parents being arrested at parent-teacher conferences related to Common Core didn't show any indication of those parents having been violent or threatening, unreasonable, etc. Those videos I've seen show parents being punished, humiliated, and intimidated for earnestly attempting to have a say about how their children are being educated. Parents across the country are being treated in a way that implies that it's their job to shut up and salute, and that any inconvenient assertion of their rights which might interfere with the roll-out of this Common Core scheme is not to be tolerated. 

From what I've seen in those videos, we all need to be deeply concerned about how intrusive, controlling, domineering, and tyrannical our government has become and continues to become.

My children do not belong to the state. My sons and daughter are not merely being babysat by Lauren and I while we wait for them to mature into adulthood when they can quietly, submissively join in building the economy. 

Children are primarily their parents' responsibility, not the government's, and I reject the notion that someone who has attended formal training and indoctrination in how to shepherd a class of dozens of children toward a State dictated end-goal is inherently superior to myself or my wife in their appreciation of my child's intellectual, emotional, spiritual, or physical needs. Forgive me, but I don't see why I should assume that they will inevitably do a superior job of teaching my children reading, math, science, history, etc.

Quite the contrary, I feel confident that the statistics in the U.S. support my assertion that homeschooling parents are either outperforming the professional teachers in the public schools in their ability to educate their students. That, or else the professional training and structure is a moot point.

Home educated students, on average, consistently and significantly outperform their public school peers in every academic measure, in study after study after study. I would even dare say that quite often the social intelligence of homeschoolers is also superior to that of their public school peers. Yes, public schoolers have a lot more practice interacting with their own age group, but homeschoolers are getting individual one-on-one attention for much more of the day than one child in a sea of public education could hope to, and the ability to carry on an adult conversation is a side-effect of this.

It is my sincerely held view that homeschoolers are receiving a superior education experience to their public school peers, not merely with regards to the academic subjects they study, but this "socialization" which we are told is the primary downside of home schooling is, as far as I'm concerned, actually another advantage which homeschoolers have more-so, relatively speaking, to the kids in public schools. 

For instance, how often do you hear about homeschooled children shooting up their classmates and teachers? So when someone asks me what the problem with Common Core is, I feel confident in my skepticism. 

The troubling thing about Common Core is not so much the specifics of the standards themselves, which, as I've already said, I'm not an expert on. Rather, the philosophical and ideological basis on which those standards were developed, and on which they have been and will be implemented - that's what I take issue with. 

As is the case in almost every conceivable aspect of our lives as Americans today, the government increasingly gives us the fig leaf of saying that we own the details of our lives, that we are "free", while at the same time adding innumerable and repressive regulations which more profoundly and more convincingly and constantly demonstrate that they see themselves as more ultimately the owners of those details, since they presume the right to dictate, specify, and ultimately control them.

"The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world," as the famous William Ross Wallace poem tells us, and for the life of me I can't see why we should entrust the job of rocking our children's cradles to the State. Can you?

Unfortunately, our government is demonstrating daily that an ever-increasing, seemingly endless number and variety of measures and efforts designed to restrict, coerce, and manipulate us all today is not sufficient for them. They want to have complete and unfettered control tomorrow also, over what and how the next generation will think. By having dictated all of education, they will then have even more complete control of that coming generation than they have over this one, or were able to over the previous.

I find that to be a very troubling and unsuitable circumstance, one which I feel we must navigate with great care, and which we must not allow to be cemented into place.

That said, as far as Common Core does or does not currently relate to the hiring decisions which NiSource made with regards to homeschoolers (which I realize was what the article I linked to at the top of this post was discussing, having gotten somewhat, but not really, off-topic), I think it's worth me saying that we need to not be so limited in our evaluations of these things - Common Core, immigration policy, the right to privacy, religious liberty, etc. - that we only consider what is currently obvious and direct about what's being implemented or proposed. 

To the contrary, we must, when evaluating these developments in society - in education, the economy, foreign affairs, civil liberties, religious liberty, etc. - weigh and consider the potential future implications for precedents carelessly set now, and how these implications might be combined in the future to produce awful and regrettable outcomes for us and our descendants

I am concerned that, in these things, chains and shackles and prison bars have been and are being constructed which will entrap us and our families and our fellow citizens, which will limit our freedoms and our liberty, and which will increasingly make us more and more the slaves which we look back on history with condescension and are appalled by the condition of.

A single bar does not a prison make, but a prison isn't made in a day either. It takes time, is planned out and built piece by piece over time. Our government now, I am sincerely and wholeheartedly convinced, is willing to accept collateral damage in the pursuit of a Utopian vision for the future. And if that means destroying some things, some people getting hurt, or severely restricting those who might oppose them, they will regulate, manipulate, lie to, and in all ways oppose and castigate and vilify those who are not helping them to achieve their vision for a Utopian future.

I, for one, would rather maintain  and advocate liberty and independence for myself and my family than accept these measures which are being imposed upon us in America.

For instance, I'd like to keep more of my tax money in my own pocket, to be spent as I see fit, instead of paying it to our government so it can be used to fund foreign armies in Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan. 

...Or abortion clinics and public schools here in the U.S., where if our children are not murdered as infants, they are misled and neglected and set adrift intellectually and spiritually.

...Or an internal revenue service here which has been shown to officially punish American citizens who held political positions which were deemed inconvenient to the current administration's efforts and agenda. 

...Or an NSA which is conducting a massive spying operation on American citizens, treating us all as if we are guilty until proven innocent, where it is more true than ever before that "anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." 

...Or the militarized police forces which aggressively conduct no-knock raids with the most trivial and tenuous of justification, injuring innocent men, women, and children, and causing Americans to feel that they are no longer really free in their own nation.

...Or lavish (and frequent) vacations taken by our President and his family to all corners of the globe.

Instead of paying for those things with my tax money, I'd rather spend the money I've earned as a free man would, making independent determinations according to his conscience, values, beliefs, and goals. 

I'd rather spend my own money, for instance, on educational opportunities and resources which I feel and am convinced and have good reason to believe are actually and directly beneficial to my children and our family. By contrast, I'd rather not helplessly and dumbly and meekly give my money over to our government to make all these determinations for me and my children as to what is best for us.

Where is $500 of my money better spent? On taxes that pay administrative fees for implementing a top-down, one-size-fits-all, dictatorial approach to education like Common Core? Or in taking my family on a trip to Yellowstone National Park? 

Where is $8 of my money better spent, on taxes that pay for the coffee and creamer for the teachers' lounge at the local public school, or on a subscription to Netflix where I can select educational titles for my children to watch which help supplement their coursework and enrich their understanding of the subject matter?

The problem with Common Core is not merely what it is, but more importantly what it isn't. What it isn't is my wife and I making decisions about how to educate our children, taking responsibility for the little people God gave us to parent and raise, and being good stewards of their hearts and minds, educating them to live happy, healthy, and holy lives in service to Him.

And beyond that, I have zero confidence in the American government to do the moral, godly, or honest thing with regards to things which only indirectly affect my family and I. So why in God's name would I entrust them directly with my children, to do what's best for them? Why would I place my children in their hands, or allow them to suggest that my role is only secondary and coincidental?

No, when it comes to the public schools, I don't experience a surplus of confidence. It's obvious that something is profoundly and deeply broken there when I hear about school shootings, explicit and immoral sex-ed classes, fervent and aggressive secularization, suspensions over pop tarts being eaten into the shape of guns, bullying that drives children to commit suicide, godlessness, the advocacy and normalization of sexual immorality and abortion, scandals involving teachers having sex with their students, the teaching of Darwinian origins which tells children that we as a species originated from lower life forms over millions upon millions of years of death and dying and randomness, and that God may have been involved somehow if we want to believe that, but that the Bible is essentially a lie, unreliable and superstitious, inconvenient nonsense.

These things are rampant and, at least as it seems to me from my vantage point looking in from the outside, inherent to the philosophy and methodology under which the public education system is administrated. So, no, I don't trust our government to establish good and healthy and wise standards in Common Core which I would want to subject my children to. Look at what they've accomplished so far with the education system, and how can you be inspired to trust to their future efforts?

The proponents of Common Core and government dictated education systems may say that they have thus far not succeeded because they had not enough power and control before, but I am convinced that they had rather too much power and control, and that they should have less of both rather than more.



Friday, March 28, 2014

America's Response to Boys and Childhood Masculinity




“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”


― C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man




My suspicion is that our public education system is increasingly being setup and oriented to focus on quantifying the development of children at younger ages, and to direct those children towards activities in which they can be measured, tested, and ranked relative to their peers - for instance, "teaching to the test." I think in such an environment of increasing pressure to conform to a standardized system, and to engage in things which can be converted neatly into a spreadsheet to submit to the authorities for review of one's performance as an educator or administrator of educators, there is a pivot or shift away from those activities which would engage young boys and allow them to feel they are free to assert themselves, explore, play, have adventures, and focus their energies in a positive direction.

That isn't even to speak of the mindset which has little boys being suspended for eating their Pop Tarts into the shape of a gun. As it seems to me, our culture has become so preoccupied with preventing another Columbine that much of the rambunctiousness and rowdiness of masculine childhood and adolescence is being quietly and subtly demonized in a misguided and disproportionate reaction to and attempt at prevention of school shootings.

Further, I think feminism has a part to play, insofar as there seems to be a conscious resistance to and attempt at reversing and counteracting societal norms with regards to gender which feminism sees as counterproductive towards egalitarian visions for the future. In short, little girls are getting encouragement to be assertive and reach their potential as leaders, and little boys are getting conscious feminizing out of a misguided attempt to make society more equal.

The problem with that being if little boys and little girls are hardwired differently, generally speaking, and if they are supposed to be permitted and encouraged to thrive along the lines of which they were created. It is my position that little boys have been endowed by their Creator with certain relative qualities which it's our job as parents and other authority figures to celebrate and guide, not suppress, amputate, reverse, or punish.


And it isn't just a waste of time, it's likely also a very great frustration to little boys, who then respond to these efforts to penalize and reverse their masculine nature by acting out and acting up.

Fathers not being present has very real and dramatic implications for the imparting of even reasonable instruction which isn't attempting a sort of gender-bending. The subconscious implication for a young boy who only ever receives instruction and guidance from a mother-figure is that she doesn't understand first-hand what it is he needs to prepare for: namely, manhood. She's a woman, so she could give this little boy guidance on what to expect if he were a girl, but the little boy knows he's not a girl, and if he's healthy he doesn't want to become a girl. Best case scenario, if the little boy is only receiving instruction from a mother-figure, with no father-figure consistently and reliably present, all that instruction is discounted in his mind because he's trying to leave himself an exit in case it turns out at some point that authentic masculinity is to be found along some other path than the one he's being told to follow.

Meanwhile, our society sees a little boy who's frustrated, distracted, defiant, and wayward; and if you throw in a lack of moral instruction and spiritual authority, a refusal of parents to administer corporal penalties (i.e. - spanking), or a confusion about when and how and why to administer corporal penalties, and a lack of will and commitment to consistently apply discipline, and not only a lack of support for this from society at large, but rather an ardent opposition, what's left for that boy except for psycho-pharmacology?

It is an epic tragedy, and the long-term consequences are going to be dire, I'm afraid.

I think another handicap to a boy receiving only mother-figure instruction is that it tends to, in my experience and observations, relative to preparing a boy to someday become a man, rely heavily on negative examples of masculinity which the boy should avoid growing up to resemble, and typically lacks sufficient positive examples of masculinity which the boy should pursue and emulate.

The high divorce rate in America, and the high percentage of children (including boys) who are born out of wedlock in the U.S. - it doesn't just have implications for whether a father-figure is consistently present in that boys life to instruct and guide him. It also means that there is likely a great and powerful stigma attached in the mind of the mother-figure to the male example who does have or would have had the greatest potential for impact on the development of that little boy, and this stigma is then passed on to the son. Those sons who grow up without fathers don't just grow up in a neutral rather than positive position; rather, they start behind the 8 ball, so to speak, when it comes to having an optimistic outlook on what to expect when they reach manhood. 

The divorcee mother who resents and blames, openly or not, the boys' father who she's no longer married to due to a marital failure on one or both of their parts - this mother, intentionally or not, places a stigma on the first example of masculinity which that boy has to look up to and learn from. 

The single mother who was first impregnated, then abandoned by a dead-beat will always condemn, either by what she says of or by her silence about, that man who should have stayed and provided for and protected that family, and so again in that case the little boy is taught subtly or explicitly that he can look forward to shame, disgrace, and resentment when he grows up. Absent any positive examples of mature manhood which might enter his life, this will be all he has to go on. Even with the arrival of positive examples later down the road, however, there will always be that tinge of self-doubt relative to the infamy of his father.

And none of that even factors in the situations where the mother-figure may come to resent those masculine traits which she observes in her son which she has, consciously or not, come to associate with the husband who she is divorced from, or the sexual partner who abandoned her when she became pregnant. God forbid the mother blame the son for the sins and shortcomings of the father, but I fear this oft times happens, and its effect is not a positive one on the behavior and attitude of the boys in our culture. Women, like all people, can sometimes be vengeful creatures; and absent the father to punish, sometimes the sons are instead.

We must proactively encourage, guide, and celebrate the boys in our culture, since how we raise them today will impact greatly the kind of men we'll have in our culture tomorrow. 

Do we really want 1 in 7 men learning that their masculinity is something to tranquilize? Or what if the other 6 of 7 men look on from a distance at the 1/7th and feel compelled to either stifle themselves or risk being likewise medicated into submission? 

What will the implications be for alcohol and drug use and dependency for generations to come if we set and maintain this precedent regarding ADHD medication now?

What we need are men and women, fathers and mothers, who take responsibility for teaching and guiding their children, and the taking of that responsibility should start with figuring out what it is we're preparing our children for. My advice? Prepare your boys for manhood and your girls for womanhood.

The end goal should not be to raise a boy to adulthood who has learned (through the assistance of drugs, or out of fear of being put on drugs) to sit quietly and do his work without making a lot of noise or requiring much attention. The end goal should not be to drug a child into submission so he'll do well on tests, or at least not interfere with the other children and their tests. The end goal should not be an androgynous re-imagining of society.

No, our goal should be to raise young boys who take responsibility for themselves and those around them, and who towards that end use their God-given gifts, talents, abilities, and opportunities. Mistaking blessings for curses will be a terrible detractor from rather than benefit to this goal.

Much of my opinion on this matter has been tested and subjected to having four little boys of my own, but I suppose the "proof in the pudding," as they say, may not be fully realized until my young boys have themselves reached adulthood.

In the meantime, I find it somewhat surprising that such mainstream venues as Esquire and The New York Times are pointing out a disturbing trend which would seem to imply that America has the wrong idea about boyhood.

It isn't just as simple as the breakdown of families, though this is part of it. I say this is a part but not the sum of the matter because fathers aren't just absent from the lives of American sons, but also of American daughters.

When we diagnose with ADHD and medicate so many more American sons than daughters, I think we should conclude that there is a problem with how we view masculinity and femininity, maleness and femaleness, in our culture; there is a problem with how our views on boys and girls, men and women inform and shape the way we relate to boyhood development. Clearly there is a trend in the wrong direction which seems to indicate the need for a revision. If it were just that the fathers were absent from the lives of their children, wouldn't we see an equal rise in ADHD diagnosis for girls as for boys?

Parents leaving the raising of their children to educators is a large part of the problem. This is in part because the educators and aren't in a sufficiently advantageous position to successfully perform these duties for society, and even moreso because parents are, to the contrary, ideally positioned to do so.

An article or book like this one from Esquire comes my way, or I hear someone conversing on the subject, and I feel the need to attempt to reverse the societal trend, "being the change I wish to see in the world" as Ghandi so famously advised, by speaking with confidence as a parent myself, and taking my responsibility as a parent seriously; by proving with my confident assertions that a parent can and should observe carefully the trends of society, attempt earnestly to make sense of them, and think soberly and carefully about the impact these trends have and will have on their children, and respond accordingly and appropriately.

The initial push-back will likely be that to do so requires calling into question what many parents and authority figures have chosen to do in America. But I ask you this: How else can we as parents effectively guide our children in a way which will prepare them to live as adults in the world, as it is now and as it is swiftly becoming, unless we observe openly and honestly the pitfalls as well as the prizes which are inherent to our society?

Those who refuse to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. And how will we know which choices in our society were mistakes unless we're willing to take an open and honest look at the results we're seeing in the present? It may be difficult, but the future of our sons (and daughters) is worth it.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

PRISM and Me

I keep thinking about this whole PRISM scandal coming out recently, especially because I'm a very opinionated person, and am quite active on the internet in sharing my opinions via Facebook, my blog, etc.

Two things: 1) I'm not surprised to learn about PRISM - actually, I'd be more surprised if there weren't a program like that in place; 2) How much more extensive are these covert operations than we know?

The thing about PRISM (our government mining personal, private online data from Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.) is that it's most concerning in conjunction with the IRS scandal, given that we know conservative groups and individuals were especially targeted and given a hard time when seeking non-profit tax status, and all because they were active in disagreeing with some of the policies of our President, policies which they viewed as detrimental to the health and safety of our nation.

What I mean is, how troubling is it to think that under that same administration, individual American citizens might have their private correspondence, photos, posts, etc. looked through without their knowledge, or that they might even face hassles in real life for the opinions and beliefs they shared in their virtual life? Surely there is no such thing as privacy anymore; I do hope there is still such a thing as liberty.