This Concerns Kidnapping! Read Immediately!

Wow. No, you are no­­­t dreaming. It’s time for another installment of Blog You Like A Hurricane. (You didn’t remember it existed? You never knew it existed? You faintly recollect it showing up on your News Feed one day in 2011 but never bothered to read it? You don't fool me!). 

Today let’s talk about……..child abductions! It’s February. I’m currently wintering in the historic waterfront city of Hartford, CT. If anyone has a more cheerful topic, I’m all ears.

Actually let’s talk about fear of abductions. This week a coworker said her 10 year old son is having training on how to steer clear of potential pedophiles. This seems crazy to me. I don’t think anything like this was ever thought of when I was that age. Fire drill procedures were the only training against a potential disaster I can recall. Rather than getting scared half to death, I’m hoping the kids will just treat it as a big joke. (Like we treated fire drills. The school might catch on fire and we could all die if we don't learn to walk single file? OK, Boomer). And I know that’s how everyone treated sex ed too—which, if I remember didn’t take place until high school. Um, the cat was kind of out of the bag by then. I mean we didn’t have the Internet but we did have cable TV and magazines and older kids who were actively dedicated to corrupting the impressionable minds of their juniors.

Part of the kidnapping fear may lie in misleading headlines. There is a difference between “missing children” and abducted children. Most missing children are teen runaways and most abducted minors are abducted by a family member who doesn’t have legal guardian rights over them. But most people’s primary fear is about strangers kidnapping kids, isn’t it? Those cases are 0.1 percent of missing children cases. There’s about 100 kids under 17 abducted by a stranger per year out of 84 million kids. And most are teens. and 90 percent of them come home. Children under the age of 12 are practically never kidnapped by strangers. By comparison, 4,000 kids aged 18 and under die in car accidents per year. 2,500 kids die from firearm injuries. Cancer kills 1,800 kids.  

So as a threat, stranger kidnappings barely register on the radar screen. I don’t want to say parents are being irrational and paranoid. It’s not unreasonable to say that unless you can know that zero kids are kidnapped, you can’t feel safe. But it is interesting, isn’t it? We haven’t raised the age for kids to get driver’s licenses or banned kids from riding in cars. We haven’t passed laws banning guns from being in any home with a child. But it almost seems we have completely reorganized childhood around the fear of strangers kidnapping children.  

Of course movies and shows probably don’t help. I love the show Stranger Things but what was season 1 about? Children getting abducted by strangers! Andis whole widespread fear apparently has its origins in a 1983 made for TV movie called Adam. Adam is kidnapped and murdered. Based on a true story. It was watched by 38 million people on its first airing and rebroadcast in 1984 and 1985. Each time a list of missing children was listed with a phone number to call with any info. Adam’s father was John Walsh---later the host of America’s Most Wanted. The only thing I really remember about that show was John's habit of referring to any criminal as "this punk" like Dirty Harry. 

Then beginning in 1984 there were the milk carton kids. Have you seen this child? But for all of that campaign’s attempt to raise awareness of stranger danger, many of the missing milk carton kids were abducted by estranged family members, not strangers. But the milk cartons somehow didn’t cause people to fear their family more, only strangers.  

Oh….and of course abduction fears seem almost inextricably linked with pedophile fears. Here too the risk is often misplaced. Children are far more likely to be molested by—you guessed it-- a family member than a stranger.   

But again, does anything I’m saying matter? The fact that these cases, however rare, do happen instill such a terror and panic in parents that there’s just no fighting it? But it's undeniable: if we are guided by the facts, we will start to fear family members more and strangers less. 

But fear of the latter seems to have changed the way we raise children. I know this much: when I was a kid a kidnapper would have had ample opportunity to nab me. I walked to and from the bus stop from as early an age as I can remember. I would ride my bike around the neighborhood often by myself, sometimes with other kids. We would go for walks through the neighborhood and wander through the woods. Are you sitting down? Sometimes we got lost in the woods! All without a single adult to be seen. And not a single adult had any technological way to contact us. If we went to the mall, I would go my own way and meet my mom at an agreed upon time from a pretty early age. I was into the record store and the video store and the bookstore as opposed to, you know, women’s clothing stores and flower shops. I can remember my brother and I seeing Return Of The Jedi in the theaters while my mom went to see Flashdance I think. I was 10. But what was going to happen to you in a movie theater? Innocent times indeed.

And during adolescence, it was all about the parties in the woods for many Gen Xers. These were sophisticated grain alcohol tastings. At night. The bonfire providing the only light. Again, zero adult supervision—unless the cops showed up and broke it up. That peppermint schnapps or Purple Passion wasn’t going to pour itself out.

But I was never once scared by any of these things. As a kid I was more afraid of ghosts under the bed than getting kidnapped. As a teenager I was scared of rabies after reading about it for biology class, but zero stranger fear to speak of. And why would I? I lived in Ellington, CT. A town with a ridiculously low crime rate. Obviously, nothing was going to happen to me. In "bucolic" Ellington, the most famous story of a child coming to a bad end involved Samuel Knight: run over by a wheelbarrow. Stay away from wheelbarrows and you would live happily ever after. 

And I think most parents across America believed the same thing. Yes, the made for TV movies and milk carton brigades were slowly beginning to erode confidence, but mass panic hadn’t sunk in yet. The Suburban Dream was still alive. This is why you lived in the suburbs. Good, safe schools and a safe town where you could let your kids play and wander freely without any worry. Just be home in time for dinner. The way my parents raised me and the way most kids of my generation were raised would lead to a Facebook mob engaging in mass shaming and/or an arrest for neglect today. What is now called “free range parenting” was how everyone parented. Sometimes my mom would go in a store and…………ready for this…….we would wait in the car. Scandalous!

All I can say is I think I’m glad I grew up when I did. I grew up without the slightest fear that walking down the street was dangerous or even walking through the woods alone was risky. With parents seeming so hypervigilant today, I have to imagine some of that rubs off on kids and the outside world seems like a more dangerous, scary place even if you live in a quiet little town. Or even if kids aren’t afraid themselves, they still have to live a life in relative captivity. That can’t be as fun. And what must parenting be like? Always a hard job, is it now 10x more anxiety inducing? No wonder the birth rate is at record lows!

Fear is almost impossible to avoid. We’re hard wired for it. Goes back to our caveman days when we had to be vigilant against hungry lions and panthers. But the key is to be afraid of the right things. I’m not much better at this myself. I went on a lot of trips growing up but I haven’t boarded a plane since I was 18. If I actually had somewhere to go or someone to go with, I might do it but the thought of it makes me scared. It shouldn’t. The odds of dying in a plane crash are 1 in 5 million. You’re not only more likely to die in a car crash, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning or killed by a shark. Drive your kid to school because it's safer than letting them walk to school or the bus stop? Nope. It bears repeating: they are more likely to die in a car crash on the ride to school than to get kidnapped walking to school.     

Or am I wrong to say parents fear the wrong thing? There’s one obvious big difference between my generation and today: the Internet. We were told it was an Information Superhighway that make us all smarter and better people. Meanwhile the blog has been reduced to the meme. No one reads articles before commenting. No one proofreads their posts. (Or, even worse, they do proofread). And…………….is the Net a Creeper Superhighway? Clearly it does give strangers with bad intent a better avenue to earn the trust of kids. Before you needed to join the priesthood or become a schoolteacher for that, but now you can work any old job! (Sorry—bad joke). There was a case in Farmington about a teenage girl and some 40 year old married dude just a couple of years ago—they met online. So a case can be made that the freedoms we enjoyed as kids can’t exist today. If that’s the case, it’s just one more reason the Internet sucks. Seriously, has it done far more harm than good or is it just me?       

Also it seems no matter what method of parenting one embraces, there are always going to be critics. Pay too close attention to your kids? You’re a helicopter parent who is preventing your kid from developing independence. Raise your kids with a loose leash? You are neglectful. I just saw an article about the 35^th anniversary of The Breakfast Club. Crap I’m old. It was released on February 15, 1985. John Hughes was just about the spokesman of my generation and he built an entire movie career around the concept of parental neglect. Molly Ringwald’s parents forget it’s her birthday in Sixteen Candles. In The Breakfast Club when we get the big reveal of what Ally Sheedy’s parents did to her, she says, “They ignore me”. Ferris Bueller’s parents had absolutely no clue he had been absent NINE TIMES. Macauley Culkin’s parents go on vacation and oops! They forget him and leave him home alone to fend off burglars. That was just life in the radical 80’s, man!

Life is hard. Too much of something is often bad, too little of something is often bad. Do we now live in an over parented world? Did we used to live in an under parented world? And if life was so perfect the old way, why were all these movies in the 80’s focused on absentee parents and teachers? Again,  I’m glad I grew up with the relative freedom I did, but I do sometimes wish I had been involved in more structured activities. Like I wish I didn’t quit the band in junior high (because it was uncool and for some reason they refused to play a single Motley Crue song). Or I wish I had joined the drama club. Or the school newspaper. All those nerdy things! Maybe today’s kids are pushed a little more into after school and summer activities and that’s an advantage over us more aimless wandering latchkey kids?

As it was at the time, I was a true child of the 80’s because my regret upon graduating high school was completely different from what it is now. I regretted not going to more of those aforementioned parties in the woods. Who wanted to be rehearsing for a production of Our Town in a world where there was underage drinking  in the woods in February? Anyone who thought differently wouldn’t know cool if it hit them in the face.

In the Jonathan Franzen book The Corrections, he wrote about how kids often try to live their lives in polar opposite ways to their parents because they are correcting what they saw as the flaws of their character or their parenting methods. But sometimes maybe you overcorrect. And maybe that’s what we see today in parents. They are overcorrecting because maybe, like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club, they felt like they were ignored or forgotten so they want to guarantee their kid doesn’t feel the same way. As a kid are you always parented in ways that prevent problems you never yourself experienced?

But how much of all this is rooted mothers’ working? For most of human history, mom stayed home and took care of the kids while dad worked. Even by 1970, only 31 percent of households featured both parents working full time. Today it’s 48 percent. I actually can’t believe it’s that low. All that free unsupervised time we had might have been the byproduct of two parents working being a new thing and society not fully adjusting to it yet. Did women’s liberation lead to children’s liberation?

And is freedom over? I read cops now go on social media looking for posts which tip them off to any underage parties  go and bust them up. That’s cheating. I heard some moms join their grammar school kids for lunch in the cafeteria every day! Or stories about moms who do their college aged kids’ laundry. Me? I went to the school of hard knocks in the laundry game. I was taught before leaving for college. But I probably didn’t pay full attention because I nearly burned down my dorm on my maiden voyage after getting to college. The washer started to smoke and two girls told me they had to stop it. I didn’t realize you couldn’t jam ALL of your clothes in there. But us Gen Xers learned things the hard way and moved on with our lives!

Oh and it seems like if a kid gets a bad grade, the parent blames the teacher! In my generation, parents and teachers always seemed to be in collusion with each other. As it should be 99% of the time. Some teachers were better than others, but I really don’t remember a teacher that was so bad or so unfair that I felt there was no way I could do well if I tried my hardest.

So there you have it, folks. Words of wisdom about parenting form a non parent. You’re welcome. For my next blog I will provide expert tutelage on how to fly an airplane, win a Mr. Universe contest, and swim the English Channel. 

If That's Movin' Up Then I'm Movin' Out

Does anyone like moving? It seems to be one of the most stressful life events for most people, including me. The stress seems to be based on the idea that you will be taken away to a distant land—like Mars---where all that you have known and seen will change forever. A place yet to be moved into is a foreign and frightening alien land, but it’s amazing how quickly it feels like home by your mere presence there. We create home. Why do long time prisoners feel like strangers on the outside? Probably because if you spend a long enough time somewhere—even a jail cell—it starts to feel like home.

Yet it’s hard to remind yourself of this before moving somewhere. But I thought—to the benefit of possibly no one but me—I would summarize all the previous times in my life I moved. I’ve done it several times and just about every time I thought I was dying but I’ve miraculously landed in one piece every single time.

We moved up about two streets when I was four years old to a then brand new development called Woodside Acres. (These were the late 70’s—the glory years for the middle class when my dad’s policeman’s salary could buy a brand new two story house with a breezeway and a two car garage and plus sized yard—but I digress). Being so young, I can barely remember this and as far as I know I was pretty nonchalant about the whole decision, but I recall—or at least I think I do—one part of it. I think we moved on a really cold, sunny winter’s day. I remember standing out in our new front yard admiring the huge tree at the bottom of our driveway. That’s all of I’ve got on that.

My next move didn’t come until college. This was horrifying. Inhumane almost. You mean I have to live in a shoebox of a room with a total stranger!? Who came up with this torture? I would have preferred waterboarding. My first roommate wasn’t even such a bad guy, I suppose. But I was pretty noncommunicative and he moved out after a semester. He was from Greenwich. Obviously this cow town native had nothing in common with this rich stuck up preppy! At least that was the excuse I made for myself. I’d like to say I spent my first night at college getting to know my new college mates, enjoying my new freedom, and maybe partying until I puked, but the truth is I spent my first homesick night talking to my grandmother from a payphone on the first floor of my dorm. (The phone must have not been installed yet in my room). Embarrassing. I was such a homebody that it took me a couple of years to socially adapt in any way to college. I would literally have dreams I was back in high school! But I did settle in….I actually liked my classes, going on long walks around campus and surrounding areas, and coming back to my dorm to listen to my boom box, eat Doritos and drink Coke. It was kind of hermit’s life, but I did settle into a workable routine after the initial trauma.

Until I didn’t. I nearly flunked out of school after I stopped going to class for a semester. I then realized I needed a change of scenery and maybe moving to another dorm would help. North Campus: aka The Jungle it was. It was maybe half a mile up the road but it was light years different. Unlike my former home in East Campus, the kids in the jungle may not have all been your ideal young scholars, maybe everyone wasn’t bringing the potato salad to the Mensa meetings, but they were much more fun! In East Campus most people kept their doors closed even when they were home. On my floor in The Jungle everyone kept their door open. That said it all. It was also far less cliquey. I quickly realized I made the right move. On the bulletin board where someone liked to post uplifting stuff for everyone else to mock mercilessly, someone had written, “On NH3 (New Haven, 3^rd floor) there are no strangers, just friends we haven’t met yet”. As cheesy as that is, that’s kind of how it was. Fun times. Except when I overdid it with the booze but in the interest of time let's move on...

My next move was back home after college. I actually had to complete one more course to graduate, which I took at the West Hartford branch. That’s when I realized for the first time the problems that can surface from NOT moving. I was back home with no real plans (vague thoughts of grad school or getting a jobby job) and I had lost touch with most of my hometown friends and I realized how confining it was to live in my small town as an adult without a car. It was just my mom and me in the house and it started to feel like there were ghosts. (Speaking metaphoricaly-- I wasn’t having hallucinations). The house seemed too big. I started to panic. Kind of a quarter life crisis here.

But God is good and I was bailed out. My old college roommate in The Jungle, who I had reached out to over the summer (a slightly uncharacteristic move but sometimes desperation can be your best friend after all)) called me up and asked me if I wanted to move into their off campus house. I could not have said yes fast enough. Mind you, they were all still in school and what was I doing back at school? Oh yeah, maybe grad school…. And getting to work (I now had a job in a workshop through Services For The Blind) suddenly became an epic journey each and every day involving walking or biking to the bus stop in front of the library where a Peter Pan bus drove to Hartford—with stops in Coventry and Bolton. I would get off downtown and then take a separate city bus to the Elmwood section in West Harford. (I’d be lying if I said this country boy didn’t have a few fears of getting murdered on the city bus my first few trips). If memory serves me correct, it was a two hour commute each way. But to me it was worth it! You know those old stories: “I crawled barefoot through ten feet of snow just to go to school”? Well I rode my bike through the snow to get to a bus stop just so I could have four housemates and kind of live like I was in college again vs. feeling like a stranger in my hometown turned ghost town. I had come full circle from the day I was dropped off at college!

Aaaaaand I wasn’t there very long. On my very first night living in the A frame, as everyone called it, the landlord dropped by and ever so politely told my new housemate that we were evicted. Pack your bags by December 31. (It was November). It turned out that prior to my moving in, they held a Halloween bash. Unfortunately, the cops made a surprise guest appearance and arrested another of my brand new housemates and his girlfriend for drugs. This happened because a former housemate of the A frame (my former next door neighbor in The Jungle if you’re keeping score at home of this increasingly convoluted story)…so this former housemate had himself been busted for drugs prior to the Halloween bash and he elected to narc on his friends instead of face prison time. He tipped off the cops about the party. This had caused him to be, um, asked to leave the house. And this was why they had a sudden vacancy and why I had been asked if I wanted to come live there. Maybe I should have been upset that I hadn’t been entirely clued into the situation beforehand (or not clued in at all) but even if I had I would have moved there anyway and taken my chance with getting evicted. A no brainer, really. 

So the next time I moved was two months later. Two of my housemates and I moved to the 2^nd floor of a house further off campus, across from the mostly townie bar Schmedley’s. (Which I think is now under different management). This was definitely a downgrade. The house lacked the nice hardwood floors and sunshine of the A frame, but beggars can’t be choosers. We did have company with one housemates’ Rottweiler Athena and anther housemates’ pet snake Jager. (His scales resembled a bottle of Jagermeister). I actually came home from work one day and saw Jager sprawled out on my bed just chilling. I asked his owner to not let him in my room anymore—a request he did honor. We ended up living in the house until the end of May. The landlady—a mean old lady with a sandpaper voice--think Mama from Throw Mama From The Train---inspected the house as we were moving out and gave us a severe tongue lashing about the way we had treated the place. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

I didn't care. I had been days away from being homeless—or, worse, having to go home again—when my Jungle roommate once again saved the day and asked me if I wanted to sublet an apartment for the summer with him at Carriage House Apartments. Did I!? Ground Zero for UConn off campus partying. Though not so much in the summer, of course, but this still sounded much more fun than living with a Burmese python and a roommate who took collect calls from his girlfriend in Niantic State Prison and shared with us the dreams he would have of inflicting bodily harm on the aforementioned former A frame roommate turned rat. (Although the calls and the, uh, forceful dreams of defending her honor were a touching display of loyalty in its own way I suppose. Chivalry isn’t dead). The Carriage House crowd was a happier lot overall. No mouse devouring snakes or angry Rottweilers, just our neighbor’s cat wandering into our apartment and meowing. We even hosted a couple parties (well….my more outgoing roommate hosted them,  but I was there too). Things turned a little darker when our next door neighbor decided to kick a hole in the wall during a card game and my roommate started having nightmares about one of the girls who rented the apartment we were subletting. She was this big, tall girl. Might have been six feet. He imagined her walking in the front door one day, seeing the hole in the wall, and murdering him with her bare hands. But despite the damaged wall and the fear of sudden death, a pretty fun summer if you ask me!

But I was starting to realize I had probably stretched my post-college college life as far as it would go. Can you go to college in a different town but still turn into a townie if you hang around too long? This question lurked at the back of my mind. I couldn’t really go home, so I was probably going to have to get my own place. But how do you even do that? Well, my dad bailed me out this time and found me a place in Vernon. Moving my stuff out and saying goodbye, I struggled mightily to fight back tears. I never wanted to leave! Adulthood? Count me out! And I was going to live by myself for the first time in my life. This seemed so scary. 

But, again, it worked out. My new apartment did have a nice balcony. (Why do so few apartments feature these?). The paper thin walls were a slight issue, though. My next door neighbor was an older gentleman who didn’t appear to enjoy Alice In Chains or The Beastie Boys turned way up quite as much as I did. Also he was NOT a big fan of my guitar playing. One night he scared the living crap out of me when he pounded on my door and said….actually I didn’t hear all of what he said because I had to turn down the music first, but I made out, “……….you’re a pain in my ass!”. Conversely, downstairs noise floated up to me. A couple. They fought. All the time. And then they made up—if you know what I mean. All the time.

I stayed there for two years and moved to downtown Hartford. My commute to work had once again become ridiculous. For a while, I paid a guy to drive me downtown. (Again, my dad deserves props because he posted an ad in the paper before I moved in). One problem: he turned out to be kind of a crazy driver who thought owning an SUV made you invincible and possibly immortal. We hydroplaned on the New Jersey guardrail in a snowstorm and by some miracle we were not hit by another car. Deciding to give him just one more chance (without telling him this) he forced me to fire him after getting in a fender bender the following summer.

Looking back, I’m amazed I had the guts to move to Hartford. I came from a very small rural town. I went to college in a very small rural town. And in small town dominated Connecticut, the prevailing wisdom is, “The city is a nice place to live—if you don’t mind getting stabbed, shot, and left for dead”. Again, desperation was my co-pilot. It was taking me well over an hour to get to and from work. I had also finally gotten a real state job a couple of months earlier after 2 ½ years of a pretty lousy job. A woman who was a supervisor at my job had met me and decided to fight for me to be given a chance. I felt reborn and life presented infinite new possibilities so what in Hartford could possibly harm me? Plus the idea of being able to walk to countless bars (Pig’s Eye Pub and Bourbon Street North were my neighbors? No freakin’ way!)) was too tempting to pass up. And walking distance to UConn basketball games? (When The Big East made that seem so much cooler). And concerts? (Before Mohegan Sun started to steal so many concerts from the Civic Center). Call me a city slicker. 

I did have some culture shock. I lived in a studio apartment in a high rise building and that was a lot different from life on my back deck on the Ellington border. And I lived right off the 84 exit where there seems to be an incredible amount of accidents. The sound of slamming breaks followed 3 seconds later by shattered glass became routine. And the sirens. But I was young and still adaptable and overall I liked living in Hartford.

That is until I got bedbugs my last summer there. Nightmare. At first I wasn’t even 100 percent positive that’s what was happening, although these weird tiny bugs did start crawling on me at night. But I jumped right to “it’s some incurable disease which is causing a severe rash and this is only the beginning!”. I even went to the St. Francis ER twice for Prednisone—which did help with itchiness but obviously didn’t kill the infernal bugs.

Luckily my lease was up at the end of August so I got out of Dodge and moved to West Hartford. People had been suggesting West Hartford Center to me for a while and bedbugs finally accomplished what peer pressure never could. After seven years in Hartford, this created a bit of culture shock of its own. On my first night I marveled at the sound of crickets. A sound I hadn’t heard in seven years in Hartford! It seemed like the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. You don’t realize there’s an inner tree hugger in you until you live in a concrete jungle.  

I also noticed that two story apartments surrounded by trees have an oddly lonely feeling compared with a building with hallways and neighbors closer by—even if you never even talk to your neighbors. I also noticed to my astonishment that West Hartford Center had no true bars! (That’s since changed in a big way). Restaurants with bars? Sure. But it felt weird to go into these classy west of the river establishments and get s$%faced like you were in McKinnon’s tossing peanut shells on the ground while a cover band blasted out My Own Worst Enemy and Blister In The Sun, so I didn’t drink much and actually welcomed the change. (I’ve since realized people go in Grant’s and get annihilated all the time—they are probably doing it as we speak--but I’m not sure if they were doing that yet in 2007). I also noticed the bus which crawls down Farmington Avenue to downtown Hartford blows. But there were crickets. And actual signs of human life walking the sidewalks on Sunday afternoons. It’s the little things.

I’m not sure if my last move even counts but I switched units at my complex in 2011. Again….driven by external circumstances. The walls are paper thin in my complex and my upstairs neighbor and I had become less than each other’s biggest fan. He stomped on the floor a couple times if I turned my guitar amp up too loud. I had bought a four watt Vox amp which got natural distortion at full volume. I figured “People use 100 watt amps on stage so 4 watts is nothing! I can ROCK at apartment volumes!”. Or not. Four watts is still pretty loud. I then turned up Bruce Springsteen's Thunder Road one Saturday night at maybe around midnight. Let the record show it was not even a stereo, just my computer speakers. Apparently, not a big Boss fan, he again stomped on the floor and called the cops! The cop was cool, I didn’t even have music on at the time. But to add insult to injury, my neighbor was himself loud but, infuriatingly, not in a way that I could bust him for. He just had a heavy foot and seemed to literally walk around his apartment all hours of the night. Who walks around that much? Who sleeps so little? It was so extreme, the paranoid side of me wondered if he was trying to torture his loud music loving arch enemy downstairs. If that was his goal, he succeeded brilliantly. I tried ear plugs. I tried putting my pillow over my head. I bought a pair of noise cancelling headphones from the Bose store that was in Blue Back Square at the time. I could still hear him! My sleep and sanity were running short.

So I asked my landlady if I could move, but with no second floor apartments vacant, my only option was a super expensive 2 BR apt just for me. I’ll take it! The first night, the sound of silence above my head was the sweetest sound I ever heard. Even better than crickets and a cranked four watt Vox amp. I slept like a baby. But it’s also weird to live in two story, two bedroom apartment by yourself. It’s too cavernous! But noise privacy is amazing.

Holy cow I’ve had a lot of moving misadventures. I’m not proud of any of this! But what is that? 10 moves? Oh, and the craziest story of all is the move I DIDN’T make. I almost moved to Boston two years ago but didn’t. But this blog is long enough already so never mind!

In short, moving is what you make of it and home is where.....ah forget it. 

The Earth Is Flat But No Polar Bear Will Be Left Behind

Hi So we keep hearing “our public schools are failing”. Time to push the panic button. In a 2012 study, we ranked 35^th out of 64 countries in math and 27^th in science. We suck! And our poor and/or minority kids are performing even worse than other kids. This is the “achievement gap”. Solutions: No Child Left Behind, Common Core, charter schools and……the results are actually a little worse. Doh.

In 2015, the national graduation rate was 83 percent—a record high. (So much for “failing” public schools?). For Asians the rate was 90 percent, for white students 88 percent, Hispanic student 78 percent, and black students 75 percent. And these rankings seem remarkably consistent no matter what measurements you uses: SAT scores, ACT scores, Common Core scores, you name it. Asian students do the best followed by whites, followed by Latinos, followed by blacks.

Is it classroom sizes? Child poverty? The laziness of complacent unionized teachers? The need for more charter schools? The need for more standardized tests? All of these issues have been addressed, if not entirely solved, in one way or another in the past 50 years but progress still seems sluggish.

I don’t have the answer, so for lack of anything else to do, why don’t I use myself as a test case? Allow me to briefly summarize my own academic career……

From kindergarten through 8^th grade I was a good, but not great student. Could I have been great? Maybe, but I didn’t have parents that pushed too hard for straight A’s (believe me, that’s not a complaint) so I generally did well enough. Once high school started, I decided I was going to be “cool”. A bad ass. I had my jean jacket dipped in bleach and an Appetite For Destruction patch sewn on the back. (Sewn on by my grandmother at her sewing machine probably after a meal of chow mein and bread pudding but that shouldn’t subtract from the badassery in any way). I grew myself a killer mullet. I was ready! And of course I purposely tanked in school. Do I look the kind of kid who has TIME for your rules or homework?

But it slowly dawned on me that I was a total failure in the role of a teenage hooligan. Aston Kutcher gave a better performance in Dude, Where’s My Car? Sure, I would bum a Marlboro Red here and there, but I never had the commitment to buy my own packs of cancer sticks and become a full time smoker or even frequent the smoking lounge between classes in school. Sure, I sipped the occasional $3 vodka and Hi-C but I was always terrified my mom would smell it on my breath. Sure, I got sent to the Vice Principal’s office for wising off in class and on the bus, but I was sooo terrified. And my brother had already carved out the angry young rebel role in the house and he did it so much better. He was James Dean to my Kirk Cameron. No mullet, but FULL heavy metal long hair. No jean jacket, but a black biker Hell’s Angels leather jacket. Earring? Check. Me? Ow, that probably hurts. Plus I worried about driving my poor mom to a nervous breakdown if she suddenly had to deal with TWO teenaged punks in the house at once. Worst. Rebel. Ever.

But I pretended for two years anyway.

When my junior year arrived the combination of realizing I was no hooligan and glimpsing the terrifying finish line of high school on the horizon caused me to think I should probably start trying. I had ZERO plans after graduation and I didn’t want to have to go to a junior college, so I decided to become a good student again. The C’s and D’s turned into A’s and B’s overnight.

But that wasn’t the end of the rollercoaster. Fearing I might have scammed them when they let me into UConn and I might be in over my head, I was pretty studious my first couple of years of college and I did well. Then the challenge went away when I knew I could get good grades whenever I wanted to. Boring. Also I had adjusted academically better than socially to school. I had no real friends (due entirely to my own standoffishness) and it started to get to me and I decided I hated school and do I really have to get up and go to class? So I stopped. My clumsy desire to be a rebel resurfaced in a new form. Except I kept going to the one class I liked: Eastern Philosophy and Religion. That made sense to me! So my semester grades looked like this:

F

F

F

F

A

I kind of thought that was a little funny. A stinging indictment of Western Civilization from this undergraduate! I had to meet with the Dean of Liberal Arts over the summer (or maybe it was the Assistant Dean—the Dean was probably on The Riviera) and she told me my semester was so bad they could expel me, but since I was a good student prior that, I would get one more chance. She said, “Were you depressed?”. I said yes and felt gratified that she understood me!

So I did better. Again, fear was a healthy driver. If I didn’t have plans after high school, boy did I have no plans after college, so I better not flunk out. But my grades did become more mediocre—more C’s than before. This was because I had moved to a new dorm where everyone was so social that even I came out of my introverted shell. And……then I took up college drinking and partying. But I had to “make up for lost time” after all those trips to the library on Thursday nights before walking back to my dorm to eat Doritos and drink Coke while listening to the radio on my boom box. So class attendance became sporadic, papers became a little more half-assed—not because I was depressed or rebelling this time, just your garden variety hangovers and indifference. But I stumbled to the finish line and graduated and lived happily ever after.

I provide this brief summary of my checkered academic career to illustrate a point. At times I was a good student, at times I was a bad student, at times I was a mediocre student. And it never had anything to do with the curriculum itself. It was always related to outside the classroom stuff: faux teenage rebellion, college loneliness, Long Island Ice Teas….these were my academic barriers. Nor did my success really have to do with any Dead Poets Society-style inspirational teaching either. (Although I did have some good teachers). When I did well, I can’t really say it was due to my teachers’ brilliance. When I did poorly, I can’t say it was because they failed me. For the most part, they were along for the ride and I was driving the bus—for better or for worse. They always led the horse to water, but sometimes the horse chose to drink, sometimes he chose not to. Or the horse chose to drink Natty Ice instead of water. It less about my teachers and my aptitude than my attitude.

And I have a hunch my experience is not entirely unlike that of most kids. Some are perhaps a bit more mature and grounded than I was and never hit those ebbs in performance. Some have more severe outside-the-classroom issues (like a dad in jail and a mom on crack) which preoccupy them and cause them to lag behind more consistently than I did. But it’s always primarily about attitude. And school itself has a very limited ability to steer attitude. Guidance counselors? Let’s get serious.

And I think our attempts at educational reform which seemingly try to filter that out--the most important factor of all—may be part of the problem. The “high stakes testing” which started with No Child Left Behind in 2002 and continues now with Common Core (a “refinement” of NCLB) seem to float on the fantasy that standardized tests can somehow serve as a magic wand and cure all problems. All you have to do is let test results reveal the problems, close a few failing schools and/or fire a few deadbeat teachers, and schools will get their act together and finally start trying harder and really educate the crap out of our kids. This is probably how Einstein got started! A few heads rolled in his failing German schools and, voila, out came the theory of relativity. Imagined how much more brilliant he could have been if they had charter schools back then. 

Also the Easter Bunny is real.

I think about my wandering in the academic wilderness during my freshman and sophomore years in high school. What if that had happened at a time when schools had Common Core hanging over their necks and this caused them to drill lesson plans more? What if they “tried harder” to get me to study? Would I have likely listened? HECK no. In fact I probably would have pulled away from studying even more if they were making school drearier with more “teaching to the test” boring facts. I didn’t want to do well in school and that was final. Nikki Sixx didn’t care about Earth Science and neither did I.

And turning kids off with this style of teaching may be exactly what is happening. No Child Left Behind was passed 15 years ago. High school seniors weren’t even in kindergarten yet. If high stakes testing worked, we should be seeing results.

The NAEP, aka “The Nation’s Report Card” is a standardized test that is given today and was also given before NCLB. The highest NAEP scores for black students with the narrowest gap was in 1988, the gap is higher now. Hispanic achievement gaps have shown zero improvement since NCLB. SAT scores have declined for all groups since 2006 except Asians. This is despite the fact that the SAT has been dumbed down. Ten years ago they eliminated analogy questions. Recently they eliminated difficult vocabulary words in favor of “evidence based reading”. Like if you said the impeachment of Richard Nixon would divide people into two parties, does two parties mean, like, Republican and Democrat? Or a frat party and an all-night rave? You are also not penalized by penciling in a wrong answer. Yeah I would say that’s dumbed down. They added an essay in 2005 but they took it away again. The College Board wants scores to remain consistent so they felt they needed to dumb down the test as a result of kids’ declining performance.

But that brings us to another reason why using standardized testing as a focal point for education is probably stupid to begin with. You can create any storyline you want. Let’s say you believed in self-fulfilling prophecies and you wanted to instill confidence in our school system because you assume outcomes will improve if more students and parents are buying into the system. You could create standardized tests that yield healthy results. (I don’t mean one of those Facebook tests, mind you. You know, those “Only people with an IQ of 180 can answer this question: the opposite of day is _?”). 

But let’s say you actually wanted to trash public schools and use of the phrase “our failing public schools” lights up pleasure centers in your brain like a Christmas tree. You could design……Common Core. It tests math and language arts. It raises the standards so high that the majority of kids fail the test. Is that really a productive thing? Will that really provide a wake-up call that will result in teachers getting out of the break room and getting every kid college ready—as Common Core promises? Again, this is all based on the premise that those lazy unionized teachers just aren’t trying hard enough. Fire a few of them for low Common Core results and watch the learning flourish! In the end, all Common Core seems to do is build a case that our schools suck. Betsy DeVos and Co. love this because they can then argue that charter schools are the savior. Is that the whole unstated point of Common Core, in fact? 

Except charter schoolkids tank on Common Core too. Oops. And that’s despite them finding clever ways around the law to screen out kids with disabilities as well as other potential poor performing students. They also expel kids like there’s no tomorrow—which should help their scores too. And the teachers have no unions! Still doesn’t help learning. Maybe unions aren’t the culprit after all? The evidence that charter Schools benefit kids seems inconclusive at best—but they do help the rich get richer. If you invest in a charter school, the government gives you 39 percent of your investment money back. (Oh yeah, charter schools don’t really save tax dollars either). That’s on top of the interest you will earn with your loan. So within 7 years, your money doubles. Donate $10 million, wait seven years, deposit $20 million in the bank. The best way to make money is to have money. Tax payer provided subsidies and tax exemptions have turned modern public charity into a huge profit maker. Also, opening charter schools means more buildings—which has created a gold mine for real estate developers. Real estate mogul Donald Trump appointed a charter school fanatic as Secretary of the Department Of Education. I’m sure it’s all just a coincidence.

Another absurdity of the high stakes standardized testing craze: it doesn’t matter to kids. I remember taking those tests in school: the Iowa tests and the like. But they always told us, “Don’t worry about it. It won’t count toward your grade”. And it didn’t matter much for the school or teachers then either. Now teacher heads are poised and ready for the chopping block yet apparently the tests are still meaningless for the kids. They know it won’t affect their grade and, unlike the SAT’s or the ACT, it won’t affect their future. And these tests are now grueling three day affairs. Um, maybe some kids aren’t trying? Maybe a lot of “guess C and move on with your life” is going on? Nothing is on the line for them, everything is on the line for their school and/or teachers. That’s like being a football coach whose job depends on his team’s performance not in the Super Bowl, but in the 3^rd preseason game.

This situation is so bad that apparently some schools bribe kids to try harder. One article I found noted that in the early days of No Child Left Behind, a school in Colorado offered certain kids free iPods, cameras, and other cool stuff if the proctor could tell they were like really into it while taking the test. Another article noted that a couple of years ago in Fairfield, Common Core scores were WAY higher in both math and language arts in one high school compared with the other high school in town. Now this is Fairfield. I don’t think there are any mean streets of Fairfield. I don’t think there are many kids living below the poverty line. So the superintendent dismissed the tests results as invalid because they made zero logical sense. Unless…….one of the high schools offered free pairs of Beats headphones and iPhone 7’s to kids who decided to give a f#%% about their Common Core tests and the other just told them to sit down and shut up?

So standardized testing appears to be a joke. Even if was a valid measuring stick, it seems to do nothing to elevate education. Rather, it apparently just leads to robotic rote learning which bulldozes art class, music class, and even science and history classes because that kind of meaningless fake news nonsense is not going to be on the test. Let’s make school seem boring and like jail to kids. That’s just what these devils need! Performance will skyrocket!

This is so obviously counter-intuitive and I would think all anyone really has to do to see this is reflect back on their own experiences in school or, if they are a teacher, look around. But it seems education has been hijacked from the teachers, principals and even superintendents. Now state Department of Education bureaucrats, US Department bureaucrats, and members of Congress are calling the shots. Oh yeah, and private for-profit test makers. What they put on the tests drives the curriculum. And Common Core tests are kept confidential! A private company issues a private test. Is this still even public education? Standardized testing kids to death may be doing nothing to improve education but the testing companies are laughing all the way to the bank. Imagine if we took all the taxpayer money we give to private test makers and the money we give to billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg to encourage investment in charter schools and instead used it to pay for classroom supplies so teacher didn’t have to pay out of their own pockets? Or maybe hired more teachers to reduce classroom sizes? I know. I’m really living in a dream world.

But recently there has been a huge backlash against Common Core and it might be heading out the door. Maybe the whole era of high stakes testing will bite the dust. I’m not smart enough or informed enough to say what should replace it. But I think restoring education to the teachers and principals would be a good place to start--the ones who actually got degrees in education and committed to a career in education, not billionaire dabblers like Betsy DeVos and Common Core founding father Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a really smart guy, but he’s a computer guy. Mark Zuckerberg is a smart guy, but he’s a social media website creator where people play Candy Crush and post pictures of cream of cauliflower soup. Donald Trump is a smart (?) guy, but he’s a real estate developer. We live in an era in which the super-rich think they can steer areas of society they have no formal training and experience in just because they can.

It might also help if we remember who ultimately decides the fate of our country’s education. It’s not bureaucrats, superintendents, principals, or even teachers; it’s students. Kids decide how hard they are going to try. Just like I did in school, they may sometimes willfully try to not do well. And what can you do? Ground them. Fail them. Keep them back. But what if they don’t care? What can you do then? With that in mind, dare I say the focus should be on making education fun, not just about dreary test preparation? But with a system so overrun by politics and profiteering schools probably have one hand tied behind their backs when it comes to engaging students and building their trust in school and getting them to buy into the idea that it actually benefits them if they take it seriously—they aren’t just being punished through schooling. Distrust in the educational system can’t sully distrust in learning and knowledge itself. 

Cleveland Cavaliers star point guard Kyrie Irving made headlines this weekend when he said he believes the earth is flat. He’s apparently not trolling, but the jury is out on that. His explanation: “I’ve seen a lot of things that my educational system has said that was real that turned out to be completely fake. I don’t mind going against the grain in terms of my thoughts”. See what I mean? He doesn’t trust the educational system. Is there really an achievement gap or just a trust gap which makes some resistant to learning? Finding a way to re-establish trust might accomplish far more than any standardized test ever could. The earth is round. Just don’t ask me to calculate the earth’s circumference---that’s probably a Common Core question fourth graders are now being asked to answer. Better ask them.

Helicopter Parents, Latchkey Kids, and The Boogey Man

Hi. Boy, are these Millenials sad or what? Kids, come out of your safe spaces because pretty soon mommy and daddy won’t be there to hold your hand when you have to remember to put a cover sheet on a TPS report! Suck it up, buttercup or you will get knocked on your ass in the real world! Now if you will excuse me, I have a fantasy football draft to attend to.

Boy that’s fun to do. Too bad it’s mostly BS. I stopped taking seriously  “these kids today are pathetic” arguments sometime in college after I read an older guy's complaints about the weak, shallow and self-involved younger generation he saw before him. A real collection of selfie stick using snowflakes! Knowing the future was going to be placed in their hands, he was positive this spelled the imminent end of civilization. He said this in ancient Greece in about 410 BC. That’s when I said, “Oh, this has always been a thing. Older people always think the young are this way. Before Millenials were the obvious harbingers of societal decay, it was Generation X, and before Generation X it was Generation Omega”. Part of the problem is we probably cast our younger selves in a better light than we should. We didn’t actually walk uphill barefoot through three feet of snow. We weren’t as cool as we think. Our youthful coolness was often like a garage band that hadn't learned how to play in tune yet, they had just learned how to turn the amp to 10.  We weren’t as good looking as we think. (What’s up with all those zits? What’s going on with that gut? A tucked in shirt without a belt? Holy hair gel!?). And, yes, we were positive the world revolved around us too. Scorn for the young is mostly a refusal to see our younger selves as we were vs. the semi-mythical beings with limitless potential our nostalgia filled minds create.  

But….that’s not to say there are NO generational differences, but I say if you don’t like Millenials, don’t blame the kids; blame their helicopter parents. If stories are true and some of them are still doing laundry for their college aged children, picking their kids’ college courses for them, and negotiating salaries for their adult children, well….is it really the kids’ faults if they are spoiled and lacking in self-reliance? A leaf doesn't fall far from a tree and a snowflake doesn't fall far from the sky.  

But the closer you look at things the harder it is to totally judge. Who are these helicopter parents of today? They were the latchkey kids of yesterday: the kids with both parents working, or possibly only one (working) parent in the house after a divorce, who were left on their own after school got out and before their parents got home. And the summers? Forget it. Teachers and parents: who are they? 

I was a latchkey kid. We even had a chain under the light switch in the garage where the house key hung. (I guess we operated on the hunch that burglars would never think to look in the most obvious place). I can ever remember getting home one afternoon when I was still in elementary school and a strange dog I had never seen before was on our breezeway barking like a maniac. I was so scared I ran to the neighbor’s house instead of grabbing the key and trying to get in the house without getting eaten alive by Cujo.

But I did live.

I also wandered aimlessly all around the neighborhood and town, rode my bike around (without a helmet), played street whiffle ball games, driveway basketball games, Nerf football games,  and Smear The Queer. I explored the woods with the other neighborhood kids who were also home after school unsupervised—and we sometimes got lost in the woods without GPS or a cell phone in sight!, took up temporary residence in the partially built houses down the street, hung out in our neighbor's fort up the street (containing dirty magazines) got into snowball fights (including a black eye from a close range iceball) and got kicked directly in the family jewels by my brother’s very drunk friend after I made a smart remark. Also someone had the brilliant idea to set up huge piles of snow in our backyard. No, not for a snowman; instead everyone trudged through my room, climbed through the open window onto our garage and dove off the roof into the snow pile. Solid, constructive, character building after school activities! When I finally got the nerve to dive myself, I believed I could fly. I believed I could touch the sky. God must have been our helicopter parent because no bones were ever broken.

I’m proud to have been a latchkey kid. I don’t think I would trade it for the more structured and supervised life kids seem to live now. I never got hurt, I was never kidnapped or murdered. In those days, I think parents’ security blanket came from making sure they bought a house in a safe, quiet, sleepy town. After that, they pretty much assumed their kids would be safe. Not anymore. The life I led as a kid apparently barely exists anymore.

And this is apparently because the parents of today have cast a negative vote on their own youth by raising their kids in a very different way. In Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections he shows kids living their lives as a correction of the flawed ways of their parents’ lives--all lives and all points of view are maybe only one side of the two sided coin of life. Children of alcoholics become teetotalers, children of teetotalers become lawyers, children of hippies become hedge fund managers, children of hedge fund managers go on Phish Tour… And it seems modern helicopter parents of today—recovering latch key kids of yesterday-- are playing out this same dynamic.

But beyond our desire to be the yin to our parents’ yang, what else created this? Is there a feeling deep down that maybe it wasn't a perfect way to grow up? Admittedly, there was a lot of down time, a lot of unstructured time. And while a lot of my time was spent with friends, I have to admit I was home alone a fair amount of time too. Listening to the radio. Watching World Premiere Videos on MTV...kind of wasting time. "While you were sitting home alone at age 13 your real daddy was dying", sang Voice Of Generation X Eddie Vedder. A lot of us were home alone at age 13. Maybe Millennial parents are just trying to correct that imperfection. Being a latchkey kid was a cool way to grow up but it was flawed and it was the heads to the tails that is the current child rearing model. So that's being corrected until the next generation corrects it again. The only problem? Whenever we try to plug a hole in one imperfection we often just create a different imperfection as a result. Life is hard. But now more day care, more structured after school activities for older kids, less time for them to fend for themselves. I looked up extra curricular activities at my old high school and there seems to be way more options than when I was there. They even have guitar lessons!? So maybe this does represent progress in some ways. 

But I think there's also a less healthy impulse driving this shift. Fear. Many think the beginning of the end of parents’ sense of a safe, secure suburban Eden where no harm could come to their children was a 1983 made for TV movie called Adam. It was viewed by 38 million people on its first airing alone. It was based on the actual kidnapping in 1981 of a six year old boy in a Sears in Hollywood, Florida named Adam Walsh who was found dead two weeks later. (His father John Walsh went on to host of America’s Most Wanted). Soon after this, missing kids started showing up on the back of milk cartons from coast to coast. Our culture of fear was born. 

Fear probably isn’t all bad. It alerts us to dangers. But what if we are afraid of the wrong things? And are misplaced fears viruses of the mind rather than helpful mental alarm clocks? The fearmongering media loves to quote a chilling statistic: 38,000 kids go missing every single year. But this is very misleading because it includes 17 year old runaways, kids abducted by a parent in a custody battle, and kids who get lost at the beach and are found an hour later. Slightly less alarming is the fact that 99.8 kids who go missing are found and the number of kids who are kidnapped by a stranger a la Adam Walsh is just 100 per year--and 50 of those kids return home in one piece.  

“But that’s 50 too many. It’s horrific no matter what the number is”. True. But about 700 kids aged 14 and under die every single year from drowning, yet we still don't have legally mandated swimming lessons for all. An estimated 155 kids die every year from accidental shootings. More than 3,000 people die every year from distracted driving—many of them teens. I think I can confidently state that it’s not an opinion but a fact that guns, cell phones, and swimming pools are far more dangerous for kids than a stranger. Yet we have changed the very way kids are raised out of stranger danger but it seems like we look the other way with much greater risks.

But fear is not a thought or a statistic. It’s perhaps our most hard wired emotion lying in a more primitive part of our brain than rational thought. Maybe the fear of a stranger stealing and harming a child just strikes to the core of people’s deepest darkest fears more than anything else and no facts can shake people away from that. But it’s not just parents. I can remember getting lost a couple times when I was young. I was terrified a stranger would nab me and I was now an orphan. Was I afraid of dying in a car accident? Nah. 

We also have a culture in which we are always listening to experts. Huge mistake! The experts thought Tom Brady was a backup QB at best. The experts thought Hillary was a shoo in. Yet we run to them anyway. And life coaches—be they therapists, social workers, self-help gurus, Oprah, or Ted Nugent—so often give you a “you’re doing it wrong!” brand of advice. You can find countless experts bemoaning the current helicopter parenting style—in fact the term itself came from a 1990 book authored by a pair of experts. They claim we’re suffocating kids and depriving them of developing self-reliance. They say parents are forgetting that parenting is a job in which the object is to put yourself out of a job. Who can argue? But I found an article originally published in People Magazine in 1982 in which an expert of the day declared the permissive parenting style that allowed for latchkey kids was “a national disgrace”. Give the experts credit: they stay on message. You’re doing it wrong—even if you’re doing it the opposite of what they formerly said was wrong. It’s an “expert” game of bait and switch. Remember kids, if you’re doing it right, why do you need an expert? Experts need to eat too!

Then is a slightly less nightmare inducing fear: the fear our kids are falling behind in school. OMG. Kids in Singapore are scoring higher in math and science? RIP America. We will be a 3^rd World banana republic hellhole by next Tuesday. So we’ve decided to shift our education strategy: more homework, more teaching to the test, more rote memorization. But is this going backwards or forwards? This debate is nothing new. In Hard Times by Charles Dickens, a teacher sums up this scholastic strategy: “Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals with facts; nothing else will be of service of them”. Life does imitate art, doesn’t it? This is a fictional teacher in a book published in 1854, not a Common Core advocate in 2017.

But aren’t facts good? Armed with facts, won’t kids be better equipped to sift out the facts from the alternative facts? No! I think that comes from critical thinking skills. It comes from having some working knowledge and insight into how the world works. Reading and writing sharpen those skills, but blind memorization of facts which may come in handy on a standardized test fosters little of that on the unstandardized test of life. And why are we turning education into some type of arms race with Asian countries? Our educational model created the most booming economy in the world after World War II. Why are we so insecure that we think our way has been the wrong way and their way is the right way? What if our way is right for us and their way is right for them? Everyone is claiming Tom Brady is the greatest QB of all time, but he isn’t perfect. He’s brilliantly accurate with short, quick passes but he’s actually fairly average at throwing the ball deep. Had he been in an offense which called for long bombs all the time, he would probably have zero Super Bowls instead of five. Different players have different skills. Maybe different cultures have different educational models that best suit them.  Is our current system a foolish attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole?

Boy am I in danger of losing the overall thread of this blog! Must be my pre-Common Core education that created my tangential thinking and writing style! Anyway....has an education model rooted in anxiety and fear of falling behind infected kids of today? All day kindergarten. Less recess. Less gym. No home ec? Where will be football pillows of tomorrow come from? And then we get this: “Our kids are all hyper! They all have ADHD! Better get them diagnosed and medicated fast!”. Or maybe go back to a school day that actually remembers that kids are kids and not short adults? Maybe they won’t be so stir crazy that way? Maybe helicopter education is the culprit, not kids' scattered, defective brains that can only be fixed with pharmaceuticals? 

Another apparent facet of helicopter culture: the self-esteem movement. This began in the 80’s and it argued outcomes might be better if we valued “personhood rather than outcomes”. This brought with it those much maligned participation trophies. Graduation ceremonies for kindergarten. Grammar school. Middle school.... Is this bad? I mean isn’t self-esteem a good thing? Critics argue that while self-esteem is of course a good thing, it can’t be given to someone like a gift, it can only be earned. All of us—including kids—are hard wired to feel confident when, and only when, we succeed, not when we merely show up and are praised for it. So let’s say you’re a basketball coach and you tell your players, “You can do it! You can make this shot! I know you can!”. The kid shoots….and bricks the shot. The coach says, “Nice try! So close!”. Then he gives him or her a trophy. But the kid knows they sucked. And they will feel bad about sucking no matter how much you attempt to sugar coat it and encourage them. Maybe a better approach? Tell kids they can make the shot but teach them proper shooting mechanics. Teach them to release the shot at just the right time in their jump. Don’t just encourage them to succeed, teach them how to succeed. And if it works, kids will have genuine self-esteem, not just whitewashed insecurity. And well intentions as it might be, maybe participation trophy culture too often offers little more than whitewashed insecurity. Do participation trophies not breed self-esteem at all but merely a sense of entitlement? Two very different things. There's a certain humility to earned self-esteem because the person who earned it knows they had to work for it, but there's nothing but arrogance to entitlement because it says you should be rewarded regardless of whether you worked or not. 

Fostering real self esteem is like providing a really good corrective lens, fostering fake self esteem is like handing someone a beautiful pair of rose colored glasses that just cause them to bump into everything and stub their toe. Does the self-esteem movement create kids who aren’t very good at anything but think they’re great at everything? And let’s be honest…..that type of person is just kind of annoying.

Besides, kids aren’t dumb. If you give them a trophy but they see you gave every kid a trophy—even the kid who squirts milk out of his nose every time he tackles a milk carton in the cafeteria at lunch  ---how is that trophy supposed to make them feel special? If everyone gets a trophy, does no one get a trophy? Isn’t it like that episode of Seinfeld where a guy calls Elaine “breathtaking”. Her self-esteem goes through the roof! Then she learns he calls every woman breathtaking. She feels crushed and betrayed.  

In summary, according to this self-appointed expert, you’re doing it wrong! But I know what I’m talking about. My lack of teaching experience is perfectly complimented by lack of parental experience. But if I know anything, it's that we need to stop being so afraid! We're afraid of strangers, afraid of terrorists, afraid of scoring below Hong Kong in standardized math tests.... Fear leads to the Dark Side! 

On inauguration day, a woman I work, a doctor born outside of the US, said she wasn't worried about Trump's election. She said she knows it won't directly impact her life very much but she worries about the world her grandchildren will be left with. She then said we have a world where you can't even speak or look at someone else's child without them assuming you're a kidnapper or pedophile. How interesting that that's the thing she singled out. But it's so true. We have a world where people don't seem to talk to their neighbors as much. A world where we're all afraid of each other. We've come full circle since 1983. The movie Adam taught people to be more on guard about potential boogey men, but I think we're  so on guard that we are in a "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" phase. Maybe our society needs some type of correction on this. With constant fear of strangers, you can still have friends and family, but you can't have a community. And does a society need some degree of a larger community to avoid running off the rails? Laws are just the boards and windows of a house, community is the foundation. 

Final observation. (I promise!). I read Bruce Springsteen's autobiography a few months ago. Bruce didn't learn to drive until he was 22 years ago. This is funny because he wrote so many songs about cars and driving all night on that thunder road. But how did he get by before that without Uber or Lyft? He hitchhiked. This was once a common, fairly mainstream thing! People actually trusted each other enough to let a stranger in their car! Or to get into a stranger's car! I'm not saying hitchhiking is necessarily advisable. (I would never attempt it in a million years). But just maybe hitchhiking is a thermometer which measures a society's health and right now the patient has a fever. Bring back the hitchhiker! 

GMO Yeah

Hi. Today I’d like to address the plight of the poor lonely downtrodden…..scientist. Everyone these days is an armchair scientist. It doesn’t matter if they have a PhD, an MD, a degree from the school of hard knocks, or (God forbid) an English degree. What kind of loser gets an English degree? Oh wait…. Fortunatley obtaining an English degree should allow you to write a very eloquent letter of apology to your parents.

But kids, what if I told you there was an issue out there which has a fairly strong consensus among the experts and yet only about a 50/50 consensus among the public? And no, I’m not talking about the Rotten Tomatoes page for The Tree of Life, I’m talking about climate change. If the scientific community and Leonardo DiCaprio say it’s real, that’s good enough for me. But approximately 0 percent of Rush Limbaugh listeners believe it’s real even though 99 percent of them believe Hillary is a mass murderer and Obama is an ISIS spy. (NOTE: this is based on a non scientific poll).

Actually I just dug up a real survey which said 63 percent of Democrats and 18 percent of Republicans consider it a very serious issue. Our President-elect opined that it’s a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. And if you think he’s not a science expert, just note that he saw Interstellar. Half of it anyway. He got bored and told his assistant Chris Christie to load up video clips of him berating Bret Michaels on Celebrity Apprentice. That’s how he got pumped up for his rallies.

But before you leave, this blog is not about climate change or its deniers! That seems like too settled an issue to even be worthwhile. But what if told you there was another issue that apparently has a scientific consensus yet many don’t believe in? I’m afraid to even say what it is. Deep breath……GMO’s.

This English major has no firm opinion either way but I will say that I’ve come to realize climate change and GMO’s are very different. To be honest, I started to question my assumption that GMO’s are bad when I stumbled on a statement made by the celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. This guy is an astrophysicist, so maybe even he is out of his element on GMO’s, and perhaps his “celebrity scientist” status should make us scratch our heads—as with the celebrity physician Dr. Oz, whom many believe is a pill peddling quack. Those qualifiers aside, Tyson said being anti-GMO is being anti-science no less than being a climate change skeptic is being anti-science. He also said that the very notion of non GMO food is a myth because we’ve been modifying food for millennia through selective breeding of animals and crops. The apples we eat are far sweeter than wild apples not because we discovered ones that way, but because we made them that way through our own manipulations. The only difference with modern GMO’s is we are now doing it in a lab, but that shouldn’t scare us. Maybe it’s playing God, but we’ve been playing God all along. We just changed the venue.

Oh boy. This means that if one is a climate change believer and a GMO hater, one can’t use the same argument to defend both: I trust the scientists. In fact, to be anti-GMO, it seems one has to essentially mimic the right wing argument against climate change: scientists are often wrong, scientists might be on the payroll of corporations that bribe them into saying what they want, etc. It’s the hoax argument. But my pave pounding research (you guess it: Googling at my computer) indicates Tyson’s GMO opinion isn’t the outlier, it’s pretty much the mainstream scientific view. GMO's have been studied and found to be harmless by the EU, the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One method they used was to compare incidents of cancer in the US where GMO foods are everywhere and the EU where they are almost nowhere. They found no differences. Ditto many other diseases. Listen, no one is more cynical than me, but can they all secretly be on Big Food's payroll?
Or could GMO's actually cause cancer but they just haven't been around long enough to do their damage? A person who has smoked for 20 years is less likely to get lung cancer than a person who has smoked for 30 years--which is longer than GMO's have been on the market. Beats me.

But another problem: supporting clean energy as well as supporting organic food seems tricky. One is forward looking, the other is backward looking. Electric, solar, and wind energy represent a technological advancement over digging up liquefied pre-historic fossils buried in the ground and using them to fuel our SUV’s. But electricity and batteries are also a less “organic” form of energy. Oil isn’t produced in a lab; it has to be found in nature. It’s just the recycling of old life for modern usage.

Favoring organic food production is the opposite: it’s saying the old way was better. All food was once organically made—because science hadn’t figured out how to produce GMO’s any more than they had mastered the electric car or the smartphone. Clean energy is progressive technology being championed by progressive thinkers. Organic farming is regressive technology being championed by progressives. The former says, “The past is a gas guzzling nightmare we have to awake from in favor of a brighter, cleaner future”, the latter says, “Things were so much better in our grandmother’s day before modern science poisoned the well, so let’s return to that organic Eden before the GMO serpent ruined everything”.

But what are GMO’s anyway? Genetically modified organisms, but what else? And why do scientists even go through so much trouble? Much of it has to do with the two arch enemies of farmers: pests and weeds. Traditionally the farmer has had two basic weapons against them: spraying and plowing.

If you polled the average person and said, “Which do you think is more harmful for the environment and human health? Plows or chemical sprays?”, I imagine people would overwhelmingly say sprays. Plows just seem natural. There’s the tractor drawn plow which makes us think of modern country musical masterpieces like She Thinks My Tractor Is Sexy or there’s the more quaint, rustic visions of horse or ox drawn plows. It’s all so country pure. Chemicals? Cancer in a bottle!

But apparently it isn’t quite as simple as that. Tilling the soil with a plow has plenty of its own problems. In short, it’s terrible for the environment. For starters, plows are huge gas guzzlers which release carbon into the air. On top of that, when plows overturn the soil, they release still more carbon into the air. On top of that, it also releases nitrous oxide into the air—an even nastier greenhouse gas that is just no fun to deal with in non-balloon form. The irony? Organic farming in 2016 is more reliant on this traditional method. Can one even be an environmentalist and pro-organic and be intellectually consistent?

Then there is no-till farming. This reduces if not eliminates all the above mentioned problems of plowing the soil. And….it’s primarily practiced by GMO farmers.

So back to GMO’s…. One way crops are genetically modified is to add something called Bt, or Bacillus Thuringiensis: a bacteria with a crystal protein which acts as an organic insecticide. For the last 20 years, most corn, soy, and potatoes have been modified to contain Bt. The advantage is you don’t have to spray these crops with insecticides because they can now take care of pests on their own. The other advantage is Bt only targets certain pests rather than anything that comes within its sight, like a mountain lion or Donald Trump, so it’s apparently perfectly harmless to most insects and all humans. It’s understandable why eating something that contains a built-in insecticide would makes one queasy, but it should be asked: did you have a cup of coffee this morning? Or tea? Caffeine is an organic insecticide. The coffee plant—unlike corn, soy, and potatoes—has this built-in defense mechanism in nature without even needing to be modified. Nicotine and cocaine are other natural insecticides. Is it then ironic to rail against pesticides over a latte in a Starbucks? Should pesticide fearers start with quitting coffee or perhaps cutting back on freebasing cocaine as a New Year’s resolution? Also organic famers use Bt as well—in spray form.

A second GMO tactic—and this is the most controversial one—is modifying crops so they will be resistant to herbicide sprays: the most famous/notorious one being Roundup or glyphosate which is made by the shadowy and evil multinational corporation Monsanto. They also created Roundup Ready genetically modified crops which are advertised as being immune to any toxic effects from Roundup spray—but the weeds around them will be destroyed by it. Monsanto has intellectual property rights on Roundup and Roundup Ready crops AND genetically modified, Roundup resistant seeds are sterile, so instead of being able to re-use the seeds the next year, you have to buy a whole new batch from Monsanto. So yeah…..a huge proprietary money grab? Probably. And many screeds have been written about this from many a Macbook….with their proprietary ports and accessories that Apple would love to sell at a Genius Bar near you.

So in one case genetic modifications allow the end of the need for spraying (Bt modified crops) and in the other they create a built-in immunity to a chemical spray (Roundup Ready crops). And reduced plowing? Win, win, and win. Of course anti-GMO people say GMO’s don’t in fact facilitate no-till farming, it's grown independently from them. They also note the problem of weeds developing a resistance to glyphosate similar to the way microbes mutate to develop immunities to antibiotics. They also say organic farming allows for more crop rotations vs. single crop monocultures and this is beneficial to the environment. So…..I don’t know. I’m not a scientist or a farmer. But I can write you a killer 5 page essay on Moby Dick.  

GMO’s have also been created for other purposes. The insulin that is provided to diabetics is a synthetic GMO whereas at one time it was pork insulin—obtained, you guessed it, only by slaughtering pigs and taking insulin from their stomach linings. (Why did Ozzy Osbourne never think to do that on his Bark At The Moon tour?). There is also something called golden rice which has been genetically modified to contain beta carotene—a precursor to Vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiency is a big problem in developing countries; it kills an estimated 670,000 children under the age of 5 each year. This product is still in development. GMO sweet potatoes are also being developed that should resist a virus that destroys African crops—it may save countless lives. GMO’s are poison we are told, but boy do they sound like medicine to me--at least in some instances.

So…..I don’t know. I mean I’m supposed to view GMO as the most evil and scary acronym in the English language next to ISIS and GOP but I just don’t know if I’m seeing indisputable evidence for it. Couple this with another fact: GMO crops have much higher yields than organic crops. Higher yields mean, yes, bigger profits for greedy factory farmers, but they also reduce the need to carve up more land for farming to get the same production of food. Also, the world’s population is exploding. What if organic advocates got their wish and we reverted 100 percent back to the older, less efficient, lower yield (albeit more natural) methods? Would this actually make world hunger and starvation a bigger problem than it already is? Maybe we miss this factor because here in the first world we just don’t see real starvation. Is GMO fear…..dare I say it?.....a first world problem?

There is the remaining question of the toxicity of sprays. Yes, Roundup is toxic but it’s far from the most toxic spray. And one assumption I had before I started researching this was that organic food/farming was free of pesticides and herbicides. Chemical free food! Isn’t this what most organic marketing claims or at least implies? It’s not so. Both types of farming use chemicals. In a world with weeds and pests, there is just no way around it. Over 20 types of sprays are regularly used by organic farmers. And organic sprays are often less potent than synthetic ones so they have to actually spray crops more often. “But it’s natural, so it’s okay”. True….but cocaine is natural. Heroin is natural. Earthquakes are natural. Steve Bannon is natural. Maybe the poison is in the dosage, not whether it's natural or synthetic.

And remember that Chipotle E Coli outbreak? This happened shortly after they went (mostly) GMO free. Maybe not a coincidence. A study showed that diseases like E Coli and salmonella are actually more common on organic farms. Probable reason: bacteria is transmitted through fecal matter. Organic farmers only use manure as fertilizer. GMO farmers use manure as well but they add synthetic anti-microbial agents to fight against diseases like E coli. Organic farmers skip their flu shot, you might say.

And remember….organic food isn’t just a “movement”, it’s a business model. Yes, Monsanto, General Mills, and ShopRite are large for-profit corporations, but so is Whole Foods. And the organic industry is trying to do something that’s always tricky: offer the same products at a higher price. So they have to make the Mac vs. PC argument. They have been pretty successful at this since the organic industry is now a $52 billion global business. Sure, Big Food has lobbyists, but so does the organic food industry. Can we be sure that at least some of the anti-GMO arguments are anti-science fear mongering motivated by the pursuit of the almighty dollar? The flip side of anti-science greed driven practices by the likes of Exxon/Mobil? And if we believe GMO farming reduces the need for gas guzzling tractors, are Big Oil and organic food……..strange bedfellows?

Whatever the truth is, it’s understandable where this all comes from. We live in a very sick society. Obamacare premiums are going up because they underestimated just how sick people are. As a disability examiner for Social Security who reads medical records every day, I could have told them people are really, really, really sick. It’s only natural that people would look around and try to find the cause. And it’s reasonable to ask whether GMO foods are a major culprit. Especially since this is uncharted territory. The explosion has only happened in the last 20 years but already 88 percent of corn, 93 percent of soy, 90 percent of canola, 90 percent of sugar beets are GMO. The whole push to label GMO foods actually seems pointless at this point because unless it has that certified organic label, guess what? It’s GMO. (And maybe even with the organic label). And before you say, “Dude, I skip corn in my burrito bowl and I haven’t had a beet since Thanksgiving ‘93. I’m in the clear!”. No you’re not. A huge percentage of our food uses corn, soy, canola, beets, etc. as ingredients. So our food is overwhelmingly GMO. But….scientists just haven’t been able to find evidence that GMO’s are harmful. In some cases, they may have nutritional advantages. Could the future prove them wrong? Sure. Scientists once told us the earth was flat. They once took a stance on smoking that went something like, “Just don’t go too crazy and smoke a carton a day. But other than that, smoke up! In fact, I’ve seen three patients in a row and I think it’s about time for me to light up. I’m having a serious nic fit”.

But while we do have a sick society, does the GMO obsession help or hurt the problem? I read a really interesting article a few months ago in The Atlantic. The author argued that GMO fixation from food purists like Michael Pollard was possibly harmful. He noted that while the evidence is just not there that GMO’s are harmful, the evidence that obesity is harmful is overwhelming. Many believe it's worse than smoking. He also said that given the cheaper prices of fast food and processed food and the fact that basically all of our food is already GMO, the anti-GMO crusade does absolutely nothing to help the segment of the population most prone to obesity and poor health: poorer people. For better or for worse, they are going to eat GMO food. So maybe we shouldn’t sneer every time McDonald’s announces a new menu item that is lower in calories or fat. Maybe such adjustments may actually do more to improve our nation’s health than Whole Foods is ever gong to do even if it’s not our food. That’s a very pragmatic, unsexy argument. It appeals to none of our sense of food ideals. But maybe it’s correct.

Whether it’s GMO’s, or the anti-gluten movement, the anti-dairy movement, Paleo diets, vegan diets…. Sometimes I think we make this more complicated than it has to be. I think we all know how to be healthy—it’s just that it’s not the answer we want to hear. Ten years ago—motivated actually by the fact that I got on a scale and realized I was about 20 pounds heavier than I thought—I went on a diet. It had nothing to do with GMO’s or any fancy specialty diets involving demonizing entire food groups. I found a website called The World’s Healthiest Foods which lists….the world’s healthiest foods according to them. It follows a pretty traditional model: all the food groups are allowed. Some dairy is allowed—just not ice cream. Grains are allowed—just not white bread, etc. Oh and no mention of coffee or booze—just milk and water. For a few months I adhered pretty strictly to this. I lost about 20 pounds and felt great. But I didn’t stick with it….because it was hard! People know how to be healthy—just don’t eat chips, cookies, ice cream, pizza, etc. Don’t drink beer. But that’s no fun! Maybe more fun: make non-organic food the enemy. So just drink organic beer! Eat organic pop tarts! Or make gluten the creation of Satan himself. Gluten free brownies or pizza anyone? That’s a bit easier. Maybe when it comes to our diets we look for scapegoats because simply cutting out all the common sense bad stuff just seems to damn unbearable! What are we, Mormons?

So don’t worry about GMO’s….or do. Again, I don't actually know what the f%^k I'm talking about, but I have a keyboard.

If you will excuse I have to walk down to the grocery store. Anyone need anything at Whole Foods?