I had another dream, I had another life
It seems I’m back on my Monday morning posting schedule at Times And Seasons. Today I posted about potential problems with Mormon expectations for missions and marriage conflicting with society’s emerging idea of prolonged adolescence. Mostly a Mormon-centric piece again (it is on T&S, after all) but I think margon (Mormon jargon) is relatively light.
Also: I talk about Twilight. So there’s that.
According to W. Bradford Wilcox (writing in The Atlantic),”today’s dads tend to make distinctive contributions to their children’s lives.” He gives 4 examples:
Wilcox then goes on to talk about the particular impacts that fathers can have on their children’s lives. The whole articles is definitely worth a read.
In a provocatively timed New York Times Opinionator post (just before Father’s Day), Laurie Shirage argues that fatherhood ought to be optional. The kernel of her argument comes from 2005 paper in the Journal of Applied Philosophy:
If women’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a fetus, then men’s partial responsibility for pregnancy does not obligate them to support a resulting child.
The logic is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go very far.
So the position is logically consistent, it’s just totally divorced from reality. Which, all things considered, is about what I’d expect from “the Journal of Applied Philosophy.”
Let’s call it Cheerio-gate. It starts with a simple commercial by Cheerios featuring a cute little girl and her parents: a black man and a white woman. Next thing you know, ugly and racist comments are being made on YouTube, General Mills has to shut comments off of the video, and now everyone on the Internet is referring to the “controversy”. Think I’m exagerating? Google it. I’ve even seen several Facebook friends angrily state that anyone who has a problem should just defriend them now, and so forth and so on. The anger is justified, of course, but do these people really believe that there is even a significant minority of Americans out there who have a visceral antipathy to mixed-race families? I want to be clear at the outset that this is not a post that argues that everything is perfectly fine in America as far as race goes. That’s so obviously not true it should go without saying, but I said it just in case. Instead, I just want to do my best to try and dissect what is really happening here, and why–overtime–it is a perfect model for American political stupidity.
I’ll proceed in phases.
When I was in high school I wasn’t much of an athlete. I did track one season, but I was already a junior and my only real motivation was that I had a friend (a real runner) who always told me how awesome running was, and I wanted to give it a try. I had some good experiences even if they weren’t exactly fun experiences, like getting passed by injured runners during the first practices, winning junior varsity events that I probably wasn’t supposed to be competing in as a junior, and once getting thrown into a 4X100 varsity race because I joked that I was fast when coach asked who wanted to replace one of the real athletes. I had never even practiced handing off a baton and didn’t know where I was supposed to stand. I didn’t take off fast enough for my hand-off (I was third), and got a friendly shove-from-behind. Good times.
But one of the reasons I never really tried that hard was because I figured that when I was a teenager good health was just a gift. Later on in life, it would be harder. I know that if I really pushed myself hard at something I would probably peak in my teens or early 20s, and then spend the rest of my life in a slow decline. That just sounded incredibly depressing. I also just wanted the kind of life where, at 30 or 50 or 70 years old, I would be willing to make big changes, take up something unknown, and try to learn new skills.
And that’s why Sy Perlis is my hero. It’s not just that, at 91 years old, he just set a world record bench press. It’s that he didn’t start weight-lifting until he was in his 60s. Now that is what I’m talking about! I’m not saying I want to push everything off until then–I’m working hard on my running now in my 30s–but I just love that attitude. I hope I’m as healthy and strong as he is at 91, but I also hope that along the way I’m as willing as he is to get started.
As someone who is passionately pro-life, something I care deeply about is recognizing the humanity in those who don’t meet our usual definition of perfection. One of the great, unknown tragedies of modern America is that the vast majority of babies with Down syndrome are aborted, depriving them of their lives and us of their light and of our need to exercise our humanity in empathy with and sacrifice for those who need us. As Viktor Frankl said:
If all men were perfect, then every individual would be replaceable by anyone else. From the very imperfection of men follows the indispensability and inexchangeability of each individual.
To be born with a serious genetic defect is of course a terrible tragedy, but to spare us from the knowledge of tragedy by hiding those who suffer–either through abortion or institutionalization and segregation–is to compound and expand that tragedy. We are most human when we recognize humanity in those who are not like us, and that’s why I love this story:
Guidotti’s life has been all about beauty and the power of images. He spent years as a fashion photographer in Milan, Paris, and with a studio in New York, always shooting what fashion editors decreed to be beauty. Then, fifteen years ago, when he considered photographing a woman with a disability, he was shocked at images in medical textbooks he consulted. Where, he asked, is the humanity?
Where indeed. As a result, Guidotti began a personal effort to change that by photographing people–often children–who suffer from these conditions. The results are challenging, beautiful and–especially when you learn that so many of the subjects died young–heartbreaking.
Check out the article, and watch the video as well. Really, you’ve got to watch the video.
When my wife saw this tumblr: Reasons My Son is Crying (and especially when she saw that they were talking submissions), she knew that she had found a new calling in life. The theme is simple:
A – Pic of child crying
B – Explanation of perfectly mundane, non-tragic thing that triggered the tears
The most recent pic (at the time I wrote this) is a perfect example:
And yet, despite the simplicity, an infinite variety of hilarity ensues.
Check out the site, ’cause there’s more where these come from! Oh, and if you submit one yourself, could you drop a line? I’d love to see ’em!
[This piece might make more sense to Mormons, but I think it should be of interest to anyone.]
Defining anti-Mormonism can be tricky, but here’s one pretty good indicator. When the denizens of the ex-Mormon subReddit are calling you out, you must have really crossed some lines. And yet, when it comes to the newly launched FutureMissionary.com, that’s exactly what’s going on:
With a headline like that, you might expect a link to InfoWars or at least the DailyCaller. Nope, Business Insider is the one reporting:
Even before Glenn Greenwald published a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems and interviewed NSA whistleblower Eric Snowden, there were credible reports that the NSA was intercepting U.S. communications.
The most significant of those occurred in July, when the court that was established to “hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance,” called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), found that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment’s restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures “on at least one occasion.”
Guess that answers John Oliver’s concern. (Can’t get embed to work, follow the link for a clip from the Daily Show.) He had said: “The problem here, Mr. President… No one is saying you broke any laws. We’re just saying it’s a little bit weird you didn’t have to.”
Turns out, he (or, rather, the NSA) did have to. They apparently sort of broke a big one we like to call the Fourth Amendment.
Imagine if grocery shopping worked like health insurance. Let’s call it “food insurance”.
First of all, you’d better hope that you’re not self-employed or unemployed. You see, way back in World War II the United States created strict wage controls as part of the Stabilization Act of 1942. Since employers still wanted to compete for the best employees–even in wartime–they had to get creative. Instead of offering higher salaries (which was now illegal), they began to offer fringe benefits. The most important of these was healthcare insurance. Let’s pretend that food insurance started in the same way. That would mean that, today, if you get your food insurance through an employer-provided plan you not only get a nice tax advantage on your own premiums, but you can also rely on the employer to pay some of your costs as a matter of traditional expectations. But if you’re self-employed, you not only lose the tax-advantage, but also the ability to get the lower rates that come with buying insurance for bigger groups.
Now let’s imagine what actually shopping for groceries would look like.