What I'm watching.

I was looking for a video clip that would help my students understand the concept of the social construction of identity, and I chanced across this Colbert Report clip featuring Toni Morrison.


What a beautiful and gentle conversation.

I love how he is so awed by her presence that he can't even slip into his brash persona until about halfway through.

I love how gently she offers insights that could have been shouted accusingly--she invites us into a better world rather than castigating us for not being there already.

I love how her soft, lyrical, powerful voice calls forth an answering delicacy in his.

Reading This Week

Interesting proposals afoot in the world of elementary and secondary education: Cuomo's Plans for School Reform.  Lots of reasons to be concerned, especially if you're a teacher.  Or a student.

Here's the thing, though.

Until we solve the poverty problem, we are never going to solve the the education problem.  Never.

Yes, incompetent teachers are a problem and should be fired.
Yes, school districts that fail to educate their students are a problem and should be reformed, whether they like it or not.
Yes, wasteful educational programs should be curtailed and eliminated in order to spend money educating students helpfully.  (Note to politicians: services for gifted or disabled learners, the arts, and the humanities do not fall under the "wasteful educational programs" rubric.  Nor do programs that involve class sizes smaller than 40, students having textbooks, and buildings that are not in imminent danger of collapsing.)

But teacher incompetence, failing school districts, and wasteful educational spending pale in comparison to the problems generated by the wealth gap in this country.

They also pale in comparison to the rank injustice of property-tax-funded school districts.

Solve the poverty problem.  Do that first.  Then worry about firing teachers and cutting programs.

Civil Disobedience

Dear Sons:

If you are ever arrested, it damn well better be for something like this:

90-year-old, Two Pastors Arrested For Feeding Homeless

What I've Been Reading This Week

This has got to be the awesomest story ever, even if it was an April Fools joke.  For the record: if I were from a future "communist chocolate hellhole," with no poverty and free Kit-Kats for everyone, I don't think I'd be trying to stop it.

This one left me stunned and flabbergasted.  I had no idea that being hungry could make people grouchy.  None.  Somebody funded this study, y'all.  They may as well fund a study on whether or not people like bacon.  Duh.

I have no idea why it's news that Philip Seymour Hoffman left his estate to his long-term partner, the mother of his minor children, rather than to the children themselves.  Don't parents normally structure their wills this way, trusting their surviving spouses to take sufficient care of their minor children?  Don't a whole lot of them do it this way even when their children are grown, trusting their surviving spouses to do right by their own children?  Sorry, kids, but if you bump me off, you still have to work around Dad.

The Poor You Will Always Have With You. (Just not at your doorstep . . .)

Well, that's one way to respond to the Lazarus at your gates (doors).

When we lived in Paris, there were three or four homeless hangouts in our area (the second-chic-est area in the city). During the summer, the police would come around to all of them every day and shoo away anybody that was sitting panhandling.

But during the winter, one person took up residence in each of the areas, complete with sleeping bag and a few small possessions, and the police came around every day and said hi, and sometimes brought coffee.

One of them was right in front of a music school, even.

I hope the fact that the Brits thought of it first will keep Paris from ever doing anything like this. I hold out no hope for the US.

How Many Clueless Men Does It Take To Host A Radio Show?

I'm so glad so very many other people are commenting on the sheer stupidity evidenced by these two children masquerading as men.

It saves me the trouble.

Well, since it's not out of my way, I'll go ahead and state the obvious:

Sure, dudes, let's go ahead and make women responsible for cutting open their own bodies to avoid you missing a baseball game.

I'm sure your children, too, (will) appreciate hearing that you think they should schedule their neediness around your professional lives.  Being born surely takes a back seat to 1/162ndth of a single baseball season.  Thanks, Dad, for putting that into perspective!  I'll mark you down as a "no," then, for high school and college graduation, shall I?  And I won't dare to plan a summer wedding, don't you worry!

You know, now that you put it this way, I'm sure all parents will be nodding in agreement, that parenting is exactly just like that--you can arrange every detail of a child's life, from conception onward, to suit yourself.

Also, no one can respect a man that stops doing a life-or-death activity--you know, playing baseball--to do something stupid like hold his wife's hand after she, you know, does nothing of any importance whatsoever.  Real masculinity requires, positively obliges, men to be ready to dismiss at a moment's notice and for any reason, anything done, or valued, or said by people with ovaries.

And it's totally true that biology teaches us something important about ethics: men don't have boobs, so they're pretty much useless after they donate their sperm.  They can get on with more important things, like playing baseball.  Sure thing.

Yes, you're the one "putting food on the table" with your Really Important Work.  The fact that I can produce food with my very body--not important.  At all.  You're feeding us.  It's all you.

Also, the thing where you endanger women by casually tossing around your disgusting opinions about their bodies and their medical care so that you can have a cute little reputation as a "controversial" commentator--totally okay.  With all of us.

I'm definitely pointing you out to my sons as role models to follow.

Oops.  I think I may have gotten a little sarcastic there.

Despite the above sarcastiplosion, the idiocy, the ignorance, the appallingly willful and unabashed misogyny evidenced by these two men is not really the thing that troubles me about this video.

What troubles me more is the possibility that this will shift the conversation about child-bearing and -rearing toward the collectively-bargained rights enjoyed by a few privileged men and away from the lived experience of women who still cannot afford to exercise what few and inadequate protections they have.

Working mothers will hear every one of Esiason's and Carton's contemptuous dismissals of their needs as mothers, every one of their contemptuous rejections of a father's role in nurturing children, and gnash their teeth at being told by one more pair of assholes that it's their job to breastfeed the babies, alone, while their husbands go off and do "real" things, things that matter, things that put food on the table.

But they will also hear, in the background, everything contemptuous thing their co-workers and bosses say about "breeders," about women who take maternity leave at "inconvenient" times for the company, about women who "owe the profession" a single-minded dedication that leaves no room for child-bearing at all (much less child-rearing).

(I'm not making this up.  I've actually been told that it's my job as a woman in academia to delay childbearing until I have tenure, or forgo it entirely.  I've been told that it's what I owe the profession, and especially other women in the profession.  I mean "been told" literally, here.  Like, by a person, speaking to me.  In those exact words.)

They'll read all the articles cheering Daniel Murphy for doing such a "sweet" and "important" thing as showing up for his child's first week of life, and they'll remember all the times they, as working women, were criticized for doing the same thing, or for their failure to do so.

Women are criticized by traditionalists for failing to handle all the nurturing on their own, and they're criticized by supposed progressives for failing to protect The Company from the inconvenience of their functional reproductive system.  (I guess they're supposed to be grateful for the sort of "progress" that allows them to work for pay at all, and not pay attention to such things as maternity leave, lactation accommodation, and health insurance for dependents.) 

I was extremely grateful to my colleague at [my former college] for covering my classes for me the first two weeks of the spring semester after the birth of my third son, because it allowed me to have a full month's maternity leave.

But the insanity--the stark, raving insanity--that Amos's birth will forever in my mind be linked with all of the professional obligations he didn't interfere with (fall semester exams, grades due, seven Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services)!  I swear, I am not making this up: I have never once spoken of Amos's birth without joking about him "helpfully" waiting until the day after Christmas to be born "because of all of our pastoral responsibilities."

And the insanity--the stark, raving insanity--that I've met actual, real, live, educated, professional women who have told me that they went back to work within a week of giving birth because they "couldn't afford" to take maternity leave!

Please hear me: I am among the privileged few in the world, even if you can't tell it from my bank account.  My colleagues are other privileged women--women with terminal degrees in their field, with professional clout, with publications and numerous speaking invitations per year, women who've been on NPR, even.

If my colleagues and I have to worry about this . . . what on earth is going on in the rest of the world?

No.  I don't get worked up by the fact that a pair of idiotic men said some idiotic things about men taking paternity leave.

But I am worried that a bunch of men will use this as an excuse to spend their time wagging their tongues what wealthy men do with their legal rights and collectively-bargained contract protections, and ignore--once again, still, always--the needs and rights and near-constant vulnerability of women and children.

Prayers For an Unworthy Soul

Some occasions tempt me more than others to declare a particular soul unworthy of the grace of God.

But that is, of course, the very definition of the grace of God.  And so I give thanks for the reminder that my soul, too, has no claim to deserve the prayers of the saints, the forgiveness on which it depends, or the beatitude which God's grace imparts.

And I offer a prayer for the unworthy departed, and for those who must somehow learn to live the grace we proclaim:

May he know the love and grace of God in death that he seemed not to know or value in life. And may we all repent of our sadistic delight in the deaths of those for whom our Lord was pleased to die.

What I've Been Reading This Past Week

I've been saying this for awhile now, but only to people who are tired of me saying it: praise music makes it harder, not easier, for the congregation to participate.  I could add ten more reasons than the ones offered here by Erik Parker, but I'll stick with two.
The more a tune follows a pop aesthetic, the harder it is to sing, unless you're the kind of tenor for which most pop music is written.  The majority of hymn tunes, boring and unlovely as some of them may be, are written to be sung by almost any voice, and virtually all of them also have parts that can be sung by specific voices.
And, second, when the tune is all there is (and it's hard enough to catch that), the church misses out on the strangely theological wonder that is harmony, the unique sound that can only come when people sing different notes at the same time.  Beauty is enhanced by difference--what a wild world our God has made for us!


This was a fun story: professors on a plagiarism sting op!  I would love to be a full-time plagiarism detector.  That would be fun.


In many ways, this is old news: Children with family routines have better emotional health.  But just in case you needed an expert to tell you so, there it is.  The sorts of things you imagine a healthy, happy family doing--reading, playing, eating, making music together--tend to make for healthy, happy families.


This was a fascinating article on Shakespeare performance.  I was especially interested in how the company dealt with The Taming of the Shrew, which ceases being a comedy at precisely the point it offers the pretense of a happy ending.

What I Read Last Week

(Besides, of course, a million papers on Hinduism.)

This is a lovely reflection for the beginning of Lent.  Even we high-church folk are a little childish in our church-going, sometimes.

I listened to this, rather than read it, and then I repented of having preached a merely entertaining Ash Wednesday sermon.

I read this lovely collection of reflections by women religious, and was reminded that a life hedged in by promises and renunciations is no less full than the allegedly unrestricted life.  Indeed, self-denial creates the conditions for an unlooked-for kind of flourishing.

I read this, and then stridently repeated it near verbatim to my offspring.  And then I wished the accompanying chart had provided guidelines for the adult consumption of screen entertainment.

Penalizing the Wrong Thing

It seems that the only people still struggling with institutional expressions of moral courage are the Catholics.

This tends to cause kerfuffles, because moral courage always involves sacrifice and risk. Pissing people off is not a certain sign of being right, but it is a not-uncommon result of the exercise of moral discipline (self-discipline or imposed discipline).

One recent kerfuffle was caused by a Montana Catholic school's decision to fire an unmarried teacher who became pregnant.  The evidence of her having violated their moral turpitude clause was plain for all to see, and so they acted on it.

The temptation, of course, is to say that the school was in the wrong because they were being mean, judgy McJudgersons.  This is a response that implicitly condemns any exercise of institutional moral discernment, that makes all moral decisions not immediately and forensically related to work performance private, individual ones.  This is the default practice of virtually every institution in the country, even those that are explicitly religiously affiliated.  (The UMC has a hard time firing pastors for moral turpitude, much less secretaries or daycare workers, and churches whose well-liked pastors have been terminated for having multiple affairs with many different congregants bear resentment against the mean, judgy denomination for decades.  Firing pastors for incompetence is a near impossibility, but that's another story.)

I honestly don't think that argument is a helpful one, even if I am sympathetic with the underlying concern--that firing this woman is the wrong response.

Cathleen Kaveny has written this lovely and careful piece responding to the issue and has offered a better line of thought.

In it, she highlights a crucial problem with the exercise of moral turpitude clauses: only women can be found guilty.

This isn't really true, and Kaveny doesn't make the mistake of putting it that way.

It is functionally true, however.   The Catholic church--themselves almost the last remaining institution with a moral backbone--have retreated from virtually every issue but that which makes them the most unpopular: sexuality.  And in that realm, since the beginning of time, there has only been one gender whose very body bears the incontrovertible evidence of sexual sin.

Only women can get pregnant.

And pregnancy is the only "proof" that cannot be hidden or ignored.  Men can be forced to take paternity tests, of course, though few institutions have gotten around to remembering that and fewer still manage to overcome their general reluctance to give a man a reason to file a lawsuit.  (Do women file fewer lawsuits?  Probably.  There is certainly less institutional fear of those who might.)

But a big, fat belly thrusts itself into our communal consciousness just as surely as it thrusts itself into a room before its duck-waddling bearer can catch up with it.  Institutions can no more forgo institutional responses to the inconvenient facts of women's reproduction than seventy-year-old men and women can forgo rubbing pregnant women's distended bellies.

So sweet Miss Susie walks into school one September with a big, big belly, and the school cannot ignore that problem, the way they can ignore the Lamborghini Mr. Michael very sensibly keeps at home or the bruises Mr. John's wife is careful to hide or the income Miss Janie doesn't report and tithe or whatever else violates their moral convictions.

And, of course, Miss Susie's paramour suffers nothing, unless they were caught, as Dr. Kaveny puts it, canoodling in the broom closet at school.

So the burden of these punishments are shared unfairly, and the community learns the wrong thing: it is pregnancy that is punished, not extra-marital sexuality as such.  Getting caught--and only women can get caught--is the problem.  Pregnancy is the problem.

This ought not be.  Pregnancy is not a problem.  It's not evidence of sin.  It's evidence of life.  It's evidence that God continues to give the gift of children to us, even in the midst of--even by means of!--our sinful condition.

This is exactly the mistake that Isaac's school's Health program makes, and it suffers from the same pedagogical idiocy: it teaches that pregnancy is the problem to be avoided.

One exercise in particular jerked my chain.

Isaac was required to calculate the financial burden a child imposes its first two years of life.

I thought we were having a great moment of communication, until I realized what was going on.

"Hey, Mom, how much do Amos's diapers cost?"
"Well, we use some cloth, so it's hard to say exactly, but it's about $35 a month for the disposables."
"When did he switch to regular milk?  And is formula more expensive than milk?"
"Oh, yes, formula is, like, twenty-five dollars a week, if you're formula-feeding full time, and that's if you're lucky enough not to need the special needs stuff.  You switch to milk at one year, but the amount they still need isn't exactly trivial."
"What are other things babies need?"
"Um . . . wait a minute . . . why are you asking?  Is there an urgent need here that I should be aware of?"
"Health class."
"Oh.  Oh.  Mmm."

The assignment was designed to discourage teen childbearing, but it did so by presenting a baby as a costly, burdensome thing.  It was one of the few assignments that spoke a language teens can understand, and it was all oriented toward making a baby seem like a bad thing.

Isaac didn't understand why I started throwing a temper tantrum at the end of his assignment.

"Okay, son, what's the total cost you've come up with?"
"$13, 850.  But the website says that I didn't include living quarters or travel expenses, which I would need because I'd be on my own."
"What?"
"I'd need to get my own place."
"ARE YOU FARGLING KIDDING ME?!?!"
"I mean, you know, some parents would . . ."
:hostile stare:
"So, uh, that's, uh, why I didn't even think to include the cost of the apartment, because, uh, I knew you and Dad would . . . uh . . . be . . . so, $13K.  Pretty pricey."
"Okay.  So.  You're in your car.  You're on a date.  Your girlfriend is with you.  It's dark out, and the windows in the back seat are tinted."
"Um, Mom, I don't like where this is going. . ."
"Do you really think to yourself, 'Gosh, I'd like to, but this could cost me $13K'?  Is that really going to stop you?"
"Well . . . it . . . maybe . . ."
"No.  It won't.  The only time you're going to think about $13K is when the little test strip comes back with two pink lines on it, and you think, 'Gosh, I could spend $300 now, or $13K later.'"
"I would never!"
"Well, you might now.  Now that they've frakking given you a reason to!!!!!"

It focused on disincentivizing child-bearing (or, really, child-rearing), not teen sexuality.  Having a baby is costly.  Having sex isn't.

And, as if to drive the point home, there was no corresponding financial activity related to STDs.  No calculating how much getting HPV or HIV or gonorrhea or chlamydia costs you.  Oh, they mention STDs.  The medical aspects.  But not the financial costs.

The part that is simply and entirely costly and painful and burdensome is noted, but the burden is not demonstrated in the terms teens understand.  (They understand money, because they all want iPhones and candy bars and cars with full gas tanks.  That's why the price-out-a-baby exercise works.  They do not understand sickness and death.  They think only old people get sick and die.  "You can get this disease, and it's really bad, so use a condom.")

But the child that might result is reduced to a single, uncomplicated, and entirely negative quality--its costliness.

And so they teach my son that getting pregnant is a bad thing and worth avoiding and preventing and "fixing" if you get unlucky.  They don't teach him that teen sexuality is a dubious pleasure at best and worth forgoing.

They also didn't bother to teach him that his parents are actually good people to consult when he is confronted with such issues, but I suppose that cannot be remedied.

Let this serve as your notice, though: Parents whose children must take school-based health classes, do not neglect to correct all the misapprehensions your children will pick up in those classes, but especially, most especially, the one that you are not going to be on their side if they "get caught."

Let them know that getting pregnant is not the bad thing, the thing to be avoided, the thing worth punishing.

Let them know that there's a difference between a serious thing--which having a child most assuredly is--and a bad thing--which having a child most assuredly is not.

Let them know you love them.  And that they will screw up.  And that you will still love them.

How to Change Someone Who Won't

I found this ad profoundly moving.



I should admit that I'd never really thought much about this issue, growing up, because I don't particularly care for football.  I was a baseball fan, and when someone talked about mascots that were insulting to Native Americans, I could only think of the Indians and the Braves, and those didn't seem all that insulting to me.  (The concept of cultural appropriation was far too sophisticated to find a sympathetic home in my teenaged brain.)

And when I watched the occasional football game, the nickname of the Washington team just didn't penetrate the fog of apathy (about football, not about justice), and it didn't occur to me that an actual racial slur, not a cultural appropriation but a racial insult, was being used.

(By the way, parents: remembering what an idiot you were when you were a teenager is a great way to remind yourself to be patient with your teenagers.  Just sayin'.)

Anyway, once the injustice was pointed out to me, I had a hard time unseeing it, and I have lost my sympathy for any arguments (are there any, actually, that don't boil down to "we don't wanna"?) for the worth of keeping that name in play.

Obviously, these proud Native Peoples have not found a sympathetic hearing among NFL execs, team owners, managers, players, and the like.

But there is a group of people who could change things.  Radically.  Without them changing at all.

Sportscasters.

Sports journalists, networks, papers, commentators--anyone whose job it is to talk about sports could simply refer to the team as "Washington."

It can be an adjective and a noun.  There is no grammatical or practical need to use the offensive nickname.

It can be dropped.  Entirely.  Without fanfare, or with a simple public statement, or even with a big to-do.  But it can be dropped.

Sportscasters can't control what coaches and players say, they can't control what team uniforms and logos look like, they can't control the fans or even preach very successfully at anybody.

But they can stop using hurtful words.

Individual commentators and writers and interviewers can quietly drop the word out of their vocabulary, even if the organizations of which they are a part will not go along.

Larger organizations can make public announcements or send confidential corporate memos.

They can do it.  And they could make a difference.

I'm going to try to stop using the Washington team's nickname.  You can, too, if you like.  It probably won't much matter.

But maybe it will.

The Only People Crazier Than Theologians Are Linguists

I read this article earlier today, and I've been because-noun-ing all day.

Because Linguistics

"Why do you need a Moodle course for this class, Christian Ethics? (Please give a reason so that the administrator can determine the need for this course.)"
"Because God."

"I can't quite figure out why none of you are taking notes on what I just said.  Because, you know, exam."

"And so we see here that James makes the same explanatory move that was made in Leviticus.  Why shouldn't you hold a day laborer's pay back until the next day?  Because God."

"Please don't email me during another professor's class!  Because courtesy."

I feel very hip.

Well, I felt hip.  And then I realized that, by the time someone writes a blog entry on a hip thing, it's not hip anymore.  (Because, you know, novelty.  And boredom.)

And then I realized that someday, someone will write a second-grade grammar textbook in which "because" will be listed as a preposition, because of this article.  (Because idiocy.)  And I was tempted to repent of my participation in the stupidification of my own grandchildren.

But then I went back to because-noun-ing.  Because fun.  And also entropy.

Scratch and Dent Food

This is a great idea, and I'm glad he's doing this:

Former Trader Joe's Exec Wants to Reclaim Expired Food, Reduce Waste

But, honestly, I'm a little sad to see how few grocery stores take the initiative to deal with this reality themselves.

I've seen many--although decidedly not all--that with throw a little $1-off sticker on expiring meat, or put their ultra-ripe bananas in a special bag on a discount.

That's, you know, nice.

But I think they could take a more comprehensive approach.

I've only ever seen it done in one store, but it really worked, and it didn't detract from the store's upscale vibe.

This store, a Harris Teeter in North Carolina, had a special section in the meat department and a special rack in the produce department.  All the expiring meat got a nice little discount--often about 30%--and was conveniently located all in one place.  Meat that was expiring that day often got a more substantial discount--maybe two-thirds or three-quarters off.

Scratch-and-dent and super-ripe produce was similarly repackaged and all placed together on that special rack.  It might contain damaged apples or pears (I often used them for pie or applesauce), cut melons (that had been, presumably, bruised on one side but were salvageable), old-ish mushrooms (wrinkled was fine, slimey was not), smooshy avocados (fine for guac), or plantains that had ripened black (which is the exact perfect time to use them!).

Here's the thing: even though Harris Teeter tended to be pricier and more upscale than Kroger or Food Lion, I always shopped at Harris Teeter, once they started doing this.  It really did help the budget, I really appreciated the convenience of having all the sale stuff in one place, and I really liked patronizing a store that was trying to eliminate waste.

In fact, I thought of those scratch-and-dent sections as a small way for the grocery store to redeem the manipulative practices that grocery stores routinely use to separate you from as much of your money as possible.

I never make applesauce anymore.  I don't have time, first of all, and it's been over four years since I moved away from that Harris Teeter.  (The idea of making applesauce from full-price apples makes me grumpy.)

And I've never--never--seen a grocery store with the same concerted effort to do what that Harris Teeter did.  (I don't think my current grocery store even puts little $1-off stickers on its expiring meat.)

I shop at Publix now.  Maybe it's time for a little letter to the manager.

Dreamers

Some day, my youngest son will ask me why I gave him a name that rhymes with an embarrassing body part and its attendant malodorous function.

I will tell him that his daddy wasn't terribly cooperative with the whole name-generating process, and that this was the best we could do while they were wheeling me into the operating room to deliver him.

And then I will read him (again) the book of the dreamer-shepherd Amos.  And I will tell him that God hates injustice and cares for people who are hurting.

And I will tell him (again) the story of Saint Martin of Tours and his dream.  And I will tell him that God cares for people who are hurting, and that the surest way to meet Jesus is to care for someone who is hurting.

And I will tell him (again) of another Martin who read the book of Amos and found there the assurance that God hates injustice and cares for people who are hurting.  And I will tell him of Martin's dream that people who love God will also care for people who are hurting and will try to do something about the injustice.

And I will tell him that I gave him a beautiful name, and I didn't mean for people to make fun of it.  And if kids make fun of his name, I will be sorry for his pain, and it will hurt me that he is hurting.

And I will tell him never, ever to forget that God cares for people who are hurting, and that God wants us to do something about it.  And that whenever he dreams about his own future, he should ask God for dreams worth having.

So, There Was Someone ELSE On The Stage, Right, People?

My dearest sons:

You all know that your mother is occasionally a little picky about things like table manners and homework and chores and saying nice things to your brothers, but not so picky about penmanship and getting your bed made every morning and wearing a coat when it's a little chilly out.

I haven't yet had occasion to be picky about this issue, so you may not know that it's in the Picky rather than Not Picky column.  But it is, and you need to know this.

Treating Women Right is in the Picky column.  Treating Hurting Women Right is in the Especially Picky column.

When you take a girl on a date, you give her your full attention and you don't ogle other girls.  If Angelina Jolie walks into the room, the right answer is, "Who?  Oh.  Is she famous or something?  Get back to what you were saying.  I'm really interested."

That's Treating Women Right.

When your boss is a woman, you speak respectfully to her and you do what she says and you don't undermine her authority by using the belittling language that men like to use when they're embarrassed about taking orders from a woman.

That's Treating Women Right.

When you are the boss and a woman works for you, you speak respectfully to her and you keep your comments focused on her work, not on her person, and you don't try to keep her subservient and dependent on you by paying her less than you would pay a man for doing the same job.

That's Treating Women Right.

Also under this heading would be things like avoiding gendered pronouns and descriptions for issues that are not sex-determined (like pretty much everything but reproduction and having prostate cancer), assuming you'll be doing a lot of the housework if you ever get married, and teaching your daughter how to read in at least two languages before you teach her how to put on make up.

Your daddy has given you a pretty good example to follow in this regard, and if you just ask What Would Dad Do?, you won't go too far wrong in life in general, nor in the Treating Women Right realm in particular.

You will meet a lot of hurting women in this world.  You will not have been the one to hurt them, I hope, but you will meet them.

Treating Hurting Women Right is not markedly different than Treating Women Right, but it 1) is even more important and 2) requires even more courage.

Treating Hurting Women Right often means going even more against the grain, taking an even more public stand, and sometimes, even, confronting the Hurting Woman herself with her brokenness.

Treating Hurting Women Right means not participating in the sex industry, even if you're in Nevada and the woman is supposedly okay with it.

Treating Hurting Women Right means being ready to shelter an abused woman if she gets up the courage to leave the abuse, or at least offering a ride home to a girl that's getting chewed out by her boyfriend in public.

It means not laughing--pointedly not laughing--when your friends make rape jokes.

It means leaving the party if somebody gets the idea to call a stripper.  It means offering to get the stripper to a safe place if the party next door gets out of hand.

It means being the one to bring up gender issues so that the women in the room don't have to feel like angry bitches all the time when they bring them up.

And when a girl is so hurting, so broken by her past or her present, so caught up in a destructive mix of unrestrained hedonism and even more unrestrained advantage-taking that she thinks performing a simulated sex act on national television is a good thing, it means refusing to be the guy she's grinding on stage.

Let me tell you, sons, if I ever see you doing what whatever-his-name-is did to a girl on live TV, I will not be telling the world how shocked I am at what she was doing.  I will not be telling the world that I didn't expect her to put her butt so close to your groin.  (Because, like, your groin was just innocently standing there when this girl's butt unexpectedly accosted it!)

And I will most especially not be commenting on how sharp your suit is.

You'd better get this one right, sons.  Because the world will not be writing blog posts and tweets and ponderous articles on your behavior.  They'll be heaping it all on the Hurting Woman and not asking themselves or anyone else how she found a guy so unchivalrous as to join her in her public self-degradation.

But I for damn sure will be asking that.

I will be in your face asking in very pointed words and at very loud volume why you weren't the guy telling her she didn't have to do this, asking her not to do it, giving her alternatives, giving her the healthy attention she needs rather than the poisonous attention she's become addicted to.

I love you, and I will love you no matter what, in life, you do wrong.

But don't get this thing wrong.  If a woman is hurting, help her.  If you can't, at least refuse to be the guy that keeps the hurt going.

Don't be that guy.

Don't. be. that. guy.

Active (Shooter) Response

One of the faculty workshops I attended this week--the last week before classes begin--was called Active Shooter Response Training.

I will admit that I did not quite appreciate either how forward-thinking and proactive my college was being in offering this training or what I might learn from it.

I did, by the end of the talk, come away with a renewed appreciation for the all-but-impossible task our law enforcement and public safety officers face and a feeling that I would not be entirely bereft of hope should the unthinkable occur.

I would encourage anyone to take advantage of such training, if the opportunity presents itself.

One tiny little niggling doubt, however, remains in my mind after the event.

One thing the presenter did over and over and over was to downplay, even ridicule, the possibility that someone who was engaged in or about to start a Columbine-type assault could be talked out of his or her plan.

I found it providential that this occurred the exact same day of our training:

Gunman Talked Into Surrendering By His Hostage

I understand how unlikely this sounds, and I appreciate that the probabilities are with the gentleman that did our training.  People who become sufficiently unhinged to plan and execute large-scale assaults like this are not usually open to rational argument or pleas for mercy.

But perhaps they are still open to love.  Perhaps they can still be reached by prayer.

Perhaps a people that still remembers to pray for the violent, the criminally insane, the sinner, the abuser--perhaps that people can still reach the violent, the insane, etc., when no one else can.  Perhaps a people that prays not, "God, please don't let me die," but "God, please help me to help him," perhaps that people has more resources to hand than those who are merely trained how to survive an assault.