Saturday, April 26, 2008
Raising the Kids: Whose Job?
In the course of her work, my daughter recently has had occasion to read various “mommy blogs,” an outlet for maternal obsessing that wasn't available when I was a new mother. (Instead I got to bore people in person.) My daughter was horrified by the compulsive preoccupation with every trivial detail of baby care, and it has put her off the whole of idea of motherhood.
She had a similar reaction to a Sex and the City rerun we watched together. It was the famous baby-shower episode, where a mommy character announces that she's given up a career as a corporate senior vice president to stay home with her child. “That is so unrealistic!” Cait said. “No one would ever do that.” “Yes they would, and they do,” I said.
Personally I guess I wouldn't recommend putting a career on the back-burner. Luckily for me I never had to make that choice, not being a senior vice president of anything when I got pregnant. As a self-employed writer, I could shape my work around taking care of my child. I could even channel my maternal preoccupations into my work by writing for parenting magazines. I never had to contend with the heartrending, impossible balancing act of mothers with employers and office jobs.
I wanted to say something reassuring to Cait about how times have changed and there were more options available. I wanted to say that the senior vice president would now be able to take a year of parental leave and return to her previous job without penalty. That the part-time or reduced-hour work week was widely accepted. That there were excellent government-subsidized childcare and education centers, and that these high-quality programs were staffed by trained well-paid workers. That she could contribute to her pension fund even in the years she wasn't working.
Unfortunately, there’s no way I can say such things. Most of these family-work reconciliation measures I mention are taken for granted in Europe. There, caring for the next generation is considered to contribute to the social good. But In this country, we are rugged individualists, where the prevailing attitude is, “you had 'em, you raise 'em.” This backward attitude toward family benefits is unique in the developed world.
Realigning our family policies would be an investment that pays dividends for everyone. Literally. Because these future generations will, if we’re lucky, be paying the taxes that fund our social security dividends
She had a similar reaction to a Sex and the City rerun we watched together. It was the famous baby-shower episode, where a mommy character announces that she's given up a career as a corporate senior vice president to stay home with her child. “That is so unrealistic!” Cait said. “No one would ever do that.” “Yes they would, and they do,” I said.
Personally I guess I wouldn't recommend putting a career on the back-burner. Luckily for me I never had to make that choice, not being a senior vice president of anything when I got pregnant. As a self-employed writer, I could shape my work around taking care of my child. I could even channel my maternal preoccupations into my work by writing for parenting magazines. I never had to contend with the heartrending, impossible balancing act of mothers with employers and office jobs.
I wanted to say something reassuring to Cait about how times have changed and there were more options available. I wanted to say that the senior vice president would now be able to take a year of parental leave and return to her previous job without penalty. That the part-time or reduced-hour work week was widely accepted. That there were excellent government-subsidized childcare and education centers, and that these high-quality programs were staffed by trained well-paid workers. That she could contribute to her pension fund even in the years she wasn't working.
Unfortunately, there’s no way I can say such things. Most of these family-work reconciliation measures I mention are taken for granted in Europe. There, caring for the next generation is considered to contribute to the social good. But In this country, we are rugged individualists, where the prevailing attitude is, “you had 'em, you raise 'em.” This backward attitude toward family benefits is unique in the developed world.
Realigning our family policies would be an investment that pays dividends for everyone. Literally. Because these future generations will, if we’re lucky, be paying the taxes that fund our social security dividends
Garry Trudeau and John McCain
Remember Mark Slackmeyer, aka “Megaphone Mark”? He was part of the original Doonesbury gang, the 60s slacker/activist who has ended up working for NPR, where he and his politically conservative life partner debate each other on the air. Around where I lived, Slackmeyer was a familiar type. (In fact, it was rumored that a local alternative newspaper journalist, a classmate of Garry Trudeau’s at Yale, was the original model for Megaphone Mark.)
We recognized many of the Doonesbury gang in our own circle. It was fascinating watching them grow up, because, unlike other comic strip characters, they did grow up. Like us, only somewhat more slowly. They left their communes behind, got married, had kids, got divorced, went to law school, got jobs on Capitol Hill, got fired, went into rehab. Ups and downs. Like the rest of us.
But in the last several years, Garry Trudeau has thrown something much tougher at one of the old gang. B.D., Michael Doonsbury’s college roommate, has lost a leg in a grenade attack in Iraq. Since his injury, the football coach and former college jock has turned into a moody alcoholic, now undergoing therapy for post-traumatic stress at Walter Reed Hospital.
This new storyline has won Trudeau admiration and awards in some surprising quarters, including the Pentagon and the Disabled Americans Veterans. Even John McCain has done an about face. In 1995, he went on record as saying he held the liberal cartoonist in “utter contempt.” This past year McCain wrote an introduction to Trudeau's The Long Road Home , a collection of his strips about B.D.'s injury and recovery. (The proceeds will go to a veterans’ charity.)
Doonesbury has always been topical, and often controversial. During the Vietnam War Trudeau’s anti-war cartoons were part of a larger protest movement. Because of the draft, that war was central to our generation’s experience. After it was over, many of those who opposed the war came to regard the veterans as victims, not perpetrators.
In the war in Iraq, decades later, Trudeau’s has directed his focus and sympathy to the soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to writing about their issues, he’s a frequent visitor to the injury ward at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and at gatherings of wounded troops.
On his website, Trudeau has also created a virtual community for soldiers – a sort of "Global War On Terror literary magazine,” as he has written. "The Sandbox," is a digest of military blogs, open to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Posts on The Sandbox include a list of 63 items every Iraq-bound soldier should pack (baby wipes, webcam) and attempts to compare real combat with the way it’s portrayed in the movies. (Movies are more interesting,” wrote one soldier. “It’s sort of the banality of being shot at.”)
In providing this forum for active duty soldiers, and in writing about disabled soldiers in Doonesbury, the humorist underlines and important truth as effectively in the era of Bush as in the era of Nixon and Johnson.
http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/
We recognized many of the Doonesbury gang in our own circle. It was fascinating watching them grow up, because, unlike other comic strip characters, they did grow up. Like us, only somewhat more slowly. They left their communes behind, got married, had kids, got divorced, went to law school, got jobs on Capitol Hill, got fired, went into rehab. Ups and downs. Like the rest of us.
But in the last several years, Garry Trudeau has thrown something much tougher at one of the old gang. B.D., Michael Doonsbury’s college roommate, has lost a leg in a grenade attack in Iraq. Since his injury, the football coach and former college jock has turned into a moody alcoholic, now undergoing therapy for post-traumatic stress at Walter Reed Hospital.
This new storyline has won Trudeau admiration and awards in some surprising quarters, including the Pentagon and the Disabled Americans Veterans. Even John McCain has done an about face. In 1995, he went on record as saying he held the liberal cartoonist in “utter contempt.” This past year McCain wrote an introduction to Trudeau's The Long Road Home , a collection of his strips about B.D.'s injury and recovery. (The proceeds will go to a veterans’ charity.)
Doonesbury has always been topical, and often controversial. During the Vietnam War Trudeau’s anti-war cartoons were part of a larger protest movement. Because of the draft, that war was central to our generation’s experience. After it was over, many of those who opposed the war came to regard the veterans as victims, not perpetrators.
In the war in Iraq, decades later, Trudeau’s has directed his focus and sympathy to the soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to writing about their issues, he’s a frequent visitor to the injury ward at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and at gatherings of wounded troops.
On his website, Trudeau has also created a virtual community for soldiers – a sort of "Global War On Terror literary magazine,” as he has written. "The Sandbox," is a digest of military blogs, open to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Posts on The Sandbox include a list of 63 items every Iraq-bound soldier should pack (baby wipes, webcam) and attempts to compare real combat with the way it’s portrayed in the movies. (Movies are more interesting,” wrote one soldier. “It’s sort of the banality of being shot at.”)
In providing this forum for active duty soldiers, and in writing about disabled soldiers in Doonesbury, the humorist underlines and important truth as effectively in the era of Bush as in the era of Nixon and Johnson.
http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/
John Adams: The Courage to Sign
It's not only youth that's wasted on the young, as George Bernard Shaw famously remarked. So is education. Other than learning to read and write, and maybe do the odd sum, is there any point in going to school before you're 40-something or even or 50-something?
Certainly teaching me history was a waste. As a schoolgirl, I was too self-absorbed and my imaginative powers were too undeveloped for me to fully appreciate any historical event. If it happened before I was born, my M.O. was “memorize and forget.”
This occurred to me recently because I am in the middle of watching “John Adams,” the seven-part HBO miniseries about the founding of our country. There are aspects I don't much like about the production, mainly Paul Giametti's John Adams -- he seems to have two facial expressions, both of them cribbed from Homer Simpson.
But I have found the history unexpectedly moving, and have for the first time begun to grasp what it really means. Watching scenes from the Continental Congress, where the terms of Independence were hammered out, I understood for the first time how terrifying it was for these men to repudiate their government -- how extreme an act, and how uncertain of success.
They had reason to be scared. Benjamin Franklin (played brilliantly by Tom Wilkinson) expressed everyone's mood when he said, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” And so they would have. Because we know how the story comes out, it's hard to fully appreciate the courage and audacity of these 56 men. In signing the Declaration of Independence, they might well have been signing their own death warrant.
Strip away the mythologizing and the pieties of history-books, and the fact remains: those Patriots were extraordinary men. Not only courageous, but also smart. Pretty much the same bunch went on to frame the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they created a substantially new form of government that has proved durable and important.
Certainly teaching me history was a waste. As a schoolgirl, I was too self-absorbed and my imaginative powers were too undeveloped for me to fully appreciate any historical event. If it happened before I was born, my M.O. was “memorize and forget.”
This occurred to me recently because I am in the middle of watching “John Adams,” the seven-part HBO miniseries about the founding of our country. There are aspects I don't much like about the production, mainly Paul Giametti's John Adams -- he seems to have two facial expressions, both of them cribbed from Homer Simpson.
But I have found the history unexpectedly moving, and have for the first time begun to grasp what it really means. Watching scenes from the Continental Congress, where the terms of Independence were hammered out, I understood for the first time how terrifying it was for these men to repudiate their government -- how extreme an act, and how uncertain of success.
They had reason to be scared. Benjamin Franklin (played brilliantly by Tom Wilkinson) expressed everyone's mood when he said, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” And so they would have. Because we know how the story comes out, it's hard to fully appreciate the courage and audacity of these 56 men. In signing the Declaration of Independence, they might well have been signing their own death warrant.
Strip away the mythologizing and the pieties of history-books, and the fact remains: those Patriots were extraordinary men. Not only courageous, but also smart. Pretty much the same bunch went on to frame the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they created a substantially new form of government that has proved durable and important.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Obama Plays the Age Card
Young people don't vote. That's the conventional wisdom, and this year it's big news that, in the primaries, young voters surged to the polls as they haven't in a long time. In 1970, when the voting age was lowered to 18, 55 percent of the young voters went to the polls, but in recent elections that figure has dropped dramatically.
This year, though, they're coming back--mostly, no surprise, to support Obama. He has delighted them in part by challenging the baby boom generation, whose members, he has said, should "get over themselves."
From an age standpoint, it’s hard to think of another election year that has been as interesting as this one. For the first time ever, three generations are represented in the Presidential horse race. Obama has declared that it's time for a representative of a new generation to enter the White House, namely him.*
Not baby boomer Hillary Clinton, born in 1947, the same year the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And certainly not John McCain, whose 1938 birth date makes him a son of the Great Depression. The year Obama was born, 1961, was the year John F. Kennedy exhorted Americans to "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country." Some seasoned political hands say they see in Obama the youth and hopefulness of JFK.
After 16 years of running the country, maybe it is time for our generation to step aside. But it's annoying to hear Obama sound off on the subject. As even he acknowledges, many of the social reforms we now take for granted were initiated by the 60s politics that he now called "tired." If the Democratic nomination does end up going to him, I imagine he will begin to soft-pedal the anti-boomer rhetoric. We are, after all, still the largest generation in American history and we do vote.
*According to some demographers, Obama, with his 1961 birthdate, qualifies as a late boomer. But he counts himself as part of the baby bust, a.k.a. the boomer backlash. If you doubt there is such a thing, take a look at the blog dieboomerdie.
[http://dieboomerdie.blogspot.com]
This year, though, they're coming back--mostly, no surprise, to support Obama. He has delighted them in part by challenging the baby boom generation, whose members, he has said, should "get over themselves."
From an age standpoint, it’s hard to think of another election year that has been as interesting as this one. For the first time ever, three generations are represented in the Presidential horse race. Obama has declared that it's time for a representative of a new generation to enter the White House, namely him.*
Not baby boomer Hillary Clinton, born in 1947, the same year the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And certainly not John McCain, whose 1938 birth date makes him a son of the Great Depression. The year Obama was born, 1961, was the year John F. Kennedy exhorted Americans to "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country." Some seasoned political hands say they see in Obama the youth and hopefulness of JFK.
After 16 years of running the country, maybe it is time for our generation to step aside. But it's annoying to hear Obama sound off on the subject. As even he acknowledges, many of the social reforms we now take for granted were initiated by the 60s politics that he now called "tired." If the Democratic nomination does end up going to him, I imagine he will begin to soft-pedal the anti-boomer rhetoric. We are, after all, still the largest generation in American history and we do vote.
*According to some demographers, Obama, with his 1961 birthdate, qualifies as a late boomer. But he counts himself as part of the baby bust, a.k.a. the boomer backlash. If you doubt there is such a thing, take a look at the blog dieboomerdie.
[http://dieboomerdie.blogspot.com]
Uncle Internet is Watching
Back in the Dark Ages, before there was an Internet, I subscribed to a newsletter called Privacy Journal. It was edited by Robert Ellis Smith, America's leading expert on the right to privacy. Smith counseled that you should never give your Social Security number without asking why, or if, it was needed. I followed this advice for a while and then gave up because it was too much trouble. In fact, privacy itself became too much trouble. There are only so many issues you can be angry about at any one time, and privacy infringements just did not make the cut.
It may be time to rethink that. A recent article in the New York Times reported on the amassing of consumer information by Web companies that track your every Internet search. They can then use this window into your tastes and desires to personally target the ads that appear on your screen. As a marketing executive explained, with more data, it's possible to put the right ads in front of the right people. "That's the whole idea here: put dog food ads in front of people who have dogs."
A while back, I posted a piece about my Googling habit, in which I described my computer Search History as a kind of stream-of-consciousness autobiography. Now I see that, from a marketer's angle, it's also a wish list. Let's see. Customer Banks orders lots of vitamin supplements; she appears to be a bit of a hypochondriac (though some of those symptom searches were on behalf of others); she's often on the lookout for high-end sheets at low-end prices; she researches more travel destinations than a person could possibly visit; and when she does travel, she is relentless about turning up the absolute cheapest airfare. Lots of possibilities for target marketing there.
Does this matter? Sometimes it might be convenient to get targeted ads, to have Uncle Internet know just what you want. But there's a cost - in privacy, not to mention the general creepiness factor.
The New York Times article quoted one of my favorite-ever New Yorker cartoons from 1993. Two dogs are sitting in front of a computer and one says to the other, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
Now they do.
It may be time to rethink that. A recent article in the New York Times reported on the amassing of consumer information by Web companies that track your every Internet search. They can then use this window into your tastes and desires to personally target the ads that appear on your screen. As a marketing executive explained, with more data, it's possible to put the right ads in front of the right people. "That's the whole idea here: put dog food ads in front of people who have dogs."
A while back, I posted a piece about my Googling habit, in which I described my computer Search History as a kind of stream-of-consciousness autobiography. Now I see that, from a marketer's angle, it's also a wish list. Let's see. Customer Banks orders lots of vitamin supplements; she appears to be a bit of a hypochondriac (though some of those symptom searches were on behalf of others); she's often on the lookout for high-end sheets at low-end prices; she researches more travel destinations than a person could possibly visit; and when she does travel, she is relentless about turning up the absolute cheapest airfare. Lots of possibilities for target marketing there.
Does this matter? Sometimes it might be convenient to get targeted ads, to have Uncle Internet know just what you want. But there's a cost - in privacy, not to mention the general creepiness factor.
The New York Times article quoted one of my favorite-ever New Yorker cartoons from 1993. Two dogs are sitting in front of a computer and one says to the other, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
Now they do.
Are We Scared Yet?
If you are old enough to remember Lassie and hula hoops, chances are your grandparents lived through the Great Depression. You may have been taught in school that the stock market crash of 1929 sent the country on a disastrous 10-year economic decline; you also may have heard, and heard again, personal stories of that time. Often these stories consist of a single memory, one that is meant to stand in for all the rest, and to convey what it was like to live through such an event.
My grandmother's story was this: She was working in a real estate office in Palm Beach, Florida, before the Crash. Sales were booming and times were flush. This exuberance was reflected in a large mosaic map of Florida embedded in the office floor. At the center of the map was Florida’s Gold Coast, and that the center of the Gold Coast was Palm Beach, marked by a shiny silver dollar that the artist had cemented among the tiles.
Not long after, the Florida boom became a bust and my grandmother ended up losing her house, her car and the money she had been saving for my father's education. But the story she told wasn't about that. Instead it was about the silver dollar – and how one morning she and her colleagues came in to work to discover that someone had chiseled it right out of the map. Times were that hard.
For a while after the '29 stock market crash, nobody understood the extent of the economic crisis. Especially the nobodies. On Wall Street, stockbrokers were jumping out of windows. But lots of ordinary people bought the government’s assurances that the shortage of cash was temporary, nothing to worry about. Then something would happen - in my grandmother's case it was the disappearance of the silver dollar - that crystallized the new reality. Yes, times were now that hard.
I haven't come upon my own silver dollar yet, but I'm on the lookout. It stands to reason, when in the same week, a major Wall Street firm collapses and Alan Greenspan announces the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. (Actually he said World War II, but that is essentially the same thing, since it was gearing up for war production that decisively pulled the U.S. out of the Depression.)
I was raised on stories of the Depression. I still have in my possession a photograph of the beautiful Victorian house my grandmother lost. I admit to being a pessimist about money issues, and I sincerely hope I'm wrong this time. But if I see something that looks like it might be my silver dollar, I will let you know.
My grandmother's story was this: She was working in a real estate office in Palm Beach, Florida, before the Crash. Sales were booming and times were flush. This exuberance was reflected in a large mosaic map of Florida embedded in the office floor. At the center of the map was Florida’s Gold Coast, and that the center of the Gold Coast was Palm Beach, marked by a shiny silver dollar that the artist had cemented among the tiles.
Not long after, the Florida boom became a bust and my grandmother ended up losing her house, her car and the money she had been saving for my father's education. But the story she told wasn't about that. Instead it was about the silver dollar – and how one morning she and her colleagues came in to work to discover that someone had chiseled it right out of the map. Times were that hard.
For a while after the '29 stock market crash, nobody understood the extent of the economic crisis. Especially the nobodies. On Wall Street, stockbrokers were jumping out of windows. But lots of ordinary people bought the government’s assurances that the shortage of cash was temporary, nothing to worry about. Then something would happen - in my grandmother's case it was the disappearance of the silver dollar - that crystallized the new reality. Yes, times were now that hard.
I haven't come upon my own silver dollar yet, but I'm on the lookout. It stands to reason, when in the same week, a major Wall Street firm collapses and Alan Greenspan announces the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. (Actually he said World War II, but that is essentially the same thing, since it was gearing up for war production that decisively pulled the U.S. out of the Depression.)
I was raised on stories of the Depression. I still have in my possession a photograph of the beautiful Victorian house my grandmother lost. I admit to being a pessimist about money issues, and I sincerely hope I'm wrong this time. But if I see something that looks like it might be my silver dollar, I will let you know.
"You Had 'em, You Raise 'em"
In the course of her work, my daughter recently has had occasion to read various “mommy blogs,” an outlet for maternal obsessing that wasn't available when I was a new mother. (Instead I got to bore people in person.) My daughter was horrified by the compulsive preoccupation with every trivial detail of baby care, and it has put her off the whole of idea of motherhood.
She had a similar reaction to a Sex and the City rerun we watched together. It was the famous baby-shower episode, where a mommy character announces that she's given up a career as a corporate senior vice president to stay home with her child. “That is so unrealistic!” Cait said. “No one would ever do that.” “Yes they would, and they do,” I said.
Personally I guess I wouldn't recommend putting a career on the back-burner. Luckily for me I never had to make that choice, not being a senior vice president of anything when I got pregnant. As a self-employed writer, I could shape my work around taking care of my child. I could even channel my maternal preoccupations into my work by writing for parenting magazines. I never had to contend with the heartrending, impossible balancing act of mothers with employers and office jobs.
I wanted to say something reassuring to Cait about how times have changed and there were more options available. I wanted to say that the senior vice president would now be able to take a year of parental leave and return to her previous job without penalty. That the part-time or reduced-hour work week was widely accepted. That there were excellent government-subsidized childcare and education centers, and that these high-quality programs were staffed by trained well-paid workers. That she could contribute to her pension fund even in the years she wasn't working.
Unfortunately, there’s no way I can say such things. Most of these family-work reconciliation measures I mention are taken for granted in Europe. There, caring for the next generation is considered to contribute to the social good. But In this country, we are rugged individualists, where the prevailing attitude is, “you had 'em, you raise 'em.” This backward attitude toward family benefits is unique in the developed world.
Realigning our family policies would be an investment that pays dividends for everyone. Literally. Because these future generations will, if we’re lucky, be paying the taxes that fund our social security dividends
She had a similar reaction to a Sex and the City rerun we watched together. It was the famous baby-shower episode, where a mommy character announces that she's given up a career as a corporate senior vice president to stay home with her child. “That is so unrealistic!” Cait said. “No one would ever do that.” “Yes they would, and they do,” I said.
Personally I guess I wouldn't recommend putting a career on the back-burner. Luckily for me I never had to make that choice, not being a senior vice president of anything when I got pregnant. As a self-employed writer, I could shape my work around taking care of my child. I could even channel my maternal preoccupations into my work by writing for parenting magazines. I never had to contend with the heartrending, impossible balancing act of mothers with employers and office jobs.
I wanted to say something reassuring to Cait about how times have changed and there were more options available. I wanted to say that the senior vice president would now be able to take a year of parental leave and return to her previous job without penalty. That the part-time or reduced-hour work week was widely accepted. That there were excellent government-subsidized childcare and education centers, and that these high-quality programs were staffed by trained well-paid workers. That she could contribute to her pension fund even in the years she wasn't working.
Unfortunately, there’s no way I can say such things. Most of these family-work reconciliation measures I mention are taken for granted in Europe. There, caring for the next generation is considered to contribute to the social good. But In this country, we are rugged individualists, where the prevailing attitude is, “you had 'em, you raise 'em.” This backward attitude toward family benefits is unique in the developed world.
Realigning our family policies would be an investment that pays dividends for everyone. Literally. Because these future generations will, if we’re lucky, be paying the taxes that fund our social security dividends
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