There's a video on CNN.com today about a high school that is abolishing the honor roll because it causes too much stress for students. Put simply, I think that's BS.
I remember high school. I always made pretty good grades, and part of the reason for that was that I liked be rewarded for my efforts. There were other reasons, too (internal motivation, my dad killing me if I didn't, etc), but recognition did play a role. I knew that if I went to school, turned in an assignment that wasn't up to par, I'd hear about it - from my teachers, friends, and parents. Sure, I was stressed in high school. But when has stress become such a bad thing??
In the last 5-10 years, kids have become coddled to the point that it makes me want to puke. Teachers can't use red pens because it's damaging to kids' self-esteem. Huh? Sports teams can't hold try-outs because it's not fair that some kids aren't good enough to make the team. Oookay. Sure, seeing your mistakes and realizing that you're not the best can be stressful, but that's what life is all about. If kids go through life without learning about these things, they're going to be in for a fun time when they're adults. Can you imagine an employer just hiring everyone so they didn't hurt anyone's feelings? Unfortunately that's not the way things work in the real world.
I think schools have an obligation to prepare students for life after high school. Any way you look at it, stress is part of the real world. We are not doing kids a favor by protecting them and not teaching them how to deal with these things. Life's tough - and they should be prepared. Abolishing stress from their lives is NOT they way to do it.
Showing posts with label I'm thinking so I must be drunk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label I'm thinking so I must be drunk. Show all posts
Monday, December 18, 2006
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
One of the best Pro-Choice Essays I've read in a while
The Rights Of the Born
By Anne Lamott, ANNE LAMOTT is a novelist and essayist. Her most recent book is "Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith" (Riverhead, 2005).
February 10, 2006
EVERYTHING WAS going swimmingly on the panel. The subject was politics and faith, and I was on stage with two clergymen with progressive spiritual leanings, and a moderator who is liberal and Catholic. We were having a discussion with the audience of 1,300 people in Washington about many of the social justice topics on which we agree the immorality of the federal budget, the wrongness of the president's war in Iraq. Then an older man came to the mike and raised the issue of abortion, and everyone just lost his or her mind.
Or, at any rate, I did.
Maybe it was the way in which the man couched the question, which was about how we should reconcile our progressive stances on peace and justice with the "murder of a million babies every year in America." The man who asked the question was soft-spoken, neatly and casually dressed.
First Richard, a Franciscan priest, answered that this is indeed a painful issue but that it is not the only "pro-life" issue that progressives even Catholics should concern themselves with during elections. There are also the matters of capital punishment and the war in Iraq, and of HIV. Then Jim, an evangelical, spoke about the need to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and the need to diffuse abortion as a political issue, by welcoming pro-choice and pro-life supporters to the discussion, with equal respect for their positions. He spoke gently about how "morally ambiguous" the issue is.
I sat there simmering, like a samovar; nice Jesusy me. The moderator turned to me and asked quietly if I would like to respond. I did: I wanted to respond by pushing over our table.
Instead, I shook my head. I love and respect the Franciscan and the evangelical, and agree with them 90-plus percent of the time. So I did not say anything, at first.
Then, when I was asked to answer the next question, I paused, and returned to the topic of abortion. There was a loud buzzing in my head, the voice of reason that says, "You have the right to remain silent," but the voice of my conscience was insistent. I wanted to express calmly, eloquently, that pro-choice people understand that there are two lives involved in an abortion one born (the pregnant woman) and one not (the fetus) but that the born person must be allowed to decide what is right.
Also, I wanted to wave a gun around, to show what a real murder looks like. This tipped me off that I should hold my tongue, until further notice. And I tried.
But then I announced that I needed to speak out on behalf of the many women present in the crowd, including myself, who had had abortions, and the women whose daughters might need one in the not-too-distant future people who must know that teenage girls will have abortions, whether in clinics or dirty backrooms. Women whose lives had been righted and redeemed by Roe vs. Wade. My answer was met with some applause but mostly a shocked silence.
Pall is a good word. And it did not feel good to be the cause of that pall. I knew what I was supposed to have said, as a progressive Christian: that it's all very complicated and painful, and that Jim was right in saying that the abortion rate in America is way too high for a caring and compassionate society.
But I did the only thing I could think to do: plunge on, and tell my truth. I said that this is the most intimate decision a woman makes, and she makes it all alone, in her deepest heart of hearts, sometimes with the man by whom she is pregnant, with her dearest friends or with her doctor but without the personal opinion of say, Tom DeLay or Karl Rove.
I said I could not believe that men committed to equality and civil rights were still challenging the basic rights of women. I thought about all the photo-ops at which President Bush had signed legislation limiting abortion rights, surrounded by 10 or so white, self-righteous married men, who have forced God knows how many girlfriends into doing God knows what. I thought of the time Bush appeared on stage with children born from frozen embryos, children he calls "snowflake babies," and of the embryos themselves, which he calls the youngest and most vulnerable Americans.
And somehow, as I was answering, I got louder and maybe even more emphatic than I actually felt, and said it was not a morally ambiguous issue for me at all. I said that fetuses are not babies yet; that there was actually a real difference between pro-abortion people, like me, and Klaus Barbie.
Then I said that a woman's right to choose was nobody else's goddamn business. This got their attention.
A cloud of misery fell over the room, and the stage. Finally, Jim said something unifying enough for us to proceed that liberals must not treat people with opposing opinions on abortion with contempt and exclusion, partly because it's tough material, and partly because it is so critical that we win these next big elections.
It was not until the reception that I finally realized part of the problem no one had told me that the crowd was made up largely of Catholics.
I had flown in at dawn on a red-eye, and, in my exhaustion, had somehow missed this one tiny bit of information. I was mortified: I had to eat my body weight in chocolate just to calm myself.
But then I asked myself: Would I, should I, have given a calmer answer? Wouldn't it have been more useful and harder to dismiss me if I had sounded more reasonable, less what is the word spewy?
Maybe I could have presented my position in a less strident, divisive manner. But the questioner's use of the words "murder" and "babies" had put me on the defensive. Plus I am so confused about why we are still having to argue with patriarchal sentimentality about teeny weenie so-called babies some microscopic, some no bigger than the sea monkeys we used to send away for when real, live, already born women, many of them desperately poor, get such short shrift from the current administration.
Most women like me would much rather use our time and energy fighting to make the world safe and just and fair for the children we do have, and do love and for the children of New Orleans and the children of Darfur. I am old and tired and menopausal and would mostly like to be left alone: I have had my abortions, and I have had a child.
But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women is a crucial part of that: It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.
During the reception, an old woman came up to me, and said, "If you hadn't spoken out, I would have spit," and then she raised her fist in the power salute. We huddled together for awhile, and ate M&Ms to give us strength. It was a kind of communion, for those of us who still believe that civil rights and equality and even common sense will somehow be sovereign, some day
By Anne Lamott, ANNE LAMOTT is a novelist and essayist. Her most recent book is "Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith" (Riverhead, 2005).
February 10, 2006
EVERYTHING WAS going swimmingly on the panel. The subject was politics and faith, and I was on stage with two clergymen with progressive spiritual leanings, and a moderator who is liberal and Catholic. We were having a discussion with the audience of 1,300 people in Washington about many of the social justice topics on which we agree the immorality of the federal budget, the wrongness of the president's war in Iraq. Then an older man came to the mike and raised the issue of abortion, and everyone just lost his or her mind.
Or, at any rate, I did.
Maybe it was the way in which the man couched the question, which was about how we should reconcile our progressive stances on peace and justice with the "murder of a million babies every year in America." The man who asked the question was soft-spoken, neatly and casually dressed.
First Richard, a Franciscan priest, answered that this is indeed a painful issue but that it is not the only "pro-life" issue that progressives even Catholics should concern themselves with during elections. There are also the matters of capital punishment and the war in Iraq, and of HIV. Then Jim, an evangelical, spoke about the need to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, and the need to diffuse abortion as a political issue, by welcoming pro-choice and pro-life supporters to the discussion, with equal respect for their positions. He spoke gently about how "morally ambiguous" the issue is.
I sat there simmering, like a samovar; nice Jesusy me. The moderator turned to me and asked quietly if I would like to respond. I did: I wanted to respond by pushing over our table.
Instead, I shook my head. I love and respect the Franciscan and the evangelical, and agree with them 90-plus percent of the time. So I did not say anything, at first.
Then, when I was asked to answer the next question, I paused, and returned to the topic of abortion. There was a loud buzzing in my head, the voice of reason that says, "You have the right to remain silent," but the voice of my conscience was insistent. I wanted to express calmly, eloquently, that pro-choice people understand that there are two lives involved in an abortion one born (the pregnant woman) and one not (the fetus) but that the born person must be allowed to decide what is right.
Also, I wanted to wave a gun around, to show what a real murder looks like. This tipped me off that I should hold my tongue, until further notice. And I tried.
But then I announced that I needed to speak out on behalf of the many women present in the crowd, including myself, who had had abortions, and the women whose daughters might need one in the not-too-distant future people who must know that teenage girls will have abortions, whether in clinics or dirty backrooms. Women whose lives had been righted and redeemed by Roe vs. Wade. My answer was met with some applause but mostly a shocked silence.
Pall is a good word. And it did not feel good to be the cause of that pall. I knew what I was supposed to have said, as a progressive Christian: that it's all very complicated and painful, and that Jim was right in saying that the abortion rate in America is way too high for a caring and compassionate society.
But I did the only thing I could think to do: plunge on, and tell my truth. I said that this is the most intimate decision a woman makes, and she makes it all alone, in her deepest heart of hearts, sometimes with the man by whom she is pregnant, with her dearest friends or with her doctor but without the personal opinion of say, Tom DeLay or Karl Rove.
I said I could not believe that men committed to equality and civil rights were still challenging the basic rights of women. I thought about all the photo-ops at which President Bush had signed legislation limiting abortion rights, surrounded by 10 or so white, self-righteous married men, who have forced God knows how many girlfriends into doing God knows what. I thought of the time Bush appeared on stage with children born from frozen embryos, children he calls "snowflake babies," and of the embryos themselves, which he calls the youngest and most vulnerable Americans.
And somehow, as I was answering, I got louder and maybe even more emphatic than I actually felt, and said it was not a morally ambiguous issue for me at all. I said that fetuses are not babies yet; that there was actually a real difference between pro-abortion people, like me, and Klaus Barbie.
Then I said that a woman's right to choose was nobody else's goddamn business. This got their attention.
A cloud of misery fell over the room, and the stage. Finally, Jim said something unifying enough for us to proceed that liberals must not treat people with opposing opinions on abortion with contempt and exclusion, partly because it's tough material, and partly because it is so critical that we win these next big elections.
It was not until the reception that I finally realized part of the problem no one had told me that the crowd was made up largely of Catholics.
I had flown in at dawn on a red-eye, and, in my exhaustion, had somehow missed this one tiny bit of information. I was mortified: I had to eat my body weight in chocolate just to calm myself.
But then I asked myself: Would I, should I, have given a calmer answer? Wouldn't it have been more useful and harder to dismiss me if I had sounded more reasonable, less what is the word spewy?
Maybe I could have presented my position in a less strident, divisive manner. But the questioner's use of the words "murder" and "babies" had put me on the defensive. Plus I am so confused about why we are still having to argue with patriarchal sentimentality about teeny weenie so-called babies some microscopic, some no bigger than the sea monkeys we used to send away for when real, live, already born women, many of them desperately poor, get such short shrift from the current administration.
Most women like me would much rather use our time and energy fighting to make the world safe and just and fair for the children we do have, and do love and for the children of New Orleans and the children of Darfur. I am old and tired and menopausal and would mostly like to be left alone: I have had my abortions, and I have had a child.
But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women is a crucial part of that: It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.
During the reception, an old woman came up to me, and said, "If you hadn't spoken out, I would have spit," and then she raised her fist in the power salute. We huddled together for awhile, and ate M&Ms to give us strength. It was a kind of communion, for those of us who still believe that civil rights and equality and even common sense will somehow be sovereign, some day
Friday, May 05, 2006
Guess Jeans
I'm thinking of putting together a collection of short stories from my life, basically just so I have them written down. I was shopping the other day, and was reminded of an incident that took place was I was 12 or 13, and decided to start there. Here's the first installment:
When I was in middle school, all I wanted was a pair of Guess jeans. All of the cool kids had them, and even some of the not-so-cool kids. I begged my mom nearly every day. The only answer I got was, "We can't afford them."
My mom finally reached her breaking point one day while we were doing our annual fall school shopping. I think it was right before the start of 7th grade. We were at Sears, buying sensible clothing that she could afford, when I started in on the Guess jeans routine. Right in the middle of the store, she grabbed me by the arm, led me to Bergner's (the expensive store), and made me pick out a pair of Guess jeans. I didn't know what was going on, but I picked out my jeans and mom paid for them. I don't remember how much they cost, but I'm sure it was more than mom was planning on spending at Sears. After that, we went back to Sears to continue our shopping. Mom picked out some clothes for my brother and sister, and went to check out. I was confused. What about me? I asked mom when we were going to go buy the rest of my clothes for the year. She just looked at me, and then she said, "I could have bought you three pairs of jeans here for what I paid for the one pair that you so desperately needed. So this year, instead of having three pairs of jeans to wear to school, you'll have one. But I'm sure that's fine with you since they are the coolest pants around, right?" Suddenly my jeans weren't so cool.
The reality of having one nice pair of pants to wear to school finally set in around the second week of school, when kids were starting to notice that I kept wearing the same pants every day. I finally caved, and began wearing some of my too-short jeans from the previous year. My mom never said anything to me about it, but I'm sure inside she was shaking her head and saying, "I told you so."
I went to a big, suburban middle school in the best part of the city. We lived in a duplex right in the heart of the good part of town. In our backyard, literally, was the Saxer Mansion. I remember longingly looking out the window and wishing I lived there. Our house wasn't bad, but it wasnt ours. The duplex was the only rental unit on the block. Many of the kids I was so envious of lived just a block away, where the new subdivisions began. They would often ride their bikes past our house and I would wish that I could follow them home. It was as if I was always on the brink of something good, but couldn't quite reach it.
When I was in middle school, all I wanted was a pair of Guess jeans. All of the cool kids had them, and even some of the not-so-cool kids. I begged my mom nearly every day. The only answer I got was, "We can't afford them."
My mom finally reached her breaking point one day while we were doing our annual fall school shopping. I think it was right before the start of 7th grade. We were at Sears, buying sensible clothing that she could afford, when I started in on the Guess jeans routine. Right in the middle of the store, she grabbed me by the arm, led me to Bergner's (the expensive store), and made me pick out a pair of Guess jeans. I didn't know what was going on, but I picked out my jeans and mom paid for them. I don't remember how much they cost, but I'm sure it was more than mom was planning on spending at Sears. After that, we went back to Sears to continue our shopping. Mom picked out some clothes for my brother and sister, and went to check out. I was confused. What about me? I asked mom when we were going to go buy the rest of my clothes for the year. She just looked at me, and then she said, "I could have bought you three pairs of jeans here for what I paid for the one pair that you so desperately needed. So this year, instead of having three pairs of jeans to wear to school, you'll have one. But I'm sure that's fine with you since they are the coolest pants around, right?" Suddenly my jeans weren't so cool.
The reality of having one nice pair of pants to wear to school finally set in around the second week of school, when kids were starting to notice that I kept wearing the same pants every day. I finally caved, and began wearing some of my too-short jeans from the previous year. My mom never said anything to me about it, but I'm sure inside she was shaking her head and saying, "I told you so."
I went to a big, suburban middle school in the best part of the city. We lived in a duplex right in the heart of the good part of town. In our backyard, literally, was the Saxer Mansion. I remember longingly looking out the window and wishing I lived there. Our house wasn't bad, but it wasnt ours. The duplex was the only rental unit on the block. Many of the kids I was so envious of lived just a block away, where the new subdivisions began. They would often ride their bikes past our house and I would wish that I could follow them home. It was as if I was always on the brink of something good, but couldn't quite reach it.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Forgive me
I've been thinking a lot lately about people who I've not treated as well as I should, as well as those people who have not treated me well. For some reason, I feel an overwhelming sense of shame and guilt about the wrongdoings I've committed in the past. I find myself thinking about these people, and wondering how I can make it right...and then realizing: the past cannot be changed.
The one person I feel most badly about is Brian. God, I treated him like shit without even realizing it. Looking back, I can see that he loved me more than anything and I didn't recognize or appreciate it. Sure, I loved him, but I took it for granted...a mistake I hope to never make again. He's married now, and I hope he is truly happy and has found what he was looking for. To Brian, I am sincerely sorry and I hope you will someday forgive me.
To Donald: I'm sorry that I didn't realize sooner that everything I was looking for was right in my own backyard. I'm sorry I made you complete an obstacle course before accepting you. You've been my very best friend for so long, I think I started to take you for granted, too. For all of this and more, I'm sorry. I know you have forgiven me along time ago, and for this I am humbled. You mean everything to me.
To Mom: I know now how hard it must have been for you. I know you've always wanted the best for your children but didn't always know how to provide that. Every person has their own struggles in life that they must work through, including you. I'm sorry I didn't realize that sooner. I no longer judge you, but look at you as a fellow cast member of this production called life. I'm sorry for all of the awful things I've said to you. I know we will never agree on some things, but that's okay. Love doesn't rely on complete agreement.
To those who have hurt me: I forgive you. We are all a product of our environments, and I know that many of you acted as a part of that environment. Acceptance and tolerance do not come easy in this world; it is something we each must work at every day. It is very easy to hurt, but much harder to heal. My wounded heart has healed, and will do so again should I be hurt again.
The one person I feel most badly about is Brian. God, I treated him like shit without even realizing it. Looking back, I can see that he loved me more than anything and I didn't recognize or appreciate it. Sure, I loved him, but I took it for granted...a mistake I hope to never make again. He's married now, and I hope he is truly happy and has found what he was looking for. To Brian, I am sincerely sorry and I hope you will someday forgive me.
To Donald: I'm sorry that I didn't realize sooner that everything I was looking for was right in my own backyard. I'm sorry I made you complete an obstacle course before accepting you. You've been my very best friend for so long, I think I started to take you for granted, too. For all of this and more, I'm sorry. I know you have forgiven me along time ago, and for this I am humbled. You mean everything to me.
To Mom: I know now how hard it must have been for you. I know you've always wanted the best for your children but didn't always know how to provide that. Every person has their own struggles in life that they must work through, including you. I'm sorry I didn't realize that sooner. I no longer judge you, but look at you as a fellow cast member of this production called life. I'm sorry for all of the awful things I've said to you. I know we will never agree on some things, but that's okay. Love doesn't rely on complete agreement.
To those who have hurt me: I forgive you. We are all a product of our environments, and I know that many of you acted as a part of that environment. Acceptance and tolerance do not come easy in this world; it is something we each must work at every day. It is very easy to hurt, but much harder to heal. My wounded heart has healed, and will do so again should I be hurt again.
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