Indiana University:100; The Old Folks Home: 0

Long before the chancellor announced “Our youngest graduate this evening is 21 and the oldest is 68”, my status as a senior scholar had been confirmed.

In my Cold War History class, the professor called me “the archives” as I was the only one in class who had lived through and remembered General McArthur’s recall, Adlai Stevenson’s candidacy for President, and Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech.

Although my memories of World War II are limited to snapshot images of stamp drives, mother flattening empty cans in the kitchen, young men in uniform at the railroad station, and pounding a pan with a metal spoon when the war ended in 1945, I had personal, adult memories of  “duck and cover”,  the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the Kennedy assassinations, and the destruction of the Berlin wall.

I was the “expert” on Medicare Part D coverage when my classmates learned that Social Security had added a prescription plan and admitted that it was confusing to their parents.

I elected “to walk” in commencement this past May, receiving my Masters’ degree in all the pomp and circumstance because it was important to me.

My classes had been better than a book club.

Through them I learned things I’d never dreamed of, and met wonderful people – my classmates.

Soon I will be 69 – an age I would have achieved anyway.  This last degree was so much fun, that I will begin the next the fall semester!

A Young Man’s Enterprise

“Thirty-two dollars: that’s a lot of money for an eight year old.”

Tom told me the story when I asked – early in our marriage – “Did you ever have a paper route?”

“No”, he answered, “I never needed one.”

Though his family lived on the wrong side of two tracks in a rented duplex community called Rubberville, Tom always had more money in his jeans than the kids of the country club set.

He and  a sometimes business partner shared a large two-wheeled cart; their business was junking.

The $32 was the product of $3 each to haul old ice boxes away, and $5 each the trash man paid him for the four after he had cleaned and painted them.

A skinny blonde kid with freckles, Tom was an entrepreneur early.

He admits that the lady with a garage full floor-to-ceiling  bundles of newspapers and magazines  probably thought that he and Jack represented the Boy Scouts who had an annual paper drive when she said, “I’m so glad you finally made it” before showing them the motherlode she had been collecting for years. (The Police Gazette copies were delayed on the way to the recycling center”, he admits. “Jack and I read every one.”)

Tom’s solo adventures also included addressing penny postcards to every Anderson, Jenson, Johnson, Scandinavian named in the Minneapolis white pages – a job he did for a neighbor who sold appleskiver irons as a cottage industry.  He had won this job over the other school kid applicants with time on their hands that summer because his penmanship was best.

He also sold handkerchiefs with tatted and crocheted borders which his mother painstakingly worked while the family watched TV together evenings.  He blushed with either pride or embarrassment or both  when he admitted taking a mark-up for the sales.  The black funeral handkerchief sold for $15 though his mother had asked for – and received – $10. And he developed his salesmanship skills too – creating a market by describing other available models to his buyers who promptly ordered more.

“You see”, he told me, “There was no reason to get up at 5:30 in the morning – except in corn tasseling season – because there was plenty of money to be made in more civilized times of the day.”
 

Charity Does Not Serve the Children

“Rocking chair money”, “on the dole”, “collecting welfare”, being poor, and – the implication was - being lazy.  As kids we were pretty righteous in our condemnation of people who did not work as hard as our dads did, who weren’t as important, who would never be respected. We were tough on the poor in the 1950’s.

But they were tougher in the twenties and thirties. Aunt Ethel told me about “charity” as it was dispensed before government made it pale, impersonal, and an entitlement.  She said she was embarrassed for those who gave it, and for those who received it – back in the days when the ladies of the church would call at a poor home, and the courtesy was that the lady of the house would serve them coffee or tea in her thread-bare living room or parlor.  When they left, the church ladies left behind the clothes and shoes their children had outgrown – a public charity in a small town, for the other kids always knew who had worn that dress, or coat, or those shoes first.

Today, debit cards provide a method free-of-embarrassment for those who are supported by tax payers to buy food.  The stigma of producing food stamps at the check-out counter is gone.  Now the poor pay as everyone else does. 

Charity has been destigmatized, but it has not been improved, and it does not fix anything.

The very people for whom the government provides food at reduced cost and superior medical treatment are not eating well-balanced meals; their children are not being disciplined, or read to, or nurtured.  Too often, the food budget goes on Momma’s back, up Momma’s nose, or into the pockets of an unemployed boy friend, and no one cares enough to discipline – or even notice – the children.These children who will grow up incompletely prepared for citizenship in the community – in humanity – are a problem demanding a solution.

In the 1980’s there was a lot of talk about what this nation should do with all the military bases we were closing. Since then, many have become shopping centers, business complexes, and condominium communities.

It occurs to me that we had an opportunity with all of that empty real estate: we had available housing for the homeless,  those who do not work,  and their families.  As the military has often “made men of boys”, we had an opportunity to add structure and balance to the lives of thousands of ignored, neglected, destined-to-fail children.  Certainly life in a barracks with three squares a day, schools and after-school activities nearby, and caring adult supervision would be an improvement over the catch-as-catch-can system of government charity that produces generations in poverty.

I have met nine-year-olds who cannot  read, swim, look an adult in the eye, or identify their own nose, elbow, knee.  Their lack of confidence and skills aside, these children make dinner of  a bag of cheese puffs.  They do not know what a family dinner is – because they have never experienced one. Every program in place perpetuates the system, even well-meaning church ladies who  counsel imprisoned crack whores “not to give up the baby”.  There is something very wrong about continuing the poverty that we blame for drive-by-shootings, drugs, generations of disfunctional familes, violence, and lost childhoods.

The poor need our money, but they also need for us to manage how it is spent.

As the tax payers pay the bill, I believe it is time that they took control of where, and how, the money destined for children is dispensed.  The current system is broken. Its victims are the children.  Let’s perform a real charity, and give the kids a chance.  My money is on dedicated, supervised  housing, community centers,  meals, medical care, and the genuine charity of caring adults.

Public Anger: A Symptom, Not a Disease

You can see it everywhere! 

Public displays of anger are a chorus of loud voices, raised fists, and impending disaster.In our cars we are cut off by the impatient, the intolerant, the inconsiderate driver. Whether he salutes us or not, he squeals around corners; he lays on his horn; he shouts passionately – as he speeds past us to the next angry encounter

.RAP on radio, CD, and TV is the venue of a generation of young people who are ANGRY.  They are angry at “the man”, at “hos”, at dead-end jobs or no jobs, and failed romances.  They’re mad at America, at the President, at the Congress … at themselves! Shouting about injustice in rhyme is a Sunday-suit version of just shouting.  The air waves are full of their pain. They’ve identified the problem(s); will they never move on to the next step of the problem-resoultion process? Like a needle stuck in an old vinyl recording, they repeat their pain, making it a self-serving mantra.

Junior high girls in fist fights and wrestling matches, the horrible Columbine shootings and the “copy cats” that followed, and the “postal” individuals who lack the good sense to kill themselves first instead of after they’ve killed family, co-workers, or innocent bystanders: all are illustrations of a building, dangerous anger that selectes no sex, age, class, but infects Americans without discrimination.

Our courts are burdened by foolish law suits – a formalized method of expressing our anger and pain. For a filing fee the angry guy will get his day in court, his chance to attack, belittle, and diminish his opponent- with the judge as an audience. Look at the insanity of the Anna Nicole hearings- a celebrity version of a universal event.

Does the public display of anger allay or prevent the ultimate explosion each of these people is headed for?  If it does, that is its only virtue.

The Battle of the Sexes: A Stacked Deck

My college freshmen students are both amused and amazed when I define the term “rule of thumb” for them – in part because I add the wisdom that the term was in Indiana law until only twenty years ago.  Here in our home state it was lawful for a man to beat his wife – as long as the tool with which he beat her was smaller in diameter than his thumb. Why should anyone challenge this?  A wife was, after all, a man’s property. 

The discussion opens doors to myriad illustrations of the disrespect and abuse which have been the fate of women in all cultures, all periods since the end of goddess worship by civilized people.  You have, no doubt, read of most of them:        

        The foot binding of young Chinese girls – a tradition even more horrible when you learn that young women were crippled – unable to walk throughout their adult lives – because the “bird” configuration their broken feet had been bent to was a sex tool of their future husbands.                  Female castration – the inhumane cutting and/or stitching of the labia of young girls – preventing their ever having pleasure in sex. This custom in many cultures was an effort of the family to prevent the family disgrace of a daughter who was promiscuous, or who might have a child out of wedlock.        

     The stoning – still practiced in some cultures – of those who commit adultery.  This is more correctly, the stoning of women who commit adultery – as often the couple are buried in the sand and given a short time to dig themselves out, with those who are successful escaping the punishment, as women are buried to the neck while their male partners are buried only to the waist – with arms free.         The fact that rape has been a feature of war throughout history establishes that it is an acknowledged method of both victimizing women and humiliating their men.         

           The stacked deck in Pakistan that says a woman who has been raped is guilty of fornication unless four virtuous Muslin men will testify that they witnessed the attack – and, presumably, that the woman did not enjoy it.        The barbarous practice in Africa of men engaging in sex acts with infant girls because of the mistaken belief that this act will counteract the HIV infection that so many in that country carry. 

What motivates all of these expressions of disrespect/hatred?  

I would like to suggest – modestly – that it is jealousy.  Primitive man must have been overwhelmed by the miracle of birth – and humbled by the recognition that women were involved in this powerful magic, and they were not.  Women had children; incredible new life came from them.  It stands to reason that early women were powerful, that they were revered and worshipped, that they owned property. 

All of this reverence must have gotten old – for at some point a deliberate set of actions designed to reduce the status of women began. ( Perhaps physiological knowledge that both parents contribute to the creation of a child – that a woman is not born with a number of children inside her which would spring forward contributed to this loss of respect, or growth of contempt.)  Step-by-step cultures came to the place where women could not own property; could not vote; where the practice of birth control by women was a crime; where careers were closed to those who do not stand to pee. 

Books of the Bible named for women were removed by the scribes.

A deliberate set of steps have been taken to elevate the position of men; interestingly, elevating one sex worked most effectively if it was done at the expense of the other.  Somewhere along the way, being different came to mean being less.  The result is religion in which a male God gives birth to man and woman, a culture where woman bears the responsibility for the loss of paradise, where woman comes to represent lust and impurity – and men virtue. 

Women too smart for their own good were labeled witches – in both Western Europe and the United States. A great deal has been written about the injustice.  Almost none of it addresses why this nonsense has gone on for so long, in so many places.  If insecurity of the male animal is not the answer, I wonder what is.

College Campuses: Sexual Playgrounds

“Eve Ensler hit the G-spot with [The Vagina Monologues]”, Kathleen Parker, Washington Post columnist wrote in her column February 14, 2007 – a day when a lot of columnists wrote about V-Day, Eve Ensler, vaginas, and violence. “V-Day is a political vehicle in the gender wars”, writes Parker. It is celebrated on the nation’s college campuses by young women, a global movement involving “talking publicly about your privates”.

V-Day is a metaphor for the phenomenon of 2007 campus sex.

If timid groping outside the girl’s dorm at curfew time, passionate kisses in the woods behind science hall, and dancing pressed tightly together at the spring ball were characteristic of your campus sex experiences, you may not even be aware that orgasm workshops and sex toy parties have replaced the frat party carnivals, pajama dances, and smokers of earlier generations on the campuses of residence colleges in the United States.

Hooking-up, the deliberately ambiguous term that has replaced other dating and mating rituals has everyone talking about the subject everyone thinks about but no one used to talk about. Only the pronunciation of it – hooking-up or hooking-up – gives a clue to what sex act the speaker is really talking about when she says the words.

There are those who call this whole new sexual environment an illustration of feminism gone awry. The frightening prospect of women shouting “Vagina” and taking charge has, on the surface, created a sexual playground for college men. What motivation does a guy have to phone a girl to arrange a dinner date, study date, or coffee break? He doesn’t need to win a woman to develop personal intimacy – not when young women walk into his dorm room, disrobing as they move closer, to give without invitation what men used to seek in measured steps.

It’s not an idyllic situation.

The whole atmosphere is hostile. Young condom-toting women have taken charge. They don’t want relationships. They want sex. They have recast college men in a new role: playthings. Like women’s other competitive sports, sex is a challenge, and playing means winning. Is it any wonder that impotence among college men is epidemic?

What young women are winning can be challenged. Laura Sessions Stepp in her best seller Unhooked describes the “decoupling of physical and emotional intimacy”. The book reveals the problems which occur when bright, educated, privileged young women call “o.k.” what isn’t okay and never has been. The quest may appear to be for sex, she writes, but – in fact – these young women both really want relationships and really fear them.

The young adults privileged to attend residence campuses fulltime with being a fulltime student as their only occupation live in a remarkable world. ( The life costs $40,000 a year at Duke University.) Those who have already been given so much define their college years as a time to party. They are looking ahead to degrees, even graduate degrees, and delayed marriage. Society has constructed a prolonged adolescence for them.

Is it possible that a vocal few are responsible for all the books, editorials, blogs and discussions on the subject of today’s college kids and sex? It would seem not. Elizabeth Paul, Professor of Psychology at College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, has released the results of 2004-2006 research which reveals that 76% of the 2,000 college students she interviewed have had hook-ups; one-half of these have included intercourse, and less than one-fourth of them turn into relationships. Of the 76% of college students who are participants in the hook-up society, the median number of hook-up partners in 5; the average is 6.9; and 29% have had more than ten hook-up partners. It is spin-the-bottle-on-steroids. Sex partners are as disposable as paper plates!

The “friends with benefits” program is discussed as a “no attachments” series of encounters, but many of the experts writing on this subject agree that women cannot separate physical and emotional intimacy, and despite their posturing that they are savvy women getting good sex – pleasure without commitment – many are praying for a romantic musical comedy moment when the young man says, “I love you.”

The hook-up culture is relationship-less, explains gynecologist Melissa Holmes (whose book Hooking-Up and Holding Out will be published in September, 2007). Because young people have no emotional intimacy before physical intimacy, they “grow up not knowing how to connect with a partner on an intimate level.” Hooking-up’s defining characteristic is the ability to unhook from a partner at any time, “just as [you] might delete an old song from your Ipod”, writes Laura Sessions Stepp. She tracks this same impermanence in the other commitments of the young women she studied for her book.

Sex has become the primary currency of social interaction.

When Stepp ( as a visiting lecturer ) asked a classroom of college juniors to define hooking-up for her, she got these responses: 3rd base and beyond; immediate gratification; fast food. Young people also told her about sexiling (telling your roommate to leave for the night when you bring a hook-up back to your dorm room ) and the roll-and-scream (“You roll over in the morning so horrified at what you see next to you in bed that you scream.”) These are the conditions the dating/mating rituals of the past have become: women are no longer at the mercy of men to make the first move, and men no longer fear that their first moves will be rejected. There is “no flirtation, casual banter, or using mutual friends as messengers”. Women have chosen McNugget relationships because they have no time for “we” and agree that there will be plenty of time to fall-in-love later.

Kathleen Parker suggests that if Western civilization has been dominated thus far by a patriarchy, we are moving rapidly toward domination by a vagina-obsessed matriarchy. Few authors ( in fact, only Amber Madison, author of Hooking Up: A Girl’s Guide to Sex and Sexuality ) believe that this is a good idea. In fact, having quoted the hundreds of young women she interviewed over a four-year period for the first 300 pages of her book, Stepp writes an open letter to mothers and daughters as the last chapter in which she advises both in the words of a wise old crone, one who knows that if you do not respect yourself, you cannot respect another, and that sex with a person you have grown to know and love is enormously superior to the “quick fix” with a stranger.

There may be sex on the playground, but there is not satisfaction.

Podcast: My Primary Education

To read about a personal experience with the state primaries and the process by which we select a candidate and elect a President, click on the word candidate.

Podcast: The Platinum Medicare Card

To hear an essay about the benefits/issues of Medicare Medical Insurance for elderly Americans, click the word Medicare.

Birds Do It; Bees Do It; College Kids Do It – And We All Talk About It

The New York Times discusses “Amazing Girls”: girls who are high-achieving, ambitious, and confident.  Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theatre. Community service. Girls who have grown up knowing that they can do anything that a boy can do – which is anything that they want to do.  One of the things they are doing in high school is foregoing boy friends, using the time not dedicated to a relationship to guarantee that they get accepted by the right college. These are the golden girls for whom everything is possible.The opportunities opened to these young women include admission to  law school, medical school, government office, and even the top side of the glass ceiling.  It is a new ball game for American women. In their quest to be “just like the guys”, young American women have gone beyond the admirable stuff.  They have enterred an era where they are the guys’ equal in the boardroom,…and puking in the parking lot.  They are equals when a new job is posted,…and when there is a prize for the loudest belch. They can graduate at the top of their class, …and can chug as many brews straight from the bottle as their male counterparts.

Claiming that “it’s my body”, they can engage in senseless sexual sessions with  strangers!  Hooking up means sex with a guy you do not know, or will not know after the experience is over. It means friendship with benefits.  In a game roughly equivalent to Russian roulette, girls are making their own choices at closing time.  Young women are engaging in oral sex ( which is not – after all- really sex, we have been told ) and plain old missionary-position sex as well.  It is a new approach to the “booty call”.

Two best selling authors have written about hooking up – a word  obviously  derived from hooker. The first is Laura Sessions Stepp, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author of Unhooked.  The other is Amber Madison, recent Tufts University graduate, author of Hooking Up: A Girl’s All-Out Guide to Sex and Sexuality. 

Obviously, their books take opposite courses. Stepp – who has interviewed hundreds of young women on college campuses in a four year study – advises that this is a new freedom that comes at a very high price for young women – that it curtails their ability to make genuine, lasting relationships with men, and that they have self-esteem issues resulting from their apparent lack of personal respect for themselves. She points out that in the new college campus morality the young woman does all of  the work.  She takes the bus to the men’s dorm; performs a sex act or acts which may well be disappointing for her; then she takes the bus back to her own dorm.  She reminds the reader that everything has changed: once women controlled relationships, inviting young men to their homes for chaperoned conversations (think Jane Eyre ); women were special, and men woed them in a manner prescribed by young women and their mothers.  Immigration brought dating which removed courtship to restaurants, movie theaters, and bars, and gave men a leading role.  Today, there is no dating; there is no real intimacy which grows from learning to know a person; there is sex with strangers. Stepp calls her book Unhooked because she says the primary characteristic of hooking-up is that no one makes a commitment: both parties are free to un-hook at any time. Some of the young women she has  interviewed are unhooked even as they hook – reading a book, for example, while he “does all the work of sex, for a change”.

Conversely, Madison who edited a sex column in her university paper called “Between The Sheets”  explains and encourages adolescent sex.   She uses all the expected arguments to justify a harmless exercise of female freedom/fantastic fun.  Her book – a paperback in its original release – reads like it was written to be read aloud at a pajama party.  “Women don’t get intimate with their genitals the way guys do”, she explains – and then, in her first chapter,  offers a line drawing of the vagina with each part labeled. [ When she speaks on college campuses, a large copy of the diagram is displayed as a back drop.] Saying that women need the tools to make informed decisions, she includes chapters about STD’s, orgasms, and how to store condoms.  Among her achievements is a web site about Spring Break in Cancun – with photo features about Boobie Night, getting trashed, getting-it-on, and the guy who showered with three women he had just met.  This woman is scary! She has lost her job waitressing at a bar, but says she would have quit it anyway, as she is preparing a sex blog, and has joined a speaker’s bureau, and gives sex talks at the nation’s colleges. One of the first was at Yale – where reviews were not favorable.

Both Stepp and Madison agree that young men have been given a free ride.  They are not consulted; their opinions are not valued; they serve – and are exchanged. There is epidemic use of the little blue pill among college men.

Amazingly, against a backdrop of this current reading about female freedom, evangelical Christians demonstrate a similar lack of respect for young men. They are organizing “purity balls“.  Tuxedo-clad dads vow to protect their daughters’ virtue, and their daughters – in turn – vow to remain “pure” until marriage in very public ceremonies in ballrooms across the country.  Vows made, the father-daughter teams then dance the evening away in celebration of their joint commitment.The “Men of Integrity“ movement takes the position that, “It is the father’s job to protect his daughter from the ‘pimp culture’ that turns young women into sex objects, pressuring them to be sexually active.”  As “the high priest in his home” the father in a Purity Revolution family must “model purity” for his daughter, and vigorously defend what is apparently the only value she has:  her body, her sexuality, her hymen.

There is no counterpart where fathers ( or the mothers – absent or discounted as they are in Disney ) talk with their robust, randy, ready sons about restraint.  Here too, the guy is a cypher.

This could only happen in America. 

And sex – which has always been viewed by someone or another as “dirty” – is the perfect subject for books not totally unlike those which used to come in plain brown wrappers, and pass from room to room on middle class American college campuses.

My Primary Education

The candidates were everywhere: reclining in barber chairs, occupying church pews, attending elementary school PTA meetings, and shaking hands in front of the IGA.

 

Nothing was unusual about it; it was the primary season in Nashua, New Hampshire.

 

Only the two one-hundred dollar a plate tickets in the hand of a public school teacher were unusual.  In his best Navy suit and paisley tie and my most elegant blue knit suit, my husband and I arrived at a fund raising dinner for Richard Nixon.  Having both taught and studied the famous Checker’s speech, I was excited about the opportunity to witness the master persuader in person.

 

 At 6:30 P.M. we entered the hall to see rows of long public-function tables covered with white butcher paper, already set for the standard rubber chicken dinner.  I thought the centerpieces were unique: running the full length of each table were plastic beer pitchers which created a pattern: dark, clear, dark, clear – with equal numbers of both.

 

The smiling greeters told us that the cocktail hour had begun and directed us to select a spot at one of the tables and to mingle.  The cocktail waitresses brought each of us an empty glass, then explained that we serve ourselves from the aforementioned pitchers; dark contained Manhattans; clear were martinis.

 

At 7:00 P.M. the candidate’s plane was “locked in” by bad weather.

 

The cocktail hour was extended.

 

…and our conversations became more animated.

 

At 7:30 P.M. the fog was clearing; he would be coming.

 

The cocktail hour was extended.

 

…and people were laughing more.

 

At 8:00 P.M. the candidate’s plane was in the air.

 

The cocktail hour was extended.

 

The pretzel bowls were empty.

 

The pitchers – even those that had been refilled a time or more – were nearly empty.

 

At 8:30 P.M. the candidate arrived.  He crossed the room and climbed to the dais to a standing ovation, the first of twenty-seven I counted as he made his fifteen minute presentation.  It seemed this was the finest, most moving, perfect political performance in history – as hardly were we seated again when a comment made us all push our chairs back simultaneously, rising to our feet, cheering.  Between ovations, I recorded Nixon’s historic comments on note cards I had pre-numbered and brought for this purpose – and I added paper cocktail napkins when the card stock ran out, writing frantically.

 

The candidate was swept away by his dark-suited attendants before the grizzly-looking entrees were served.

 

We all commented that this performance had been every bit as stirring as the famous Checkers speech which had pulled a young Nixon’s political career from the circular file years before. Once again he had established that he was modest, a model husband and father, devout, the right man to lead our nation.

 

The following day – at school – I had the opportunity to replay the speech that had so impressed me the evening before, as I had assigned a senior speech student to tape it from the radio broadcast.  I was surprised to learn that the lines we had applauded so earnestly were all of the same variety: We love America…We cherish our families…We respect our parents…and service men …plus sentiments about mother…flag…home…and apple pie…everything but a pup named Checkers and a good Republican cloth coat. How easily we had been won.

 

I examined my notes – only to find them largely illegible.

 

I came to understand why the bars are closed on election day.