Including Church. Including School. Including journalism and media coverage. Including “entrepreneurial” or “abstinence” or “extraterrestrial” or “family values” beliefs. Including political arguments about saving liberty or avoiding debt for the next generation.
Just for today, never mind the real horrors and outright tragedies — maybe if we stop to sweat some smaller stuff, we’ll adjust our eyes to better see how the big stuff got so big that we no longer even see it, and when we do catch a glimpse, why we usually can’t believe our own eyes.
If I write a blog essay on this topic today, I think I’ll somehow weave together these power of story posts:
Wife Swap Family’s Six-Year-Old Balloon Boy Doesn’t Homeschool (never mind whatever’s wrong with Jon and Kate)
Never Mind the Children’s Screams
Watch the video of the eight-year-old boy whose father is Coptic Christian, training his boy to be the same rather than educating him in the real world: “If a dog follows me barking, I can raise the [cross] tattoo for protection.”
Then I might add disturbing parent-teacher stories I’ve blogged as power of story, Glenn Beck and Jesus Camp and Sarah Palin for sure, and this.
So we can start to think globally and act locally, about
Whose Side Are We Really On?
Don’t forget all the UN Rights of the Child versus HSLDA “Parent Rights” claims and petitions and controversy. More here and here.
We can intellectually sweat some illuminating small stuff like whether we control food [or sex] or in reality it controls us, and What Should We Call Christ as a Kick in the Head?
Then maybe we can start to do the heavy ethical lifting, start to see ethical questions about parenting and education more clearly, big stuff like No Perfect Protection for Our Kids But Better Thinking Would Help.
When it comes down to it, isn’t this ALL connected and always the same power of story, always the dilemma of whether it can ever be moral, to use the kids for our own ends?
I think you’re dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, JJ..it’s about all of us as American parents, or perhaps world parents, to put together the pieces of what and how we control our children. Perhaps none of us are innocent, but at least some of us are trying to see the forest through the trees..We’re trying to allow our children to begin to become their own person, yet moral, loving and principled in some way at the same time. We don’t want fear, or hate, or brainwashing.We want human beings who know how to love and learn. Perhaps it all comes down to slogans. Live, Love, Laugh, Learn, Life.
The Five Ls could hardly do worse that the Three Rs!
UPDATE: the Heene dad has been peddling the kids as a family reality show since their second Wife Swap appearance in March. I guess they figure if Octomom and Jon and Kate can cash in on the kids instead of earning a living, so can they.
This Wife Swap video from the “science” balloon family will chill you. The parents say they believe they’re direct descendents of extraterrestrial aliens, by whom they’ve been rendered unconscious and “visited” (their own real parents in other words.)
You’ve literally gotta see THAT to believe it (that they believe, I mean) –
This is very similar to the media-savvy and profitable celebrity-creating ignorance of Sarah Palin as a sports broadcaster, promoting her pastor’s pentecostal witch-hunting imo.
Denver Post’s 2007 Profile: Balloon boy’s father a weather chaser
So that was 2007. What does his “partner” in science think now?
Sarah Palin’s latest self-serving media stunt in the works, all while promoting herself as mom of an Iraq veteran.
Bizarre new story about the morality of parenting and church combined:
A Mother, A Sick Son and His Father the Priest
Even if the Catholic Church changed its policy towards allowing priests to marry, this priest couldn’t have married this woman as she was already married to another man. Adulterous relationships are not particularly uncommon among clergy of religions that do permit marriage for their clergy. Those scandals usually don’t make national headlines (unless it’s a televangelist like Jim Bakker). There are bad apple clergy in every religion, not just Catholicism…
Yes, yes, you and I have been through that defense before right here at Snook in several threads, but that’s not this story’s power in this context imo — here the issue is whether “Church” as interpreted by these two parents as individuals, has contributed to (or detracted from) the moral and ethical upbringing of their son, for his own sake rather than theirs.
So in that approach to analysis, “Church” in the priest-father story would be like “Science” in the storm chaser-balloon boy story.
And like both “Church” and “School” in the football coach-baptism field trip story last month.
The parents’ adultery was the primary problem. Had the mom just stayed faithful to her husband, the son would’ve grown up with a real father present. But she and the priest chose to put their own selfish lust ahead of the needs of the children. And that has very little to do with Catholicism per se.
The son never would’ve been born at all, so no issue for him, no life to badly parent. If I read the story right.
Again, the story always comes back to me as one where people have lost their “balance” and usually because they tried to claim an extreme worldview as the truth..and that truth clashed with the reality of life..where people fall in love, when they shouldn’t, and when buried sins rise up to overtake us..We all have lust within us..and when we bury it so deeply in a worldview or religion..sometimes it rises up to bite us in the…..life we live.
Same thing on the opposite side of the political spectrum ( i hate that phrase) Those who bury themselves so deeply in the values of the left, of extreme disregard for any need of tradition and understanding of the power of the past and those traditions, who hurry to bury them as unnecessary and insist we, (the world) must change immediately..will lose their battle. We need to move slow sometimes..as a world..keep talking, but let’s think before we rush to action to undo a rule or law that has worked or been in existence..perhaps there’s a reason for some conservatism..for sure!
Yes, this isn’t about right/left or liberal/conservative. It’s more how each of us sees different collectives of knowledge and belief, enforced by any Authority to Rule individuals — why we accept or challenge it, how blindly we follow it and impose its conformity and penalties versus demanding it be accountable to us for how it affects the lives of individual human beings.
School for instance. Patriarchy and parent rights. The military. Science. The UN.The Justice Department. Big Labor. Big Food. Congress. The Supreme Court. The BCS. Big insurance. And yes, Church.
CW is blogging an “individual civil rights” issue we’d all agree is in fact about individual rights, yet disagree whether Religious Authority should trump Constitutional Authority in secular society’s civic equality.
ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights take here.
My comment there:
CW, there are men who don’t believe women should leave their children and home to work, so they wouldn’t hire them. These may be religious convictions and sincerely felt for the good of the children and followed by the suggestion that the woman go get a job elsewhere, but that doesn’t make it constitutional to openly act upon these beliefs in a public workplace in America. It’s impermissable discrimination, probably because men soon congregate in their religious beliefs to create a society that enforces them on all; alternatives they find individually ungodly become less available until you get the Sharia law and the Taliban.
It’s flawed, not perfect freedom, for any of us. But what’s that Churchill quote about democracy being the worst system of government, except for all the others we’ve tried?
Last night’s new “Law and Order” episode (made before Thursday’s news of course) was about a “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” family-reality-show dad murdering his wife because she wouldn’t sign the tv contract (he needed the money to support the kids.)
There was also an Octomom type suspected of the murder for the same reason, trying to get the tv contract away from the first family, to support HER kids.
Apparently this is a new meme in our society.
[...] After posting that video clip from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the other day, I was stunned that Lynn has never seen it thus doesn’t have it in her frame of reference as we talk about School Ideas — what an impact that movie had on me as a schooled girl, seeing it in the theatre in 1969! [shudder] [...]