Monday
10/28/03
Live and Learn. Sometimes.
Not very long ago on a crisp autumn afternoon, there stood a red plastic Solo cup of milk on the counter. It was a fine cup of milk. Cold and freshly poured, it accompanied a fine looking specimen of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. All was right with the world. Little did we realize that it could all go so horribly wrong so quickly.
That’s when the elbow appeared, as if out of nowhere. Seemingly in slow motion, the elbow grazed the surface of the counter, relentlessly approaching the helpless cup. It might as well have been a baby carriage bouncing silently down the Odessa steps. A mini estuary of milk now covered the counter and threatened the floor. The six-year-old owner of the elbow looked mildly surprised. The thirty-eight-year-old maker of the now soggy sandwich looked irked.
Anyway, when we were done with the usual post-spill "spilling is no big deal, but here are the paper towels so you can help me clean up" conversation, I got to thinking about how we teach our kids about personal responsibility and, well, cleaning our own messes. Seems to me that we generally do a fine job. By kindergarten most kids are savvy to the whole responsibility thing and understand that it’s required for them to at least help address whatever the problem may be.
But then, something so often seems to go astray. Somewhere along the line that well-meaning tousle-haired youth grows into Ken Lay and Jeffery Skilling. Technically breakers of laws? Possibly not, but wrongdoers and evaders of responsibility? Absolutely. I suppose on that level, their transformation can be explained away with the whole timeless duality of man thing. The constant internal struggle in most of us between idealism and cold pragmatism. Or something like that.
I wonder though, does the same reasoning apply to culture and our society at large? I look at the party of Lincoln and I see policy that is generally geared toward self-reliance and personal responsibility. Welfare is bad because it promotes an ongoing culture of laziness and precludes people from having to be self-reliant. Perhaps so.
Another item on the republican’s wish list is tort reform and caps for all kinds of damage settlements. High, freewheeling settlements are bad for business, and the lure of such settlements discourages personal responsibility. Maybe so.
But I find it entirely puzzling that, at the end of the day, when the lights are low and it’s very quiet, the neoconservative's personal monster comes out from under the bed to terrorize them like so many four-year-olds. And that bogeyman is the specter of taking responsibility for ourselves as a nation. In short, it seems that all the basic rules we learn as children go out the window when we find ourselves on the world stage.
It begins with the simple things, such as kissing the Kyoto protocol goodbye because of our childish refusal to believe in global warming and that we are far and away the biggest contributors to the problem in the first place. In fact, one of my favorite moments with Ari Fleischer was his ‘blessed way of life’ press conference on May 7 of 2001.
Like Bush and Fleischer, I too am a big fan of America, but refusing to take long term environmental responsibility for the fact we are a nation with just 7 percent of the world’s population who consumes more than a third of its resources is, well, childishly irresponsible.
And of course this childish evasion of culpability on the world stage is again made all too clear by the consequences of our shortsighted, ham-fisted attempts at manipulating and pacifying the Middle East over the last fifty years or so. Our instillation of the Shah ensured that Iran would hate us forever, and then we thought it was a great idea to arm the Taliban crazies in Afghanistan because they were fighting the Soviets, but then we thought it would be an equally great idea to arm Saddam because he was fighting our latest self-created enemy, Iran. And the list goes on. And yet, Ann Coulter calls those who wonder about the role America plays in it’s own fate "traitors."
When we were just about done cleaning up the last of the milk, my older son came into the kitchen, poured himself some juice, gulped it down, and tossed the cup in the sink. He then went on his way, all without spilling a drop. Kids really do learn from experience. Hell, even I learned not to stick my fingers in electrical outlets. So why the hell can’t neoconservatives do the same?
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Live and Learn. Sometimes.
Not very long ago on a crisp autumn afternoon, there stood a red plastic Solo cup of milk on the counter. It was a fine cup of milk. Cold and freshly poured, it accompanied a fine looking specimen of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. All was right with the world. Little did we realize that it could all go so horribly wrong so quickly.
That’s when the elbow appeared, as if out of nowhere. Seemingly in slow motion, the elbow grazed the surface of the counter, relentlessly approaching the helpless cup. It might as well have been a baby carriage bouncing silently down the Odessa steps. A mini estuary of milk now covered the counter and threatened the floor. The six-year-old owner of the elbow looked mildly surprised. The thirty-eight-year-old maker of the now soggy sandwich looked irked.
Anyway, when we were done with the usual post-spill "spilling is no big deal, but here are the paper towels so you can help me clean up" conversation, I got to thinking about how we teach our kids about personal responsibility and, well, cleaning our own messes. Seems to me that we generally do a fine job. By kindergarten most kids are savvy to the whole responsibility thing and understand that it’s required for them to at least help address whatever the problem may be.
But then, something so often seems to go astray. Somewhere along the line that well-meaning tousle-haired youth grows into Ken Lay and Jeffery Skilling. Technically breakers of laws? Possibly not, but wrongdoers and evaders of responsibility? Absolutely. I suppose on that level, their transformation can be explained away with the whole timeless duality of man thing. The constant internal struggle in most of us between idealism and cold pragmatism. Or something like that.
I wonder though, does the same reasoning apply to culture and our society at large? I look at the party of Lincoln and I see policy that is generally geared toward self-reliance and personal responsibility. Welfare is bad because it promotes an ongoing culture of laziness and precludes people from having to be self-reliant. Perhaps so.
Another item on the republican’s wish list is tort reform and caps for all kinds of damage settlements. High, freewheeling settlements are bad for business, and the lure of such settlements discourages personal responsibility. Maybe so.
But I find it entirely puzzling that, at the end of the day, when the lights are low and it’s very quiet, the neoconservative's personal monster comes out from under the bed to terrorize them like so many four-year-olds. And that bogeyman is the specter of taking responsibility for ourselves as a nation. In short, it seems that all the basic rules we learn as children go out the window when we find ourselves on the world stage.
It begins with the simple things, such as kissing the Kyoto protocol goodbye because of our childish refusal to believe in global warming and that we are far and away the biggest contributors to the problem in the first place. In fact, one of my favorite moments with Ari Fleischer was his ‘blessed way of life’ press conference on May 7 of 2001.
Like Bush and Fleischer, I too am a big fan of America, but refusing to take long term environmental responsibility for the fact we are a nation with just 7 percent of the world’s population who consumes more than a third of its resources is, well, childishly irresponsible.
And of course this childish evasion of culpability on the world stage is again made all too clear by the consequences of our shortsighted, ham-fisted attempts at manipulating and pacifying the Middle East over the last fifty years or so. Our instillation of the Shah ensured that Iran would hate us forever, and then we thought it was a great idea to arm the Taliban crazies in Afghanistan because they were fighting the Soviets, but then we thought it would be an equally great idea to arm Saddam because he was fighting our latest self-created enemy, Iran. And the list goes on. And yet, Ann Coulter calls those who wonder about the role America plays in it’s own fate "traitors."
When we were just about done cleaning up the last of the milk, my older son came into the kitchen, poured himself some juice, gulped it down, and tossed the cup in the sink. He then went on his way, all without spilling a drop. Kids really do learn from experience. Hell, even I learned not to stick my fingers in electrical outlets. So why the hell can’t neoconservatives do the same?
