Still Crazy After ...

I changed my career today. You'll never believe what I did.

I spent the whole day being a *gasp* librarian.

I catalogued stuff. I checked out books. I helped kids with computer issues. I worked on the new signs that finally came in. I even fixed the damn laminating machine.

In other words, three weeks into the school year, I actually got to start doing the work I was hired to do, the work I'm paid for.

I really have to see if I can unload this I.D. card thing for next year. I'm working on it.



In other news, let's see. I'm having a fairly political day again, and I'd like to share something with you, but with some comments on it as well. R never forwards me Internet stuff, but today she sent me this article. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait.

la di da di da la di da di da ... what's the name of that song?

Okay, now, the odds are you are having some sort of response to this, and that's what I want to talk about. When I read this, I wrote back to her "When did I write this?" because bingo, she was the kid who went to Europe and South America with the Scouts, not to mention taking her own trip to Australia as an adult and going to graduate school in Wales, and yes, she performed in plays -- Shakespeare -- when she was stage manager of the drama club, and yes, she has seen her own plays produced. She works for a very large non-profit that is educational in nature. She happens also to be a beautiful girl -- so others have told me -- and we have done our best to raise her to have many experiences. (She has also done extensive camping and hiking, and I don't mean with tents and latrines, I mean with a sleeping bag, a backpack, and a little shovel. She did the longest trail at Philmont; if there are Boy Scouts among you, you know what that is.)

All right, so that was my reaction, and I wasn't naive enough to think it would be everybody's, but when I read the comments, I was blown away. Many comments were supportive, as mine would have been, but some were just mean and vicious. Here's one (#15, excerpted):

You should have bought her a shotgun and gone out shooting with her. It would have broadened her cultural horizons, taught her some cultural tolerance, and rounded her out enough to understand how the other half lives.

Ya know, maybe a good moose hunt, and getting her hands bloody actually processing the meat rather than buying it pre-packaged in the store, would have taught her to be a little less pretentious and self-righteous.

Tell me, why does this thought follow the first? Why must it be that "getting her hands bloody" is necessarily good for her? How would this "broaden her cultural horizons" and "understand how the other half lives" unless the other half is the just-killed animal? I'm not saying hunting is wrong for people who do it, or teach their children to do it; it's just another one of the possible choices people make for their lives. Where in the original "letter" did it indicate that the daughter was pretentious or self-righteous? I must have missed that part. Here's another one (#29, also excerpted, because it rambles like hell, although I left some of it in):

it seems you have trained her to live off the donations of others, seeking attention and self esteem, while sneering down at the "common people." good show.

many kids do not have the sort of spoiling parents she was blessed with-some actually have to get jobs.

but that sort of thing often interferes with a path of suckering others into believing up is down, and left is right.

when my kids were small, they used to demand to go up gold mining in the sierra. they got out of the city, and they could partake in the magic of gold flakes, never before seen by man, appearing in their pans. they also learned how much worthless sand and gravel one had to shovel through to find those few tiny nuggets, and that stood them in good stead later in life.

they learned about buzz worms, poison oak, berries off the vine, how chinese coins could wind up on a hillside in the foothills, fossils, geology, earth history, people history, weather predicting, cooking over an open fire, etc.

even barbecueing fresh rattlesnake they skinned and cleaned on their own.

and these are the stories their own children demand in return. my 6 year old grandson gets wide eyed. "wow, mom! you did that when you were my age? i wanna go do that, too!"

so far, he has not expressed any interest in being a faceless member of the mob that makes up mass movements. he learns personal responsibility instead, and paying for one's own mistakes. he likes the poetry of robert service.

my kids missed the dark musty museums with a thousand flavors of dead christs, and monuments to inbred, intolerant rulers with hereditary blood diseases. they missed out on the dogma that the common folk are just worthless peasants to be directed by their betters, the stringpullers and their media lackies.

they suffer under the delusion that one can pull oneself up by their own bootstraps, working harder and smarter to create, rather than working dad's network of connections(which their dad never saw the point of assembling).

but they did learn to appease their own curiousity, with libraries, and a hunger for knowledge and books, and the refusal to accept the pat statements of others, without checking it out for themselves..

they're not real big on tv, either. so sorry.

they often miss tuning in for their programming as well, being too busy living life, instead of watching others fake it.

So do we all agree, at least, that this guy is nuts?

I think his whole panning-for-gold thing is charming, and a lovely experience and set of memories for his children. (Except for the rattlesnake thing, but that's just me.) We happened to choose to give our children a different set of experiences that they will never forget. (We were once trapped in the Lincoln Memorial during an unbelievable storm, and if you think sitting in a marble cave with Abraham Lincoln and his wonderful words for an hour with lightning every few minutes is something you can forget, think again.) I don't understand at all what's wrong with museums; can someone explain that to me? And I happen to enjoy Robert W. Service and Shakespeare; they're hardly mutually exclusive. And my kids worked plenty, from an early age.

Here's the upshot: I'm not criticizing any of Palin's life or family choices; she has hers and I have mine. I definitely do not like the polarization in the country that seems to be occurring because of this. But the bottom line is that her life choices, fine as they are, do not qualify her to be president of the freaking United States of America. She happens to be lacking the particular qualifications for this.

Is she just a regular old Joe (so to speak), just like common folk, and didn't go to some high-falutin' Harvard or Yale? Yeah, she is. Forgive me. I want my president to have gone to Harvard or Yale, if that's an option; there's a reason that they're considered two of the top universities in the world. Having a president who is proud of her ignorance and just-plain-folkiness is not an asset, it's a liability. Even that idiot Bush went to Yale, if you recall, and Annapolis isn't exactly a joke school, either. Damn. Don't we want our president to be the best he or she can possibly be? How stupid would we all have to be if we didn't? Isn't this how Warren G. Harding got elected? Look how that turned out. (Not well.) Who are we going to elect next time, Carrot Top?

And now, to quote one of my favorite all time just-plain-folk, "Ah has spoken." (Be sure to let me know in my comments if you know who was known for saying that!)


WATCHING TWO AND A HALF MEN :: ENTRY #1859
READING: The Professor and the Madman by ??