Politics and Parenting

I don't know which bothers me more: watching and listening to all these Democrats acting like petulant children throwing temper tantrums over the President's opportunity to appoint another Supreme Court justice by vowing to stop it at all costs, or watching and listening to those in the media who diligently report all this as though it was serious adult behavior. They don't even want to wait until they hear the actual name of the nominee before they stamp their collective verbal feet and dig in their heels. Their predictions about criminalizing women and putting them in jail would be laughable if I didn't fear that there are those who are woefully ignorant of reality and actually believe these diatribes.  So far, the only person even approaching any semblance of rationality has been Senator Elizabeth Warren, who actually said she would have to wait to see who the nominee was before voicing her opinion. This is the first time I have applauded her stance on anything. If these other legislators and media types were my children, they would all be sent to their rooms until they could behave in a civil manner.

Reflections on Love and Respect

I have been thinking about the difference between love and respect, and I have come to the conclusion that one can love another but not respect them, while one can also respect another without loving them. Love is a feeling: an  attraction or connection to another person, on a purely emotional level. It is a reaction that we can either ignore or embrace, but other than that we don't have much, if any, control over it.  On the other hand, respect is a choice: the approval of a characteristic or set of characteristics displayed by another, and is based solely on what we hold in our own minds to be worthy of that approval. It explains why families of convicted felons can profess to love the convict while at the same time disapproving the crime they committed.  Implicit is the notion that they have no respect for the convict; or maybe it's just that they are actually respecting (or not respecting) the action and not really the person who did it: "He has my respect because he acts in a certain way." That would explain the conflicted feelings we have when we love someone but do not respect them, for whatever reason. Personally, I have decided that it is a much more rewarding feeling to have respect for someone than it is to love them.  Ideally, it would be nice to have both, but when that is not possible, I find that it is painful to have no respect for someone you love. I wish it were not so.

My Sweet Boy

I have three grown children, but the youngest one has always had the most difficult time holding on to  happiness. As I write this he is divorced, single, unemployed and living in our in-law apartment. This is the third time he has needed to live at home, the second time since his divorce, and it has been a struggle for him to resist the despondency and depression that comes with losing a job, losing a fiancee, and having to take whatever job comes along just to be able to make enough money to pay child support to an ex-wife who has nothing but contempt for him, and is relentless about making him pay, no matter what his circumstances. However, things may be starting to turn around for him. He has a son whom he adores and who absolutely adores him, in spite repeated attempts by his ex-wife to poison their son's feelings for him. It stuns me that anyone could be so cruel while insisting that she is only trying to "protect her son".  I won't go into the things she does to undermine the relationship, except to say that in spite of them, my son is starting to regain his health and emotional strength. I am cautiously optimistic for the first time in years.

 

Honor thy Father and thy Mother

I've been thinking about the Fourth Commandment lately.  Of my three children, the one I am closest to is my daughter. She lives about 500 miles away, yet manages to call home at least two or three times a month. Truth be told, I wish it were more: one of my aunts had a daughter who called her every day, and another of my aunts had a son who called home every Sunday night like clockwork. My daughter and I get along very well, and have similar views on most things, including politics.  Maybe that makes a difference. At the moment I am not particularly pleased with either of my two sons, although for different reasons.  My focus right now is on my oldest son, who years ago adopted the attitude that birthdays and other holidays don't mean anything to him, and so should not mean anything to us as well. I can't remember when the last time was that he gave anyone in the family a birthday present, and cards, when he sends them, are usually late. He hardly ever calls us, and never comes down or offers to help us get projects done like other people we know. I guess he just doesn't like us. He lives about 100 miles away, and we could see him  more than we do, but he almost never invites us to his home, and always seems to be too busy to accept our invitations to visit here.  He and his wife have two delightful children, and we would love to see more of them but I feel uncomfortable asking them if we can visit them.  On those occasions when we do, we always offer to bring lunch, and they always accept our offer.  Occasionally they are late with their rent, and have had to borrow money to pay it. They don't have to be poor: they both have multiple degrees and are very intelligent, but neither of them seems to think that supporting the family should be the first priority; work should be something they love to do. Our son insists on working to create an entrepreneurial music business online, which nobody seems to want, while his wife prefers to stay at home with their kids rather than work even part-time outside the home so that they can pay their bills on time. We put them on our EZ Pass account so that they don't even have to have toll money when they visit, but they still don't come down unless it's a major holiday.  What really ticked me off recently, however, is that during Thanksgiving we celebrated the birthdays of his father, brother, and nephew, all of whom have birthdays a day apart around then, and he couldn't even give them birthday cards to mark the event.  His wife is an artist who is trying to start a business that includes designing cards, and it never occurred to him that maybe his father or his brother or his nephew might like to have a card specially made for them. Unbelievable. He is so hurtful to everyone in the family, all the more so because I doubt that he even realizes how much his lack of attention is noticed and felt. He appears to be totally self-absorbed, and oblivious to all of us.He has told me that when his sister was born, he resented mightily that we had more than one child; he coulldn't understand why he wasn't enough.  I wonder if he would have treated us with more respect if he had been the only one.  I guess we'll never know.

Incentive vs. Punishment

Greed is a flaw in the human character, not a function of any political or socioeconomic philosophy. No matter what form of governance operates in a particular country, there will always be people who try to take as much as they can from the available wealth. In autocratic societies like Socialism and Communism, those people are mostly concentrated in the ruling class, while the non-ruling population usually struggles in poverty from which they cannot free themselves, because the government controls what they can and cannot have.  In a free-market society, those who control the economic output are usually those who have the most wealth, and generally control only what their employees can and cannot have, at least financially. In a free-market society it is the Law of Supply and Demand that operates in business, such that if an employing entity does not provide its employees with sufficient reward for the work provided, those employees are free to seek employment elsewhere. A business without sufficient employees cannot survive for long.

In any economy, wealth is generated by the entities who provide products and/or services needed or wanted by the general population. Wealth is not finite. The more there are entities providing products or services, the more wealth is generated. Government does not generate wealth, it takes it from those producing it. In autocratic societies under Communism or Socialism, the government owns most of the means of production. History has yet to show that these systems are in any way beneficial to the population: universal poverty and chronic shortages of materials are the usual result. In an ideal society, there should be incentives to encourage more people to generate wealth (ie, create new businesses), not punishments in the form of stifling regulations that prevent this from happening. The objective is to make use of the natural tendency toward greed so that all people who want to rise economically can do so. The more people who are generating wealth, the more the government can take if it so chooses, but there, too, the government has to weigh the benefits of taking wealth from those generating it against taking too much, which will cause the wealth generators to stop producing. It is the free-market system that has resulted in the greatest expansion of upward mobility and wealth generation in the history of the world. We need to nurture it and protect it, not punish it.

Media Bias: Yes or No?

Here are two headlines, both of which appeared atop an above-the-fold article in our local newspaper:

"Trump Attacks Senator on Twitter" and "President Responds to Blumenthal's Criticism.."

Which one do you think was the big headline on top, and which one was the small sub-headline underneath it?

If you want to convey a headline that accurately summarizes the story, you would use the second one on top.  If, however, you want to convey a negative meme about our president, without regard to the truth, you would put the first one on top, and ignore the fact that the incident was a retaliation, not an instigation.  Given that many people never bother to read the actual story, what do you think happens when they only read the headline? If you guess that they would come away with an image of a combative, irrational leader, I think you would be right, even though this was not the case here. Oh, and by the way, Senator Blumenthal didn't just "criticize" Mr. Trump, he accused him repeatedly in print and on air of having spurious and nefarious motives for firing FBI Director Comey, without any evidence whatsoever.  Mr. Trump, in retaliation, brought up Mr. Blumenthal's repeated statements during his 2010 election campaign that he had "served in Viet Nam" when in fact he didn't, but the good people of Connecticut elected him anyway.  Seems they don't care if someone lies just to get votes, as long as he's a Democrat. Just so you know, the screaming headline was the first one, and the small sub-headline was the second one. And yet, the media insist that they are not biased.

 

Duplicity

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?” I responded.

What, exactly, are you sorry for?

For letting him into your life and letting him think that you loved him as much as he loved you, or for abruptly ending that love and evicting him from your life when you decided that you couldn’t “fix” him?

For betraying him to his ex-wife repeatedly via text after you kicked him out?  For sharing  personal information about him that was none of her business? For conspiring with her to keep the communications a secret from him?  For then lying about it to him when he asked you if you had communicated with her?

 Or for us finding out about it? You made a mistake trusting her to keep your conversations private: she forwarded all the texts that passed between the two of  you to him, not wanting to be called a liar. She really can't be trusted.  But then, apparently, neither can you.

Are you sorry for accepting his engagement ring as though you would love him forever, or for not having had the decency to hand it back to him two months later when that turned out not to be true?  You let him think that the separation was temporary, until he happened to find the ring a week after he had moved, neatly boxed up and buried in with his clothes that you had so quickly packed up while he was out at work one day.

Are you sorry for  the envelope that came to your mailbox from the Court that you refused to either deliver to him or let him pick up in a timely manner, opting instead to write a forwarding address that did not even include the town, thus delaying its delivery until after he was supposed to appear in court? He had no idea what it was about, and he narrowly avoided getting arrested for failing to report to a hearing thanks to your selfish negligence. Thank God he had the good sense to call the Court House to find out what it was for when the letter still hadn't come after more than a week of waiting. Are you sorry for that?

Are you sorry for often offering money to help out with his expenses, or for deciding that he owed you all of it back when you ended the engagement? I doubt that he asked you for money; he probably assumed that you were helping him out of love, and that once he could land a better-paying job all this would be resolved. After all, this was the love of a lifetime. Too bad that wasn’t true. Coincidentally, he did land a better job, but you had already made up your mind by then. Bad timing.

 

Your pursuit of a stress-free life has caused more emotional damage to him and to us than anything we have ever experienced. Our son, while flawed, is nevertheless a kind, sensitive, gentle and loving man who was a wonderful father figure for your son, especially given the boy's special needs. Very few men have the capacity to love children like he does, yet you discarded all of that when you literally erased him, and us, from your life. There is an expression that aptly describes what you did: throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Memorize this: you can’t fix people. Either accept them as they are, or leave them alone. Love is not a reward for good behavior. It is a gift freely given, something you apparently are incapable of doing.

Do I forgive you? No. I wish now that you and he had never met. Will I ever forgive you? That depends on whether and to what extent our son can recover from this explosion to his self-esteem and to his ability to trust another human being again. He really loved you, more than anything else besides his own son, and it will take a long time for that love to eventually die, in spite of what you have done to him. His heart is broken and so is mine. When his heart heals so will mine, and then I will think about forgiving you.