bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • In which I am an amateur linguist, just for fun.

    Today I feel like blathering about an academic subject in which I am completely untrained, and yet have Opinions.

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    Friend of mine on Facebook yesterday shared this post from Letters of Note, the photograph grabbed apparently from a book called 'The Elements of Eloquence,' author Mark Forsyth, and posted originally on Twitter by Matt Anderson.

    Screen Shot 2016-09-05 at 7.55.53 AM

    Said friend and I — alright, it was Melanie — had a blast discussing it.  The most fun I've had on a Sunday afternoon in a long while.  It must be the long weekend.

    Before we start to criticize, let's discuss the overall pattern.  Have you noticed this feature of spoken English before?  That when you prepend — without conjunctions — more than one adjective to a noun, often there's a particular way to order the adjectives in series that sounds better than the other possible orders?  

    Native English speakers would say, unless there was some special reason of emphasis,

     The little red wagon

    not

    The red little wagon

     

    Or

    The old brass key

    not

    The brass old key

    Or

    The enormous antique rocking chair

    not

    The antique enormous rocking chair

    nor

    The antique rocking enormous chair

    nor

    The rocking antique enormous chair

    and so on.  

    (Even though the author used an amusingly long string of adjectives as an example, I'm not going to go with more than three or four of them here, since our test of validity is simply to see what sounds okay.  Overlong strings of adjectives don't sound like natural English to begin with, so they don't make good test examples.)

    How do we know which order is right?  And is there a permanent pattern?  Mark suggested to me that we simply know what is right because we are used to hearing it some ways and not others, but I don't think so because I can construct an entirely novel phrase and we still know that one is better than another:

    The delicious square German vegan liverwurst

    is obviously (to me) preferable to

    The German square vegan delicious liverwurst

    but it isn't obvious why.

    Some kind of pattern production program exists in our language brain.  This isn't mere mimicking.  We have a pattern inside our heads, and we know when something doesn't fit the pattern, without ever having been explicitly taught it.  What is this pattern?

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    The author of the photographed excerpt considers pre-nominal adjective sets as a string.  Like beads, they go onto the noun one after another, and since we apparently prefer some permutations to others, he looks for a pattern that tells us what order we automatically identifies an ordered list of attributes that, supposedly, describes the order in which English speakers string adjectives.  Here's the order again:

    Opinion – size – age – shape – colo(u)r – origin – material – purpose – Noun.

    This doesn't of course mean that we are likely, in ordinary speech, to craft sentences in which we describe a noun with a string of eight adjectives.  It just means that we supposedly put size-adjectives before material-adjectives, opinion-about-the-thing-adjectives before origin-adjectives, and so on.

    Let's see the examples I wrote just now:

    "little red" wagon is size-color …. Check!

    "old brass" key is age-material…. Check!

    "enormous antique rocking" chair is size-age-purpose I guess… Check!  

     

    Or is it size-age-shape?  What if the chair is, er, shaped like a rocking chair but intended for an office?  Then it would be an enormous antique rocking office chair.  Still fits the pattern, I suppose.  Check!

    "delicious square German vegan" liverwurst is opinion-shape-origin-(material or maybe purpose) … Check!

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    So far so good.  But!  If one sits and thinks for a while, one may come up with contrary examples.  So the "absolutely" in the author's paragraph must certainly be struck out.

    The first one I thought of was

    She has a new little baby.

    This pattern puts shape before age, yet it is clearly better than 

    She has a little new baby.

    Later I thought of

    The white crescent moon shone above

    which, though it puts the white color before the crescent shape, sounds more correct than

    The crescent white moon shone above.

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    Okay, so the "absolutely" isn't warranted for our pattern.  Yet it seems almost right.  Is there a way we can generalize?  And what makes this pattern appear in the first place?

    One of our interlocutors suggested that it had to do with "essence" — that the more essential qualities are placed closer to the noun, and the more superficial ones are placed farther away.   So, for example, a little red wagon is more essentially red and only superficially little.  A German rocking chair's rocking-ness is more essential to its nature, and its German-ness less so.

    This seems like it is on the right track towards the pattern, but not so much on the how-we-apply-the-pattern.  Deciding about the essential nature of things is a philosophical exercise.  But we don't stop to practice philosophy every time we order our tall skinny decaf latte.  We just ask for it, and make the poor barista hunt for the keys in a different order.  (From the perspective of the cashier, the size of the latte is more essential, since it specifies the cost of the item; options like decaf and skinny are not.)

    But there is something to this notion, and I think if we carry it farther we will find something better than the "string-of-attributes" theory.  

    Let's start by asking the question:  Why is purpose placed in the closest spot to the noun?

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    I don't think it's because the purpose of the object is the most essential quality of the object, but because of the natural way in which English speakers form compound nouns made up of multiple words.

    A tennis racket is a thing.  We aren't speaking French:  We do not have to say "a racket of tennis."  For all practical purposes, in English tennis racket is a single noun.  We've never joined the words into tennisracket — we aren't speaking German — and that has created a bit of a red herring, in that, yes, "tennis" is a modifier, behaving like an adjective, describing the purpose of the racket — but face it, a tennis racket is a thing.  It is not a racket that might or might not be for tennis, at least not in the same way that it might be green or lightweight or expensive or homemade.  It functions as a noun.  You don't drop the  "tennis" part of the noun unless it's obvious that you're in a tennis context.

    Because a tennis racket is a thing, we don't divide the "tennis" from the "racket" by interspersing any other kind of adjective, any more than we divide the "dish" from the "washer" when I describe to you my new household appliance.  I don't have a dish shiny washer, and for the same reason, I don't have a tennis new racket.

    Is this because tennis-ness is the most essential quality of the racket?  Indirectly, maybe; but the proximate reason is linguistic.  When we talk of a tennis racket, we join the two words into a compound.  

    So the handheld implement for striking the ball in tennis, having a certain color and size is not described with a string of three adjectives:  large-blue-tennis RACKET.  Rather, tennis is joined to RACKET:  blue (tennis racket).

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    But purpose isn't the only kind of modifier that we make functional compounds with.  I talked of liverwurst up there.  We stick that together because, I suppose, liverwurst is German in origin, but we're really discussing liver sausage here — "liver" denoting the material of which the sausage is made.  And doesn't it often function as a compound too?  Liver sausage is a thing.  If you say "liver sausage" I get a mental image of a package of braunschweiger at the supermarket, followed by a strong association with rye bread and mustard — I don't imagine a sausage (different mental picture) and then, thinking of liver, modify my mental picture.  

    "Pork sausage," same thing, until you want to mention that it's pork breakfast sausage (material-purpose-noun).  But "pork breakfast sausage" is also a thing, although not as securely as is breakfast sausage and pork sausage.

    I propose that in English, when we increase the number of modifiers on a noun, what we are really doing is creating nested compounds.  Not sausage that is made of pork, and intended for breakfast, and which I think is expensive, and which is of a brown color, all on a string; but

    expensive ( brown ( pork ( breakfast sausage ) ) )

    That is, it's breakfast sausage that happens to be pork.

    And, it's pork breakfast sausage that is brown.

    And, it's brown pork breakfast sausage that is expensive.

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    Let's look at our counter examples:  the white crescent moon and the new little baby, both of which violate the prescribed order.

    The white crescent moon is easy to explain.  "Crescent moon" is a common compound.  Yes, "crescent" literally describes the shape of the moon.  But in the English language, a "crescent moon" is a thing in and of itself, much more strongly than is a "white moon."  So while you might write about a crescent white moon, you are much more likely to write about a white (crescent moon).

    Too, look at this:

    white full moon  (color before, nominally, shape)

    but

    round white moon (shape before color)

    And that's because a "full moon" is an established compound and a "round moon" is comparatively only an adjective plus a noun.

    How about that new little baby?

    "Little baby" definitely functions as a compound in many contexts.  Sweet little baby, good little baby, third little baby.  Little almost goes  before baby as a tic.

    "New baby" is also a common utterance.  

    Why, then, "new little baby" and not "little new baby?"  I think it's because new babies are by definition little, whereas little babies may or may not be new; so when we want to say, "She has recently given birth to a child!" we say "She has a new (baby)!" or "She has a new (little baby)!" almost interchangeably.  The newness is up front.  It's what we're emphasizing.

    But if we want to say "She has a BIG new baby!" we are probably talking about a nine- or ten-pounder.  It's a big (new baby).

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    And what of compound adjectives?

    Check out this triplet of adjectives along with the noun "baby", two nominally denoting size and one nominally denoting age, and consider how it works:

    tiny new baby (but not new tiny baby)

    little tiny baby = tiny little baby (interchangeable)

    new little baby (but not generally little new baby)

    What's up with this?  Tiny must go pairwise before new.  New must go pairwise before little.  But tiny and little are pairwise interchangeable.  

    I think this is because "tiny little" and "little tiny" function, and equally well, as compounds.  "Little baby" can be a compound, but we can force it apart with the right choice of modifiers and then you can get something like

    (tiny little)(American baby).

     With new, tiny, and little, there's six possible orders:

     little tiny new baby

    tiny little new baby

    new tiny little baby

    new little tiny baby

    little new tiny baby

    little tiny new baby

    Some of these sound better to me than others.   How about to you?  

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    Anyway, that's my untrained blathering about English syntax for the day.  I have a vague notion that the concept of a "parse tree" is the one that trained linguists would use to point out the flaws in my crackpot analysis is.  As they say, any fool can criticize, and I am always happy to play the fool for that purpose.  But, as I said to Melanie via FB, the fun thing about linguistics is that any nerd can do original amateur research on your own brain and your friends' brains, something that is hard to do in other sciences unless you have an MRI machine in your cheerful spacious well-equipped American kitchen laboratory.

     

     

     

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    3 comments on In which I am an amateur linguist, just for fun.

  • Labor day weekend, after the vacation.

    We just finished a family vacation in the North Woods of Minnesota at YMCA Camp du Nord. Every time we go it is a bit different; some years we have struck up many conversations with the other campers; some years we have spent a great deal of time closely together as a family. This year Mark’s parents joined us, which was lovely, and so we got a larger cabin —

    — well, it was more that we snagged a larger cabin, so they were able to join us. Cabin assignment is by a lottery system, and we were lucky this year — at first, we didn’t get anything at all, but went on the waiting list, and they called us later to offer us a cabin that slept ten in the last week of the summer. We took it.

    Anyway, this year it felt like a quiet retreat.

    I’ve owned these Teva sandals for more than twenty years.

    I determined to take no work with me, and requested recommendation for novels. My chief activity was sitting in a camp chair on the beach, where the creek trickles down to the clear cold lake and endlessly lays down its light sandy burden, reading in the sun. Late summer in northern Minnesota: the sun would go behind a cloud and I would put on my hat and cover my shivering knees with my fleece, then the sun would come out and I would take off my hat and fleece, slide my toes into the suddenly hot sand.

    Nominally I was supervising the 2yo and the 6yo, but they didn’t take much supervising. The 6yo and a band of his fellows and a lot of plastic shovels were busily damming up the creek with a series of sandy terraces and logs dragged from the edge of the forest. I imagine the creek is dammed over and over, week after week, all summer long. The 2yo commandeered somebody else’s plastic dump truck and drove it endlessly in and out of the very edge of the lake. The first full sunny day he would not touch the water, the second day he splashed at it, and by the fourth and last sunny day he was brave enough to venture knee-deep.

    I am not really a beach person, but I drank in the sun this last week of the summer. Lately, living as I do in Minnesota, and growing older, I feel more and more acutely the swiftness of the warm sunny days and the slow march of the coming chill. Summer no longer stretches out before me indefinitely. I know the snow and ice is coming back too soon. It isn’t that I don’t like winter up here — I do; it’s just that it overstays its welcome, and I never quite feel that I have had enough of the warmth in each year. As a child in southern Ohio, where winters are not as interesting or beautiful but where they last the correct amount of time, I used to comfort myself in January, at the bus stop, by imagining how pleasant it would feel to swelter under hot sun, and I also used to long in July for a single gust of frigid wind and a few pricks of refreshingly icy sleet. Now I still sometimes fantasize about the former. But not the latter, no matter how sweaty we get. Why bother fantasizing about the wind and cold? It’s going to be here soon enough, you can count on it.

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    It occurs to me just now that I speak from a certain place of privilege, namely (a) my house is air-conditioned and (b) mosquitoes really don’t seem to like me very much. So there is that.

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    Besides reading and being the designated person to “watch” my youngest boys on the beach — I must have put at least twelve to fifteen hours in on the beach in a course of a week — I had a few hours to spend with Mark. We went on two trail runs together and also a two-hour kayak paddle. I found that the trail runs seemed to make my troublesome hip feel better rather than worse. Need to find a new way to move around that is less monotonous, perhaps, than padding around and around the flat paved lakeside paths.

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    I brought no work with me, but only leisure, which is to say that I brought a few books of botany and plant idenfication, several novels to read of the challenging and literary kind, and also a novel in French — I saved weight by downloading an offline dictionary app. My mother-in-law had brought a basket of crocheting along with her, and I contemplated that as I considered the knitting class that was offered as a camp activity.

    What is your personality type? We are always asking this question, it’s a new kind of horoscope we tell. Sometimes it’s silly and fun (what Jane Austen character are you?), other times pseudoscientific (introvert or extrovert? INTJ or ESFP?), veers from time to time into quackery (Eat Right 4 Your Blood Type anyone?) and occasionally it hits on something that — not everyone — but some people find genuinely useful, even life-changing (I hear that pretty often about 5 Love Languages).

    I have this one completely nonstop friend, whose six children cover a range as wide as mine but a little bit older. Her previous life was technical corporate training, so we have a kind of affinity there, each of us having turned a ridiculously analytic personality towards managing and educating a house full of children. She is constantly doing something, running something, creating something. I often suspect her of dealing with stress, or solving logistical problems, by becoming more busy. It is the kind of thing that in movies portends everything coming crashing down because no one can just keep going like that, right? But it seems to work for her — I suppose there may be a deep internal disaster that none of us can see, isn’t that always a possibility, but I can’t see one. I am fully ready to believe that what would exhaust me is what inspires, fuels, even soothes her.

    We were talking the other day about cooking, and she commented how restful it is for her to be creating and producing things — how making something complicated and multistep, baking Bavarian pretzels I think we were talking about, puts her in touch with family members from long ago, soothes and comforts even in the busy-ness, when there is a tangible thing taking shape under her capable hands.

    I am not like that, and that looks like work to me instead of rest. But what is rest to me is work to someone else. And superficially useless work at that!

    What refreshes and re-creates me is learning. I told Mark as we picked our way rapidly among winding tree-roots on the trail, “One time when we were here — I believe it was in 2009 — I brought that one botany coursebook up with me, and I spent the whole week learning to identify different families of plants by sight. It’s so weird to think so, because there is no foreseeable use for this knowledge for me. But it felt so satisfying just to learn their names and to recognize them. I don’t understand what is so satisfying about nothing more than putting a label on a thing, but it is deeply satisfying to me. I don’t even expect or desire to use the knowledge to impress anyone, and the kids aren’t very interested in it either. It’s like the same thing that makes some people collect coins, or butterflies — you catch one and you put a pin through it and a label on it and you keep it in a case. Except it’s only in my head, I don’t even have a gallery to show anyone. But there is something just as satisfying, as if merely by learning to recognize the butterfly and knowing its name, I have collected it. I don’t need the physical butterfly, but somehow I have caught it and I possess it if I know it by sight and by name.”

    And it is restful to me: study for the sake of study, knowledge for the
    sake of knowledge. I try things for a while and enjoy the trying and sometimes never pick them up again because I don’t have to, there are so many other things to try. I read French for fun and write down the vocabulary just as I did in school; but I don’t teach my children French because to do so would be to miss an opportunity to learn a new language with them, so we learn Latin and dabble here and there in other languages, Italian, Polish, as opportunity moves us. I buy textbooks and struggle through them. I play with apps designed to teach children how to program computers; even though I once wrote code, I am rusty, and never was all that good at it anyway, and the latest app promises to award points for shorter code with fewer steps, and has constraints that make it interesting. I find that fiction, really good fiction, is too difficult for me unless I have uninterrupted time, which is why I took good novels with me on vacation, but I am constantly reading nonfiction as my light mindless reading to settle the brain before bed: a lot of history, but also sciences and disciplines of engineering, especially the ones that are more of a mystery to me because I didn’t have them much in school.

    We say that introverts and extroverts (by one common and fairly useful definition) are distinguished by whether they seek solitude or company in order to recharge the batteries, so to speak. I wonder if we can also usefully classify ourselves by what sort of work we find restful. Not just what we find agreeable; There is work that I enjoy and have an aptitude for but that is still work to me — I am thinking of the school-planning here. I do it because it saves me a kind of work I like less (winging it in front of the children), but I wouldn’t do it for fun. But I learn for no good reason at all except that it makes me deeply contented and happy.

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    Just one short note here without explanation: I erred gravely in thinking that this feature of my personality would make me an excellent academic.

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    “Usefully classify ourselves.” That sounds like the lepidopterist-of-ideas in me again. No, I think it is useful — in the way that some find the five love languages useful — it can help us understand each other and give each other the space and resources that we need to recharge, so important in families; and help us to understand why apparent frivolities can be so desperately important — how close we come to striking someone else to the heart, sometimes, when we lightly tease them about wasting their time!

    And also to give us permission to be ourselves and to love what we love. Extroverts and morning persons dominate, and maintain their hegemony by ridiculing night owls for laziness and introverts for backwardness, but why should there be only one schedule of wakefulness, one pattern of sociability? Is it taking it to an extreme, this claiming of being marginalized even in these areas of comparative unimportance, a sign that our culture is unhealthily obsessed with victimhood? Maybe, or maybe it’s just noticing the large pattern writ small, that humans tend to crush and shame differences of all types everywhere we are.

    Anyway. What is work for some is refreshment to others; “leisure” is relative. What leisure of yours is work to someone else?

     

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  • Laïcité, freedom from and freedom to.

    France is in the news this week because of an incident in Nice which four armed police officers forced a woman on a beach, in front of onlookers, to remove some of her clothing, consequent to the city’s ban on “clothing that overtly manifests adherence to a religion.” Since that occurred, possibly in an attempt to demonstrate that they weren’t discriminating against Muslims, the city’s deputy mayor insisted that habited nuns weren’t welcome on the beach either, and then a French high court overturned the rule — probably setting precedent for dozens of similar rules enforced at the municipal level all over France. This still leaves open the possibility that the national legislature could craft a law explicitly empowering local officials to ban beach clothing that contravenes their sense of laïcité, or could even craft one that sets national policy.

    Here are a few related links that set some context for the matter:

    Wikipedia article on the 1905 French law concerning the separation of church and state

    Wikipedia article on the 2004 French national law banning certain religious symbols and clothing

    Raphael Liognier writing in the Macquarie Law Journal in 2009: “Laïcité on the edge in France: Between the theory of church-state separation and the praxis of state-church confusion.” This article is critical of French policy, but it provides a good historical review of how the French state put itself in this situation, explains the cultural concept that now bears the name “laïcité,” and describes some of the incongruities in the existing law.

    At Feministing, “A Guide for White People on the #BurkiniBan and Discussing Muslim Women” by Mahroh Jahangiri. This piece reminds us of the political history of colonialists’ efforts to police Muslim women’s dress, reminds us that there isn’t just one true feminism, and, I should hope, reminds us not to treat Muslim women as political objects. Her seven pointers for writers are worth reading.

    (I don’t go as far as the author to say that it’s always wrong to make analogies to other kinds of societal clothing-policing, but I sympathize. A well-crafted analogy can powerfully force an honest interlocutor to “see it from the other side” and thus open minds, but a poorly-crafted analogy can be legitimately offensive. If you’re not sure how well yours is crafted, it’s likely better to keep it to yourself.)

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    So, not wanting to repeat what other people have written on the topic, I’ll just make a couple of comments.

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    First of all, I have a strong preference for American-style civil liberties. I come very close to being a free-speech absolutist, interpreting “freedom of the press” to be a freedom possessed by the owner of the press, and “press” interpreted broadly to mean any means of publishing, paying for, or disseminating speech, and interpreting “freedom of expression” to mean one’s entire way of life in and out of the public sphere. So I don’t like the French system, no.

    At the same time, I am interested in different possible ways to assemble a consistent legal approach to philosophical diversity. I like our ideal of massively free expression; but no real system is perfect, and one does run up against conflicts from time to time, and lurking behind it always is the logical problem of tolerating intolerance, or of somehow having to respect philosophies that themselves do not respect philosophies — the fundamental logical flaw of all relativism. Could there be better ways to deal with it than ours? Maybe. And it’s interesting to explore systems that may have solved some of our own persistent problems while creating problems that we don’t have. Also, I’d like to pay a little lip service to state sovereignty and to there being the possibility of having a set of priorities that is different from ours, that wouldn’t fly in U. S. culture, but that makes sense and respects human persons in its own way. So I don’t want to write them off entirely right off the bat — at least not just because it’s not the American way.

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    So, it strikes me that one of the inherent weaknesses in the French approach to law here is in banning a kind of “symbol.” An inherent with symbols is that they are not universally agreed upon, and that they are context-dependent. So the French have a truly fundamental legal problem here, namely, that they have written their law in inherently ambiguous language. Perhaps it is impossible to write laws that contain no ambiguity whatsoever, but zero ambiguity is the standard for which all laws ought to aim; one could even say that to remove ambiguities is the entire point of having laws at all, so that people can securely know how to comport themselves so that the state will not lock them up or seize their property, and so that the people have a means of creating a state whose power extends to agreed-upon bounds and no farther.

    So we’re stuck, because sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes an article of clothing is just an article of clothing. Jahangiri’s piece in Feministing points out that it is the white colonialist mindset that first interpreted Muslim women’s wear as a symbol of Islam, imposing a meaning upon it from outside. White feminists and rejected males alike continue to say implicitly or explicitly, “this is not clothing, it is a symbol.” French laïcité means a freedom from certain symbols in the public square; maybe this sounds okay, a legitimate expression of a state (not consistent with the American expression, but trying to be open-minded and tolerant here toward la peuple française and their distinct culture); the problem is that apparently, for the French majorité to be free from what they see as symbols, some French minority women have to be free from what they see as their clothes.

    It would be less problematic if the French had just come out and said “We are banning visible crucifixes that are longer than 325 mm, and little round hats worn on the back of your head, and when we said that you have to show your face in public, we also mean your hair, unless it’s below a certain temperature Celsius or raining enough that drivers have to turn on their windshield wipers.” At least the ambiguity would be gone, and though we might object to the infringement on personal freedom, we could at least say, “Well, it’s clear,” and then we could debate its rightness or wrongness. But no, they had to ban “religious symbols,” which means one thing to one person and another thing to another. Which puts government in charge of deciding what your clothes really mean. And which means that you will never be judged on what they mean to you, but only on how they are received by other people, whom you cannot control. In other words, in a regime that bans “symbols” rather than banning specific objects and articles, individuals are liable for other people’s thoughts about them, whether those thoughts are correct or incorrect. And that is about as illiberal as you can get.

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    Third, it is important for Americans to understand the French system as a kind of warning of where we might go, if the forces of “freedom from” get out o
    f balance with the forces of “freedom to.”

    Already there are hints of this in all the parts of the First Amendment. Politicians are speaking, it seems, more and more often of religious freedom interpreted as a “freedom to worship,” which is rather closer to the traditional French understanding than to the more expansive American one; our tradition is one of “freedom of expression,” meaning the freedom to live our lives, private and public, in accord with our beliefs. Speech codes which attempt to give people the freedom to live without hearing offensive speech are constantly being crafted at government institutions, struck down, and tweaked to sneak back in; they enjoy a great deal of popular support; and yet they exist in opposition to the American ideal (I won’t say tradition, because it has been so unevenly lived by minority communities in this country) of the freedom to express minority ideas. Interpreting expensively produced publications and expressions as a financial transaction that can be regulated — for some government-friendly spending entities and some points of view and not others — is another way the definition of “freedom of the press” is being interpreted narrowly. Some “presses” are favored as shrines of freedom of expression; other “presses” derided as mere businesses, the speech they produce interpreted as a product for consumption, and subject to intense regulation.

    The French problem is a warning to us. They have tried to favor “freedom from” over “freedom to.” If we object to the results of that effort, we can learn from it and try to craft a balance between the two that will result in something more to our particular American taste.

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  • Writing your own charter.

    Saturday morning I took a walk from Lyndale Farmstead Park, where I left the car, a mile and a half to the Lake Harriet bandstand.  I'm taking a break from running, because of my hip, and wore no athletic gear; just a tank dress and sandals. The late-summer sun beckoned me to the lake.  From the lakeside restaurant Bread & Pickle I bought ice water for $3 in a reusable stainless steel water bottle.  The cold bottle sweated big drops of water.  I took it to a table and rested my hip there for a while before walking back.

    IMG_1729

    There was a 5K going on at the lake, a walk-and-run, and bluegrass-tinged rock music wafted from the bandstand.  August in Minneapolis can be brutally humid, but it usually looks beautiful, with lots of sunny days and blue skies.  There's something about August here that makes me wistful:  the cool weather will be here soon, and fall is sometimes cut short, with the snow arriving before the trees have even lost their leaves.  

    It's hot now, but.  You know that the bitter cold is coming.  

    I don't like to hide from the heat in August, at least not in the daytime, at least not all day.  I want to stand in the sun and soak it up, like a house of adobe, and radiate it inwardly all winter long.

    + + + 

    As I wandered back with my empty metal bottle swinging by its lid-loop from my finger, I was passed by a woman and a tween boy walking quickly, a mother and son.  She was dressed in sunglasses and running clothes, he in the ten-year-old-boy uniform of basketball shorts and a graphic tee and well-worn-in sneakers, and they were chatting easily.  It sounded as if she were explaining something, and he was nodding with real interest.  They walked faster than me and soon disappeared ahead, one parent, one child, being together, here at the lake.

    I find I don't spend a lot of one-on-one time with any of my children.  It's the kind of thing that you have to deliberately create, in a family of five children at home (practicing that terminology; it will feel soon enough before one of them has aged out).   I do try to create it:  take one with me to the grocery store, take another on a trip all by himself to buy shoes, drive my daughter to camp. A biteback effect of safety regulation on family life:  no one younger than twelve is legally allowed to ride in the front seat with me, and who knows how many would-be conversations were thereby squelched before they came to be.

    Maybe the mother and son on the walking path are like me, stealing time away from a large family on a Saturday afternoon.  Or maybe the boy is the one child at home.  I considered what it could have been like, me homeschooling a smaller family, one where I felt that I had enough time to get around to everybody.  Things would be different for sure.  I have a few homeschooling friends with one or two kids, or maybe just one or two left at home after the others have grown and gone, and it always seems as if they get to go very deep and run very far, and all together, not so much sending the middle-schooler with another family to see plays, not so much dropping the teenager off to go with the group to the museum exhibit that frowns on toddlers.  

    + + +

    Of course, I'll have a chance to find some of that out eventually, when the ones who are little now become big and there aren't more coming up behind them.  We'll see if I do all the things I imagine I would do.

    + + +

    Comparing yourself, inside and out, to what you can see of other people, that's a losing game.  I know this.  I also know that I wouldn't have it another way:  the large family is exhiliarating and challenging (in a good way) and I'm so glad I have every one of the children, and am grateful that we were gifted with them, and aware of those who long for many children and haven't seen that longing become reality.  

    The most important thing to remember — I don't know why it seems so hard sometimes — is that whatever you are, whatever your family is, you too have strengths that others don't have.  It's not a kind of "I'm better than they, so there" mentality, it's more — let's restore some balance to our vision.  Instead of constantly seeing "They can do things I can't — she has advantages I don't — he accomplishes what I don't — they can give their kids something I can't –"  see that you too have your specialties.  

    There's something to the Incredibles message "When everybody's super, then no one is."  But there is another side of this,  entirely true: the differences among us mean we can excel in different things, for real, not in a wishful way.  We can be our own self better than anyone else.  

    Sometimes the things in which we are uniquely gifted are not things that are widely celebrated, and that's too bad, but we can work to appreciate those things in our own quiet way, when we see them in ourselves and in others.

    + + +

    Last week I was talking to a friend of mine, a homeschooling parent of four, a part-time working professional musician herself married to a music professor.  They're in almost the opposite academic position from Mark and me — we are both engineers, one PhD between us, and Mark working full time.  She fretted about finding good science teachers for her bright science student (who, by the way, is also a gifted musician himself — none of those in our family!) while I commiserated in an analogous sort of way because I'm nearly hopeless in the arts and am not a gifted English or writing teacher.  Both of our families have solved this problem by outsourcing the relevant subjects to someone better qualified, one way or another.  It's a common thing for homeschooling families to do, urban ones anyway.

    "Think of it this way," I said, "it's not that your kids are unusually handicapped in a subject you aren't expert in.  You've had at least a high school education in everything, college classes in some of it, and you get to have the teacher's manual.  Lots of public schools put first-year teachers into classes that they've never taught before and don't have particular expertise in.  You meet the minimum standards in every subject, and you far exceed them in others.  And you can find tutors where necessary."

    The notion of being Adequate not seeming to be comforting, I went on —

    "If you have to compare your family's achievement to a school, then think of your family as a super-exclusive, super-specialized magnet school, or charter school.   You run an arts magnet school.  I run a STEM academy.  And where we both are only so-so in the other sorts of things, we do make up for it with, you know, small class size and a lot of personalized attention.  

    "Also an extremely flexible schedule."

    + + +

    We all have to be who we are.  It's tempting to see that as only limiting.  There have certainly been times in human history where the limiting aspect was emphasized even more than it is now, where people were chastised for dreaming too much of things that were closed to them for purely arbitrary reasons — or for reasons that were thought incorrectly to be rational but really weren't.  It turns out that we do well to eliminate the arbitrary limitations, but we can swing too far the other way in insisting that anyone can do and be anything or everything, and excel in it.  The main problem with that is that inevitable difficulties are sometimes cast as "not working hard enough," "not wanting it bad enough," "not believing in yourself enough."  There are certain realities that are not arbitrary, and except for the extraordinarily gifted and/or extraordinarily privileged, wanting is not enough to overcome them.

    Buried within the truth that we all must be who we are, though, is that it isn't just a limitation but also an encouragement, an identity.  If I must be who I am, then no one else can be it for me.  I have unique gifts and I should exploit them, use them to every advantage.  If they are the sort of thing that is not recognized as a strength, or even if they are the sort of thing that some call out as a liability, then I still have options:  go where these qualities are rarer and valuable, or, well, surprise people.

    + + +

    One precondition is logically necessary, and it cannot be taken for granted:  the philosophical conviction that every human person has equal value, whatever his or her circumstances.  It's a sad truth that not everyone agrees with that, and even fewer behave in accord with it.  Some people see the good in everyone except themselves;  such a reflex has a useful side, in that it maintains humility, but it has a dark side too, one that misses opportunities for gratitude and tempts to despair and apathy, and risks swallowing others in its wake.   You have to practice finding it in yourself too, as an exercise in truth-seeking if nothing else.

    Anyway, once you have this conviction, the conclusion boils down to:  whoever you are, you have strengths.  They aren't the same as mine.  You can exploit them to your advantage, to your family's advantage.  Go forth and win at your own game.

     

    —

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    1 comment on Writing your own charter.

  • Catchup post: a good son, a Chicago getaway, my IT band, and something to read.

    On account of the two weeks since I last wrote a post, I'm going to do a catch-up roundup.  Here we go:

    + + +

    In mid-July I wrote about sending my oldest off to World Youth Day.   He spent  twelve days there, and returned safely.

    I didn't make it a secret that I wished I could have gone along (even if I didn't have small children to care for, the chaperone spots filled up rather quickly).  "Text me and send me pics," I asked, "not because I'm trying to be a super helicoptery parent, but because I want to see the things."  And… he did!  I didn't expect him to send me so much, but he sent me pictures every day that he had access to wifi.

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    He told me about the deafening, constantly circling military helicopters, the grapefruit-flavored Oshee brand soda (so ubiquitous he was sure that Oshee was sponsoring the event), the crush of the crowd waiting for the Popemobile to pass by, the poutine he bought from a stand.  He told me about the huge arena for English-speaking pilgrims, and how a few rogue groups of young people impulsively ran in circles around the arena with their big national flags, an unauthorized parade of nations, to pass the time while waiting for the start of catechesis.  He told me that Filipino Cardinal Tagle gave a great talk and that NY Cardinal Dolan gave him a pat on the back while he was venerating the relics at the stadium.  He told me about the food in the pilgrim package ("This stuff had the same dimensions and texture as bird food blocks.  Tasted awful") and how a couple people in his group got heatstroke.  He told me about how their group hashtag became #InDmitriWeTrust, Dmitri being their local escort employed by the tour service they had contracted with.  He told me that when they got tired of singing hymns they walked along singing "Hotel California."

     

     

     

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    And he told me about the ambient noise of a million people sleeping in the field, of his surprise to find that the daily routine never got repetitive but was different every day, about how the park was sometimes loud and sometimes peaceful, about how the exuberant atmosphere almost changed instantly when Mass began.

    I don't know if I've been able to express to him how appreciative I was and am that he took me along, so to speak.  I was moved.

    He asked to go out to a barbecue restaurant for his sixteenth birthday, just a few days after coming back, and we gladly obliged.

     

    + + +

    I went to Chicago for a couple of days, the day after my son got back from Poland.  

    The occasion:  my youngest child, at 2.5 years old, is now night weaned and sleeping all the way through the night.  And I am not pregnant.  So I took the opportunity to spend two nights in a row away from my entire family… for the first time in sixteen years.

    I'm a little sheepish even writing that.  Doesn't it seem like I should have managed to get away once in all that time?  But, you know, we set up our family to work a certain way, and I haven't needed to for any reason, and there's nearly always been a nursling around.  I've been away from home, yeah, but I've generally had a baby to tote with me.  IMG_1675

    So when I realized this was possible, a few months ago, I texted my good friend from high school, the one I used to hang out at the mall with when we were twelve, and asked what she thought of a Chicago getaway (Chicago is close to midway between where I live and where she lives), and — bless her, may she live long and prosper — she did not say "maybe" or "I'll check and see what's on my calendar" but immediately said YES and figured she would work out the details later, which she did.  She reserved a hotel room, I bought a plane ticket, and off we went!

    I know.  It is not that big of a deal to buy a plane ticket and spend two days away from home.  But it felt like a big deal.  

    Here's the thing.  I could have done stuff like this at times over the past sixteen years if I had made it a priority.  Generally I'm pretty good at giving myself the things I need, rather than letting the needs of the family always take precedence over mind.  And the things I need, on a daily basis, to keep myself fed, are a steady diet of little things, which I've made space for by insisting on a few hours to myself every Saturday.  Breakfast out by myself, a quiet coffee shop in which to knock out a few items on my to-do list in peace, time to shop for my own clothes or get my hair cut, a visit to a local museum, Mass on my own, a run around the lake.  All that keeps me satisfied enough that I haven't felt the need to ask more of my family.

    So it suddenly got to the point where it wasn't really asking too much to be gone for two whole days, and I took it.

    It wasn't a complicated itinerary.  We stayed at the Drake and had access to the executive lounge for the free fancy breakfast (thank you, friend's husband's Hilton points) with a view of the lake.  We went out for nachos and margaritas close to our hotel the first night.  The next day we walked up and down Michigan Avenue (she bought candy for her daughter; I bought a hat for myself) and spent 3 hours in the Art Institute.

     Then we got gratuitously dressed up, and had dinner and drinks in the historic hotel restaurant.  And the next morning she dropped me off at the airport, where I killed time happily browsing through bookstores and finding a tasty box lunch to take on the plane (sixteen years of only traveling with kids can make solo airport time not suck at all), and I flew back home and took the train back to our 'hood.

    + + +

    I think my hip pain is getting better.  After a frustrating few days of attempting to exercise carefully, and then hobbling around with pain for hours afterward, I settled on the following regimen:

    • Assume, arguendo, that I have bursitis.
    • Take sodium naproxen faithfully every twelve hours to reduce inflammation.
    • Stop running.  Switch to swimming and the occasional walk of no more than a couple of miles.   Get full rest days after exercise.
    • Stretch the IT band whenever I think about it.
    • If it's not better in two months, go see the sports med doctor.

    I'm kind of bummed that I'm missing the best time of the year to go running outside (well, if you're like me and don't get bitten by mosquitoes much, and like to get up early), but I'm already seeing some improvement.  So maybe I self-diagnosed correctly after all.  One piece of evidence:  Taking the naproxen makes the pain go completely away for at least eight hours, which makes me think that all the pain is coming from inflammation and that I haven't actually torn or sprained anything.

    A nice thing about IT band stretches, relative to other kinds of therapeutic stretches, is that they are very easy to work into your daily life.  There are standing IT stretches, sitting IT stretches (I'm doing one now while I type!), and lying-down IT stretches that you can do in bed.  So wherever you are, if you think of doing one, you can do one without interrupting your activity much.  You don't need to take off a shoe or go find a towel or a yoga block or clear a space on the floor. 

    + + +

    That takes care of three old things.  Now here's one new thing.  I've recently discovered the webcomic (graphic serial?) Stand Still, Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg, a Swedish-Finnish artist who writes in English and paints in digital.  

    I encountered SSSS by accident via a link to a piece of her art, a language tree from the comic, reproduced below (link to full size at her site):

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    I'm a sucker for linguistics, and this really drew me into the SSSS world.  Post-apocalyptic literature is fun enough on its own, of course, but this comic is especially fun if you are interested in languages, because linguistic and cultural differences between the characters drives a fair amount of the plot.  

    I would classify this as a near-future post-apocalyptic novel of the Zombie Plague type, although it isn't exactly zombies.  The general background is that a worldwide plague has shrunk the size of the "known world" of the comic to Iceland and scattered parts of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.  (That's why the language family page only includes two families).  Fantastic elements (e.g., some characters are mages) draw heavily on Nordic and Finnic mythology and traditional culture.  

    The world is well built and intricate.  The art is beautiful:  spare in its color scheme, eerie, and (though digital) resembles brushed watercolor.  People and animals have wonderfully expressive faces.  There's plenty of action scenes with monsters to chop up and buildings going boom, but the real drama is psychological and interpersonal so far.  Another fun aspect of the website:  the well-populated fan forums and comment sections, which include people from all over the world, sometimes offering fanfic and fan poetry, and helpfully translating text that appears in the background art for the benefit of non-Nordic, non-Finns.  

    Catching up on the nearly six hundred pages already posted was a weekend's leisure reading, and now I have to settle down and resign myself to reading updates just one day at a time.  

    Cats are extremely important, so if you are particularly fond of kitties, there are many drawings of them to enjoy.

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    To start reading SSSS from the beginning, go here.

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    1 comment on Catchup post: a good son, a Chicago getaway, my IT band, and something to read.

  • New IT experience.

    In the summer, I like to get up early on Sunday mornings and go for a run around Lake Calhoun.  

     A breeze comes off the lake even in high summer.  Most of the way around is tree-shaded.  It's never crowded at 7 am on a Sunday.  The scenery is pretty all the way around, at least to my urban tastes:  the busy waterfront restaurant, wheeling gulls, a small forest of boat-masts, big houses up on the hill, public beaches, dogs and frisbees and volleyball nets, the sun glinting off the water.  The running path around measures exactly 5K, and I'm not in a season in my life where I have time to train for longer runs than that.  

    Sometimes I try to go fast, and I check my watch to see how well I did against previous timed 5Ks I've run.  Sometimes I just go out with the goal of enjoying the morning.  My PR is a not-embarrassing but not-particularly-special twenty-seven-something; for lazy Sunday runs I am happy to come in between 30 and 38 minutes; if I try to go fast I want to be between 28 and 32 minutes.  

    A couple of Sundays ago I went for a lazy Sunday run in which I did not check my watch.  I specifically did not try to go fast, and was thinking to myself that the victory was just in showing up that morning.  I was just ending an unusually symptomatic menstrual period.   I don't typically experience much in the way of cramping, heavy/prolonged bleeding, or mood swings; for me it's more lower back pain, fatigue, and general feelings of crappiness.  I crave extra rest, and if I can just take a couple of extra naps and some ibuprofen, I weather it fine.

    This past cycle I felt like I had been hit by a truck, with pronounced achiness and several days of exhaustion.  For the first half of it I wondered if I was pregnant, I felt so exhausted.  For the second half of it I wondered if I actually had some kind of intestinal bug.  In the end I decided it was just my normal menstrual symptoms, just intensified.   I'm old enough now that things are starting to fluctuate and get weird, and I guessed I had just had some kind of hormone surge that made all the usual stuff feel a lot worse.  I spent several evenings in bed.  I skipped one swim workout, which is not unusual, and took the second one a bit easier than usual.

    So anyway, back to this Sunday.  I went on my easy run, enjoying the feel of moving a bit faster.  At the end I got in the car and drove a short distance to one of my favorite breakfast spots, where I  enjoyed coffee and toast and eggs and a very nice fruit cup.  Everything was perfectly lovely until it was time to get up out of the booth and OH MY WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY HIP.

    I limped out the door, bent like an old person, and eased myself into the driver's seat of the Prius.  Once I got all the parts aligned in the seat, with my foot on the pedal and such, the pain disappeared.  "A bit stiff," I thought, and drove home, and then when it was time to get out of the car again OW OW OW.

    I spent the whole day and most of the next day being totally fine except when I had to change from sitting to standing and from standing to sitting, and it was worse the longer I had been sitting.  Just this intense irritation in the outside of my right hip, wrapping around a bit to the back and shooting a bit down the outside of the thigh.   It diminished over the next few days.

    I skipped another swim workout for good measure and then tried a very slow and easy swim.  There was the pain again, not as bad as after that Sunday run, but still annoying.  I quit early and took ibuprofen, but I still spent the next couple of days stiffly and painfully sitting down and getting up out of chairs.

    I'm a little afraid to go for another run.  

    + + +

    I fretted aloud to Mark about my injury that came out of nowhere.  He was unsympathetic.  "I hurt every time I do anything," he pointed out.

    "But this is new!  I'm not you!  I don't hurt when I run!  I definitely don't hurt when I swim!  This is terrible!"

    He observed that I was still walking just fine and that I had not even tried increasing my ibuprofen dose.  I realized I was not going to get any sympathy for my very first ever running-related pain from a man who has had (mostly in series, not parallel) plantar fasciitis, shin splints, a compressed disc, tibial stress fractures, and chronic injury to an assortment of muscles in both legs, and who wants to do a lot more than I want to do.

    + + +

    First, since the only unusual thing about the past week was the massively worse-than-usual menstrual syndrome, I thought that maybe I'd had some kind of immense hormone surge that had loosened up my joints and the like.  But all the information on that seems to be about knee injuries, so that rabbit trail was inconclusive.  

    I did some more reading and convinced myself that the best match to my symptoms was greater trochanteric bursitis, although the match wasn't perfect.  Pain when changing positions: check.  Tenderness over the greater trochanter:   not really.   Then I found out that gluteus medius tendinopathy is often mistaken for trochanteric bursitis.  So maybe it's one of these things?  They're both associated with scoliosis among other things.   I have a type of scoliosis that tilts my pelvis to one side (can't remember which side is higher than the other); in my twenties I had a spate of back pain that was treated by an OMPT, by putting a lift in one of my shoes to force the pelvis back to level.  Maybe I should go see an OMPT or sports med physician to see if that is part of the problem.

    At any rate, it seems that iliotibial band stretches — "IT band" stretches — are the thing to try for both diagnoses, so I guess I'll be doing that for the time being.  I tried a few of them this morning and the stretches felt good, so that's one thing in their favor.  It's inexpensive and unlikely to cause more problems, so it's worth a try, especially since the pain isn't severe enough to interfere with most of my activities, just really annoying.  

    + + +

    The one significant thing I am not clear on is whether I should stop running and swimming for a while, or whether to cut back on either or both.  And here's where the silver lining lies:  I find myself hoping that I don't have to cut back.

    Not looking for an excuse to skip workouts, but hoping I can keep up my (admittedly time-constrained and not very rigorous) routine.

    I've unlocked a new achievement:  my first encounter with running-related pain — and with hoping to keep running, or at least swimming, hopefully both, right through it.

    I'm one of you, athletes.

    But if Mark is any indication, I probably still shouldn't whine about it to the rest of you.

     

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  • Intrinsic.

    "We were promised an election, not a damned trolley problem."

    Such has been my one-liner about the 2016 presidential race.

    + + +

    The big problem with the concept of "choosing the lesser evil" is that, in speaking the phrase, we reduce a fairly complicated, nuanced and lengthy moral discourse down to four words.  There are, so to speak, a lot of conditions and considerations that go into the discussion before you come out the other side with the conclusion, "Thus, to choose the lesser evil is permissible" or even "Thus, to choose the lesser evil is a positive good."  

    A moral argument in complicated circumstances is a structure built carefully upward from a firm foundation, all of its pieces working together like a truss to support one another and ultimately to support the weight of unforeseen future circumstances that will test it.  Having dismantled the relatively intricate structure of the argument, reduced it to nothing but its shadow painted on the ground, we dubiously free ourselves to follow the traces of that shadow and build upon it, taking "choose the lesser evil" as the postulate of a new moral system — sometimes building a structure that would be completely unrecognizable to the original architects, unless they happened to peer at it from just the right angle — and that, the direction from which the light fell upon it.

    But we want our philosophical structures to make sense from every direction, especially the directions that look toward it from the darkness.

    + + +

    I find it interesting that "Choose the lesser evil" is being deployed both to justify voting for the GOP candidate and to justify voting for the Democratic Party candidate.  It is being deployed from both directions to say, "Even though you think you have to vote for [candidate] because [particular evil], I'm here to tell you that you may vote for [other candidate] because [different particular evil].  

    I am detecting a common error in the arguments:  the notion that picking between the two major candidates is equivalent to some sort of referendum on which evil is worse (or which set of evils is worse).

    As if "Choose the lesser evil" means "That which I choose, I declare its evils to be lesser."

    Coming down to specifics right now because it's too exhausting to keep talking in generalities.  Here's the notion I'm talking about:

    • That choosing Mrs. Clinton means "I say that mass deportations and other bad things that Trump champions are worse than abortion and other things that Clinton champions."
    • And that choosing Mr. Trump means "I say that abortion and other Clinton-championed causes are worse than mass deportations and other Trump-championed causes."

    We then devolve into an argument about which kind of devaluation of human life is the worse kind of devaluation of human life, complete with arguments that the other side is pro-degradation because it has a different favorite kind of degradation.

    And that's not even getting into the wrinkle of both sides turning and attacking the ones who say, "I refuse to choose either."

    + + +

    It's almost impossible to find a discussion of the moral nuances of voting that doesn't come at it from one side or another.  I thought this was a pretty good piece laying out advice from Bishop Flores of Brownsville, TX.  The direction it comes from is "You might think you have to vote for Mr. Trump because Mrs. Clinton clearly supports legal abortion.  But maybe that's not so, because it isn't that simple, and Mr. Trump's policies also represent an assault on human dignity."   I'm not highlighting the piece because I think this particular direction is the direction that most needs highlighting.  I'm highlighting it because it digs, a little, into the not-so-simple structure that gets simplified as "Choose the lesser evil":

    Prudence judges circumstances in light of principles that are rightly ranked in terms of gravity. Keeping that in mind, circumstances are different this year. It is not possible now to take the issue of immigration policy only as a matter of having diverse positions on a badly needed reform of the system. One could argue that in prior elections there was a dispute between the parties about whether a reform was needed, and about what principles would guide a possible reform.

    This year, there is a proposal on the table to proceed with mass deportations of undocumented men, women and children. One cannot in conscience countenance a program of mass deportation. It is a brutal proposal. In some instances, particularly dealing with the Central American mothers and children, and deportations into some parts of Mexico, we are dealing with placing them in proximate danger of death. I consider supporting the sending of an adult or child back to a place where he or she is marked for death, where there is lawlessness and societal collapse, to be formal cooperation with an intrinsic evil. Not unlike driving someone to an abortion clinic.

    So, even as a Catholic finds the radical pro-abortion platform of the other party beyond reprehensible, there is no comfort for the conscience of a Catholic on the side of a radical program of mass deportation. Both positions are assaults on the dignity of life, and in the case of mass deportations, can be linked to no. 24 of Faithful Citizenship (FC), “treating the poor as disposable.” Overall, I think we have to look at nos. 35-38 of FC very carefully. We should all read it and think about its implications between now and Election Day.

    I think it is worth citing number 36 in particular: “When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.”

    It seems that if a Catholic votes for either major candidate, he or she must do so with a conviction that the evil the candidate supports can be successfully opposed, and that other aspects of their policy proposals are sufficiently good to warrant voting for them. Thus if a Catholic votes for a pro-abortion candidate or for a pro-mass deportation candidate, for what FC calls “morally grave reasons,” because the candidate is deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods there should be conscientious commitment by the voter to oppose strenuously the pro-abortion agenda or the pro mass-deportation agenda respectively And there are other factors that FC rightly asks us to think about, including a candidate’s commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue.

    And note, that I have not even addressed the issues of targeting innocents (who may be relatives of evil-doers) in military actions, or indiscriminate use of drones in warfare. Nor have I mentioned a great many important issues raised in FC and which we must take into account.

    …

    The bishop reminds us not to fall back on a simple formula, like "Choose the lesser evil."  Rather, we should return to the source (the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount) and to its development in American pastoral theology (Faithful Citizenship, a.k.a. Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship:  A Call To Political Responsibility, a teaching document to U. S. Catholics advising us how to exercise our political voice.)  

     

    We are in the situation described by paragraph 36 of that document, but not in the way that faithful Catholic voters expected to be.  The document reads:

    36. When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods.

    I submit that most pro-life voters imagined that this describes an election where every viable candidate is a pro-legal-abortion candidate.  

    Instead we have the (much more realistic, technically ever-present, but now extremely obvious) situation where every viable candidate openly supports an intrinsic evil, but it's not the SAME intrinsic evil.

    Thus we are divided, and distracted into arguing about which intrinsic evil is the worse intrinsic evil.

    This is a fool's discussion.

    "Intrinsic" evils do not permit us to distinguish between a greater or a lesser evil.  That is what "intrinsic" means.

    It means that whichever way we go, we walk in the valley of the shadow of death.

    We may as always distinguish prudentially between a greater or a lesser danger, but not between a greater or a lesser intrinsic evil.

    And if you'll take a look at paragraph 36, you will note that the U. S. bishops do not advise U. S. Catholics to vote for the candidate whose evil is deemed lesser.

     Instead they advise us that we may (a) choose not to vote for either candidate or (b) may vote for the candidate that is less likely to advance the evil parts of his/her agenda and more likely to advance the good parts of his/her agenda.

    In other words, if we are to vote at all, we are obligated to consider the structures of platforms and of power as wholes — not merely their foundations.  How would each candidate be constrained in their political goals by opposing parties, by checks and balances, by the slow lurch of bureaucracy?  Who can inspire the masses to support them, and what can that inspiration accomplish?  Do the respective platforms contain (besides the rotted planks) sound, achievable goals that further justice and mercy?  What role will competence and incompetence play in the advancement of the good and evil parts of the agendas?  What role will self-interest play, and how strong is it in each candidate?

    "Choose the lesser evil" is not going to work as a slogan this year.  We have a much harder decision ahead of us all.  

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    1 comment on Intrinsic.

  • Sending off the pilgrim.

    As I write this, our 15-y-o son is on a plane from Paris to Prague. We left him at the airport yesterday — him and 60-some other Minnesota teens, plus chaperones, a handful of priests, and Bishop Sirba of Duluth.

     

    They’re on the way to World Youth Day in Krakow.

     

     

    He’s carrying the same green canvas backpack that Mark carried when he did his solo Eurailpass-and-hostel tour in college, 21 years ago (a drinking age ago?). That’s a good bag. It has one broken strap-clip and a cracked zipper pull. Still works fine.

    He woke up in the morning and said, “I’m finally getting excited to go. Up till today it’s just been getting ready for something that will happen in the future. Now it’s real.”

    I kept myself busy by randomly poking my head into the room, and asking, “Did you think of [thing]?”

    “Yes, I have one.” “I decided I didn’t want to bring that.” “They said we didn’t have to.” “Yes, Mom, I have two.”

    + + +

    Several years of Scout camping trips have made it easy for me to relinquish control over my older boys’ packing for trips. We gave him the list and let him worry about it, offering to help track down any stray items. We already had almost everything on the list. Travel wallet on a string? Borrow Mark’s (come to think of it, I think that travel wallet is also 21 years old). Sleeping pad for the night in the field? The 12yo Scout, who likes to roll ultralight, lent him his superthin inflatable. Do we have mylar emergency blankets? Do we have mylar emergency blankets? Take two, they’re small. Cash for a snack in the French airport? Mark opened his wallet and pulled out a fifty-euro bill.

    The 15yo raised an eyebrow and said to his dad, “You carry fifty euros around with you in your wallet?”

    “Yes,” I teased him, “something like that would never come in handy!” He shook his head.

    + + +

    “Did you think of phrasebooks?”

    “They’re on my phone, mom.”

    “In German and Czech and Polish?”

    “Yup.”

    “Do you remember how to say thank you in Polish?”

    “Yes.”

    [suppress with great effort the urge to demand he prove it]

    + + +

    I took him shopping at The Mall (you know I live in the Twin Cities, right? Yes, I mean That Mall) a few days ago for less-beat-up-looking sneakers and shower shoes. It seems a bit silly, but I honestly had such a good time walking with my teenage son from store to store, chatting about various things. He showed me how the Pokemon Go app worked and told me a story of the time he was at the mall and spent his last half hour playing Ingress there, changing portals from green to blue; then his phone buzzed all night with notifications as someone in the mall (“probably an employee or a security guard,” he said) walked around changing them back from blue to green. The shopping trip made me ridiculously happy.

    Also, I got credit for finding the shoes he wanted at a 20 percent discount. Nordstrom Rack FTW.

    + + +

    After we left him at the airport, I asked Mark if he didn’t mind going out for dinner, because I wasn’t feeling great (nothing big — just a headache and general malaise, but I had had it all day). Friday night it’s hard to get a table for six, so we wound up at the family restaurant in our neighborhood — the one that’s been around for nearly sixty years, the one with the pie specials. I ordered soup and toast, and Mark the fish and chips, and the 10yo had waffle fries and an egg; the rest got standard kids’ meals.

    While we were waiting for dessert an older gentleman dressed in painter’s clothes and carrying his bill stopped by our table, and complimented us on having said grace at the table in the restaurant. He said he lived with his son and his grandchildren, and that his son’s family with their small children always says grace in a restaurant (“They’re not Catholics like you,” he said, “but they have a strong faith and they walk with the Lord”). We nodded and thanked him. We told him about having just sent our son off to Poland. He told us that his brother was a missionary in Poland.

    He lingered, and told us a little bit of his life story, marked by not a little tragedy. I looked away, fed the 2yo French fries, feeling a twinge of discomfort from a stranger’s sharing of details; and then I forced myself to turn back and look him in the face and to listen, really listen. It is not that I was not interested, it’s that I have a sort of automatic avoidant reflex. You don’t know where this sort of thing is going. I probably worked harder on looking like I was listening than on actually listening, but Mark kept the conversation up. I was concentrating on suppressing signs of visible alarm that someone had breached the Upper Midwestern wall of polite detachment and was trying to make a human connection with me, with my family; concentrating on connecting back.

    When he was about to leave I reached out my hand and grasped his, and looked him in the eyes, and said, “It was very nice meeting you.”

    + + +

    A few minutes later, after dessert had been served, the waitress stopped by, her arms stacked high with plates, and said, “That man who stopped by your table? He just paid for your dinner. Dessert too.”

    + + +

    Mark and I stared at each other for a long time. “I guess we won the game,” he said.

    “We should have bought his dinner,” I said, thinking back over the story he told.

    “I guess we pay it forward,” said Mark.

    + + +

    I exchanged texts with our son later in the day, complete with photos from the pre-WYD tour of Prague, and was sure to pass the story on to him. Grace is where you least expect it sometimes.

    Wonder what the next ten days will bring.

     

     

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  • The seventh corporal work of mercy.

    Philando Castile (whom I mentioned in a post the other day) was laid to rest here in the Twin Cities on Thursday. Mr. Castile's funeral was hosted by the Cathedral of St. Paul at the request of Valerie Castile, his mother. There are some moving photos taken outside the building here at this article from the St. Paul newspaper website. There you can also view photos of the program detailing the chosen readings and speakers.

    At the end of the article are comments, which I in no way recommend you to read. Some of them gave me the impression that the Archdiocese has received some comments from persons identifying as Catholic who object to the Cathedral's welcoming the Castile family to bury their son at a public ecumenical service. Castile was not a Catholic, and a Baptist minister was invited to deliver a sermon, while the rector of the Cathedral delivered introductory prayers.

    My impression was strengthened by the Cathedral's release of the following statement:

     

    The Archdiocese was honored that Philando Castile’s mother, desiring that her son’s funeral be an opportunity for “people to come together in a new way,” thought our cathedral could be a fitting setting for an ecumenical service at which our community could unite with her family to pray for peace and reconciliation.

    During his general audience on September 9, 2015, Pope Francis said “the assembly of Jesus takes the form of a family and of a hospitable family, not an exclusive, closed sect.”

    At this difficult moment we feel privileged to have the opportunity to offer hospitality to the Castile family and to our hurting community.

    We are praying that our cathedral might serve as a place where all might encounter a God who offers consolation and hope.

     

    I endorse this wholeheartedly.

    Some of the objections to Mr. Castile's burial from the Cathedral are of a character that I will not dignify with a rebuttal.

    On the other hand, the question "Why can Mr. Castile, a non-Catholic, have a 'Catholic funeral?'" is a reasonable one, even if expressed–rather insensitively–during the funeral in question, to judge from the time-stamps on the various comments. So is the corollary continuation "….when my brother/dad/son/grandpa was not allowed to have one?"

    Let me just offer some context for that one.

    The term "Catholic funeral" is imprecise. There is such a thing as a Requiem Mass, which is the quintessential "Catholic funeral." It can only take place inside a Catholic church or Catholic chapel.

    There is also among the ecclesiastical funeral rites a "Funeral Liturgy Outside Mass," which is also a type of Catholic funeral. If you have been to a "Catholic funeral" in a funeral home chapel, in a private home, or in a cemetery chapel, that is what you most likely experienced. Sometimes (for example, in families that include Catholic and non-Catholic members) this is deemed the most fitting pastoral choice regardless of the location of the funeral.

    It is also permitted (in fact it is encouraged!) to hold ecumenical prayer gatherings inside Catholic churches, presided over by Catholic and non-Catholic clergy, for many different reasons. These can include funerals and memorial services. Mr. Castile's funeral would seem to fall into this category.

    Finally, at any memorial service at all, at a gravesite, in another church, at a wake, in someone's home: if a Catholic priest happens to be in attendance, he might accept an invitation to offer prayers or a blessing.

    The first two categories, because they belong to the ecclesiastical funeral rites, are properly called "Catholic funerals." The latter two are not.

     

    The diocese and the pastor have leeway in deciding who may or may not be buried according to the ecclesiastical rites, anyway. In some dioceses, under some circumstances, a baptized non-Catholic may be buried with full funeral rites. In other dioceses and in other circumstances, it may not be allowed. It can seem as if the standards are looser for non-Catholics than for Catholics, because in some dioceses a so-called "non-practicing" Catholic might not be permitted a "Catholic funeral" while a person who never was a Catholic might be permitted one, or at least might be buried in a Catholic cemetery.

    It is undoubtedly upsetting for a bereaved family, at a vulnerable time, to be told that their loved one cannot receive a requiem Mass, or that a requiem Mass cannot be held at the location and/or time that they are planning to have the funeral, or that the deceased is ineligible for the ecclesiastical rites at all. Some of the commentary and pushback probably comes from this place.

    To that I can only say: This post is the short answer giving reasons why Philando Castile could be permitted a memorial service in the Cathedral. There really is no short answer as to why some particular person might not be permitted the type of funeral desired by his or her family. You would have to talk to the pastor, and listen to the explanation, and then possibly do a lot of reading, in order to understand that. No short answer. I am sorry I cannot help relieve that pain.

     

    The purpose of Catholic ecumenism is to foster true Christian unity. When Valerie Castile called the Cathedral and asked that it host her son's funeral "for people to come together in a new way," this was precisely what she was asking — and she asked it not just of the Cathedral parish, but of the whole local church, the diocese. In a sense she asked it of our universal Church.

    Who are we to turn her son away?

    If I had been the one to take that call, I would have wept in humility before Mrs. Castile. It was she who honored our church, not the other way around, by reaching out to us.

    Furthermore, everyone knows that Mr. Castile's funeral was not just a funeral. It was also a gathering to call for peace, justice (in the Christian sense), and love in the wider community.

    For what the Catholic Church has said about ecumenism, I encourage you to refer to the Pontifical Council's Directory for Application of Principle and Norms on Ecumenism (link). Here is an excerpt:

    108. Where appropriate, Catholics should be encouraged, in accordance with the Church's norms, to join in prayer with Christians of other Churches and ecclesial Communities. Such prayers in common are certainly a very effective means of petitioning for the grace of unity, and they are a genuine expression of the ties which still bind Catholics to these other Christians. Shared prayer is in itself a way to spiritual reconciliation.

    109. Prayer in common is recommended for Catholics and other Christians so that together they may put before God the needs and problems they share—e.g., peace, social concerns, mutual charity among people, the dignity of the family, the effects of poverty, hunger and violence, etc. The same may be said of occasions when, according to circumstances, a nation, region or community wishes to make a common act of thanksgiving or petition to God, as on a national holiday, at a time of public disaster or mourning, on a day set aside for remembrance of those who have died for their country, etc. This kind of prayer is also recommended when Christians hold meetings for study or common action.

    110. Shared prayer should, however, be particularly concerned with the res- toration of Christian unity. It can centre, e.g. on the mystery of the Church and its unity, on baptism as a sacramental bond of unity, or on the renewal of personal and community life as a necessary means to achieving unity. Prayer of this type is particularly recommended during the "Week of Prayer for Christian Unity" or in the period between Ascension and Pentecost.

    111. Representatives of the Churches, ecclesial Communities or other groups concerned should cooperate and prepare together such prayer. They should decide among themselves the way in which each is to take part, choose the themes and select the Scripture readings, hymns and prayers.

    I see no evidence at all that Mr. Castile's memorial service was not a suitable instance of the sort of ecumenism discussed in this document.

    (Incidentally, paragraphs 120 and 121 of this same document explicitly grant to the local ordinary — normally the bishop — the discretion of offering full funeral rights as well as prayers and blessings of other types to non-Catholics.)

    For a deeper examination of the role of ecumenism, one could consult two documents of the Second Vatican Council in particular, Lumen Gentium and Unitatis Redintegratio.

    + + +

    I am grateful to Mrs. Castile for reaching out to our diocese, and I am glad that our Cathedral rector responded with welcome. I'm sorry that anyone calling themselves Catholic publicly objected to the rector's decision, which was entirely in accord with Catholic teachings. May Mr. Castile rest in peace, and may eternal light shine upon him.

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  • The hard work of marriage.

    The Darwins write about the work of marriage:

    Used to be that when people would make a remark about family size or me being pregnant again, I'd say, "Oh, what's one more?" In a sense, that's true — if you have a crowd, one more isn't going to make much difference. And yet one more person makes a lot of difference. When you have teenagers trying to talk to you about teenage problems while a ten-year-old and seven-year-old are sparring and a six-year-old has her own complaints and the two-year-old's new hobby is sitting inside the fridge, and they all want to tell you about it at one time, then one more is an awful lot. One more activity, one more drama — it's a lot.

    For years I used to scoff at the notion that marriage was work. But you know? It is work. Not bad work, but necessary work, if one isn't going to sink in a sea of daily fuss and busyness, and emerge on different life rafts, floating near each other but not quite together. To stay united is work. To maintain a family is work. Everything this side of heaven is work, the daily bread earned by the sweat of our brow.

    + + +

    Before I got married, I was warned that it would take a lot of work, this marriage thing, to succeed.  In fact, I was told not to expect my marriage to last very long at all.  

    That warning turned out to be overkill.

    On the other hand, I don't feel I was adequately warned about how much laundry there would be.  I am a great ignorer of laundry.  But then, it turned out that my husband is not an ignorer of laundry.  He very kindly refrains from complaining about it on Saturday mornings, while he carries baskets about and sorts.  I should remember to say "thank you for doing the laundry" more often.  I thank him for many things, but not enough for the laundry, probably because I have forgotten it was ever there, because nobody warned me about it.

    + + +

    In my experience, the people who usually write or say "Marriage is hard work" are almost never talking about the rolled-up-sleeves work of supporting and running a home and a family.   Which is funny, because from my perspective — that is where all the work has been!

    It's unusual these days, the belief that the purpose of marriage is to create and maintain a home where children and adults can thrive, and — should they come along one way or another, unexpected or no — to give those children in particular what they need to thrive.  For those of us who still hold to it, the "work" of marriage is or should be consubstantial with the work of supporting and running that home and family.

    But if you google "marriage is hard work" you find that people mean "weathering stormy periods," "making life-altering decisions," "recognizing that you have to accept the good and the bad." 

    Oddly enough sometimes they seem to mean "going out on dates" and "having meaningful conversations."  A good gig if you can get it.

    I'm paging through articles — you can do the same — even for articles that are written by parents who mention how tough it is to care for a bunch of little kids, they aren't dignifying their daily work by identifying it with the "hard work of marriage."   By that phrase they mean things like "ridiculous fights over nothing" and "talking our relationship out of a hole" and "hours wasted angry at my spouse."  They don't mean settling squabbles and cleaning up the kitchen.

    The work that brings in the paycheck that feeds and clothes the children doesn't get a nod either, but how can that not be "hard work" that is part of the work of the marriage?   

    It's like the term "hard work," applied to marriage, is actually just a metaphor for managing stress and anger and interpersonal conflict.  

    Don't get me wrong, that is a necessary part of making the home and family a place where children and adults can thrive.  But really, the kind of work that marriage requires is mopping the floor, and cleaning the toilets, and trying to fix the garage door, and calling in a professional to really fix the garage door, and sitting in commuter traffic, and mowing the lawn, and standing at the stove, and holding people's hair while they vomit, and updating the budget spreadsheet, and teaching the children.  Marriage requires hard work that is actually work in the sense of economically productive labor, the purpose of which is always and everywhere to support families.

    It isn't a freaking metaphor.  Or at least it isn't only a metaphor.

    All marriages require work.  Some marriages also require frequent management of interpersonal conflict, which is not at all surprising because people are involved.  Pretty much every human relationship requires some management of interpersonal conflict, of course, but for lots of us — with the help of aligned values, grace, and habitual respect, gratitude, and good will — the so-called "hard work of marriage" isn't actually the hard part.   

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    8 comments on The hard work of marriage.

  • “A little knowledge…”

    I don't believe in putting bumper stickers on my car.

    The caveat here, before I explain myself, is that I don't care if you want to put bumper stickers on your car. Do it as much as you want. It is a matter of personal expression, and I am cool with that. But I don't put them on mine — I guess you could say that an unadorned bumper is my personal expression.

    It isn't that I don't appreciate a well-turned, pithy statement. I am fond of KILL YOUR TELEVISION. I like very much WHO ARE YOU TO TELL ME TO QUESTION AUTHORITY? I wholeheartily agree with LOVE THEM BOTH. I have a special appreciation for outrageously large window decals of Our Lady of Guadalupe. You have a lovely stick figure family.

    I just … don't want such things on the outside of my car. Not even the tiniest, most unobtrusive rosary sticker in the corner of a back window. Definitely not anything political. There may be a sticker out there that I would be comfortable putting on my car, but I have not yet seen it.

    Once, without consulting me, Mark put a sticker on the Volkswagen supporting a particular vote on a local ballot-initiative. Given that he knew I was planning to vote the same way he was, I think he was probably surprised by how annoyed I was that I had to drive around town in a car with a political bumper sticker on it. I made sour faces, I drove the minivan instead as much as possible for the next several weeks, and I made him peel it off the car on the first Wednesday in November. I didn't just feel annoyed about it, I felt unreasonably angry, and I spent a lot of time behind the wheel trying to articulate to myself why. I didn't quite come to an answer.

    The other morning when Minneapolis and St. Paul woke up to the viral video of Phil Castile dying of five bullets in the front seat of his car while a panicked policeman shrieked "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I briefly wondered — as I have wondered about various political and philosophical statements over the years as they became timely — if it was maybe time to get a Black Lives Matter sticker. Some of my neighbors have the signs in their front yards. I don't mind signs in my yard as much, we've had candidate signs in the yard and that has never bothered me. I wondered very idly if I, bearing such a sticker, might be more likely to be pulled over. I wondered, too, if the same neighbors would see such a thing with appreciation or with derision, now that virtue-signaling is A Thing.

    Two days later after the five Dallas murders I waded into one too many comment sections and I knew from my reaction to them that however sympathetic I may be to #BlackLivesMatter — and even though I could still do the yard sign thing, like I said, I don't have the same feeling about yard signs — I wasn't going to put any bumper stickers on my car, not of any sort. And I think I have figured out why.

    It isn't that I don't want you to know what I think.

    It's that I don't want you to think you know what I think.

    + + +

    Last December Ken White, an attorney who blogs at Popehat, published an op-ed in the L. A. Times about "culture-bundling." He was writing about the unproductivity of most debates about gun control — and it's a useful contribution to the discussion on that subject, too — but what really stuck with me was just one of his three points, namely, the "bundling" concept. Bear with me, I know this passage uses gun control as its example, but I'm quoting it not for that particularity but because of the general concept that I have underlined.

    We culture-bundle when we use one political issue as shorthand for a big group of cultural and social values. Our unproductive talk about guns is rife with this. Gun control advocates don't just attack support for guns; they attack conservative, Republican, rural and religious values. Second Amendment advocates don't just attack gun control advocates; they attack liberal, Democratic, urban and secular values. The gun control argument gets portrayed as the struggle against Bible-thumping, gay-bashing, NASCAR-watching hicks, and the gun rights argument gets portrayed as a struggle against godless, elitist, kale-chewing socialists.

    That's great for rallying the base, I guess, but that's about all. When you culture-bundle guns, your opponents don't hear “I'm concerned about this limitation on rights” or “I think this restriction is constitutional and necessary.” They hear “I hate your flyover-country daddy who taught you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were 12” and “Your gay friends' getting married would ruin America and must be stopped.” That's unlikely to create consensus.

    The original blog post , not bound by external editorial standards, uses a bit more colorful language. I think I prefer it. About an example of a pro-gun-control meme, White writes,

    The intended message may be "fuck the people who don't seriously debate gun control because they accept vast campaign donations and they are afraid of NRA-led primary attacks and who refuse to even consider whether there's something we can do about madmen spraying crowds of innocents with bullets." But your message is "fuck you and your flyover-country Daddy teaching you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were twelve and fuck the church you went to afterwards."

    And about an example of a pro-gun-rights meme,

    Your intended message may be "the government doesn't get to determine my rights based on its assessment of what I 'need," nor do fellow citizens who may arbitrarily determine I don't 'need' a wide variety of things based on their concerns." But what you are conveying is that "the people who want gun control are God-hating, kale-chewing, coastal-elite socialists who want to imprison your pastor for not marrying gays."

    I encourage you to read the whole thing there.

    + + +

    Even for straightforward messages that one might think could not be misinterpreted, the phenomenon of culture-bundling means that people are tempted to make assumptions about each other. The Jesus Fish drags a trail of associations behind it like so much grimy seaweed. The Black Lives Matter sticker is smugly, mentally, made to bow and scrape as a mere corollary to All Lives Matter. Every car can be neatly shunted into the left and right lanes.

    Such assumptions are not warranted, ever.

    Yes, but…

    No. They are not warranted. Not ever. The environmental-responsibility sticker doesn't also mean "People are bad and abortion is good." The second-amendment sticker doesn't also mean "Gay marriage is an oxymoron." The Jesus-loves-you sticker doesn't also mean "Keep evolution out of the schools." The support-our-troops sticker doesn't also mean "I -heart- the death penalty." The opinions behind the strawmen may be correlated one way or another, but human persons are not correlations.

    The assumptions aren't warranted. They aren't warranted because when we make them we are seeing a human being as an object: an object of our own self-gratification, the pecular good feeling because it reinforces all the things we already think.

    Bumper stickers tempt people to see each other as objects.

    Bumper stickers tempt people away from compassion and toward derision.

    And that is not even counting the occasional sticker that actually expresses something that's not just unpopular, a minority opinion, or countercultural, but actually vile.

    + + +

    And what about Christian witness? Have I got something against proclaiming Jesus Christ on the outside of my vehicle?

    Yes, I do. I do not deserve to prominently display the Holy Name on the outside of my car. I have a lead foot. I have a big scrape on my minivan door where I hit a pole in the co-op parking lot on the day before Thanksgiving. I accidentally cut people off while shouting at squabbling kids. The best I can do for a justifiably pissed-off fellow commuter is that super-apologetic "Sorry! My bad!" wave. I don't think my displaying a Queen of the Rosary sticker is going to do either the Queen of the Rosary, or myself, or the guy leaning on his horn, any good in that moment. My mishap may do more damage because of it.

    There are shades here of Luke 18:9-14. Being a Christian behind the wheel should mean driving with awareness, attention, and courtesy, not driving the right car or having the right sticker. I need the mercy of God inside my car.

    + + +

    And the world needs the mercy of God outside it, too, which is one reason I don't want to tempt anyone to think nasty thoughts. There are plenty of other places to speak the truth: places where, unlike on the bumper of my car, I get to speak the whole truth, put things in context, show my face, be seen as a whole person and not a hashtag.

    A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We have seen that this week, to our national grief.

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  • Father’s Day Twitterstorm.

    I had an interesting experience on Twitter the other day.

    I don't tweet much, as a rule, although it's becoming my preferred way to find political news, and I've gotten more active as the presidential race has gotten more… interesting.    I love Lin-Manuel Miranda's morning inspirational tweets and the Post-it Note conversations that Alton Brown puts up.  I follow the accounts my tween son follows, as a matter of parental prudence.  I retweet more than I tweet, I think.  I follow less than 100 accounts (a small enough group that I don't need to manage it with lists) and I regularly unfollow accounts as I get less interested in them or as their usefulness to me expires.  I do so little on Twitter that for a very long time, I had email notifications enabled for everything so that in the rare event that someone replied to a tweet of mine, I wouldn't miss it.

    I don't tweet much, but I'm not above tweeting back at people who say things I think are silly  – at first glance.

    + + +

    So, on Father's Day, via someone else's tweet, I saw (not long after it had been posted) this tweet by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a think tank CEO and former State Department official:

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    So, I read that, and I thought it was really, really funny.  And I dashed off a semi-snarky (but true) response and thought no more of it for a few hours.

    + + + 

    A little background here, so you don't think I acted out of disdain for Slaughter herself.

    A few years ago I read with interest and not a little empathy a longform article that Slaughter had penned for The Atlantic called "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."  It's a personal tale leading into the assertion that the existing structure is bad for both men and women, after which she calls for buy-in from organizations of all types to enact family-friendlier policies.  There isn't a whole lot there philosophically that is new to the great Working Mothers Debate, but I like reading personal stories, and hers was interesting.  She left her State Department job to be closer to her family (among other reasons), and she wrote about the condescending reactions of other women, and the hollowness of the "have it all" message, and the difficulty of living a reasonably human family life while serving in a high position in Washington.  

    I thought I remembered Hillary Clinton throwing some shade back at her in response,  and a quick Google search turned that up: "Clinton said Slaughter’s problems were her own and that 'some women are not comfortable working at the pace and intensity you have to work at in these jobs … Other women don't break a sweat,' according to the story."

     All this is to say that I have some good will toward Slaughter in general, and I really did think her article was important (which is to say, if there's a snark battle between her and Hillary Clinton, I'm going to be on Slaughter's side).  Work and family life do need to be balanced — in my view, the best way to put this is to remember that the purpose of all labor is to support families, and not the other way around.  It is good for the rest of us if women are well represented in government, and academia, and think tanks, and all the other sorts of elite positions that Slaughter was writing about in her piece.  Slaughter was pointing out that it may be good for the rest of us, but it isn't always a good deal for the individual women (paycheck aside).

     I also get that one of the great annoyances faced by married, white-collar working women, is tension between themselves and their partners about the division of child-raising labor.   Some of that can't be helped much (if only one of you can breastfeed, for example); other parts are amenable to mutual agreement, but the nature of even the best compromises is that sometimes people feel cheated, and — this is key — not every compromise is actually a fair one, and sometimes people really are cheated, and that kind of stinks.

    BUT.  

    I read her post and I pictured saying to my spouse, wagging a finger:  " I expect you to be an equal caregiver and competent in the home!  Happy Father's Day!"

    So I tweeted back:

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    And then I went on my way and didn't think about it again until I checked my mail and found the hundreds of notifications.   When I noticed that Instapundit had retweeted me, I turned the notifications off.

    Several days later, Twitter analytics tells me, the number of people who have seen this tweet is 46,559.  

    Slaughter had replied directly to me:

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    Another person replied:

    Slaughter again:

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    And then people really started piling on her.  I decided to tiptoe away slowly, metaphorically.

    + + +

    As far as I can tell, nobody in all those retweets reacted negatively to my tweet, which is pretty damn amazing, considering Twitter.   I muted some likers who had racist handles, also some obnoxious MRA's and white nationalist types.  Ew.  

    It's too bad some of the replies to Slaughter were terribly rude, because I wondered if she would listen to the more reasonable ones trying to explain to her why her original tweet was so laughable.  I kept thinking about how on earth she could possibly have thought that her expression, which recalled a schoolmarmish "I expect these papers to be neatly handwritten in ink," or a paternalistic "I expect this mess to be cleaned up when I get home," constituted praise?  I mean, I wouldn't have pegged her as the type.

    Some days later, I have a theory.  

    + + +

    The word "expect" has an ambiguity about it.

    If I say "I expect" an event to occur, it might mean that I am confident that the event will come to pass.  I believe it will happen.  I anticipate, I may even take steps to be ready for it.

    But in the very special case where the event is an action that may or may not be performed by another person…

    …and I am speaking to that person…

    …then "I expect" is tantamount to a demand that the person carry out the action.

    It is an indirect way of saying "I will be very very disappointed if you don't do the thing."  It is an implied threat!  A mild one, but a  threat nonetheless.

    + + + 

    I took Slaughter as meaning the latter:  as saying, "Let's commit to being very very disappointed in fathers who are not equal caregivers and who aren't competent in the home."  Apparently so did almost everyone else.  And they can hardly be blamed for it — the evidence suggests that this is not an "unexpected" way to read the tweet.  The word "expect" is loaded.

    But it does strike me as plausible, especially given her dismayed and incredulous response, that she meant it the other way, and doesn't understand why on earth people could have been offended.

    In that reading, Slaughter might have meant to say:  "Let's commit to confidence in the competence of fathers — that they are not second-class caregivers, and that they can succeed in roles traditionally designated as 'women's work.'"  

    If that's what she meant to say, then it is praise for fathers.  And it's a message we need more of — popular culture is full of dismissive images of the dumb, incompetent dad, burning the dinner and duct-taping the baby to the wall.  The ditzy dad is not a helpful corrective.  It doesn't help dads, and it doesn't help moms — who go on bearing the brunt of society's disapproval for anything whatsoever that goes wrong within the family, because no one "expects" dad to be the equal caregiver.

    Unfortunately, it was an inept way to phrase it, because of the ambiguity in the word "expect," and it wound up meaning the opposite.  That's because we use "I expect you to do it," so often, as a means of  communicating "I don't expect you to do it, unless I remind you."  So "let's commit to expect" sounds like "let's commit to remind."

    + + +

    I still am not sure which meaning Slaughter intended, but I'm leaning toward the more positive interpretation.  I think we owe people the benefit of the doubt, to choose the most charitable of several possible interpretations.  However, it's reasonable to call her out on her wording.  She writes for a living, and she tries to make policy:  clarity is not optional.  I feel bad that so many people responded to her so rudely, but it is entirely unsurprising.  

     I stand by my tweet.   The ironic thing: my professed love and appreciation for my spouse and the father of my children is indeed unconditional, but it isn't unearned.  He earned it, as we should all earn it from one another, by being trustworthy, competent, and caring.  The two of us have our own spheres of responsibility, and each of us takes care of what we're particularly gifted at, but I absolutely would call him an equal caregiver.  He's made it clear to me — from long before we were married — that he would be.   So I think (if Slaughter meant what I think she meant) — we don't actually disagree.

    We all could use a little work on our tone sometimes, eh?


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