Everything May Be Forgivable, But Everything Is Not Excusable

I keep coming back to the tectonic shifts in societal thinking because it keeps creeping under my skin. Here comes another post where my deep love for my fellow humans is bound to be interpreted as a judgemental rant by those who think we should be nice to even the most insidious and immoral among us. So be it.

Here is an article by a mom who was in a supermarket with her child. The little guy, the author's son, has Down syndrome. A cashier sees the boy in the stroller and "[spits], in a poison whisper," these inexcusable words:

“I bet you wish you had known before he came out. You know they have a test for that now…”

The test she is referring to, of course, is amniocentesis and/or a triple screen blood test, which were offered to my wife and me with our two sons and which we turned down because we would never have aborted because of a chance of Down syndrome. (The results of the blood test, by the way, are not even 100% reliable, so there is a chance of aborting a "normal" child, too.)

No Free Passes for Jerks

Everyone gets angry; everyone gets overwhelmed; everyone faces occasionally unfair challenge levels; everyone gets ill. These are intermittent states of just about any human life. 

But, have you noticed that, while we all face the issues listed above, some people seem to see those conditions as a license to treat others poorly? 

For some reason, I have never really functioned that way. I'm not saying that I have never been snippy on a bad day, only that I don't make it a habit, the way I see others do. If I do snap, I am well aware and I am usually apologetic for it. And, no matter how bad things are going, I can still manage to say hello and give even the slightest smile of greeting to people whose fault it is not that I am in a funk. 

I'm not sure what else to say about this, other than it seems to be egocentrism of the worst kind. If someone is angry with me for something I have done, okay. But what makes people think they can mouth off to someone else because of unrelated problems? 

I even hear people defend those who do this: "Well, she's very busy and overwhelmed, right now..." I don't think I will accept that. The quotation was not "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, unless, of course, there is a fly in your yogurt that day."

There are people enduring chemotherapy who have a smile for everyone they see. A backlog of unread emails and a coffee stain on a favorite tie doesn't give anyone the right to throw a stapler at the innocent guy in the next cubicle. 

The Tides of Morality

Over the last few years (while I wasn't paying attention, apparently) certain things that were once considered almost absolutely wrong are now considered admirable. Among these things are bragging, suicide, self-made and self-distributed pornography and incest.

I have heard each one of these behaviors, in print and elsewhere, defended at least once in the past year and, in those defenses, the behaviors above were not just defended, they were praised.

How I feel about these things is irrelevant. The important thing is that these changes serve to convince the active observer of societal trends that when it comes to morality, it really is now just a question of the tides in thought; concrete touchstones of what is "right" no longer exist; it is all a question of what the majority speaks up for. And when one has as many people (as much water) as we do, the movement of the ideas (the currents) is that much more apt to sweep people's thoughts along.

In the past, people were willing to accept absolutes. If God or if the king or if the law said it was wrong, it was wrong. Sure, some didn't think that way, but most did. Authority was something they were used to. Obeying was something they were compelled, either by force or by convention, to do. If, say, the Church told people not to marry their own siblings, they mostly fell in line. Those who did not fall in line were considered "sick."

"Things We Lost in the Fire"

Last night, I had a discussion with my son (he's in the seventh grade) during a longish car ride home. As a member of his chorus group at school, he wants to ask the director to perform a song by Bastille called "Things We Lost in the Fire." My son loves the band and the song is a better-than-average pop song. The only problem, pointed out by my son, is that it contains these lines:

You said, "We were born with nothing
And we sure as hell have nothing now."

My son's concern is the mild curse. He wonders if his teacher will allow them to do the song.

I pointed out that they could do it by substituting "heck," thinking, even as I said it, how artistically stupid that would sound. My son immediately said, "If we do that, we might as well  just not do the song. That sounds stupid."

(Good boy. Actually, melodically, it would work better with "as hell" simply dropped, but that's neither here nor there.)

This all lead to a discussion of appropriateness as related to audience. My son, though he thought enough to worry about the curse in the song, tested the waters a little by pointing out that Bastille does the song in concert and they play the song on the radio. This lead to further discussion, mostly regarding small children and grandparents at school functions. I think he got the point: in different contexts, the mild can be seriously amplified.

I told him the story of when I used to teach Shakespeare's Othello (the Branagh version, with Fishburn in the lead). In this version, there is a brief scene of nudity, in which Desdemona drops her nightgown on the wedding night. It is brief, so, while showing the film in class (to juniors), I would casually walk by the TV and, with impeccable timing, hold up a manila folder to block out Desdemona's charms for the three second during which they made an appearence. The class, of course, would laugh and jeer and one kid said, "Mr. Mat -- it's not like we never saw stuff like that before." My response was, "Not with me, you haven't."

Ladies and Gentlemen: The Courtesy of Control?

I rode the train for many years into Camden, to Rutgers, for most of my undergraduate work and for all of my graduate work. Sometime, I would be on crowded rush-hour trains and sometimes not so crowded. But the rush hour trains provided the same challenges: proximity and social graces.

For a week I have been as I previously mentioned, riding that same train, but to the end of the line in Philadelphia. The same challenges exist. People are boxed in and they are close to each other and they glance around nervously. Or, they poke their heads into books or newspapers to avoid talking; some people shut themselves off with ear buds, listening to music. 

It was the same in the late eighties and early nineties, except the tunes were on CD Walkmans and no one had an e-reader. But there is a level of uncertainty now, on one level, that didn't exist then. 

Even as late as the nineties, it seemed to me it was a given that a man would give up his seat for a woman, if she was standing and holding the seat handles. Now, it seems less like a loss of "manners" than a guessing game.

A few days ago, a college student, a few rows in front of me, offered his seat to an older woman. She graciously accepted and sat down with a sigh.

Why, Indeed?

We were watching Neil Simon's The Odd Couple in creative writing class today (playwrighting time) and there is a scene, toward the end of the film, in which the "Pidgeon sisters" come into Oscar's apartment. The guys, who are sitting playing poker, all stand up when the ladies enter.

I stopped the movie.

In an effort to point to the quick decline in manners, I mentioned that the film was made in 1969, a year after I was born, and that, apparently, in some social spheres, men were still standing up when a ladies entered a room.

One of the girls, honestly and openly, raised her hand and asked, "Why did they do that?"

[Sigh.]

Found: The Ugly American

I'll make the statement, first: I was in class yesterday with a guy who just plain disgusted me.

Now, we of the Sesame Street era and we of the Judeo-Christian backdrop have been taught not to judge others. (A lesson I think we have taken a bit too far -- which has been transmuted into: "Never give an opinion about someone else;" or, "never say when you think someone has done something wrong." But that is for another piece.) Those of us of this sort of background might react to my statement, above, as a horrible thing to say.

But, notice, that I did not say that the guy was a disgusting person. He just plain disgusted me. I had a visceral reaction to him: "Yuk."

He didn't stink. He wasn't unsightly. His actions, attitude and manner simply disgusted me, from the beginning to the end of a four-hour class.

Him.

He sat behind me and to the left. At a glance, I saw that he was a few years older than I -- maybe in his mid-fifties. He was a guy who was changing to the teaching profession from something else (I can only assume this decision was entirely driven by his desire to coach sports, because that is all he referenced, all through the class, decked, as he was, literally, from head-to-toe in Adidas wear.)

A Question of Intimacy

There are still people out there, you know, who think boys and girls ought to be separated during the educational process. I am not one of them, to be clear. But I do sometimes wonder if we are taking things too far in some cases. We need to be careful not to confuse equality with sameness.

Now, we are even integrating sports. Early on, in baseball, for instance -- or in soccer, even -- I see no problem with this. And, to be fair, we do separate them when the stakes get higher. You simply do not want a 200 pound boy flying toward a 110 pound girl on a kick-off return. It's just not safe.

Today, though, I sat and watched a Saturday karate class at my sons' school. Girls and boys are mixed into the classes. This all seems okay to me when it comes to practicing kicks and punches on the bags or when working on Tang Soo Do forms; but, during this particular class the kids were asked to partner-up and work on take-downs.

Should girls and boys be practicing jiu-jitsu (which is more of a wrestling form) together?

The Lingering, Languid Lick

It had been a long day for my eight-year-old son and for me, as well. School all day, then a hard forty-five minutes at the karate dojo for him. We came home to a quiet house -- my wife and other son were off at baseball practice -- and we had a nice, quiet dinner. The boy had one of his faves: cold pasta and meatballs. (I know, I know....) I had that classic combination of a phony vegetable chicken patty on wheat bread and a bowl of reheated pork-fried rice. Nothing but the finest, when daddy provides dinner...

After dinner we partook of a square of leftover birthday cake each. I made my self a nice cup of Earl Grey.

We cuddled up together on the couch for a little TV and, the gods smiling upon us, we found that Raiders of the Lost Ark was being shown on the SciFi Channel. Ahhh! We high-fived and pulled up the blanket.

The upside of Raiders being shown on SciFi: HD quality (I still have the original three dilapidated video tapes I bought years ago). The downside: commercials.

Yvonne DeCarlo; from the
good ol' days when vampiresses
left a little to the imagination.

Yes, commercials. That's when it happened.

You think, as a dad: Commercials. So what? Product ads. Ads for new shows on the channel. Maybe a public service message of some kind with some lame celebrity telling us that we need to save music in schools because music helps kids to be good at math. (Its only really useful purpose, you know.)

But what you don't expect is that, eager to market their shows to a particular (and particularly libido-driven) demographic, the station execs would completely ignore the fact that children might -- through some weird alignment of the cosmic energy channels; some fluke of fate -- be watching Indiana Jones at five o'clock on a Monday night. What you don't expect is to see a horrifying ad for a new vampire series.

But, you figure, "Meh...he didn't react to it, so I guess he wasn't scared. No harm done." Then, the rapid-fire, attention-span corroding edits slow down so that the viewer can focus on a shot -- a slow, languid shot (in glorious HD) of a young, lovely vampire vixen lovingly running her tongue up the cheek of another lovely vampire vixen.

The Smiling Assault

I think that I have mentioned before how much I hate formality – dressing up, sitting up straight, etc. But that doesn’t change the fact that it occurred to me, the other day, that a renewal of good, old-fashioned formality might just be the thing that can save our world from the groupthink, individual-suffocating vortex it is swirling down into.

We need to function in groups, right? It is, at times, essential for survival. So, we move into cities; we make organizations; we form “teams” and “think-tanks” and “committees” and “task-forces” for stuff.  We can all see the usefulness of working in a group. If we don’t see it, we at least have to admit that we are generally forced to, regardless of our perspectives.

The problem begins when individuals of the group begin to melt into each other. I think formality might be at least part of the remedy for this.

My wife, Karen, is a nurse. I used to joke about the fact that she referred to the doctors she worked with by their first names.  I used to ask her, “What happened to ‘yes, doctor; right away, doctor’” – the good old days when nurses called doctors “doctor” and the doctors called nurses “nurse”?

As a guy who is still a little uncomfortable with being called “Mr. Matarazzo,” even though I hear it a thousand times a day, my immediate reaction to informality between doctors and nurses  is: Good. Cut out the bull – we’re all equal. Formality, schmormality.

The Yuletide Twilight Zone

As some of my regular readers might know, I have sort of a love/hate relationship with tradition. Sometimes I think it is the greatest thing in the world and sometimes I think it is a nothing but a source of worthless discomfort and pretense.

But, be that as it may, my dad taught me stuff. He usually taught me stuff by just doing what he did -- he wasn't big on sit-down "lessons," but he certainly set a clear example. One of the things I always saw him do was to "tip" people who did things like bringing heavy boxes out to the car. It was automatic -- he'd hand the guy a few dollars and the guy would say "Thank you sir," and life would just hum along.

I like that. It seems like a nice little traditional formula, to me.

(Wavy dream sequence lines take us from past to present . . .)

Battle of the Brim



Christy Mathewson: "The Christian Gentleman"

 What the heck are our nation's English teachers doing? We are in the middle of a major cultural shift, I think: nothing means anything anymore, especially to our young lads and lasses. (By this, I am talking about things having meaning outside the obvious, not about general apathy.)

I just had a Facebook discussion with some friends -- some old friends and some young people who are former students of mine. It was light-hearted and stemmed from a status I posted. I am a Philadelphia Phillies fan and we have a pitcher named Vance Worley who is a great young arm with a bright future in the game. But he leaves his hat brim flat, which, to me, looks stupid. I have also joked about his apparent attitude in the dugout. Here is the status: