Reading the Stickers

Every morning, now, I get up at dark-thirty and I walk out into my sleeping neighborhood. One thing I have been noticing is the bumper stickers on parked cars and I think these stickers are helpful in diagnosing the minds of the typical, middle-class American. These people are, after all, the real tide-shifters of American culture, so it matters.

One car I pass, daily, has a "Coexist" sticker.
You've seen them:

On this car, the sticker is surrounded by other stickers you would expect find on the same car: faded Obama campaign stickers; NPR stickers; a sticker with he name of the band "The Black Keys;" etc.

Around the corner from this car, surrounding a "Semper Fi" sticker is and "3" sticker (in honour of Dale Earnhardt of NASCAR fame); a Luke Bryan sticker; an NRA sticker; a sticker of a deer's head; and a "Worst President Ever" sticker.

Hope for Geniuses: Fighting Stereotype

If their lives were
Exotic and strange,
They would likely have
Gladly exchanged them
For something a little more plain --
Maybe something a little more sane.

Neil Peart, "Mission." 

If you will indulge me, I will present you with another movie-inspired post. As always, not a proper review of a movie -- just thoughts inspired by it.

I thought The Imitation Game was a wonderful film, top to bottom. A scene at the end, however, rubbed me the wrong way because it contained a typical message that I think is damaging.

Alan Turing (inventor of the computer) sits, after all of the dust has cleared from his incredible intellectual victories, with his friend and colleague, Joan Clarke. They discuss how she has found, as Turing (a genius and an outsider in every conceivable way) points out, a "normal" life of marriage and career, etc. Joan chastises him for wishing to be "normal" and she points to an array of dials and wires in the next room (another prototype computer) and tells him "no one normal could have done that."

I disagree. I think someone "normal" could have done that. More of that in a minute.

American Sniper vs. the Sneetches

I don't want to be a doomsayer. (Well, yes I do -- who wouldn't? -- but that's not the point.) As I say, I don't want to be a doomsayer, but anyone who reads this knows that one of my greatest fears for world culture is that we are giving up our individuality under the stress of over-emphasis on "community." ("Community" is in quotes, because I feel we are a little free with the word: that any group is awarded the title of "community" when it should be a more of a high-quality group dynamic...)

Anyway, I have lost a few social media friends because of what I fear is this migration to groupthink. How, you ask? By professing an anti-war/pro-warrior philosophy. I've written about it here. In brief: war is a hard sell for me. I respect our warriors so much that I don't want them to be at the beck and call of those who might make commitments to war for the wrong reasons. (By the way, I use "warriors" to include all who do battle; soldiers, sailors, marines, etc.)

This sounds pretty reasonable, to me. Yet, I have has "patriots" actually stop talking to me because of this view. They apparently feel that if one doesn't support the war, one can't be a patriot. Sounds to me like a prescription for brainwashing.

The lives of individuals are always more important to me than group objectives, unless those group objectives are undeniably more important than individual life. (Stopping Hitler, for example.)

I just saw Eastwood's American Sniper. Bradley Cooper was brilliant; there were some fine scenes, but, overall, I found the film left me a little flat as Eastwoods films usually do. But I don't really do film reviews unless they have a larger purpose. Like this one:

First Words; Altered Silence

Every morning, I walk out into my cold, dark neighborhood at 5:30 AM. I think I have found the perfect way to start my day; the perfect step -- both literally and figuratively -- into the world for someone who is an introvert but whose career relies on being around large numbers of people.

The most prominent sound is my footsteps on the wet roads. Only a few cars are awake and purring in driveways, but that sound is peaceful. The dogs (even mine) are sleeping. The usual, faint ocean-sound of distant traffic is absent. The grass frost twinkles in the available light and I avoid stepping on it for fear of the noise it will make, even though the boy in me wants to stomp right over everyone's lawns. (In today's world, though, I'd probably go out the next morning to find police patrolling for the owner of the size-twelve-shoes that defiled the sanctity of so many suburban lawns.)

I walk head-down, hood-up, hands jammed into the pockets of my heavy coat. My thoughts unwind gently, the way accordion-crunched drinking straw wrappers uncurl after a drop of water: slowly and meanderingly. I see bedroom lights wink on in the periphery, here and there. The only other signs of life within houses is the occasional blue glow of televisions and that glow makes me glad my senses haven't yet been assaulted by the electronic storm that the day will become once I step into the doors of my school.

A Parental Temptation: Forcing Joy

"No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is suppose that they are like himself." -- Steinbeck, from The Winter of our Discontent. 

A parental mistake?

When I was in fifth grade, I read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea for the first (of many) times. I loved every word of it; hung on each of the old man's thoughts. Something in me immediately attached itself to the beauty of the work and to the quest of the old man to simply keep being who he was, despite his age; to his wise and humble inner pride; a pride that required (and would get) no external validation. I wouldn't have put it quite that way as a boy, but I understood on an instinctual level.

My sons have to read a book per month in school and do a quiz and a few projects on each book. I recommended it to my seventh-grader, who is both a reader and a thinker. I thought it would be right up his alley.

He didn't really like it. In fact, over the course of a month, he didn't manage to finish the ninety pages.

Part of my reasoning in recommending the book was that, even if he didn't like it as much as I had, he could easily polish off ninety pages. He has read 300 page books in that time allotment.

Apparently, he disliked it so much that he couldn't keep reading. He made an attempt to finish it the night before it was due, but, alas, fell short.

Am I disappointed? Yes. Not "in him" so much, but that a book that meant so much to me simply didn't mean much to my son. Which is okay. He's allowed not to like what I liked. And here is the parental crossroads between wanting my son to be happy and wanting him to be what I want him to be.