Untouchable

My husband has a thing for documentaries. I enjoy them if they are well made, despite my cravings for more base forms of entertainment. (Think Top Gear or Farscape.) He found one the other day called "Obesity in America." I think the subject matter is quite obvious, and the first half or so was quite informative, but we didn't make it all the way through. There reached a point where the documentary started discussing childhood obesity. At one point, there was a scene of an overweight teacher leading a class of skinny teenagers (I swear there wasn't an extra 5 pounds between the lot of them) on the causes of obesity. The hypocrisy seems to have gone right over the producers head(s). And the cause of obesity in children? School lunches, vending machines, video games, and commercials were all culprits. Bad parenting was somehow not an issue, and it was up to the government to fix the problem. It should be fairly obvious to anyone who knows me that this is where we turned off the show.

The government solution was so frustrating because I know for a fact that it is unnecessary. The school lunch is a no-brainer. I made it through 12 years of school bringing my lunch nearly every day; homeschooling means my kids eat at home everyday and I have complete control. Homeschooling also means they don't have access to vending machines, and even if they did, it would ultimately fall to me to decide where, when, and how much they could eat out of the vending machine. I realize that for children there is something almost magical about vending machines. As soon as they see one, they are struck with the wants: Can I have …? But that's where the parent comes in: No, you've already had a treat, or yes, it's okay this time. That's my job, not the vending machine company's. They didn't create the desire for junk food in my kids, although they certainly make money off of it, but it's my job to moderate or gatekeeper that desire and in the process teach my children self-control. I won't always be there to tell them no. At some point, they must be able to tell themselves no; it's an essential part of what separates adults from children.

So that leaves video games and commercials. Again, these are simple parenting issues. If you think your child is spending too much time in front of the computer or television, send the kid outside. Or sit down and play a game together. It's not the game's fault if you can't parent your child enough to apply some simple redirection. If they are seeing too many commercials, turn off the tv. Or better yet, do we what did: Get rid of the stupid box altogether.

It is possible to remove yourself and your children beyond the reach of the influence of commercials or programs you find offensive, and it doesn't take Big Brother to do it. You alone can make your family untouchable.

And now for something completely different...

This wasn't what I had originally planned for my next post, but that one has turned into a convoluted beast that I have yet to tame. Blog posts should be short, sweet, and to the point, not 20 page dissertations on the nature of modern thinking. The days are getting short and the days have been gray. Don't read too much into this.

Have you ever been in a room full of people
And no one could see you?
Have you ever walked away from a conversation
And cringed at everything you said?
Have you ever laid awake at night
Replaying each and everything you said
And wished you could never speak again?

Have you ever felt the madness
Creeping in on all sides
And clamped down and held tight
Until the voices faded?

Have you ever dialed the phone
And prayed you'd just get voice mail?
Have you ever talked with someone
And nothing they said fit?
So you'd try again
And phrased your thoughts a different way
But it was like you were talking another language?

Have you ever held your thoughts in tight
Afraid they might escape?
Have you ever felt your heart struggling to beat
Through the pressure in your chest?

Have you ever wished, just once,
That someone understood what you meant?
Have you ever wanted to stand in the middle of the street
And scream until everyone stopped?
Have you ever laid in bed
Wishing the day would never begin
Wanting to stop rather than face another day?

Have you ever wanted to know
If others felt that way too?

Glamourous Lies

We caught our 12 year old watching a music video on YouTube and yanked her access to the internet. YouTube is not taboo, and neither are music videos. However, when my husband walked into the room, all he saw were a gyrating, half naked couple obviously pursuing the more carnal side of their relationship. My daughter was offended and took this as a sign that we didn't "trust" her. It took time to make it clear to her that our issue wasn't one of "trust." The video wasn't particularly racy but it was misleading as to the nature of love (typical of love songs, right?). "Love" was being equated with sex, period. EVen then, it wasn't all about "our" definition of love versus the singers, but rather that at 12 our daughter was not prepared to separate the wheat from the chaf. Like all heavily produced music videos, this one was pushing buttons my daughter was not prepared to have pushed, much less knew she had to be pushed!

Halo 2 is a popular game in my house, especially the online arena-style version of play. The game has carefully crafted laws of physics so that objects fall down, grenades blasts send bodies flying in logical directions and jeeps and armored vehicles are too heavy to pick up, much less throw. Sometimes, however, you end up in a game where the host has altered the physics of the game. Jeeps become projectiles and players can jump over buildings or fall from great heights without injury.

The game's original makeup is intended to resemble real life, at least at a basic level. (Regenerating in a new, unhurt body 10 seconds after being shot is definitely a departure.) But the game play is predictable because the consequences of an action are pretty clear. You hit someone with a grenade and they are going to fly. In the same way, the stability of real life physics are fairly self-evident; if you walk off a building, you are going to fall. As physical action has consequences based on the stable, unvarying physics of the universe, so to do ideas. When someone truly believes an idea, they act upon that idea and those ideas have consequences. Thus, in simple terms, bad ideas lead to bad consequences; the greater the error in the idea, that is the more it deviates from what is true, the more dire the consequences: The idea of German national superiority lead to the death of over 5 million people.

So as a parent, one of your jobs is to teach your children to operate in terms of the ideas underlying reality: what is right, good, and true. Because what they believe, they will do. If they think it is okay to steal as long as you don't get caught (think Enron), then they will. If they think it's okay to lie about other people if it gets you ahead, they will. If they believe that it is their duty to care for those in need around them, then they will. And each of those actions have consequences both for them and those around them.

Thus, like entering a Halo2 arena where the physics had been altered, this video was presenting a view of reality where ideas might lead to actions, but the consequences of those actions are subject to the writer or marketers personal preference. In this way, movies, television, books, magazines, whatever you care to name, frequently present a distorted reality. They dress up beautiful people and show them living lives of varying degrees of depravity (in the worst cases), but then the consequences are ignored.

And so the challenge as a parent is to give my children, not just the girls but boys as well, a firm foundation on which to view the world, to prepare them to expect the consequences of their actions, and most importantly, to recognized a dressed-up, glamourous lie when they see one.