Memes That Don't Work

I periodically see a meme on Facebook that really bugs me.  Sometimes it just seems . . . more mean than funny.  Other times it simply doesn't work because the connection it tries to draw just doesn't exist.  Sometimes the information it presents is flat out wrong.  Call me humor-impaired if you wish, but when these things go to a certain level of viral, they really start to bug me.  On occasion, I find I have posted them on my own Facebook wall, and only really considered the implications later.

In many cases, it's kind of bad form to cut down someone's post on his own wall.  It's his wall.  For him to express an opinion.  A few people encourage debate and disagreement.  That's awesome.  Others are simply venting or having a bad day and aren't really seeking critical appraisal of their posts.

In light of the fact that I have been guilty of sharing some of these painful images and claims from time to time, and I don't want to be "that person" who constantly criticizes what other people post, I thought I'd share my thoughts on some of the memes here.  I'll update this post from time to time.

Without further ado, here is the 

Wall of Shame

1.    The incredibly chill turtle from "Finding Nemo" is declaiming:  "If my kid can't bring peanut butter to school, then your kid shouldn't bring preventable diseases" 

Why this meme is a fail:  This one fails on several levels.  First of all, yes, non-vaxxers irritate me (and yes, I know several, who are generally good people, who make puzzling choices on this issue).  But despite my very openly pro-vaccine stance, I cannot like this meme.  Firstly, it strangely ties together peanut allergies (a life-threatening condition that was not chosen by the individual) with vaccinations (presumably, the poster would not insist a child receive a vaccine if she is allergic to one of the compenents?)  That juxtaposition is just confusing.  I keep trying to assemble the syllogism that would make this meme work, and there are none that follow a valid construct.  Secondly, it's really unfair.  It targets kids with allergies, as if they are doing something willful just to piss you off.  I'm sure, given the choice, these kids would vastly prefer to NOT have nut or other food allergies that could take their lives in minutes with little warning.  I'm equally certain that this preference has absolutely nothing to do with any inconvenience you feel you suffer by coming up with alternative lunch options.  Oh, but, the problem is that their allergy is impacting your behavior; shouldn't they just learn to get along in the real world?  Ummmm  . . . have you ever watched kids eat in the cafeteria?  They are not careful, clean, or great at clean-up, on the whole (there are always happy exceptions).  Some kids with allergies don't even need to ingest the food they are allergic to; they only need to breathe it or have skin contact-- from a light switch, pencil sharpener, door frame, jungle gym, or other innocuous item.  Finally, it suggests that families whose kids have allergies are the same families who are refusing vaccination.  This if often not the case.  I know several kids who have severe food allergies who are fully vaccinated (though extra precautions are taken with each vaccine, hoops your kids did not have to jump through).  I know several families whose kids have no or mild allergies who refuse to vaccinate because they simply don't understand the science behind vaccines or believe they are being conned by Big Pharma.  Linking the two ideas is just plain wrong.  I sympathize with the idea of being a bit irritated by having your kid endangered unnecessarily.  But don't blame the kid with peanut allergies.  He doesn't really deserve your wrath, and neither do his parents.

2.  Look at this Common Core Math!  It's SOOOO Stupid!  I can add and subtract the "normal way" much more efficiently than this example shows!   I don't even understand my second grader's homework!  And hahahahhaha look at the smart alecky answer the parent wrote back to the teacher!  Awesome!

Why this meme is a fail:  Oh geez, I could do an entire blog post on this one.  It's hard to know where to start, though a parent openly snarking at the child's teacher via the child's homework paper would be an excellent place to start-- do I really need to explain that one?  Let's move right along then.  Should any parent be following up, "I can't understand my second grader's math homework," with claims that they know more about math than the math teacher?  No.  I have to give the answer there, because many people seem to not get that one.  As a corollary (math term, sorry) Should any parent who cannot understand second grade math homework, and pretty straightforward homework at that, really want his kid to receive the same evidently rather poor understanding of math that he did?  Again, I'll help out here.  No.  Having your kids surpass you is a wonderful, exciting thing.  Here's the kicker: the Common Core math standards do not insist all kids solve problems the same way.  Do you know what standard did?  When all kids were simply told to use the "standard algorithm" that we learned growing up.  We were all forced to do it the same way.  What does the CC actually teach?  A related but varied group of approaches, that once mastered, the child may freely choose among when solving problems.  Here's the thing.  To master each concept, the child needs to practice.  The choice comes later, after the concepts have been mastered.  To insist a first or second grader should choose the best method for solving a problem would be like asking a first-time home builder to simply choose the best way to frame a house.  Maybe, just maybe, getting solid experience and mastering the basics first would help them make solid choices later on.  When implemented properly, kids educated through the CC standards across the years develop fabulous number sense and mathematical literacy in ways our generation didn't even dream about.  For most of our generation, it was enough to see formula, memorize formula, plug numbers into formula.  For today's kids, they see a problem and are learning to reason through it, can detect if a calculator gave them an outrageous answer, and can puzzle out new problems that don't look just like the example-- they can think.

The internet, and particularly Facebook, is often a source of images and statements for people to post without thinking about it too much.  I'm sure more failed memes will be added over time.

Denying Access to Birth Control is Illogical: A Christian Viewpoint

Denying women access to birth control makes absolutely no sense.

Leaving aside the issues of economics, personal ethics, women's rights, and other societal matters for those more qualified than I am to discuss (and to be honest, those issues have been discussed ad nauseum already), I am thinking of simply the logic, and my point of view on the matter as a Christian.

I was raised in the church to believe in a compassionate, loving God, who cares for all of his people.

Those who would deny access to birth control to women (in today's economy, refusing insurance coverage IS tantamount to denying access) would have us believe that their version of God works like this:  It's okay to access competent medical care for everyone, except for women who might die if they get pregnant, and except for kids who will suffer incredibly if they are subjected to pregnancy and/or birth.  Those groups, and those groups alone, are not permitted access to preventative medical care, because God would prefer that they suffer terribly.

We may use our amazing (God-granted) brains and technology to alleviate suffering for diabetes, epilepsy, cancer, ADHD, depression, bacterial infections, surgical interventions, tooth decay, and much much more.

But if a woman has a history of HELLP syndrome that indicates she stands a serious chance of dying in a future pregnancy (and the baby along with her); if the parents have a genetic legacy that will bestow a child with a horrible disease that will result in the painful death of a child shortly before or immediately after birth; or if any of a host of other situations exist that threaten the health or welfare of mother or potential child, our compassionate, caring God, for some reason, wants us to watch this woman and child suffer horribly and possibly die, even though we could have prevented this suffering in the first place, using the brains AND technology he gave us.  Everyone, EXCEPT women and babies is permitted to benefit from medical care, but in this case, we make an exception, and feel how noble it is for them to suffer and needlessly die.

With adequate contraception, we can prevent babies who should not have gotten started in the first place from happening, and save the lives of these women.  With the benefits of after-conception possibility contraception, we can end a potential pregnancy, sad and tragic as that may be, before the mother is in danger and the child must undergo unnecessary suffering.  That sounds like caring and compassion to me, and much more like treating women and babies the same as everyone else.

Some women might be making different choices than I might personally make.  I am okay in not judging them.  I am not okay with saying, "I can have all the medical care I want.  But you . . . you are a special class of human-- one that does not deserve protecting.  I want your baby to suffer horribly, so that I can declaim about my compassion and spirituality, even though I don't even know you."  To me, that makes no sense at all.  It is, in a word, illogical.  It is uncompassionate and uncaring.  It is not my job to judge.  This is not about me charging in to save some healthy baby from a woman I never met.  It is about me not charging in to get between a woman I have never met and her doctor, by financially preventing her from making a necessary health care decision.

The God I believe in is compassionate toward everyone-- not everyone except women and children.

Food for Thought

I recently saw an article in which big agribusiness was relieved to explain "the big lie" that eating local is bad for the planet because we just can't feed people that way in this day and age.  If I find the referenced article again, I'll add the link.

I found it thought-provoking and sad that yet again, one side of the issue simply put a stake in the ground and proclaimed "of course!" instead of really providing any good data, as I strolled through both my own home and through the grocery store, and wondered, how much closer to feeding the world could we come, if even 60% of this waste could be avoided?

Some waste, in a day of needing to transport goods from agricultural areas to urban areas and non-arable land is inevitable.  Make no mistake; there is no turning back the clock there.  I don't think it's really as easy as putting in a rooftop garden or expecting everyone to raise chickens in their back yards.  Not everyone should have chickens, and a high density of poultry would increase disease rates, and not everyone has a green thumb-- and it would still not provide the variety of produce and protein our society subsists on today.  I don't think we are going to move to an all vegetarian diet soon, nor do I advocate it, and moving a lot of animal density into our populated areas would not really help our water quality, either.  So, we will continue to need to transport quantities of goods into concentrated areas, and doing so will engender some waste.

But what about the types of products that we ostensibly "need?"  Walk some of the bread aisles, and you will note in some stores upwards of 20-36 feet of highly processed non-foods, just in the bread aisle.  From various manufacturers, there is a huge variety of snack cakes, chocolatey, cream-filled treats, and other "foods" of zero nutritional value (beyond stuff added into them after the fact).  Many of these foods are waste to begin with, as they add nothing nutritive to our diet; they add to waste further when they sit on the shelf until the expiration date passes, and still more to waste if we bring them home and go uneaten and eventually tossed there.  We could stop producing those goods quite easily, freeing up the grains, sugars, and fats that go into them for flour for other foods and experience zero nutritional loss on a global scale.  Doing so would simultaneously improve world health and reduce trash output (discarded goods and packaging, as well as production waste and transportation).

I have no hard numbers, but I suspect that before we even look at the snack and chip aisle, we really could go a long way toward reducing our agricultural load by doing the equivalent of cleaning our closets at the production level, and doing without the things that we as a global society really could do far better without.

Of course, this will beg the question-- where do you draw the line?  The companies that make snack cakes would never voluntarily go out of business.  And if it is YOUR favorite treat that we are talking about, chances are good that you would vote that this would be one of the exceptions that would get a pass.  (hey, Snyder's pretzels are okay, right?  The ones with pepper and sea salt?)   From a practical standpoint, it's a lot easier to say we could just do without than to put this into practice.  It might be easier to start trying to train people to buy less, to try to be realistic about what they will actually eat before it goes bad.  Perhaps then the focus could move more toward what we will really need to eat-- moving back toward creating menus instead of buying on the fly at the store, resulting in fewer impulse purchases.  I recently had a conversation going on my Facebook wall, in which it became clear that many people today feel much less confident about baking and cooking, which also drives purchases on the snack industry, because people don't feel they can make their own snacks as much as they used to, which, ironically, may lead to increased consumption and purchase of snack related resources.

Do we need to see an increase in businesses such as one I saw in St. Paul, where you could stop in, grab a recipe, and then load up a bag with all of the ingredients you need for that dish, which have been all prepped and chopped for you, from fresh ingredients, in a matter of minutes.  When you get home, you have everything ready to throw into the pan, oven, or microwave, fresh, chopped, and ready to cook, clear instructions in hand?  (Sorry about the megasentence :D ).  I think when people prepare satisfying meals at home in a stress-free manner, they are less likely to fall back upon unhealthy snacking.  Maybe what we need is more businesses cropping up that support that model, for today's busy working families.  You take home exactly the number of portions you need, reducing waste.

Instead of listening to vitriol being shouted out by one side or the other (We need big agribusiness!  It's the only way to feed the world, duh!) (We need to buy and eat local, it's the only way to save the planet, duh!) we need to think carefully and not pick a side, but try to figure out what makes sense and really works best all around.  How can we set people up to succeed?  Maybe we do need some big agribusiness, but we don't need to let them frighten us into dependence-- particularly not on products we don't need.  Maybe local produce and other products do make a lot of sense-- less transport, less waste, less need to treat with bizarre stuff to stay fresh, more infusion into your local economy-- but you aren't evil if you buy something from farther away when it makes sense to do so (frozen veggies keep a lot of nutrients, possibly more than a vegetable that has sat on  farm stand for two days in the sun.  Or maybe you can buy one that isn't available locally).  Maybe we can do better with menu planning, fewer impulse buys, or supporting start-ups that help people make dinners at home with healthy, fresh ingredients instead of quick-fixes-- that just helps all of us in myriad ways.

So many of these "issue" articles simply look at one side-- their side-- of the issue instead of really presenting the real issue in all of its complexity.  Many mask the facts of the matter behind plenty of jargon that the bulk of the readers fail to truly understand properly, no matter how much reading they have done on it, because most of the articles just reword each other using the same jargon.  Some actually misrepresent facts terribly.  I see articles about GMO's that mix science with tinfoil hat paranoia, appropriate caution, and just lots of arm-waving, but often statements that reveal very poor understanding of how the science works, but a sophisticated understanding of how mass fear-induction works.  I see articles that are pro-GMO that do the same thing, but on the other side, taking a very "don't worry, we're scientists" tone, though written by journalists rather than scientists.  Most actual scientists, unlike what you will read in the articles, are actually quite open-minded about the issue and continue to read and learn what they can.  Avoid taking seriously claims from articles that try to tell you that scientists are all in on a conspiracy with the government to get you to like GMO's.  Most scientists even from the same lab can't agree on a radio station or what to eat for lunch, let alone on a conspiracy.

So think about it.  Probably we can't ban snack cakes.  But you don't have to buy them, either.  I wonder if it's possible to make a difference if we can get enough people to buy just what they need.  How can we do this?  Can we support our friends and neighbors in learning to cook more confidently?  Can we help with meal prep?  Can we campaign store managers to cut shelf footage down either directly, or indirectly by supporting healthy initiatives in our neighborhoods?  Are there things we can grow in our own back yards, responsibly?  Do you have a local produce coop or a local farmer you can support to get fresh items?

I think the ultimate answer lies in the middle of the extremes.  I think we need both local efforts and big agribusiness.  I don't think big agribusiness needs to keep expanding in order to feed the world; I think the world needs to get smarter about what it "needs" in order to get along.  Economically, that may not be great news for some people and companies.  But ecologically, it may make the most sense.  But can we do it?

Al Gore, According to the Pre-Teen Set

What?  That's correct; Al Gore has a solid image among the pre-teen set.

My 9-year-old told a funny story tonight about Al Gore, who has made an appearance on nearly every cartoon show he has watched in the past year, usually voicing his own character.

I queried my son, "Can you tell me one fact about Al Gore?"

He considered for the briefest moment.  "He's the funny guy who cares about the environment.  He's in EVERY cartoon!"

"Besides cartoons, has he ever done anything important?" I asked my child, who can name several Roman emperors, the Greek and Roman pantheon of deities, the kings and queens of England, and most of our founding fathers, and pretty much every Pokemon ever invented.

"No, except for the environment."

"He was also the Vice President of the United States of America," my husband supplied, sotto voce.

"Oh."

My 12-year-old jumped into the conversation.  "I think we should have voted for Al Gore as president instead of George W. Bush.  He would have done a lot more for us as president."

"Why is that?"

"He'd have been more than just a party boy, and I bet he really WOULD have done some things to start cleaning up the environment."

There you have it.  Al Gore may yet be the smartest politician ever-- he has truly worked the smartest personal branding campaign yet.  Kids 12 and under know his name.  Apparently, some kids 12 and under have formed political opinions about him and his suitability for President and his capabilities for change.  Even younger kids have clearly associated him with environmental issues.  He has reached the younger demographic through a language they simply cannot miss-- by playing himself in their TV shows.  And by being funny.  I would bet that his branding has reached kids a bit older than 12 as well.  Six years from now, my 12 year old will be able to vote, and three years after that, so will his brother, and a few million other kids.  Every one of them will likely know "Al Gore, the environmental guy."

No matter whether Al Gore tries to return to politics or sticks with his environmental stumping, the kids will be watching; in fact they are already paying attention to him.  He figured out where his next core audience was, and grabbed their attention.

Farewell, Who-Ha Master

Here is a blog entry that I did not envision writing when I began this blog, and certainly not so soon.

The amazing teacher who originally named our group of friends, Kay Schmidt, passed away this past weekend.  Absolutely "one of my 7," one of the seven teachers who has truly made a difference in my life, Ms. Schmidt will never be forgotten.

Ms. Schmidt's Obituary

Thank you for creating the Who-Has, Ms. Schmidt.  

Laundry Day

A bit over a year ago, I decided I had had enough.  I sorely missed the sun and air-dried clothing of my youth, and my darling and overburdened husband finally gave in, bought a clothes pole, dug a hole, poured the concrete, and gave me a place to hang laundry outdoors.

Over time, I have discovered some slightly unanticipated pros and cons of eschewing the dryer in favor of hanging the laundry outdoors, just like Mom used to in the good old days (good old days: back when Mom used to do everything and made it look easy).

• I get to spend extra time with my older cat.  The younger one isn't allowed outside, so he gets uninterrupted access to me when I hang laundry.  His job is to come sit on my foot.
• It is easier than ever to fold fitted sheets.  When they dry on the line, I can pick up the corners, and match them to the corners still clipped to the clothesline.  I unclip only when I have the matching corners firmly in hand.  My fitted sheets have never been folded so neatly.
• It is SO much easier to match socks!  I pull everything else down from the clothesline, but leave the socks hanging.  Now with just socks hanging, each by a single clothespin, I can see the matching socks easily, and pull them down in pairs, folding them together as I go.  They go into the laundry basket already matched up.
• Speaking of folding.  I don't know about you, but I am terrible about folding clothes out of the dryer.  If it weren't for my amazing husband, we would probably only rarely have folded clothing at all.  Seriously.  I dig stuff out of the dryer, toss it into the laundry basket on the floor, carry it to the family room, and figure I will fold it later that night.  By nightfall I am worn out, and forget it.  For some reason, when I pull clothes from the laundry line outdoors, it seems like a no-brainer to simply fold each item carefully as I unclip it from the line and lay it in the basket.  I think this might be because I am not bending over.  Whatever the reason, clothes come down off of the laundry line folded nicely.  If they come out of the dryer, we better hope my husband is not traveling.
• The clothes smell better than they ever have.  No more chemical fabric softener smell.  Even with  allergies to pretty much all my state plant life, nothing smells better to me than fresh grass (fescue, not the other kind).
• Because I now wash with baking soda instead of fabric softener (yes, we still use detergent!) I'm saving beaucoup bucks on not buying fabric softener.
• My dryer is probably 9 years old now.  I don't even want to add up how much money I am saving in electricity by line-drying my clothes in the sun.
• My dryer is 9 years old now.  How much wear and tear am I saving, and extending its life so we don't have to shell out for a new one yet?
• It gives me carte blanche to see what my neighbors are up to.  I'm not staring, I'm hanging up my wash.
• If I have been stuck inside with doing school with the kids, housework, chores, writing silly blog posts, running errands, it gets me outdoors for at least fifteen minutes twice a day.
• What can be more fun in the spring or after a few rounds of hurricanes than a rousing game of WHERE IS THE &*(&R#*()#&*#( hole for the clothesline in all this grass????  (fescue).
• At first, line dried clothes can look and feel a tad stiff, particularly since we no longer use fabric softener (interesting note-- it took about five loads of wash before all the fabric softener came out of the clothes-- wow, that stuff is really layered on there!! We used scent free/dye free softeners, and sometimes earth friendly/green varieties, because of our kids' allergies).  Baking soda in the wash water helped with that quite a bit (and made the laundry smell amazingly good, btw.  My husband is not completely sold.  He grew up on fabric softener, not grass (fescue) scenting his clothes, and isn't quite used to this new system yet).  However, two minutes after you don them, line-dried clothes soften right up.  And frankly, they feel CLEAN like nothing out of the dryer (or with fabric softener) ever really has to me.

There have also been a few unanticipated negatives to our new-found eco-friendly clothing cleanliness regime.  Namely:

• Our neighborhood is rife with dogs.  Not everyone cleans up the dog pooh, and we have had a summer of hot weather.  Nothing overrides the smell of nice, fresh grass (fescue) like melting dog poo at 104 degrees fahrenheit.  Thanks for that, guys.
• There is a skunk who occasionally pays a visit to the underside of our shed and deck.  He was just there again earlier this week.  Something had obviously frightened him earlier in the day.  I had to wonder whether the dryer might not be a better option.  BTW sweetheart, if anyone in Sweden wonders about American fabric softener, just tell them it's made in China.
• I try to be a live and let live kind of person.  And certain smells actually bring back wondeful memories.  Before contracting throat cancer when I was 7, my father used to smoke a pipe.  To this day, I fondly remember the smell of his pipe tobacco.  to me, it is the smell of security, warmth, love, and safety.  I know the smell of his specific tobacco, which is still being made.  Someone in our neighborhood uses it.  I smile when I smell it-- after all, he stands in his own yard to smoke it, and I don't have the right to tell him what to ingest or inhale, and he is in his own back yard.  If it flares my asthma, I may grumble, but I go indoors.  We can't pen up smokers everywhere.   But it does seem that there ought to be a way to work out a schedule between my laundry drying and his pipe smoking, because I don't want my 8YO to run around smelling like pipe tobacco.  In fairness, I have not raised the subject.  How do you even do that?  "Dear all neighbors.  In the event of sun, I plan to hang my underwear outdoors for all to see and enjoy.  Please refrain from doing anything stinky, because I prefer the smell of grass (fescue) to your rank dog poos, scared skunks, barbeues, pipes, cigarettes, mal-adjusted exhaust pipes, backyard fires, or anything else you were planning on doing.  Thanks!"  No, I think that in the joy that is living in suburbia, I just have to take my chances.
• I do, of course, have to hang my underwear outdoors for all to see and enjoy.  There is no mystery.  Anyone on the block can see for themselves what colors, decorations, or cup size any time they stroll on past.  I rely on the idea that nobody particularly wishes to have this information, saving perhaps kids going through the hell of puberty, hang delicates closer to the center of the clothes pole when possible, and assume nobody is really paying attention, other than wondering what the weirdo who apparently cannot operate an electric dryer will do next.

In sum, I feel the pros outweigh the cons.  It feels as if I am helping the environment, doing my bit to help my family use a smaller carbon footprint, and I, at least feel our clothes smell and feel cleaner and fresher.  My husband may not agree on the better smell thing, but on the other hand, he does enjoy finding the clothes pre-folded when he comes home (he might say that it's a wash --rimshot)

I do know that my clothes are lasting longer than they did (oh, does that add up to more savings??) before.  Most of all, I just enjoy the process.  I like line-dried clothes.  And my cat, Stanley, definitely enjoys his time coming to sit on my foot.

What is a Who-Ha?

Welcome to my blog about "anything other than homeschooling and 47,XXY."

Actually, I don't promise to never discuss those topics, but I already have a blog about homeschooling, and I'm in the midst of trying to set up a support group for individuals and families of people with the not-at-all rare chromosomal arrangement 47,XXY in the mid-Atlantic region, so those efforts have their own outlets already (I remarked to a friend, a fellow Who-Ha, the other day, that some future generations will have a ball looking back on this current age and wondering at the narcism of all these personal blogs out on the internet, though sociologists will probably love it).

Sooooooo . . . the title of this blog does kind of beg the question:  what is a Who-Ha in my context and why would we need a handbook for it?  Well, first of all, we don't need a handbook.  Those of us labeled the Who-Has already know how to be one.  As to what one is, well, one day one or a few of us who routinely banded together in middle school jointly amused and frustrated one of our teachers to the point that she finally erupted with, "You . . . are a bunch of WHO-HAH'S!"

Of course, we very likely spelled it differently than she would have.  I imagine she had a 'hoo' in mind there.  I also imagine she did not have in mind that we would adopt that moniker as our very own, with fantastical amount of pride.  You see, we were pretty much the goody-two-shoes bunch, and this was the closest most of us had ever come to getting into trouble, and we could tell she was actually having difficulty not breaking up into giggles over whatever it was we had just done at the moment, but felt obliged to yell a bit anyway.  And like the good old Yanks and quite a few other tribes, we took what was intended as an insult and turned it into a badge of pride.  We instantly became the "Who-Has."  Years later we met that teacher again, and she could not believe we became a group based upon something she yelled at us one day-- but it tickled her-- particularly the part about us continuing to be friends.

Yearly after that, even after high school graduation, we held Who Ha Christmas parties.  Many of the original Who-Has attended my wedding.  We had Who-Ha commemorative sayings, and even Who-Ha commemorative gifts (one of our members has quite the egg collection, for no particular reason, other than that it became tradition).

We are now scattered far and wide.  Our families are growing, and though most of us are still in contact with one another on occasion, we no longer have our annual Christmas gathering (and we no longer collect eggs for that one member, though I have to resist the impulse to buy them when I see particularly interesting ones).

And so in search of a name for a blog on my non-school related musings and thoughts, I decided to keep the spirit and memory of the Who-Has alive.  Because, though I try to be a good person most of the time . . . sometimes I just can't help but to be  . . . a Who-Ha.