Body Parts

Merit Badges

Delaying gratification is necessary for good parenting. The ability to delay gratification is not easily acquired. It is not acquired all at once. It is acquired throughout life, beginning in early childhood, when learning to delay gratification struggles against the child's impulsiveness. When teenagers impulsively have sex and become (biological) parents, the manner of acquiring parenthood is a strong predictor that the new parents will lack the capability for parenting. Single parent family - or as we often see now, no parent family - soon becomes the infant's environment. A cycle shall repeat itself.

The middle class community, or neighborhood, or village, a generation ago, had many institutions through which the two-parent family worked to teach a child to delay gratification, among many lessons of life. Before I was twelve, I had struggled through merit training in Cub Scouts, YMCA summer camps, and Episcopal Church sunday school. These activities of course supplemented regular elementary school, which I attended in an era when self-esteem was earned through study and grades, rather than being awarded gratuitously in fatuous programs mandated by the state.

When I was a Cub Scout, my mother was a den mother and my father was a Boy Scout pack master. I had a program of skills to accomplish. Each success led to a new merit badge. Our merit badges were gold arrowheads. Eventually I had columns of merit badges running down from the pocket of my blue Cub Scout shirt. Not as many as my cousin, however. My cousin, my childhood companion and playmate, had so many merit badges that, to display them all, he would not tuck in his shirt. Then there were five summers of boys camp. The early years were sheer misery for me, because I was taken away from my many cousins and school playmates in the small village where I grew up. Eventually, I learned to submerge my sorrow in camp team sports. Each sport, of course, came with grades of accomplishment. I was a poor athlete and seldom earned more than simple participation badges; but I did become a sufficiently good marksman on the rifle team to obtain a third-place competition badge. I struggled unsuccessfully at tennis. I failed miserably at swimming. I was competitive only in underwater distance swimming (an irony, because I was afflicted with asthma). I never made the first underwater team, however, because I had no sense of direction and kept swimming out of the marked competition area.

In Episcopal Sunday school, we earned attendance badges. I earned many of these, as well as learning badges. My cousins bettered me here, too. Eventually, I became an acolyte, carried the cross, lighted and snuffed candles at the altar. This status was an achievement and an honor. I loved wearing the robes, walking in the procession, and holding the stage at the front of the church.

By the time I was a teenager, I had internalized several lessons about delayed gratification. Achievement took a long time, but could be accomplished in steps. Patience was important for skill acquisition. Achievement would not come without skills. Self-esteem came at the end, not the beginning, of the path of achievement.

I thought a lot about these lessons when I raised my son. We enrolled him in Webelos, over his loud protestations. We also enrolled a black friend, whose stepfather, a loving man supporting his wife's large family, did not have the time to do so. I attended the meetings with these two boys, went on a camping trip with them, tried to guide their projects between meetings. I could not help my son's friend, a wonderful boy, as much as I wanted. For both boys, the Webelos was an experiment that failed. Neither boy could focus their attention on it. Neither apparently absorbed any lessons about delaying gratification. My son began to learn such lessons on his own in college; but, following a girl friend to another country after school, is learning them still. His friend's family moved out of the neighborhood, to another school district, so we lost daily contact with him; but his mother did not urge him to attend college. His stepfather, a veteran, might have encouraged him to enter the service - where lessons in delayed gratification are taught with merit badges; but I do not know if this is the case. At any rate, I felt like I was trying to hold together a disintegrating world; I could not do so by myself.

Village and Character

The notion of character seems almost quaint now; but I was reminded of it, when I watched a father stoop down to embrace his little son before sending him off on a school bus to elementary school. The Christian/Victorian notion was that character is an achievement, not an acquisition. A person built their character from childhood through adulthood, the child prefiguring the adult. This idea had theoretical underpinning in, for instance, Erik Erikson's study of Ghandi. Establishing a household and creating and building a family within it - Erikson's householder stage of life - was the foundation upon which men and women built public careers in which they took care of a nation. I see wisdom in this idea. Establishing a family and raising children is extraordinarily difficult and calls upon all strength and endurance adults can muster. Most of the time, there is little reward. Children are totally vulnerable and totally dependent; they are seldom able to transcend their own centers of being to thank their parents. Reward comes later - decades later - when parents see their children lead honorable lives, marrying wisely, and successfully developing their own families. While love is usually cited as the central value of family, duty is probably more important. Duty is required, even when love is absent.

Whether the notion of character is valid, of course it is no longer even possible as a general social phenomenon. The parents-present family with children is a declining institution. Many children are raised without both parents; many born outside of marriage. Divorce often separates children as well as parents. The toll of this social disintegration (and I do think it is disintegration, not simply change) is apparent in the most vulnerable groups. We look at young black men as having suffered the most from this collapse of institutions. Their sense of personal self-worth is stunted from serial rejection. Their mothers often don't care enough about them to insist that their fathers live with them and help raise them. Their fathers often just don't care. The black boy sees a succession of black women - mother, grandmother, aunts - yes, loving and strong - who provide homes, trips to school, after school care; but no father to provide a male role model.

Feminists have contributed to this social disintegration. I don't mean to point simply to women leaving the home to work, as so many social observers have. I mean to say that the general notion of collective compensation for past inequities toward women has undermined the notion what one does in adulthood is built upon one's childhood. State intervention in the advancement of women through affirmative action has severed the connection between character, conceived as accumulated personal worth and merit, and accomplishment.

We see a consequence of the decline of character in the current presidential campaign in the issue of whom to trust. Trust is a statement of predictability. We award trust as we see evidence that a person is predictable in their stewardship of our interests. We assess character, hoping to find the basis for awarding or withholding trust to presidential candidates. I suspect that part of Senator Kerry's political problem in obtaining voter trust is that he lacks character, or his character is being hidden for political purposes. He appears to be a political morpheme, who takes whatever shape political advantage provides (and this shape was, in eastern Massachusetts, left-liberalism). We can't trust him, because he has no identifiable character to trust. The village judges the nation. We see the world through the lens of our elementary school neighborhood. We want evidence that the man running for president is the same man who starting building his honor in our village.

Combed Hair, Flags

I live in a neighborhood that has been black since the 1880s and Mexican (to be historically accurate) since 1918. Originally, it was an enclave of properties without racial covenants, surrounded by Anglo streetcar suburbs protected by deed restrictions. When racial covenants were ruled illegal by the Supreme Court, the minority community moved outward. In the past few years, lower housing prices have lured white families back, here and there, into the neighborhood. The neighborhood remains a spigot at the end of the tunnel of illegal immigration. Several weeks ago, the city police accidently discovered a residence, several blocks over, housing over fifty illegal immigrants.

The start of the school term brings vibrance to the neighborhood streets. When I take my early morning walk, elementary school children are lined up on sidewalks at corners at school bus stops, every few blocks. Parents stand nearby, clustered in talk, watchful - mostly women, but often fathers and older brothers and grandfathers. The children are bright with excitement, wearing clean and neat clothes, new athletic shoes, faces scrubbed. Hair is parted and combed, or parted and controlled by pins. They carry large backbacks heavy with lunch and books with seeming effortlessness. I watched a father stoop down to embrace, with pride and sentiment, his handsome small son, goodbye for the long journey to the big school a mile away.

Most of the women walk back home, preschool children at their side, to raise their families. But some clearly go to work. At 4:30 before dawn, several of them toss our newspapers from their cars to our front step. I see others dropping children off at day care before going to work. The fathers and older sons drive to jobs in small pickup trucks, to work at rough and skilled carpentry, house painting, dry wall installation, auto body repair, small lot drayage, rig driving, yard maintenance. These are small businessmen; moving up the occupational ladder from work in short order cooking, fork lift operation in distribution warehouses, machine tending in small shops, and factories.

Over the past several years, the homes of the neighborhood have reflected the hard work of the families. Houses have been painted, front yards fenced and filled with new play equipment, roofs repairs and reshingled, rooms added, garages coverted to living quarters, window screens repaired, flower beds enlarged, shade trees planted.

The received political wisdom is that these neighborhoods belong to the Democratic Party. Perhaps; but the evidence is clear that the wisdom is passing into history. These are families on the move, stepping quickly into their futures, optimism expressed in their confidence and self-determination. In the 2003 recall election, Schwarzenegger the Republican took many votes away from a professional Democratic Latino politician in these neighborhoods, because he expressed the future, rather than the past. One of the houses on my walk has a large family. Three cars park on the street for the older children. The father has a trailer for a repair business. Mother tends a lushly planted, fenced, cluttered yard, surrounding a neat, well maintained house. Several years ago, they planted a tall flagpole in the front yard. At the top, everyday, wave two flags. One flag is our American stars and bars. The other flag, equally large, commemorates nine-eleven. Against a white field rise the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Across the flag, the numbers 9 1 1. George Bush will take this neighborhood.

Anaesthesia

I just completed my third surgery on my throat for Zenker's diverticulum - a hernia. The first two surgeries did not require incision; instead, the surgeon went into my throat with a remote controlled snake with a camera and laser on the front end. He lasered off the opening to the pouch, so that it could not collect contents. These surgeries mitigated the problem, but did not entirely solve it; so I elected to have the pouch removed. To remove the pouch, the surgeons (for this surgery, there were two) made a 4 inch incision in my lower neck above the left collar bone, cut through the large muscle running along the neck, pushed aside the trachea and larynx, and shielded the larynx nerve - all to expose the pouch at the top of the throat. Then they cut pouch off. They closed the hole in the throat wall by pulling together the tissues and muscles, stapled them shut with titanium staples, and finished by folding over tissues, sewing these to make a double seal at the throat wall.

I go into this detail only to say the following. This was real surgery, requiring two and one-half hours under general anaesthesia. My previous - laser - surgeries took less than 10 minutes each with correspondingly less time under anaesthesia. Of all the aspects of surgery, I dislike most the post-operative withdrawal from general anaesthesia. The emergence from anaesthesia after this latest surgery took the longest, as one might expect. Although consciousness is engaged as soon as five minutes after anaesthesia ceased, it is recovered only partially and fitfully. For - what seemed - a long time, I was in and out of consciousness, answering questions by a nurse, who was checking on my recovery, talking with the surgeon and my wife, without connection between the bits and pieces of these activities. My consciousness of reality did not have a linear quality. I could not tell you which fragment of conversation came before or after any other fragment. I could not determine, then or now, whether I had one contemporaneous conversation with several persons or multiple conversations with several persons at different times. I did not know how subjects related to each other. Memory returned quickly - I knew where I was and what I had just been through, but memory and contemporary consciousness of surroundings did not cohere for some time.

I appeared to pass through sequential stages of consciousness - sentience, sentience with short-term memory, fragmented self-consciousness, and finally coherent consciousness. The latter - normal, everyday consciousness - I might call "high consciousness" to indicate the kind of Kantian rational structure - e.g., time-space manifold, cause and effect, linear sequence of time, etc. - it carries. Lower stages of consciousness indicate awareness of environment and self; high consciousness creates and manifests a conscious world that makes sense to us.

Now, here is the point. It occurred to me, a day later, that conscious reality I experienced while in lower stages of consciousness, as I emerged from anaesthesia, was closely similar to the rhetorical world created by Senator John Kerry in his campaign for president. Kerry's world, too, lacks coherence, cause-and effect, and linearity. It lacks high consciousness. To be brief, it makes no sense and is irrational. I ask: Is Senator Kerry fully awake?

Terror and Neighborhoods

The American public seems segmented into a few blocks of opinion regarding the War on Terror. It is interesting to speculate about the experiential basis for those divisions. From my reading of the liberal newspapers - the NY Times, Washington Post, and LA Times - and other liberal media, I conclude that in the opinion of the liberal-left, there is no basic struggle between civilizations, no struggle over fundamental values. The Terrorists (all of them, Palestinians, Al Queda, Chechnyans, etc.) can be identified and explained in terms of nonmoral social-economic variables. They are not really Terrorists with an proactive agenda, but victims of oppression, poverty, frustrated ethnic dignity, etc. They are not motivated by values, but by deprivations.

On the other hand, many conservatives see the Terrorists as autonomous moral agents believing in and promoting values hostile to Western democracy, freedom, and Christianity, as well as Judaism. The Terrorists are not deprived and do not derive their support out of the deprivation of their host communities. They derive their support from the values of their host - Islamic - communities.

This split in American opinion suspiciously parallels the split between the great social groups I delineated in a previous post - the European-heritage Americans of stagnating fertility and the Immigrant-Americans with robust fertility. This suspicion could be posed as a hypothesis. Do Americans of the robust-fertility groups see Terrorists as acting out of values hostile to our own and the war on Terror as a clash of values (that is, of civilizations)?

I am certain that the horror of the Beslan hostage-taking and mass murders resonated in school districts around the nation. The school neighborhoods, populated with Americans of robust fertility, must have reeled in shock at the images from Beslan. The families of those neighborhoods would have felt intuitively the profound nature of the struggle over values.

New Time

2.3 miles. 25min54sec.

Child State and Nanny State

From Child-Centered Society to the Nanny State

We are familiar with the decline in fertility of the native European population in Europe (including the UK) and the Anglo-European-heritage population in the U.S. The native European fertility rate is now below replacement. In the U.S., the fertility rate of the Anglo-European-heritage population is close to the non-replacement level. By contrast, non-European immigrants in both Europe and the U.S. have fertility rates much higher than replacement. In France, Muslims from Africa, in Germany, Muslims from Turkey and Arab Muslims from the Middle East, in England, Asian Indians, have more than two children per two-parent family. In the U.S., Hispanic immigrants also have lifetime fertility rates higher than replacement.

From the point of view of demographers, we are looking at two populations at different stages of the demographic transition. The demographic transition, which began in Europe and America in the 1840s, is the shift from rural to urban living, from farming to industrial occupations, and from large families (useful for labor-intensive pre-industrial farming) to small families (large families being expensive to maintain in cities). The Native-European and Anglo-European-American populations are at the end of the demographic transition. The non-European immigrant populations are at the beginning of the transition; we would expect later generations of them to have lower fertility rates.

The resulting social dynamism - stagnating fertility versus robust fertility - has been studied mainly from the point of view of its relation to the aging European and, the U.S., boomer populations. To maintain their old-age welfare benefits, they need younger workers to pay taxes for them; these workers are increasingly provided by the immigrant populations.

There is another consequence of the social dynamism that also deserves study. The stagnating European and European-American populations are no longer child-centered. They move away from child-centered neighborhoods in cities and suburbs. They live in closed colonies where children are not present. They are more concerned with consumption and personal health and comfort - with nanny state issues. They are more concerned with value, than values.

One of the central issues concerning children is the conservation and transition of values. When a couple has children, they have to deal with what values to teach the child. What is right and wrong? What is good and bad? When is it acceptable to agree with peers, and when not? Do they teach belief in God? Do they attend church, temple, or mosque? What do they teach about racial and ethnic diversity? With whom do they let their child play? What do they teach about sexuality? Alcohol? Drugs? These are questions that lead to profound questioning about the kind of society in which people live and want to live. Parents become philosophers to answer these questions and "PTA activists" to implement their answers. Questions of what kind of society, the US (or Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, etc.) is to be is settled ultimately in the home and the elementary school neighborhood and in the church community.

Laws passed under the influence of aging, stagnant European and European-American populations have less influence on the long-term nature of society. The nanny state is less important in defining society, over the long run, than the child-centered state. Whether a society is vigorous, prosperous, wholesome, and committed to individualism and freedom, for instance, is determined in elementary school districts, not in the Anglo barrios of south Florida, the retirement colonias outside Phoenix and Tucson, and the gated vineyard demesnes of northern California.

That is the way it has to be; the future belongs to the young and fertile, not the old, who are passing away. We need to look at the elementary school neighborhoods around the country to find the future of America. Are the districts healthy, safe, prosperous? What values are children observing and being taught? What kind of society will the children construct when they grow up?

Good Time Charley

2.3 miles - 25'58". With ventolin, antihistamine, tylenol. Without heart attack, aneurysm, shinsplints, leg cramp, twisted ankle, falling down, slipping on gravel, or twisting my neck when looking for cars.

Not Bursting My Heart

While on a three-day break with my wife, at Rural Resort Village, I read Lance Armstrong's autobiography ("It's Not About the Bike"). I surprised myself by being gripped by his story. I don't much care about professional sports or athletes. I don't read the newspaper sports section, I don't watch sports cable tv, I have been to exactly one professional sports game/event in my life. In truth, games like baseball and basket ball don't offend me, they just bore me. Only occasionally does a sports event attract my attention, as recently the Tour de France. The number of biographies and autobiographies of professional athletes that I have read can be counted on one finger. I am the quintessential nerd: pocket protector in seventh grade, slide rule (that dates me!) by freshmen year high school, briefcase for books and papers by second year of high school, glasses with taped bridge by second year of college. I wore used a Good Will raincoat and carried an umbrella when no one - absolutely no one, except me - touched either in Rural University. My classmages went to sports events; I went to the library. I enjoyed tennis; but that's about it. I probably should have been put in a zoo.

But I read Lance Armstrong's autobiography, because I was curious about the athlete who won the Tour de France for the sixth time. He had much more to tell me, especially about how a body falls apart and how one puts it together again - a subject forced upon me now. I heard a commentator on Cable Channel 83, that covered the Tour daily, say that the Tour was all about pain, constant excruciating pain. The person who won was the person who could endure the most pain. Armstrong clearly had much to teach me. His autobiography won my sympathy and admiration. He is a nerd on bike. His continual measuring, recording, archiving, analyzing of performance was completely news to me. I had no idea; I thought you just trained to build up stamina and then jumped on a bike and rode off.

But he impressed me mostly because he is a leopard climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. He wrote that he rides with as much effort as he can, fearless that his heart might burst as he strives forward. "I had a lot to prove, to myself and everyone else -- and unless my heart exploded in my chest, I was not going to be last again." I never thought about any physical effort in those terms. Clearly that is element in the definition of a great athlete. It explains the terrible physical injuries and anatomical deconstruction the great athletes suffer. They push their performance to and beyond the limits of their bodies. I think of the injuries the Williams' sisters recently experienced that removed them from tennis competition for a year.

How does an intellectual do the equivalent with the mind?

God's Gifts

Today, 26'47". Best time yet.

I never thought I was God's gift to women; but I have always thought women were God's gift to me. Whatever I was to become, I would be more completely myself in the company of women. That has always been true. That is "my truth".