The Raised and the Unraised

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The Raised and the Unraised. Mothers are presented in popular culture either as sentimentalized, often overprotective paragons or bitchy busybodies, rarely as the highly talented, results-oriented specialists they are when they are successful.

Scripted TV has lately taken to presenting fully grown women posing as “Girls,” the “New Girl,” and “Two Broke Girls.” It’s no wonder effective mothers, all of whom are clearly women, are so little noted.

My wife Maida is a hugely successful mother of four adult children. What she did was raise them. To understand that, observe the grown-ups around you (including those fictional TV “girls” for whom motherhood would be an unmitigated disaster). Many are simply unraised. Not poorly raised or dysfunctionally raised. Unraised.

First, they were unnurtured. No one looked out personally for their safety and overall well-being at each stage of their youthful development. They are now hard, self-centered, sarcastic, cynical, and ungiving. Kindness is for suckers, and you better grab all you can while you can. That’s how you turn out when you think nobody’s got your back.

Second, they were unvalued. No one told them their talents and personality made them special, made them full of exciting potential, made them unique contributors to a lush and wondrous world. They are now clinically depressed, eating-disordered, phobia-ridden nine-to-fivers whose burning issues involve the fortunes of DeSean Jackson of the Eagles, Honey Boo Boo on TLC, and their Facebook Newsfeed.

Finally, they were unchallenged. No one withheld any material gratification, demanded any accomplishment, structured any activities likely to showcase their emerging discipline, teamwork, or critical thought. They are now angry, unfocused losers, incapable of imagining a life imbued with purpose, and so they never test their mettle, never chase their dreams, never choose a path on which to grow.

Maida is a truly splendid mother. She nurtured, valued, and challenged her four children. It was enormously time-consuming, energy-draining, largely thankless work, for our culture doesn’t even know how to recognize the great mothers in our midst. You know their kids, though. They’re the ones who were raised.

They graduate high school and move on determinedly to college or other schooling, fiercely seeking the knowledge and competencies they’ll need to contribute to the 21^st century jobs in the real world. It takes years, and it takes discipline over those years. There is no substitute for targeted education, training, and preparation. People without that equipment simply will not find decent employment.

All our kids went on to higher education, masters level and above. The same with those they married. And if one of our children had decided to seek a career in construction, plumbing, theater, or landscaping, Maida would have steered them to the essential post secondary education, training, and apprenticeships that would prepare them to be the best and most employable in those fields. No short cuts; no easy money.

And they would have done it, because they were raised! Instilled in them were the self-confidence, the discipline, the work ethic, the patience, and the motivation to turn themselves into adults capable of functioning well, earning well, and, most important, living well in a world that rarely forgives lack of preparation and drive.

Watching my children’s Mom guide them, day by day and year by year, toward responsible and caring adulthood has been an awesome unfolding. If you pointed out to her everything that I’ve written here, she would stop and think a moment. Then she would shrug and say, “OK, but I only did what any mother should do.”

She would be right, too. Every mother should raise her children, as Maida raised hers. Perhaps, if every mother saw the fruits of all those years of dedicated raising, every mother eventually would raise their kids.

As a father, I’ve tried to participate in this astonishing process of raising. Perhaps I too have met some success in that department. Of course, I have been privileged to learn from the best.

Lance Armstrong and Cheating

Lance Armstrong is again in the news. Do check out my latest article in last Sunday's (October 7) Philadelphia Inquirer, the Currents Section.

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20121007_Cheating_is_everywhere__but_in_long_view__it_s_really_nowhere.html

Get Rich Quick...Or Slow

America has a schizoid perspective on the acquisition of great wealth. For convenience sake, we could call them “Get Rich Quick” and “Get Rich Slow” modes. Those who Get Rich Quick are characterized as anonymous, lucky, opportunistic, unreliable, annoying, likable, humble, arrogant, and unassuming. They are the ones who win the big lottery, have a jaw dropping fortune stuffed into their bank accounts upon the passing of a jaw droppingly rich relative, stay on Jeopardy for three years, pan for gold and hit the mother lode, or win so big in Vegas that they are banned from ever reentering the state of Nevada.

The Get Rich Slow folks are slugs like the late Steve Jobs, the not late Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey, who work very hard on an ingenious set of ideas or a fabulous talent for which the time was right to coax enormous amounts of money from the pocket books of people eager to partake of the fruits of those ideas and talents. This is called entrepreneurship, invention, wealth creation, the American Dream, or, statistically, something that happens to staggeringly few beneficiaries of free enterprise considering that it’s pretty much the main argument for it.

People opt for the Get Rich Quick method when (a) they see how few people get rich the other way; (b) they see how devilishly hard those few people work to get rich the other way; (c) they know they will never have a generous rich relative or an idea or a talent anyone will want to pay for, which is essential to the other way; (d) most likely, all of the above.

There is no impediment to living your life either way. You can choose either without breaking any laws. OK, you can’t choose to inherit a fortune, but you can pretend you chose it. Lots of heirs do. There is a problem, though, with counting on one of those two Get Rich methods happening in your life. When neither happens, you will become sad, maybe angry, and you will despoil the contentment of people around you. You will vote for candidates who tell you to blame the people who vote for the other candidate. Blame them for what? For you not Getting Rich — quick or slow.

The easiest Get Rich Quick technique is also the least likely to succeed: entering the 200 million dollar lottery. There really is no object on earth quite like the lowly lottery ticket. You pay a dollar for it, but it will never be worth a dollar again. In fact, it will be worth (1) nothing or (2) 200 million dollars. The odds that it will be worth nothing are terrific. The odds that it will accrue many millions in value are approximately zero, about the same probability that you will invent the next billion dollar advance in digital technology. Or acquire a previously unknown aunt who will leave you $250 million. Or die in the next three seconds.

Yet we buy lottery tickets. Or we pack up and grab a wagon train to Sacramento because someone tweeted that there is a gold rush happening there. Or we stand in an enormous queue of disturbed would be entertainers in the hope of becoming the next American Idol. Or we answer emails that start, “Esteemed American Citizen,” and promise a large cash deposit if we send a small cash deposit first.

Somebody somewhere got rich quick, so lots of people hope the same for themselves. The fact that it pretty much never works is small deterrent. The fact that somebody somewhere hit it big (there really is an American Idol each year) emboldens that eternally springing hope.

Amid the fever of the gold rush or the iron man triathlon that is entrepreneurship, there thankfully exist regular folks for whom great wealth is a curiosity but not an obsession. These are the folks who wake up each morning grateful for the heater that works, the roof that keeps the rain out, the cupboard that isn’t bare, the car that chugs to and from work, and, most of all, grateful for relative good health or support when health fails.

They are the middle class, the ones content to be middle class, aware that their kind is something novel in human history, which, after all, is a centuries old story of a few big lottery winners surrounded by hordes of starving, destitute losers. The middle class, not the very rich, is the real creation of the American Experiment, the real gift of our nation to a sick and weary world.

Opera Justified

Opera Justified. Those of us who love opera are at great pains to explain ourselves. Not to each other, of course. We must explain to Bob, a friend 40 years past, who averred that opera sounded to him like people doing scales. Or Joanne, who filed opera fans under the tab that reads “snob,” right after museum-goers and before wine connoisseurs.

And, nerds that we are, we try hard to explain, sometimes haughtily, sometimes humbly, rarely succinctly, never convincingly, usually compulsively. The compulsion to explain ourselves can be downright embarrassing. Look at Richard Gere, the billionaire in Pretty Woman, who finds himself constrained to justify his love of opera to a prostitute! And what does he come up with? A threat: you better love it the first time you experience it, baby, or pffft! you won’t be able to love it the rest of your life.

I bet Julia Roberts wished she said the same thing to Richard when they had their first time. Talk about amore in franto (Google it).

Not that I am complaining. Pretty Women is one of the few mass appeal movies in the past 30 years to present opera as something the stars could love without irony or middlebrow condescension.

Gere’s “love it or else” caveat is wrong, that’s all. Sure, I loved opera the very first time I heard it. But that’s me. I’m Italian. My love of opera is probably chromosomal. I love Ella Fitzgerald today, but I didn’t like her much as a younger listener. I went to my first symphony performance at the Philadelphia Academy of Music where I heard Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra when I was 10. I sat through it all but was not awake at the end.

Two years ago I went to hear the same orchestra — well, it was called the Philadelphia Orchestra, but they were probably different people, like with the Rockettes. The point is, I was not awake at the end. Much as I love opera, symphonic classical music puts me happily to sleep. OK, I do like that Lone Ranger theme, the first eight notes of Beethoven’s Fifth, and, if it counts, the Grand March from Aida, which probably doesn’t count because people sing in it.

Musically, when we start to love what we love depends on many factors and by no means always on a genetic predisposition lying in wait for that first exposure.

There are many doors by which to step into the thrall of opera. The music itself is one such portal. The greatest operas start as a dollop of black liquid in the reservoir of the composer’s inkwell. With only genius and a sharpened feather as weapons, the creator dips into the murky pool and tears from its depths the several discrete pieces of sound that will merge, blend, and communicate one with the other forging the melody that once brought into being upon the parchment cannot be erased from the hearts of those who drink it in. Imbibing ink may be a gimpy metaphor, but you get the point.

Story grabs some. Every opera is a narrative, always dramatic, melo or otherwise. Be it Mimi, Canio, or that other prostitute in Pretty Woman, Violetta (the one who wasn’t rescued in time), operas tell tales. I got the impression that’s what hooked Julia Roberts, and that’s what hooks a lot of people on opera. You enter, live, and leave a soul searing slice of someone else’s struggle with love and hate, joy and sorrow, derring do and tuberculosis.

In my opinion, though, what most frequently starts the neophyte on the road to operatic junkieism is bigness, plain and simple. The spectacle, the glitter, the crowded stage, the overpowering orchestration, and most of all, the very big notes of very big singing. Many of us remember the thrilling moment when we first heard Dame Southerland’s impossible resonance or Miss Sills’ preposterous flexibility, Björling’s exquisite precision or Lanza’s ear-popping power.

Those gatekeepers of old, from Caruso to Pavarotti, from Pons to Price, they had the key, the capacity to lure us through the doorway and startle us into a mesmerizing world of outsized talent, from composition to performance, a massive team enterprise whose sole aspiration is greatness.

It is a greatness achieved only rarely, in a searing and transcendent moment of unutterable alignment. The moment, when it comes, is always worth the wait. And never, ever, needs to be explained.