Article on Teachers

Hey, check out my most recent article from October 20 on teachers. It appeared in the Sunday Inquirer, Currents Section:

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20131020_Teachers_inspire_for_a_lifetime.html

The Impromptu Papacy

Pope Francis and the Impromptu Papacy

As his “impromptu papacy” careens along, Pope Francis continues to make headlines. After half a year, he decided to sit and chat, about 10,000 words worth, with a fellow Jesuit about whatever the interviewer wanted to ask. Maybe it’s time for us to sit, take a breath, and take the measure of this thoroughly unexpected head of worldwide Catholicism.

First of all, what’s not different is the fact that the pope upholds Catholic doctrine, as his recent speech to gynecologists descrying abortion makes clear. What he did the following day illustrates what is different.

He went to an Italian town stricken by poverty and unemployment, and he amplified on Jesus’ contention that we cannot serve both God and money. Those who place the acquisition of wealth above any other priority, he declaimed, are idolaters whose greed deprives humans of the dignity conferred by productive work.

During his talk that day, he departed from prepared remarks, a favorite maneuver. Going off-script is one of three distinctive characteristics of Pope Francis that have gripped even casual observers of the man’s approach to leadership. He is most interesting when he is winging it. That’s when you can clearly detect the soul of this unabashed lover of God and God’s creation, especially the weak and the marginalized.

When he spoke to the unemployed about his own father’s journey to the Americas to achieve a better life, a life devastated by the Great Depression, they knew he understood their deep frustration and humiliation, their stark fear. His imagery is always personal, vivid, unadorned, and memorable.

The second element of the Francis trademark is in fact that imagery, his preference for a metaphorical moment. We saw it when he asked us to bless him as he was introduced as pope. It was patent in the amazing scene of a pope washing the feet of young prisoners on Holy Thursday. And when he held a cross made of the bark of a boat that had transported desperate refugees, when he pleaded for immigrants at the very port where a similar boat capsized killing many of those immigrants, we felt his message in a way no words could ever transmit.

The third characteristic of this pope is his enduring and endearing willingness to engage us. When asked questions, by the press, by a fellow Jesuit, or by a wide-eyed child, he just answers. No vetting, no prior constraints, no worries about the inevitable misunderstandings. He just answers, and the chips fall where they may, often right into the headlines. One of those headlines, by the way, tells us his Twitter followers have pushed him to second place among all world leaders; only President Obama has more.

Like all popes, he also receives thousands of letters. Unlike all popes, he is willing to engage these writers on their own terms. An atheist pens an open letter to Francis, and the pope answers with an open letter to the same publication. A pregnant single woman writes with great anxiety; she discarded her boyfriend when he demanded she abort the child and now wonders what priest will baptize this baby. The pope picks up the phone and says, “I will.” Maybe the most effective pro life statement ever.

There are numerous instances of going off script, direct engagement, and metaphorical moments. You might ask why he would resort to metaphors. Aren’t they subject to misinterpretation? Perhaps, but think a minute. The pope washed the feet of a young Muslim woman in juvenile detention. Did he leave Catholics with any doubt about whether Muslims should be accorded dignity and respect? How about young people? How about women? How about prisoners?

Is there a priest somewhere who now has a question about whether to baptize the child of a single Mom? Are any of us left with any question about the worth of that mother or of her child? Metaphors can be as unequivocal as the strongest statement of dogma.

Noted scripture scholar John Dominic Crossan contends that Jesus used stories, parables, to teach his disciples for one reason: he wanted to challenge them, get them questioning, talking, rethinking accepted wisdom. He was less interested in transmitting narrow, static statements of doctrine.

I see Pope Francis also challenging us, making us question the deepest meaning of our faith. In a world envious and worshipful of great wealth, he points to the unemployed and says, “Someone is worshiping a false idol.” In a world mistrustful of those who are hard to understand, hard to look at, hard to respect, he asks, “What if you just bent down and washed their feet?”

In a world wary of hucksters, tired of dogmatists, sick of violence, and fed up with duplicity, he says, “What is your question?” And then he smiles, looks you in the eye, and gives the answer welling from his heart.

It’s a heart warmed and lit by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a heart completely open to the irresistible call to proclaim it. He has become for many of us — if I may use a metaphor — our Good News anchor.

Who Got No Reason to Live?

I am a male, five-foot-four. In ninth grade, I was five-foot-three-and-a-half, and Mom insisted, “Don’t worry; you’ll shoot up.” She was assuring me that I would someday be taller. She was right, but “shooting up” was a bit of an overstatement.

Her concern, however, was not misplaced. Statistically, short men really do get short-sheeted in life. They get paid less than tall men. They get less attractive dates, a poorer selection of clothing styles, and, overall, less respect. Who ever sang, “Tall people got no reason to live”?

Even the language sasses the vertically challenged. They get the short end of the stick (which end is that, anyway?), short shrift, short circuited, and short changed. Even seemingly positive uses of the adjective have a hidden barb. A short cut is a better, more efficient way to a goal, but we are often admonished never to take one, that it’s somehow sneaky or morally suspect to take a short cut to achievement.

Yes, society is at times ambivalent about the height thing. Women want to be tall when they are pretending to be supermodels (at weddings, proms, the Academy Awards) and short all the rest of the time. Munchkins are loveable short people, although no one actually aspires to be perceived as a Munchkin.

Indeed, tall gets the nod in most instances. Confident people walk tall; moral people stand tall; strong people are tall in the saddle. Yes, you can tell a tall tale, but isn’t that really a nice spin on lying? I give motivational talks and was once introduced as a man who “although short in stature is tall in character.” Sorry, Bubba, I’m short in stature and short in character, just like Harry S. Truman. I walk short, stand short, and sit short in the saddle, and I’m proud of it.

I fit beautifully in commercial airplanes, coach class, where seats and overhead compartments (they really are overhead to me) are made for people exactly five-foot-four. No one over five-eleven should even be allowed on planes: Sorry, big boy, you’re oversize, we’ll have to check you into baggage.

I can easily rinse the shampoo out of my hair using a conventional shower head. I fit in both a Cadillac and a Miada. My whole body stretches comfortably on an average sofa or a twin bed. Revolving doors hold no terrors.

I almost never have to duck.

Yet society casts its most beatific smile on the tall ones. Take the space program. Back in the 60’s, they were looking for people to shoot into orbit, to fit into the tiniest possible area within a tiny container, which they even called a “capsule,” like it was an Advil. Every ounce was a liability. So, who got to squeeze into the “capsule”? You guessed it, six-foot-three-inch gorgons from the ranks of military test pilots. Idiotic, a waste of taxpayer money, the very reason there is a fuel crisis today.

Whom should they have chosen? Well, think about it. Cramped space, lots of rocking and weaving and careening, moving at breakneck speed, confronting sudden and unforeseen challenges with ineffable calm. Isn’t it obvious where they should have looked? That’s right, they should have shot jockeys up there. Eddie Arcaro, space hero!

But noooooo! The height bigots would have none of it. Common sense be darned. Just make the “capsule” bigger, use more fuel, anything to perpetuate the myth of “The Tall Man.”

And don’t get me started on greenhouse gases. Every time Shaquile O’Neal exhales, he contaminates more of the atmosphere with CO₂ than the entire Seven Dwarfs, with Snow White thrown in.

What can we conclude from all this? I am sure some among you will simply accuse me of having “Short Man’s Syndrome,” a disease invented by the same people that prescribe growth hormones for healthy boys who aren’t tall enough to get on the roller coaster. You know, the folks with Stupid Man’s Syndrome.

What we can conclude is that good things come in all packages, as do the bad. That shortness is not inherently inferior to tallness, unless you’re painting walls.

And, if it turns out your lollipop is on the short end of the stick, celebrate. It’s easier to reach.”

Happy in the Middle

I am a middle class American. Somewhere between a Ford Focus and an Chevy Impala. It’s my identity, my bias, and yes, my preference. I don’t want to be poor because homelessness and hunger feel like components of an unpleasant lifestyle; they scare me. I don’t want to possess great wealth because I’ve done nothing to deserve it, and so I would feel guilty.

I understand the middle class, have lived among us my whole life. I know us, our hopes and fears, aspirations and anxieties, frustrations and fulfillments. I know why a parent from Philly drives spouse and kids 350 miles to get in a long thin line of cars to Duck, NC, where we spend our sole one-week vacation in a big wooden house on the Outer Banks, and I know that this cannot be explained to someone who did not grow up middle class.

Middle class people are likeable, most of us. We take the middle part very seriously. We remember all the times we got so drunk we blacked out, because there weren’t too many. We know we got taken as often as we haggled out a fantastic deal. We brag only about the latter. If we overindulge our children, we know it, defend it, and regret it. Same when we are too strict. Behind us we leave a lifelong litter trail of abandoned resolutions: to exercise and lose weight; to read more and watch TV less; to finally give that rock band a try. So we remain a bit overfed and under-read; the guitar maintains its lonesome niche in the attic.

The best thing about my fellow middle classians, however, is our savory take on this journey we call life. Like the stuff we can’t help. We can’t help loving our spouse and our children, can’t imagine a better place to be than in the stands when our kid’s soccer team is playing. If we can’t make the game, we can’t help thinking about the fact that we’re missing it. Once there, we are truly embarrassed when we cheer too loudly, but the lesson seldom carries over to the next game.

Our first reaction to intolerance is a gentle admonition to live and let live. We are incensed by adults who are OK with being unemployed, by parents who are OK with being absent, by diners who treat waiters like servants. We’d be thrilled to win the big lottery, just like everyone else, but we don’t live our lives as if such a thing will ever really happen.

Some very clever author once wrote of this group that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. The esteemed thinker got it very wrong, mistaking desperate moments, moments of sadness and moments of regret as the sum of a lifetime. He somehow missed the ecstasy of the first look at a yowling new daughter, the devoted application of time and talent to a job that feeds a family and contributes to wealth, the pursuit of happiness of dependents over self, and the hundred thousand helping hands extended over a lifetime of inability to ignore a person in need. I think the clever writer mistook our quiet lives as desperate rather than merely uncomplaining.

Not to mention boring, which we certainly are. Gosh, when a movie producer wants to shoot a flick in one of our suburban tracts, he has to plant at least seven or eight psychopaths among our neighbors just to get the plot underway. Otherwise, cinemagoers would be sitting through two hours and change of relatively happy, faithful, sane folk backing out of driveways and off to classrooms, to workplace cubicles, to the aisles of supermarkets. Who wouldn’t cry out for Freddy Kruger, Edward Cullen, Jason, and Carrie and a few barrels of blood after forty minutes of that? Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer has done the cause of wakefulness in suburbia a distinct service.

Not that we set out to be boring. We just don’t spend time trying to figure out how to be interesting or fascinating, at least not once we’ve snagged a mate. I guess we find ourselves less involved in interesting matters than upper class or lower class people. I don’t know, because middle classians are the least class conscious of all the classes. The uppers, especially the newly upper, seem to have developed a competitive need to maintain and enhance upperness. It turns them into folks with an interest in being interesting.

Real big time uppers appear to go one of two ways, both interesting, only one attractive. The attractive one is modeled by folks like Bill and Melinda Gates, whose wealth is a direct result of giving several billion people things those people are happy to pay for. Their more recent penchant for giving large wads of that money back to kids who need educating and adults who need healing has made Mr. and Mrs. Gates all the more appealing.

Paris Hilton and Donald Trump embody the other upper. Her life swim leaves a wake that puts the obscene in obscenely wealthy, while his relentless quest for TV face time speaks of something novel: unquiet desperation. For the life of us, we middles cannot fathom her need to get so drunk so often, his need for his face and his name to be seen so often. We have to believe there are thrills she can afford that do not require the brain squishing aid of ten cosmos. Both of them seem to have a sincere loathing for people less rich or less camera-worthy than they.

And now, already, I feel guilty. Who am I to berate Paris or The Donald? They could be going through difficulties I can’t even imagine. If they wanted to be left alone, we middles would be the first ones to oblige them, even though People Magazine would have you believe differently.

Don’t get me wrong. They are both interesting in an uninteresting sort of way. You know, like a really good plate spinner at a circus or a really bad movie. I mean, have you seen “Plan 9 From Outer Space”? They really do use an old shower curtain to separate a commercial pilot from the “rest” of the plane. Come on!

Which leads to the more serious middle class lapses. While a superficial fascination with inexplicable celebrity is mostly harmless, we are not at our best when we seek such things for ourselves or our children. Our competitiveness can take on an unpleasant, even mean quality.

Also, we are sometimes too subject to fear. It can drive out compassion and tolerance, virtues we normally prize deeply. We then require direction. When those poor Amish girls were murdered in their tiny schoolhouse, our righteous, fear-driven rage was righted by the Spirit-driven response within the Amish community who sought to heal through forgiveness rather than “bring closure” through vengeance.

As we confront the specters of violent extremism, suicidal child killers, and insufficiently regulated immigration, we search for the best that is within us knowing that fear will shrink our hearts and close our minds and block our vision. It is no accident that some are clamoring for higher walls and deadlier guns.

Yes, we are at our worst when our valor fails and our fears rule. Luckily, we are usually able to call on reserves of courage and venture once again into an uncertain world but a world with slightly more hope in it than despair, more love than hate, more joy than anguish, more laughter than tears. More good than evil.

Not a lot more good than evil. Just more. But to us middles, that make all the difference.

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.