One Year Later

The need for involvement remains as strong as ever.

Child’s Play

This weekend the NYT Magazine ran a piece about the Obama marriage that quoted Obama on the significance of his election. When Michelle Obama asked him during the primary season what would distinguish his Presidency from that of other Democratic candidates Obama replied,

“When I take that oath of office, there will be kids all over this country who don’t really think that all paths are open to them, who will believe they can be anything they want to be,” Barack replied.  “And I think the world will look at America a little differently.”

Certainly, Obama’s Nobel Prize, controversial or not, has proven the latter part of his statement to be true.   I don’t think we’ve even begun to register in this country the profound shift in international attitudes and climates that will result from this Presidency.

But I was especially gratified to read the first part, because before I read this statement I wrote in an essay:

During the Primaries, I knew that whether we elected Clinton or Obama, either would signal a new order, one which concretized academic theorizing about diversity and identity politics.  In one historic ballot, many more children would be able to look at the person inhabiting the highest office in our country and say the President Looks Like Me.  And for them it really would mean that anything was possible.

So, when my daughter professed her single-minded Clinton love, I understood exactly what having a woman President would mean to the rest of her childhood (and probably the rest of her life).  If Clinton were to become President, not only could Ella play softball, or football, or run a Fortune 500 company or innovate a new technology, but Being President would become a Viable Career Option.  A Clinton Presidency would be, for my daughter, a revolutionary fact.  Perhaps not quite so revolutionary as getting the vote, but certainly it would signal a seachange in the national female psyche.  It would be a vision, a game changer, something akin to Phillipe Petit’s dance in the air.

And in the wake of the Clinton run and Obama’s victory, it has proven true that my privileged, middle-class white children do see politics differently and more importantly than they did before.  Mostly, since the election, we’ve had a long, quiet spell & a busy summer (no posts here you may have noticed).

But last week, Finley announced, “When I grow up I want to work for the President. I want to work for Obama.” Ella pointed out,  of course, that this would not be possible, but that he could work for a different President, a career which he roundly embraced.  Ella, too, announced that she shares this ambition, and this weekend, they set up a White House in the back yard, and played President. This didn’t involve much of all except imagining that they inhabited that space.

And that imagination, for both my boy and my girl, can be the beginning. It’s the beginning of being involved, of believing that democracy matters, of understanding a wide range of public service.

But most of all, it’s the beginning of possibility.

The Future

I’ve been reading and teaching Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, a difficult luminous book about the daughter of a Communist revolutionary hero in apartheid-era South Africa.  After her father dies while serving a life sentence, Rosa Burger is freed to explore what it really means to be Burger’s daughter. Will she inherit the extraordinary discipline and responsibility of Party life, a forgone conclusion for many of her friends, or will she pursue the more personal, intimate life of a more ordinary person? After seeking out both ways of living, in South Africa and abroad, Rosa returns to her homeland to take up the mantle of suffering because political suffering, well, that is the one kind of suffering she can do something about.  Her reasons are neither her father’s nor the Party’s. But as she sees her friends grow old, sick, suffer from the inevitable ravages of time, she understands that a meaningful life, for her, must be to being to put an end to the suffering she can do something about.

The book haunts me.

I have known people like Rosa and her father Lionel (inspired by the real life revolutionary South African Bram Fischer), people of extraordinary discipline and commitment.   People for whom the public life and the commitment to end suffering has been the major work of their life.   And I look at the small circle of my family, and the small ways that we contribute to our children’s education about the world and our small donations and community service and think it is not nearly enough.  Rosa and her compatriots believe in The Future, in radical revolutionary change and their is a seamlessness between their lives and their actions. They are willing to accept consequences, even prison, as a matter of fact.   They are devoid of what Rosa calls bourgeious sentiment.  Things are the way they are.  Sentiment is not to be indulged.    And their is a final freedom of Rosa’s acceptance of her beliefs, a joy even in her imprisonment.

Rosa is relevant not because I think I should become or be training revolutionaries, or engaging in civil disobedience or going to jail over health care reform…

But the book has forced me to I ask myself with renewed urgency:  To whom are we responsible?

And then:  What will I do about suffering? And how will I teach my children that the suffering of the world is their job?  We may not have directly caused the social and environmental problems (or we may have) we are concerned with, but does that make us any less responsible?

Can we face injustice, poverty, hunger, racism, pollution with a cold eye and do the job we need to do? Can we raise our kids with a fundamental awareness about how their lives are linked to others in their community?And then teach them to live in a way that acknoweldges those links and responsibilities?

Such thinking quickly becomes overwhelming.  And so I return again to the impulse to start with small and local actions and behaviors.  But the challenge is not to stay small and local, but to look for ways to make a difference so that activism in not an extraordinary, heroic gesture toward life, but one of it’s fundamental facts.

The Man Who Walked Between The Towers

I’ve been quiet here partly because we’ve been gone for much of the summer, but also because we’ve been slowly figuring out what community service and civic life mean for our young kids now that the immediate energy and opportunity of the election has passed. These are sobering times, and getting involved certainly requires more effort. But the process of educating young children is always embedded in the family, and for the very youngest, I’ve been reminded that it can be embedded in play.

Last year we discovered the excellent picture book, The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein.  It’s a biography of Phillipe Petit, which captures all the drama and poetry of his career and its culminating walk between the towers of the World Trade Center.  My children were both captivated by it, especially Finn, who spent one morning reconstructing a cardboard model  of the site.

We also made the decision to show them both Man on Wire, which Ella astutely realized “was just like detective movie” in the first minutes.  And indeed, it is, and they were both mesmerized by the film and its images. (There is definitely one questionable, celebratory naked scene at the end, but it passed right by them while we held our breath.)   But  because of its context and visual imagery, the film is also for the astute adult observer, not simply an homage to the poetry and majesty of Petit’s accomplishment, but a requiem for the Towers and those who perished there.   My children didn’t realize this exactly, of course, but they did have a sense, watching it,  that something had once been that no longer was.

The book, written post September 11,  states simply that the Towers no longer exist.  When we read it to Finn, we explained exactly why.  The story offered me another opportunity to discuss the tragedy, and terrorism, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with Ella.   Everyone in my family lost a friend or a colleague or a childhood acquaintance in the Towers, so the tragedy is immediate and personal for us.

And so, when we visited the east coast this summer, we drove by the Pit, as some New Yorkers call the site of Ground Zero, on our way to Brooklyn, and they both got to see the tremendous scale of the event.  We didn’t stop, but it was sad and satisfying that they got to see something of the reality of it, and that they could begin to understand some of its hard significance.  It’s a lot for a small child, I know.  It’s a lot for me, and for all of us. But it is as much a part of their world as endangered panda bears and polluted lakes, and this book, and that movie, and the actual site are ways that begin to make it real and meaningful.  They are ways slowly to begin the hard and difficult discussion about what happened and why and where we are now and what might come next.

What She’s Learning

My daughter, in first grade, is suddenly learning things that make her seem a little bit grown up to me.

On Monday, she bound me to my word with a pinky promise.

Last night, in deciding a contest with her brother, the eenie, meenie, miney mo chant ended with a “bounce back.”

Yesterday, in school, she discovered the Magic 8 Ball, which she promptly asked:

“Can I fly?”

Yes–definitely.

“Am I a real spy?”

Yes-definitely.

“Will I be a CIA agent when I grow up?”

Outlook good.

Of course she was ecstatic about the predictions since her life these days consists of codes and secret notebooks and solving mysteries.

But she also came home with a small box, distributed to all students from the Holy Childhood Association, which was to be used to collect coins during Lent.  The idea is like Greg Mortenson’s Pennies for Peace, but faith-based.  To be perfectly honest, I have reservations about mission work–I don’t believe that everyone is called to believe in the same way, nor that everyone is even called to believe, but I also know that terrific work is done in some missions to provide food, schools, homes, education, etc., and so I find the fundamental idea of the coin collection sound:  ask children to donate in a way that is manageable and tangible for them, with their own money, knowing that every coin they donate will make a real difference in other children’s lives.

I love that our school has regular service projects like this, where children contribute in community with their peers.  They understand that serving others is an important part of civic duty, that being aware of the larger world is a fundamental aspect of being human, and that their actions can absolutely make a difference.    I like that the message we try to support at home is supported explicitly by the school.

Of course, I am not arguing here for parochial or faith-based education for all (far from it), but I am suggesting that our experience offers two important premises for raising children with an ethic of service:  1) find a community, even a small one, perhaps only one or two other families, who can support your civic values and with whom you can volunteer/donate/act and 2) teach your children to donate directly–money or goods–in a way that makes sense for your family.

The side of my daughter’s box reads:  $3 buys 75 pencils for a mission school. $4 buys bread for ten children for one week. $5 busy mile for one child for a month, and Mortenson’s daughter puts it this way in the Pennies for Peace video:

My daughter is not selfless, nor would I describe her as an especially spiritual child, but she can be very thoughtful.  Immediately upon assembling the box, she went to her bank and collected $2 which she promptly dropped in her box without comment.   And then I remembered that each week, she brings her pink wallet to church to donate 25 cents, which I have never asked nor reminded her to do.  It seems like a small amount, but it is her money, and she does it unbidden, and it is, in fact, 25% of her weekly allowance,  which is far more than her father and I give.

Back to the Future

Yesterday, in the New York Times there was a  piece about the state of mind of the next generation, the one coming of age now, during this recession, that every day promises to be longer and deeper than we could have imagined.  How will the current dire economic straits affect them, psychologically? What will it mean for their job prospects, their attitude toward work and personal economy? Their sense of opportunity and possiblity?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, too, mostly in the form of long and angry rants about How We Have Come To This, and What Will My Children Inherit?

The last bit has nothing to do with money.   Rather, it seems to me that my children may very well grow up with the shadow of economic instability, recession, a legacy of greed and mismanagement that destablized what was, not so very many years ago, a stable and prosperous economy.  Should it take 10 years or so to pull out of this mess, they may live a good chunk of their childhood, into adolescence with the specter of a trembling economy.  They’ll see boarded up businesses, too many houses for sale, long lines of unemployed.

My daughter already knows, through her school, that our local food banks are running low on food (we’re trying to remember to donate weekly), that some people have lost jobs and houses. There is a large, very run down trailer parked not far from our home. We suspect someone may be living in it, but we have no hard evidence.  How can these facts not affect her view of the world? If the recession continues, how can its very real fallout not shape, even in a small way, her sense of what is safe and what is possible?
There is some evidence that diminished economic prospects can offer creative opportunities.  That less lucrative work might lead to a kind of generative freedom.  And yet, I find myself, sometimes, wallowing in the muck of wondering what will their future be, and how badly have we already screwed it up?  Can we reclaim that boundless sense of possibility that I so dearly want my children to have?

On the one hand, I know realistically that every generation will face its tribulations. But on the other, I find myself in the grip of that time-worn, protective impulse, one I didn’t even know I had:  I  want them to have it better.  Not so much better than her father and I have it, but just plain better.

President Obama: The Slow Blog

I realized a few days ago that it’s a little hard for me to believe that there is an Administration in the White House in which I actually believe.  I’ve been cynical and negative for so long that reversing that frame of mind takes conscious effort.

Ella expected decisive action, as did other kids. At the end of  Presdent Obama’s first full day in office, she asked, “Did he end the war?” To which I had to respond, no, it takes a long time to end a war, you can’t do it  in one day.

But while I have no doubt that decisive action will be made on this and other fronts,  I also have trouble believing that This Has All Come To Pass.

And then I wonder:  Is this the political equivalent of shock? Or post-traumatic stress syndrome?

When I hear President (!) Obama speak, I still have trouble believing his Presidency is real.  When I hear about the things he’s done right away, like signing Executive Orders to close Guantanamo, and CIA interrogation centers, and open up FOIA, and make service and citizenship a priority, and restore funding to international family planning groups, or his commitment to education, science and technology, or signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act 2009 I’m inspired with possibility just as I was during the campaign season.

Of course things are a mess right now. But they would be darker if I didn’t believe that President (!) Obama will address the domestic and international problems with intelligence and plans for action, and if I didn’t believe the Administration will continue to rally all of us to do the hard work we need to do to get back on track.  As a friend of mine recently posted on my FaceBook page:

We (Dems) have the President, but the remaining Republicans in congress continue to make it very difficult to move on and change the agenda. We must all continue to support Obama, in his effort to turn the country around..

So, day by day, I’ll keep pinching myself, and finding ways to be involved, and one day soon, I’ll take Obama’s Presidency (!) to be as natural and obvious as Ella already assumes it to be. And that’s one of the beautiful things, isn’t it? That our kids will grow up knowing not much besides President (!) Obama.  This, I think, is how the new order should be for the next generation.

For our Party, we framed our Shephard Fairley print and placed it over our mantle. Now, over a week later, it’s still above our fireplace, and we don’t really have any intention of taking it down.  Kory & I joke that we’re going to be like one of those families in the 1960s who kept a picture of JFK hanging in the living room, right next to the Pope.  There won’t be a picture of Pope Benedict in this house, but now I think our kids just might grow up wondering what the heck was with us, their silly Gen X parents, keeping that picture of Obama up, year after year after year.

And maybe we’ll say it was to remind us of something that we had forgotten for a long time, and wanted never to forget again.

And in case you missed it…another important site

In his bid to make this Administration the most transparent in history, President Obama ( I can really write that!) has launched The White House, a new site that has all manner of great features: a blog, a direct link to the Office of Public Liason–so you can talk back, fun facts (not just for kids), a slideshow full of facts about all past Presidents.  Go visit. Bring your kids.

A New Activity for the Kids

Courtesy of USAService, instructions and a US address for making a Gratitude Package for Troops.  This is a great activity for young children, and one that they can do in large part on their own.

What We Did at the Inauguration Party

You can read about what we ate, which is always a big part of our parties, but for this party, I wanted to do something more, something that would signal to the kids that this was a slightly different party, and have them contribute something that they would remember.

So, we set out red, white and blue construction paper, a sheet of  “Dear President Obama, I hope…” stickers, a few baskets of red, white and blue crayons, and decorative star and American flag stickers.  The kids wrote their wishes for their new President, and I’m going to mail them to the White House along with a note and a picture of  all our guests.

Of course, I was hoping/thinking the kids would wish for things altruistic, like world peace, or an end to hunger.  But most of them wrote more general things like:

“I hope you have a great time in the White House”

“God helps you”

“You rock!”

“I love you”

“I want you to know that my family voted for you”

“People who do not have a home will have a home”

“You have proved that what matters is how hard you work”

“I love your daughters!”

Of course, when I thought about it, these are the kinds of things that are appropriate for 6 & 7-year olds.  (And, yes, most of them sat down and colored and wrote these cards unsupervised because the parents were busy celebrating, too…)   But for one thing, while these kids are pretty sophisticated when it comes to community service and outreach (a monthly event in their school and required for the upper grades), they are also just kids.

First graders know that President Obama is the first African American president, some know he looks like them, they all know quite a lot about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. But not having had much–or any–first hand experience with racism, and not truly and fully knowing the horror of the history of race in this country, the full impact of this election is, of course, lost on them.  As is the spiraling misery of the last eight years, or an awareness of the global crises in progress right now.

But this is a really good thing. Because theirs is the generation that will grow up not without racism or social injustice or global crisis but in what (I hope) will be a new era of hope, with a new attitude of possibility.

If we can be as hopeful in our support for this administration and our democracy as our children already are, this really can be the end of irony and disillusionment.   If we can hope and continue our involvement and hard work, in our neighborhoods, schools, cities, and beyond, our kids will learn more precisely what is possible for them and for their communities working together. And the whole country will benefit from a generation raised with different ideals and different attitudes.

Of course, this is good citizenship.  But it’s also good parenting.