Wisdom from the parking lot.
Monday, July 5, 2010 at 9:56AM I was loading groceries into the back of my medium-sized SUV on Saturday when I overheard a father say to his son, "This is the weekend that we celebrate our dependence on the government."
His voice was angry. The boy was perhaps nine years old. It turned my stomach.
Do you remember being nine years old and hearing anger in your parents' voices? It didn't matter what the actual source of that anger was; when it was vocalized to you, it made you feel sad.
I'm basically a pacifist. I do not like conflict. I have difficulty even telling my maid to stop rearranging things on my bookshelves, and I'm paying her to provide a service. In short, I am a giant wimp. But I wanted to slap that man on the face for putting the burden of his discontent on his child.
No matter what I may think about the state of our world, our nation, our economy, my job as a mother is to guide my children toward an attitude of optimism; to show them the value of hard work; to teach them to be good stewards of our planet; to give them a reason to look forward to each day. I do this by example, not by instruction.
I was a young child in the 1970s. Things were terrible. We had a huge federal deficit followed by the OPEC embargo. Jimmy Carter gave his famous "Malaise Speech," which didn't help a whole lot. It took a long time to come out of that hole. I'm sure my parents were stressed out beyond belief, with three kids and an uncertain employment landscape.
But I never knew it. I had no idea if we were Democrats or Republicans or even Whigs, for that matter. The other kids at school told me things like, "Jimmy Carter is going to make us go to school on Saturdays if he's elected President." That scared the living hell out of me, and I voted for Gerald Ford in our third-grade classroom election. Nobody was sending me to school on Saturdays.
Reflecting on that now, however, I wonder where they got the idea. Because I'm pretty sure they weren't watching Nightly Business Report on PBS. Today, when I hear a young child complaining about--or for that matter, extolling--the government, it tells me a lot about the dinner-table conversations at his or her home.
I'm not suggesting that children should be shielded from reality. I'm not advocating nightly sessions of "Let's play the glad game!" But neither do I believe we should go around screaming, "The sky is falling!"
I'm merely suggesting that our approach should be more measured; that we should dial back the vitriol. You wouldn't feed your child arsenic from a spoon, and you shouldn't do it from your attitude, either.
Reader Comments (2)
//The other kids at school told me things like, "Jimmy Carter is going to make us go to school on Saturdays if he's elected President." That scared the living hell out of me, and I voted for Gerald Ford in our third-grade classroom election. Nobody was sending me to school on Saturdays.///
Hahahah! That's cute. : )
I think the final count was something like 99 - 1, Ford vs. Carter. If only we'd had that World Cup octopus around, we might have done a better job of predicting the outcome. Or at least a chicken with a bell that released some seed.