Through a Prism of Privilege

With the recent demise of Toys R Us and Babies R Us, no big box stores are dedicated to separating smitten grandparents from their wallets. I stayed away from the toy store, but enjoyed an occasional stroll through Babies R Us, keeping up with the newest inventions for taking care of little ones. “What will they think of next?” was a common expression as I admired the wraps for cradling an infant, pillows for various sitting and sleeping positions, and the wide assortment of feeding systems (a far cry from my mother sterilizing glass bottles at the kitchen stove). 

My firstborn wasn’t a very good sleeper, probably because I didn’t have the Mumbelli, a combination bassinet, infant bed and co-sleeper that “adjusts perfectly to your baby’s size providing them with warmth and comfort as when they were in their mom’s belly.” Or maybe he needed Baby Merlin’s Magic Sleepsuit, or Love to Dream Swaddle Up, weighted garments designed for improving sleep in infants too big to swaddle. Somehow, I don’t think it would have made a difference. 

One of my shopping finds for the delightful and determined Elizabeth Holiday anticipated the challenge of potty-training with the purchase of a potty-chair that played music when her task was accomplished. The experts suggested the potty-chair be placed in the bathroom so the child could become familiar with its presence even before she was fully ready to utilize it, and it didn’t take long for Elizabeth to discover the sensor that played the music. So much for that idea.

I’ve recently had our granddaughters three days a week, so am playing a role in the potty-training challenge of the summer of 2018. The M&M bribes haven’t worked too well, nor has the promise of wearing big girl panties with images from the Coco movie, so with nursery school starting in two weeks, the pressure is on. One of my young Facebook friends posted photos with her “dry-all-day” report on day #3, and I’ll admit to being a tad resentful. 

Perhaps I need to show our Lizzie the video that helped my friend’s daughter, even though we do sing a song that her dad made up for use with her big sister. Or maybe I need to head to Wal-Mart to buy PottyTime’s Potty Watch, the toilet training timer that promises to make potty time “fun and easy.” Available in pink, blue, or green, it’s set so music and lights alert the child to remember to go to the potty as frequently as he or she needs. I wonder if it synchronizes with their tablet to keep a record of success? A potty-training Fit Bit! What will they think of next?

You might guess I’m feeling a bit of a failure in the grandmother role today. Not only has the potty train express derailed, but yesterday, I dozed off while sitting on the couch with Elizabeth, and she made a post with devil faces to my Facebook story. Glad it wasn’t poop emojis. I’m fearing a pink slip in my future if I don’t shape up.

As real as the challenge feels today, she’ll get it sooner or later, and what looks like stubbornness at age three will serve her well as she grows into a determined and delightful young woman. Yet as I’m writing, I’m thinking of mothers who, because of an accident of birth, will change the diapers of their children into adulthood, of refugee moms who have no way of keeping their children clean, of incarcerated mothers who haven’t touched their babies in months, or of mothers who don’t know where their children are. Grandmother friends are estranged from their families or thousands of miles away, and I’m whining about buying more pull-ups?  

Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna observed life through a prism of empathy, and Mr. Pendleton sobbed at her vision: “You know, Miss Pollyanna, I think the greatest, most wonderful prism of them all is you.” Sterling K. Brown shares a similar view: “Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.” Thanks for holding up that prism of empathy for me today, Elizabeth Holiday.

Singing the Same Song

The lovely Madelyn Simone and the delightful and determined Elizabeth Holiday recently introduced me to a nursery rhyme courtesy of YouTube, and its call and response is running on a loop in my head. “Johny, Johny, yes Papa. Eating sugar, no Papa. Telling lies, no Papa. Open your mouth, ha-ha-ha (or ah-ah-ah).” Just one of its on-line versions has 276 million hits – how did I ever miss this charming little ditty?

Elizabeth likes to add dramatic flourishes to her songs and stories, so when she assumes the role of Johny, she does her best to act the innocent. In her way of thinking, her lips and tongue may be stained blue by the dye in her ring pop, but no way is she admitting to eating candy. Rumored to be an English nursery rhyme, one blogger suggests that it’s “the worst of the worst, the mother lode of surrealist garbage,” while one of the videos shows a tooth-brushing visit after each “snack.” A few generations ago, an alternate response might have been: open your mouth so I can wash it out with soap for being so sassy. 

Our mouths can get us in trouble, whether through over-eating, lying, inciting trouble, or speaking ill of another. As the Turkish proverb reminds us: “A knife-wound heals, but a tongue wound festers.” I wonder what the proverbial wisdom might say about a twitter-wound?

When someone utters something untrue or malicious about another person, I cringe, aware of the power of words and the damage they cause. When those words come from a one-up position, such as from a parent to a child or from a teacher to a student, they carry an extra wallop of power. Repeated often enough, they begin to seep in, and those within hearing of the words begin to accept their message. Rather than being a mischievous toddler, a child who likes something sweet, Johny is labeled a liar, a bad child. Sing the same song long enough, and whether or not it’s true, it sticks.

That’s the dilemma facing journalists across the country. When the on-going work of journalism is deemed to be “fake news,” and journalists themselves are labeled an “Enemy of the American People,” at least some of those descriptions will stick, and that’s dangerous to us as a community and a country – and potentially to individual journalists as well. 

The brush is broad. When the press is painted as the “Enemy of the American People,” that includes the cub reporter who shows up at the local school board meetings, the editor who loses sleep attempting to keep the presses rolling, and the weekly columnist who does her best to bring insight to current events and community happenings every Saturday morning. I’ve been called a variety of names over the years, but this is a new one for me. 

On Thursday, the Times-Gazette joined newspapers across the country to express concern with the language being used to describe their work by the President of the United States. It was an important and courageous step, but it felt a bit like Johny trying to defend himself. The analogy isn’t perfect, but as long as Papa is painting him as a liar, the seeds of doubt are planted. 

Historical precedence points to the use of the word Lugenpresse (lying press) in the early 1900s, and the embrace of that term in the 1930s by rising German leadership became a blatant – and successful – attempt to silence the press. As a Supreme Court justice in the 1940s as well as the United States’ prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials of Nazi war criminals, Robert H. Jackson warned that “those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. . .  the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.” 

We can’t avoid these beginnings, as seeds of mistrust and accusation towards journalists of all sorts are already being sown. Are we as a community, as the American people, willing to let those seeds grow unimpeded? Or will we stand together on the foundation of the First Amendment to support the press as essential to a continued democracy? Stay tuned . . . 

A Detour through Newtown

Each year on our annual pilgrimage to Maine, we pass the sign for Newtown, CT on I-84. For many years, it was simply another Connecticut town, east of Danbury and south of the Bent of the River Sanctuary. That changed on December 14, 2012 when Adam Lanza fatally shot his mother, went to the nearby elementary school, and slaughtered twenty young children and six school personnel. 

Prior to the shooting, violent crime was rare in Newtown, a town similar in size to Ashland, with only one homicide in the previous ten years. Within five minutes on a December morning, the lives of twenty-seven families were shattered, and the face of Newtown, CT changed forever. To this day, the motive for Lanza’s actions is unknown. As forensic psychologist James Knoll suggests, his final act conveyed a stark message: “I carry profound hurt – I’ll go ballistic and transfer it onto you.”

I don’t think about Sandy Hook very often, just as the Covert Court killings in Ashland have faded from my consciousness. Lanza killed himself, and Grate is behind bars, convicted and sentenced for his crime. It wasn’t our child, our sister, our mother, so we begin to forget. 

But from time to time, we’re forced to remember. Because of heavy traffic, our faithful GPS directed us to leave the interstate and trust her seductive voice on our path to the ocean. As a result, we drove through Newtown, passing the site of Sandy Hook Elementary School, the replacement building for the facility with so many chilling memories. We didn’t stop, but Larry and I were both sickened by the memory of that day, as are Ashland residents who travel past the now empty lots on Covert Place (thanks, Mayor Matt Miller and Simonson Construction, for demolishing the houses).

On another front, radio host Alex Jones is upset this week because Apple, Facebook, Spotify and YouTube have banned his Infowars posts and broadcasts. Facebook believes they are “glorifying violence . . . and using dehumanizing language,” while Spotify notes that Infowars “expressly and principally promotes, advocates, or incites hatred or violence . . .” 

What’s the connection? This conspiracy theorist claims the moon landing was staged, the US government was behind 9-11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Sandy Hook massacre was “completely fake” and a “giant hoax.” He has accused the parents of the children killed at Sandy Hook of being actors and incited threats to many of the families. 

Jones’ Infowars website gets as many as ten million visits a month. Let that sink in for a minute. Twenty families lost their six or seven-year-old children to a vicious murder, and the host of this site has stirred up enough hatred towards these grief-stricken people that they get threats against their own lives, even forced to relocate to keep their remaining family safe. What is wrong with this picture? 

In the days since our detour into Newtown, I’ve thought about friends who have buried a child, lost to cancer, suicide, heart disease, or violence. While loss is present in the lives of all people, those who’ve lost a child suffer deeply, and Jones’ venomous campaign against the Sandy Hook families infuriates me. Surely Jones doesn’t have a right to make up anything he wants about them, does he? The courts will ultimately sort out the legalities, but the moral answer is “no.”  

In “The Message” paraphrase of Romans 14, Paul writes: “. . . don’t get in the way of someone else, making life more difficult than it already is.” It may be a bit out of context for my biblical scholar friends, but it’s a vital rule of thumb for living in community – don’t make life more difficult for each other, especially for those who suffer. Whether motivated by profound hurt or profound hatred, we cannot accept the response, “I’ll go ballistic and transfer it onto you,” from a troubled twenty-year-old, an Ohio drifter, or a self-described “thought criminal against Big Brother.” Jones and his disciples may think they have a right to say what they want, but we don’t have to listen. Enough is enough. 

Ocean Waves and Cinnabon Buns

Today’s column comes to you direct from the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, at the tail end of a family vacation. I’ll begin with a question I’ve often asked myself this week: why did I vacuum out the car before we left Ohio? 

Having traveled to the same resort community for thirty years, we’re creatures of habit in this place, with each year’s vacation identified primarily by the change in rental houses. Salvation Army members have come to Old Orchard Beach, Maine, for summer camp meetings for 130 years, and it seems like there’s been more innovation in those meetings than in our family’s routine (aka tradition) here. We eat at the same restaurant after church on Sunday. We walk down the hill to the beach with great anticipation, and trudge the last few steps back to the house, worn out by the sun and sea breezes. After a couple of beach days, we travel to Two Lights, to climb the rocks and eat at the Lobster Shack. And as can be expected, we manage to get on each other’s last nerve by Wednesday or so. 

Yet new surprises have greeted us this week as well. Thanks to a friend’s social media comment, we discovered amazing cinnamon rolls, their delicate pastry spirals slathered in sticky frosting. Forget those cinnamon rolls at the mall. Ocean Park Subs and Groceries bake the real deal every morning. 

At Two Lights, a bit of exploring led to a tiny cove near the Lobster Shack, where the girls gathered sea shells with much determination. Had we missed this all these years, or was it fenced off before? Surely our inquisitive sons would have discovered this part of the Two Lights experience.

A chance comment by one of the locals took us to the Portland Headlight, where Cape Elizabeth’s municipal park offers a glorious view of the ocean and an up-close-and-personal look at the lighthouse and its museum. Now fully automated, it had been staffed by lighthouse keepers from 1791 to 1989. It was a lonely job for most of those countless hours, but the keeper and his family had quite the exciting Christmas Eve in 1886, when they rescued the crew from the Annie C. Maguire that ran aground. As recently as World War II, they kept watch for a German invasion. The park is also home to the decommissioned Fort Williams, whose Battery Keys can still be seen along the rugged shoreline.

The week away has provided quality time with both the lovely Madelyn Simone and the delightful and determined Elizabeth Holiday. I’m impressed with a three-year-old’s ability to do the same thing over and over again without getting tired. We’ve sung “O Do You Know the Muffin Man” at least a hundred times, and Elizabeth spent a solid hour picking up pieces of broken shells and returning them to their natural habitat, the ocean waters, with an exuberant scream every time a wave tickled her feet. She also snuck into our bed around 3 a.m. each night without waking us up. I’m not impressed with that feat.

Madelyn and I managed to take a long walk on the beach without her sister, and enjoyed a production of Godspell and an ice cream cone on the way home. I love these little ones, and being together in this place has been good for us, at least in the daytime hours!

Yet there has also been a sense of melancholy for me in these days, a pensive sadness, not pervasive, but lurking somehow in the shadows. As the little girls bury my feet in the sand, I remember three little boys who splashed in the waves, dug in the sand, and bought fake tattoos at Gregory’s Supermarket. It seems like only yesterday, and when I turned around, they were gone to the shores of adulthood, job responsibilities, and vacations with in-laws. 

That melancholy is present in the contrast between the timelessness of the ocean’s currents and the ordered days of human life. I’m grateful that the melancholy has been offset by the joys found in tradition and new experiences, as well as the healing power of the rhythmic ocean waves and fresh-baked cinnamon buns!