Before we take the second bite of the apple, we should do it well with a delicious apple and spinach salad. Good apples and dressing are key. For four you will need.
Spinach
2 or 3 apples, cored, peeled and thinly sliced (Flavorful ones like Jonagold, Golden Russet or Granny Smith)
Chopped walnuts
Crumbled blue cheese
For the dressing whisk together:
3/8 cup grape seed oil
1/8 cup walnut oil
¼ cup sherry vinegar
1 Tablespoon of Dijon style prepared mustard.
To assemble coat the apple slices with the dressing, both for flavor and to retard oxidation. In a bowl toss the spinach leaves with dressing to coat. Divide the spinach to four plates, tastefully arrange the apple slices on the spinach and top with a generous sprinkling of walnut pieces and blue cheese crumbles.
This is a beautiful and simple salad that a three or four-year-old child would delight in helping to make. (They will happily eat apple slices almost as fast as they are cut. They will also whisk vinegar and oil together with unbridled enthusiasm.) Making salads and cookies is work of a household. Children delight in participating in this work. Of course this changes when they become twelve or thirteen.
It is in context of these simple, but meaningful, household chores young children are nurtured, taught and begin to enter civil society.
Instead many kids are sent off to school to eat a cafeteria breakfast, a cafeteria lunch, and increasingly a cafeteria dinner. I make this observation in light of President Obama’s speech in Chicago on gun violence and families.
An Era of Sexual Confusion
The past forty years have been marked culturally by both sexual confusion and contentious sexual politics. Two new trees sprouted in our garden. The fruit from those trees, penicillin and oral contraceptives, allowed us figuratively to shed the clothes Adam and Eve passed on to us for covering our nakedness. Increasingly, to live within the bounds of monogamous sexual love became oppressive, psychologically damaging and above all unnecessary.
“Ozzie and Harriet” became commonly derided as a TV poster child perpetuating an idiotic cultural myth. The TV show was said to be one of our last stands in clinging to our outmoded bourgeois ideals.
All of that is simple observation. But in looking where this path has lead is to open a can of politically incorrect worms. It’s to find oneself up to their elbows in alligators wallowing in the pit of sexual politics. I’m not going there. I will only say that it seems, from our common perspective, our ultimate right is to achieve the perfect sexual orgasm, and the more often the better.
President Obama and the Ozzie & Harriet ideal
But maybe the Ozzie and Harriet ideal is in fact about right. That thought isn’t from me, but from our president. This is from a speech he gave in Chicago on gun violence, 90 percent of which is related to drug turf and gangs. [Speech Full Text] The president said:
“Now, that starts at home. There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families -- which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood. (Applause.) Don’t get me wrong -- as the son of a single mom, who gave everything she had to raise me with the help of my grandparents, I turned out okay. (Applause and laughter.) But -- no, no, but I think it’s -- so we’ve got single moms out here, they’re heroic in what they’re doing and we are so proud of them. (Applause.) But at the same time, I wish I had had a father who was around and involved. Loving, supportive parents -- and, by the way, that’s all kinds of parents -- that includes foster parents, and that includes grandparents, and extended families; it includes gay or straight parents. (Applause.)
“Those parents supporting kids – that’s the single most important thing. Unconditional love for your child -- that makes a difference. If a child grows up with parents who have work, and have some education, and can be role models, and can teach integrity and responsibility, and discipline and delayed gratification -- all those things give a child the kind of foundation that allows them to say, my future, I can make it what I want. And we’ve got to make sure that every child has that, and in some cases, we may have to fill the gap and the void if children don’t have that.
“So we should encourage marriage by removing the financial disincentives for couples who love one another but may find it financially disadvantageous if they get married. We should reform our child support laws to get more men working and engaged with their children. (Applause.) And my administration will continue to work with the faith community and the private sector this year on a campaign to encourage strong parenting and fatherhood. Because what makes you a man is not the ability to make a child, it’s the courage to raise one. (Applause.)”
The president went out of his way to promote sexual love and the necessity of households, as institutionalized by traditional marriage. It was a head fake to the notion that family is the foundation of civil society. He reversed course. Social salvation rests in universal preschool. He said:
“But what I’ve also done is say, let’s give every child across America access to high-quality, public preschool. Every child, not just some. (Applause.) Every dollar we put into early childhood education can save $7 down the road by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, reducing violent crime, reducing the welfare rolls, making sure that folks who have work, now they’re paying taxes. All this stuff pays back huge dividends if we make the investment. So let’s make this happen. Let’s make sure every child has the chance they deserve. (Applause.)”
A Federal Fix Bound to Fail
It’s good to consider the president’s remarks in the context of this passage from Wendell Berry’s essay, “Economy, Freedom, and Community.” Berry confronts our current social challenges head on. He views our industrial economy and now “post-industrial” as ultimately dehumanizing and enslaving. (I cited this in an earlier post.) In it he observes:
“The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community. But the fall of community reveals how precious and necessary community is. For when community fails, so must fall all the things that only community life can engender and protect: the care of the old, the care and education of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory, the care of the earth, respect for nature the and the lives of wild creatures. All of these things have been damaged by the rule of industrialism, but of all the damaged things probably the most precious and the most damaged is sexual love. For sexual love is the heart of community life...” [Wendell Berry Profile]
Berry is willing to acknowledge the nature of problems we confront. We’ve turned our backs to the sanctity of sexual love. In doing so we’ve turned our backs somewhat on what it means to be human.
I needn’t cite a litany of that which we’ve lost since we took to ridiculing Ozzie & Harriet. We can start with more than forty million women who for one reason or another have somehow felt compelled to terminate their pregnancies. Nor need we look at the fact the more than fifty percent children born today are born to single mothers. That the Center of Disease Control has deemed sexually transmitted diseases an epidemic shouldn’t raise eyebrows.[Full Text] All of these things are, like Chicago homicide rates, trivialities after all, and are things that one dutifully needs to pay lip service.
But, and this is the big thing after all, robust federal programs are in place addressing all of this wreckage. Perhaps, all we need is just one more. So the president says, universal mandatory preschool should do the trick. When households are unable to properly care for and nurture young children, quality day care and preschool are about all that we have, but those are no panacea.
Our long running Head Start program hasn’t resulted in statistically significant improved outcomes for the children enrolled in it.
Writing for Bloomberg, Charles Murray observed:
“Let me rephrase this more starkly: As of 2013, no one knows how to use government programs to provide large numbers of small children who are not flourishing with what they need. It’s not a matter of money. We just don’t know how.
“Is there anything that money can buy for these children? I am sure that Head Start buys some of them a few hours a day in a safer, warmer and more nurturing environment than the one they have at home. Whenever that’s true, I don’t care about long-term outcomes. Accomplishing just that much is a good in itself. But how often is it true? To what extent does Head Start systematically fail to serve the children who need those few hours of refuge the most?
“Asking those questions forces us to confront a reality that politicians and other opinion leaders have ducked for decades: America has far too many children born to men and women who do not provide safe, warm and nurturing environments for their offspring -- not because there’s no money to be found for food, clothing and shelter, but because they are not committed to fulfilling the obligations that child-bearing brings with it.” [Full Text][Charles Murray Profile]
Nothing to see here folks. Let’s move on.
The New Polyamorous Ideal
Instead, the next big thing we need to pay attention to, Popular Science informed us, is that we all have a great deal to learn from increasingly common, polyamorous negotiated sexual relationships. [Full Text]
Had the president seriously thought out his position of promoting marriage and fatherhood, he would have said what our highly learned, highly paid and fully tenured social scientists have been telling us for forty years is a lot of crap.[Link to a description of the FemSex workshops held on college campuses] Should the president have been serious, he should have asked this question: “is it really necessary or desirable to teach sixth grade children how to orally wrap a banana with a condom?”
I think there is better economy in teaching them to make a delicious spinach and apple salad.
For most middle-income families it is near impossible to be a one-income family or to achieve professional success and a work-family balance (say what you will about the European socialist system, but they are far ahead in this regard). My husband and I both earned Master's degrees and delayed having children until we had achieved some measure of professional success, but we are still barely -- just barely -- able to avoid putting our two very young children in daycare. It is unfortunate that so few children have the basic luxuries I did as a child: ample time to spend together as a family and the freedom to play outside for hours with other children in the neighborhood, being silly and messy and imaginative.
ReplyDeleteThen there's this: In the words of Robert Putnam, "Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values--these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness" (From Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community).
My intention wasn’t to deny there is great need for child care outside of the traditional home. It’s very difficult for most young couples with preschoolers to make ends meet even with both parents working full time.
ReplyDeleteNor do I believe households headed by a single parent are doomed to failure when it comes to raising children. So many women have done a heroic job of it.
Instead my complaint is that the way our cultural attitudes toward sexuality and “relationships” have evolved over the past fifty years has in fact been very damaging to the nurturing, education and socialization of children. Marriage has become increasingly optional in the formation of households. Too often this somewhat cavalier attitude toward fidelity and commitment has destabilized the social environment in which children are raised. And it’s time Marriage is once again recognized as the ideal context for expressing sexual love and raising children.