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Homelessness

Here are some statistics I picked up at a lunch thing I went to yesterday. It costs taxpayers about $350 a night to keep someone in the Lane County Jail. It costs about $850 for a night in the Johnson Unit (the mental health crisis ward at PeaceHealth’s Sacred Heart Medical Center). By contrast, to keep someone in supported housing costs about $850 a month.

Oregon did a study to determine what would constitute a ‘living wage’ in our state, looking at minimum necessities like food, health care, child care, rent, and utilities. The median wage in Oregon is less than the number they came up with.

It was with these stats in mind that I read this article about a new government report that’s coming out soon. Homelessness is not someone else’s problem. By the numbers, half the families on your block are probably one or two months away from homelessness if there were to be an injury or an illness that stopped paychecks from coming in.

New Movie

Here is a new movie of Arthur being adorable. I really like using YouTube for these shorts. I think it helps our relatives who live far away feel a little closer to our baby and our family.

The Cooperative Partnership Family Model

I’ve been working on this idea in my head, and in conversations with Taylor, since we found out Arthur was coming. It is an attempt to synthesize and describe the way I want our family to work. I’m not sure what to call the idea, but I’ve settled on ‘The Cooperative Partnership Family Model’ for the time being. I think it works to express what I’m trying to get across.

The model, at this point, is really just a set of loosely connected ideas about how an ideal family would run. It is not well constructed yet. It is a work in progress. I don’t know how many other ways I can say the same thing, which is that I am thinking as I go. Nothing is final, and I don’t foresee it ever being final. We are lifelong learners in this house. We are doing our best to make our best work. Look on these, then, as some thoughts on how our best might look.

This post exists because I think there is a better way to run families than what I see being done around me. The focus of families, a lot of the time, is on authority. Parents ‘allow’ their children do some things and ‘forbid’ other things. Discussions about parenting tend to revolve toward what should be allowed and what shouldn’t, and about parents’ ideas of what’s ‘best’ for kids. When children are allowed input in family decisions, it is often in the form of false choices between like options. Rarely is the input of the child truly valued. Children’s ideas are often valued for their amusing naiveté, not their merit.

These are some things that my model exists in reaction to, what it stands against. But one of my values is not to define myself and my ideas in terms of opposition, rather to define them in terms of proposition. In that spirit, here is what I propose;

I propose that in our house, parents and children work together to find out our family’s values. We also work together to make decisions that fit our values. We will do our best to find consensus as we make these decisions, especially where our choices affect each other. In our family, parents and children are partners who cooperate in their efforts to be healthier, happier, and helpfuler.

((I made up that last word because the alliteration was too much to resist.))

Some people will read this and accuse my vision of being soft and undisciplined, a utopian ideal of letting children run feral and hoping for the best outcome. But this vision is not one of children getting their own way in all things; it is a vision of family in which everyone has equal input. If we’re working toward consensus, everyone has to consent to big decisions (like whether or not our family will watch TV, or to eat processed sugar, or go to school, or worship God(s)). Our children will no more be feral than we will have dominion over them; we will not live in a house ruled by the whims of children, nor those of parents. In our house, we will cooperate.

In many respects these ideas won’t be applicable to our lives until Arthur is a little older, and can be clearer in the expression of his wants and needs. In other ways, however, we have been putting this model into action day by day since his conception.

There is a tendency in our society to see babies as adorable objects, things to be gazed at and often to be used for bragging points (the showing off of baby pictures, the slyly competitive comparison of developmental milestones reached). Even on a linguistic level, we often introduce our children as ‘my son’ or ‘my granddaughter’, rather than with their own names. We see our children as possessing individuality only in relation to ourselves. We fulfill their physical needs, but are attentive to their preferences only insofar as it is convenient to us.

By contrast, Taylor and I are committed to understanding Arthur as his own person, and to appreciating the complexity of his being, not just the cuteness. We often find ourselves in the position of telling our friends or relatives that they can’t hold him, because he’s tired or needing to cling to his mother or father. Sometimes people have a hard time understanding that we are trying to respect what the baby is asking of us.

As an infant, we validate his right to make a choice. He is supported in choosing to nurse or not, to nap or not, whether or not it is convenient for us. If he chooses to nurse or eat more than the doctors recommend, we will respect those wishes. If Arthur needs not to be held, we will put him down. If he needs to be picked up, we will hold him. He runs on his own schedule without our interference most of the time.

There are, of course, some times when we are forced to compel Arthur to do things he doesn’t want to do. For example, he hates his car seat, and would much rather travel on someone’s lap or in arms. This is not a choice for him, because as parents we are responsible for his health and safety. In life, after all, no one gets to do everything they would like to. There are material constraints in reality, things involving inertia and momentum, that preclude riding in cars without appropriate safety restraints. In certain situations, the material consideration of Arthur’s cognitive development presents itself as a constraint. He has not yet developed the language, abstract reasoning, or mental frameworks to connect his car-seat with protection against the threat of an auto accident. In fact, I would be extremely surprised to learn that he had even conceptualized the mental category ‘auto-accident’. He’s never seen, heard, or had one described to him.

This is still a problem for me. I want to be able to say that Arthur, Taylor, and I are all equals in our house. This is what we are working toward. By respecting Arthur’s ability to make good choices from the very beginning, we hope that he will develop the skills he needs to make more good decisions on his own as he grows. We hope that, in the long run, he will be a more effective and responsible decision maker for having been offered the opportunity to choose for himself from a young age.

As I said, this is by no means the end of my ideas about organizing a family and a household. It is, rather, the beginning. I imagine that I will post more such ideas here as I have them. Hopefully they will tie themselves together into a synthesized idea. For now our family will take things as they come, one or two days at a time.

Solid Foods

Arthur is eating solid foods now. Here he is enjoying some Nori. The vast majority of his nutrition still comes out of Mama, but it’s very nice to finally have some part in keeping my son fed. I get jealous of Taylor sometimes because of the special bonds she has with Arthur that I don’t have. But, the laws of nature being what they are, there isn’t much I can do but wait and take opportunities to be nurturing as they come about.

In addition to Nori, Arthur eats mushed rice, applesauce, avocado, dried apples and apricots, and other fresh fruits in his Munchkin (this is an amazing little product that I might do a post on later). Little by little, we’re adding new foods. He’s still figuring out what to do with food, and he makes really funny faces as he moves it around in his mouth. The experience of watching him learn something that I take so much for granted, eating, is truly a humbling reminder that we start life not knowing much.

It is a reminder, also, that Arthur is in many ways a blank slate and that the ways Taylor and I model behavior right now will be incorporated as a part of Arthur for his whole life. This is, perhaps, the most frightening thought I’ve ever had. All that keeps me from being parallelized with fright is reminding myself that kids are extremely resilient. Hopefully my mantra is more than a lullaby.

Ch ch ch changes

I’m going through changes to the site here, trying to decide on what to call this little experiment, and also working with the look and feel of things. If you’re looking for a site that was called ‘glitch’ or ‘bifurcated thoughts’ this is it. I think I’m sticking with ‘of two minds’ unless I think of something really amazing before I launch in earnest. Anyway, sorry about the mess.

And, if you pop by, leave a comment to tell me what you think of my plaid.

More on Ending the War

So, here’s the latest news about how the milquetoast democrats we elected to stop the war are proceeding. From CBS News;

With Democratic efforts to pass a Senate resolution opposing President Bush’s troop “surge” stalled, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman [Biden] said he will try to rework the 2002 measure that authorized the use of force against Saddam Hussein.

I called this one in the air. Go me. But, as the article goes on to say, there’s little hope of passing something as sensible as a law that reverses Congressional war authorization.

Parenting and Media

One of the most difficult questions Taylor and I are examining as parents is what we should do about media. Thankfully, we have some time yet before it’s time to think about TV, Movies, and Video Games. We’re agreed that Arthur (who is only five months old) is way too young for screen media. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics (who often understate potential health risks) recommend no screen time for children under two (citation). We absolutely agree, and in our family the TV only gets turned on after Arthur is asleep. We’re not as good about not letting him watch us work on the computer, but we’re both trying to be better about that as well.

Of course, we’re not going to be a completely non-media household once Arthur gets old enough to be interested in watching Television and Movies. My plan is to institute a rule that we can’t watch TV or movies unless we can understand them critically, and discuss the various messages that were included by the filmmakers and directors. In my vision we will use media in our house as a tool to learn media literacy, not as a way to check out. But, there are places where positive uses of media and the negative messages in media conflict in my mind. These are places where I’m not sure what to do. Here are a few examples.

If Arthur turns out to be a kid who gets really excited by playing sports, and who follows professionals who play the same sport he does, I would feel bad not letting him watch important games. On the other hand, I’ve watched sports on TV and most of the advertising they play during games is absolutely insidious.

Or, say Arthur is really excited by the movies, and wants to be a director when he grows up. Imagine that he wants to see every new movie that comes out, even the ones that have content that I’m not comfortable with him watching yet. If he displays the media literacy to want to watch scary or violent movies in order to parse their directorial techniques, can I really tell him not to?

These are, in the long run, all bridges to cross when we come to them. The overall important thing is that we’re thinking about it. Chances are, in a few years when Arthur is old enough to be asking for video games the media will have changed and we’ll have a whole new set of problems to face. On the next generation console, maybe Grand Theft Auto will have a full-immersion virtual reality component that plugs directly into your brain stem. You can actually go have sex with a prostitute, beat her up, kill her, and take her money, with all the sensation of real life.

One more, unrelated, thought before I sign off. Did anyone else catch that the President gave kudos to the mother who started the Baby Einstein company in his last State of the Union speech? This came back to me as I was reading up on the APA media guidelines for this article. The flagship product in the Baby Einstein lineup are videos for babies. I find it a funny coincidence that the President is in favor of a company whose products, by their very nature, cause parents to break the APA guidelines. Watching videos will not make your kids smarter, it will make them stupid and easily quieted. TV is bad for babies, end of story.

The Barenaked Ladies Are Me(n)

I’ve been a fan of the Barenaked Ladies for a very long time. I have an Aunt and Uncle in Canada who sent me their 1994 album “Maybe You Should Drive” before they began to hit it big in the United States. I was thirteen at the time, the biggest geek in the world, and I wasn’t the least bit interested in contemporary music. But, I gave it a listen, and grew to love it. There is an honest in The Barenaked Ladies’ lyrics, and a playfulness in their songwriting, that touches me. They lack the pretension of so many modern ‘artists’. They’re just some guys in a band. I like that about them, and they have a place close to my heart because they opened the door to a whole world of modern music for me that I had been closed to in my childhood.

Knowing this background you won’t be surprised to hear that when I heard on NPR that the ladies had a new record out, I was thrilled. And, par for the course for them, BNL has bucked a lot of trends. Part of the album has just been released in physical form in the US, but several digital versions have been available online for some time. There are actually two albums that they released, Barenaked Ladies Are Me and Barenaked Ladies are Men, both of which are available as downloads in either MP3 or FLAC formats from the earlier link. They’ve also released a USB Thumb Drive with both albums and a bonus live disk. What’s even better is that none of the releases contain any sort of DRM technologies. You can send songs to your friends, burn them onto disks, put them onto digital music players, and do pretty much whatever you want with them to your heart’s content. I purchased the deluxe download edition of the album for eighteen bucks because, strange but true, they made it easy to steal and I wanted to support that.

But enough with the geeky. What about the music. BNL’s first few records, Gordon and Maybe You Should Drive, were largely acoustic, and produced with a light touch. The guitars, keyboards, and vocals spoke for themselves and for the most part went unaugmented. Starting with Born on a Pirate Ship, as they began to garner more commercial success in the US markets, BNL’s records began to take on more of the character of overproduced pop albums. Electronic filters, strange noises, and other stupid studio parlor tricks became more and more common. Nonetheless, the quality of their songwriting and musicianship shone through and there were gems on each of the groups hit records.

These new albums, which are self produced after a break from their record company, are a breath of fresh air. Once again, their songs are abundant with extremely well written guitar and banjo riffs. Their harmonies are plush. Their lyrics are somehow at once poignant and irreverent. There are moments on the album that could believably be sold as lost recordings from BNL’s early years, but these records are by no means a regression. They have also moved forward, experimenting with new instruments as well as subject matter.

The (very funny) song Fun and Gamespokes sad fun at the stupidity of George W. Bush’s war on Terror. The lyrics

“Our bill of rights will be rejected/and all the blame will be deflected/the forests will be unprotected/the nation’s poor will be neglected/creation myth is resurrected/the new salute is genuflected/the Gallup poll will be respected/a gallows pole will be erected/and all this will go undetected”

are sung over New Orleans style frenetic Jazz building into a frenzy in the bridge. It’s truly scathing.

All in all, I think Are Me(n) might grow to be my favorite BNL album so far, which is saying a lot considering the important spot Maybe You Should Drive occupies in my heart. My only problem is that there’s too much to wrap my brain around. The two albums total twenty seven tracks, all of which are going to need listening to before they find that familiar comfortable place where favorite music lives. Whether or not it lands in my personal top spot, this is a wonderful album which I recommend heartily.

Ending the War

I’m watching on C-Span as the House of Representatives debates a non-binding resolution against the War in Iraq. Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican from California’s 21st district (north of Bakersfield, bordering on Sequoia National Park) has surprised me by making me one astute point (amidst his posturing and half truths). He says that the resolution being debated is toothless.

He’s right. Why are we debating a non-binding resolution? So that Democrats can posture and take positions against the war without doing anything about ending it. I’d like to remind my fellow Americans that Congress granted the president authority to make war in Iraq, and they can take it away.

But they won’t. The status quo in Iraq is politically convenient for everyone. It gives Democrats a club to beat up Republicans with for the 2008 election. It gives Republicans… I don’t know what it gives them. Maybe it’s a sense of power and righteousness at killing godless Muslims - I mean, uh, terrorists - on the other side of the world.

Whatever the reasons, I have very little hope that anything is going to change for the better in Iraq in the next two years. Representative Bob Goodlatte (Republican from Virginia’s 6th around Roanoke) just called this resolution a “vote of No Confidence” in our war on terror. If that’s what it was, I’d be all for it. It seems, however, to be a vote of do consequence whatsoever.

My message to Congress; Do something for a change, and do it quickly.

Getting Home

Taylor and Arthur get home this evening, and so of course I have come down with a bug. I woke up this morning with all the symptoms of a terrible hangover, except that I didn’t drink at all last night. I’m going to go take a midterm exam with a splitting headache, and then I’m going to come home and sleep until it’s time to pick them up.