Unspeakable Things

My wife’s family plays a game that I call “One More Terrible Thing.” It’s not really a game at all, but when the family gets together, talk will inevitably turn to some horrible news story that one of them read or heard about, and then that will remind Cousin Jane about some other tragedy that she now has to talk about, and that will remind Uncle Bob about a horrible thing that he has to tell everyone; and it all goes on in a tragic version of “Can You Top This?”

When the game starts, I leave the room. The tragedies I know about, I prefer to keep to myself; and I don’t want to add any new ones to anyone’s collection.

Why? Have you ever heard the old saying that if I have a good idea and I tell it to you, then we both have a good idea? It means that telling that good idea spreads it. Well, similarly, I believe that the same thing applies to misery; and that spreading a tragic story that you have no real connection to, merely spreads the pain. Why should I tell you about a horrible thing that happened to a friend of mine in Minnesota, just to “make conversation?” Why should I add her misery to what you already have on your plate, and then have you spread it later on to some other totally unrelated person.

Maybe I’m just too sensitive a person, but I really believe in spreading no more misery than is absolutely necessary.

Which brings us to the workshop.

A while ago I was at a workshop in which the speaker asked one of the attendees to read few passages to the audience from a book that described in gruesome detail some of the unspeakably horrible things that are being done by both sides to women in the Congo in the midst of war.

As I sat there listening to a game of “one more terrible thing” that would make my wife’s family sound like pathetic amateurs, I wondered just how much of this detail was necessary for us to hear in order for the speaker to make her point, and spur us to want to change the situation. At what point did it become overkill, making some of us think, “Just kill them all and let God sort them out,” or even to question God’s existence in the first place? And not to try to make our discomfort seem at all equal to the very real pain of the people we were being told about, did giving us all of the gory details simply end up spreading the misery further?

You will notice that I mentioned “unspeakably horrible things” that were being done. I didn’t give you the details, because to my mind, just that phrase should be enough to make you wince at what the possibilities could be, without putting actual images in your head that can never be erased.

I also used that phrase because the things that were read to us that day were indeed unspeakably horrible. As I posted on Facebook later on that day, “We need to know that the Holocaust happened, we don’t all need to know every gruesome detail of what the Nazis did.” To force people to see and hear every detail of what was done is to spread the pain that they inflicted even further.

I believe that there are some evils that should remain unspeakable, unless you have specifically asked for the information, or have a real need for it. I have heard more than I needed to know, and starting with me, it will become unspeakable, so that I don’t spread the pain any further.

And yet, it remains that something does need to be done about the situation in the Congo.

Peanuts and Prayer

I don’t much read Peanuts anymore. All the strips that are in the paper now are ones that I likely read either when they first came out or in collections as a kid. Actually, I don’t much read the comics anymore. But every Sunday, when I gut the paper for coupons for Sofie to cut out, I have to pass by the comics section, and there, right on the front page, is Peanuts. And I always check to see if it’s a strip that I remember.

This past Sunday’s was a reprint from November 3rd, 1963. It’s not one I remembered reading before, but when I saw it, I immediately called Cheryl into the room.

“You have to read this,” I said. “And then I’ll explain it to you.”

If the link I put in to the strip isn’t working, let me summarize it for you. Sally Brown comes up behind her brother, who’s watching TV, and nonchalantly says, “Guess what?” After Charlie Brown takes the bait and asks “What?” she carefully looks around the house, and takes him to a spot where she’s sure that no one will hear her, and says, “We prayed in school today.”

Then I explained to Cheryl that she was to young to remember, since she didn’t start school until 1967, but I remembered school prayer, and it wasn’t as simple and innocuous as everyone thinks it was. At least not at Ashland School, in East Orange, NJ. It wasn’t a simple case of saying a little prayer at the beginning of the day; I remember the day in Mrs Celmar’s 1st grade classroom starting with the Pledge of Allegiance, a reading from the Psalms, and the Lord’s Prayer. And this was a scene that was repeated in all four sections of every grade from K-8.

That is, until the famous Supreme Court decision of June 1963 that “banned prayer from public schools.”

Someone once said that as long as there are algebra tests, there will be prayer in school.

The decision in Abington School District v Schempp did not ban prayer from public schools. What it banned were the religious exercises like the one I described at Ashland School. It banned them as mandatory, official activities of the school.

Those of you who know me, know that I’m a religious person, and you know something? Based on what I remember, and from what I’ve found out from researching this, the Supreme Court made the right decision. A simple non-denominational prayer, a simple moment of silence, would’ve been one thing; but requiring all students to take part in a religious exercise that may not even be a part of their religion is another.

And here’s the kicker. Whenever this issue comes up, everyone always thinks of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the famous atheist. But the original plaintiff in this suit, before his case was combined with hers, was Edward Schempp, a Unitarian-Universalist, who claimed that the daily religious exercises in the schools his children attended, violated their family’s religious beliefs. Schempp felt that it wasn’t enough for his children to be allowed to leave the room during the religious exercises, because being the ones who left, being the different ones, might make them targets for bullying.

In fact, O’Hair said that her son’s refusal to take part in the classroom religious exercises resulted in bullying being directed at him by his classmates. Bullying which school officials seemed to condone.

Being bullied for being different is something that we’ve gained increased sensitivity to over the past few years.

So go on, pray when you realize that there’s a test next period that you haven’t studied for. Pray that the cute little red-haired girl over there will go to the Homecoming Dance with you. Pray that when the principal calls you down to his office, it’s for a good reason and not a bad one. You can even pray for the victims of the most recent tragedy or disaster (and there seem to be far too many of those). It’s all OK. You can do this in public school. What the Supreme Court banned almost 50 years ago was the kind of coercive, mandatory prayer that I remember. And it’s a good thing.

I just pray that everyone else understands this.

Felony Insensitivity

Many years ago, a friend of mine came up with the term felony stupidity to describe certain incidents of what we call “date rape.” I liked his terminology because it implied no evil intent upon the perpetrator, but instead, that he got himself into a situation where he did something stupid with very bad consequences.

I like to think of the term felony stupidity as also applying to those cases where kids out on a lark drop water balloons, pumpkins, or even bricks, from highway overpasses onto the cars below. I’ve seen what a water balloon dropped from a 10th story dorm room can do to a car’s windshield, so I don’t even want to think about what a pumpkin or a brick could do. Did you ever wonder why so many pedestrian overpasses have chain link fencing to a good arms-length height above?

Once again, we have cases of people with no evil intent doing something stupid, with often tragic results.

And now, with the tragic events at Rutgers last week, I’d like to add another term to the lexicon: felony insensitivity.

Was it truly a hate crime when Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei used a hidden webcam to stream live video of Tyler Clementi having a sexual encounter with another man to the Internet? Did they target him because they knew or suspected that he was gay, or were they just out for a little “fun,” hoping to embarrass him by catching him with anyone, male or female, or maybe even masturbating on camera? Was what they did motivated by hate, by homophobia, or by simple stupidity and insensitivity? Felony stupidity and felony insensitivity?

Does the motivation even matter, as long as one person is dead as a result of these actions?

For that matter, does the person’s orientation really matter in cases like this? I have a dear friend who had intimate video of her copied off of her boyfriend’s computer by his roommate, and then posted to the Internet. Was it any less wrong that this was done to her because she was straight? It might have been less embarrassing, but it definitely wasn’t less wrong. Fortunately she had a good head on her shoulders, and lots of supportive friends, as well as a supportive family; and her body was not found floating in the Hudson River.

It’s worth noting that according to New Jersey law, collecting or viewing sexual images without consent is a 4th-degree crime. Do you hear that? It’s not just a little prank, it’s a crime. Furthermore, transmitting those images is a 3rd-degree crime, with a maximum sentence of five years. These are things that everyone should know before they even open the shrink wrap on their webcam.

Before this story broke, I talked to my 6th, 7th, and 9th grade computer literacy classes about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. We concluded that knowledge is knowing how to do something, while wisdom is knowing whether or not you should use the knowledge you have. I was, however, particularly struck by the definition one young lady gave me when she said that wisdom is knowledge with a conscience.

“Knowledge with a conscience.” This appears to be something that Ravi and Wei didn’t have. They knew how to set up a webcam to spy on the private moments of a fellow student, but they didn’t stop to think that maybe this was something that they shouldn’t do. The conscience seems to have been lacking there.

It is unspeakably tragic that Tyler Clementi gave himself a permanent solution to a temporary problem, because as Ellen DeGeneres said in her widely circulated video statement about this, “Things will get easier, people’s minds will change, and you should be alive to see it.”

In the meantime, it's up to all of us to see to it that there are fewer cases of this kind of felony insensitivity.

Academic Dishonesty

School’s back in session, and it’s time to talk about cheating.

According to recent studies, over 90% of all students admitted to some form of academic dishonesty at one time or another. The educational community is shocked about this. What has happened lately to cause so many students to lose any sense of a moral compass?

However, this isn’t an issue of just recent times. In her book My Freshman Year, author Rebekah Nathan cites figures of 83% for 1993. That’s a significant rise from 1963’s figures of…81%

What’s going on here? Is cheating really rampant enough among our high school and college students for us to be worried about it? Have things gotten totally out of control?

I think it all depends on how you define “academic dishonesty.” Let me tell you a story.

My sophomore year in high school, Mrs Guyre, our English teacher, gave us a vocabulary test every Friday. We didn’t have to be able to spell them right, we just had to be able to define them. She was a new teacher, so she didn’t have her own room. She used the room we had her in just for that one class, then it was off to the next available room. My homeroom was right around the corner from the room we had English in, and one day, just to see what would happen, I put about three or four words, and their definitions, on the far corner of the blackboard.

She never noticed.

This was the beginning of a plan to have someone on the lookout for her every Friday, while I wrote as many words and their definitions on the board as possible before she got there. This went on for weeks, until one day the class got lazy and sloppy.

“Facetious,” Mrs Guyre called out. And as one 28 heads went up and looked to the far corner of the blackboard. She didn’t think anything of it.

“Ostentatious,” she called out. And again, 28 heads went up to check out the words on the board. About four words in, she figured out that something was going on, and then turned around to see the words on the board.

“OK, who did this?” she asked, and 28 fingers pointed in my direction.

“And just how long have you been doing this?”

“Oh…” I said, “about two months.”

She was not happy. Not at all.

What’s my point here? My point is that by our 10th grade standards, we had simply pulled a fast one on the new teacher for two months. We had “gotten over.” I’m willing to bet that none of the 28 of us had ever cheated on a test or paper in the classic sense of cheating, and yet, if you consider the broader term of “academic dishonesty” from an adult’s perspective, that little two-month game we played with Mrs Guyre surely qualified as a case of it.

Do over 90% of all students cheat or otherwise engage in some form of academic dishonesty? You bet they do. In fact I'm betting that most of it involves some form of "getting over" on the teacher like we did with Mrs Guyre.

Did over 90% of us do the same thing when we were their age?

If you’re honest with yourself, you know what the answer is.

A Simple Question

It was a simple question, and yet it was a tough one. It was one of those philosophical questions that make certain people’s minds just go in circles all night long. And I was one of those people.

The question revolved around a set of parking spaces.

Just a few nights earlier, I had driven to the library to check something out, and noticed the normal paucity of spaces in the little parking area right near the door. But this time, I had gotten lucky. I arrived just as someone else was leaving, so I was able to take the newly-freed spot for my own.

As I waited for the departing car to totally clear the spot I was waiting for, my attention turned to the other two free spots nearby. The three spots I couldn’t touch, and was glad that I couldn’t. These were two of the three designated handicapped parking spaces, and I realized that I had never seen all three handicapped spots in use. In fact, I couldn’t recall a time when I saw more than one of them in use at a time.

And this is when the philosophical question arose in my head.

The question is this:

If you arrive at the library, driving a car with handicap plates, but not being handicapped yourself, and see only one “regular” space available, but all three handicapped spots available, which do you park in? Do you park in the regular space because you’re not handicapped, but risk incurring the wrath of every other non-handicapped person who comes along later on, wondering why a disabled person took a regular spot when there were three perfectly good handicapped spots that they were entitled to? Or do you park in one of the three handicapped spots, even though you’re not handicapped yourself, because the plates entitle you to, you’ve never seen all three spots used at once, and you wanted to leave the remaining regular spot for someone else?

It seemed like a perfectly good question to me. It seemed like a perfectly logical philosophical question. I could see both sides of the issue, but I wanted to know what everyone else thought should be done.

And let me point out right now, that I don’t have access to a car with handicap plates, so there was no personal interest in it for me at all. It was simply a philosophical question, and one that I put out to my friends on the Internet.

I was not prepared for the hammering I got.

Apparently there is a correct answer to the question, there is a right and a wrong thing to do, and actually a legal and an illegal thing to do. And boy, did I get beaten bloody for even asking the question.

But for Pete’s sake, I didn’t know. I really didn’t know, and that’s what made it a philosophical question. Had I known that there were actual rules in place about this, and what they were, I wouldn’t have bothered to ask the question. But in asking the question, people accused me of wanting to take something that I wasn’t entitled to. The accused me of trying to steal from the handicapped, and that’s pretty low.

No one took the time to calmly say,

“Um, Keith, there are actually rules about this, and they say that unless the disabled person is in the car at the time, or is going to be getting into the car, you can’t park there, no matter what it says on your plates.” 

Not a one.

Nope, it was a veritable orgy of jumping down my throat and throwing ugly accusations my way.

Makes a guy want to think twice before asking a simple question.

Why Don't You Go Play Outside

One thing I’ve learned from 18 years of teaching high school is that teenagers are notoriously squeamish about sex.

Well, let me restate that. They’re notoriously squeamish about the idea of their parents having sex.

Think about it. As much as we parents don’t want to have to deal with the idea of our kids “doing it” (and having as much fun as we did at that age), they don’t want to deal with the idea of us doing it. But for different reasons.

We want to protect them from unplanned pregnancies and diseases that a quick shot of penicillin won’t cure anymore (remember those days?). They just think it’s gross. Old people having sex? Eew.

First of all, they can’t believe that we “old people” actually find each other attractive. About 10 years ago one of my 8th graders said, “Mr G, we understand that 20-year-olds find other 20-year-olds attractive. But do 50-year-olds really find other 50-year-olds attractive?”

Without missing a beat I replied, “Yes. And some of you have some very attractive mothers.”

They almost threw up.

Then a few years later, one of my 9th graders was in total denial about the idea that his parents ever had sex.

I rolled my eyes and said, “Matt, you weren’t hatched.”

“OK well it was just that one time.”

“Matt, you have two siblings.”

He was getting a little distraught, but said, “OK, just those three times.”

Then I went for the jugular. I looked him straight in the eye and said, “Matt, did your parents ever say to you, ‘Why don’t you go play outside?’”

There was a look of horror as the blood drained from his face, and he screamed, “NOOOOOO!”

I guess he was asked to go play outside a lot.

As I recounted that very story to a group of recent 9th graders, one girl got very quiet and said in a quavering voice, “My parents still tell me to go play outside. Oh eew. That’s just disgusting. They shouldn’t be doing that at their age. They should like each other for other reasons.”

How quaint. How cute even. They should like each other for other reasons. Almost sounds like something we’d tell them.

So then I asked her, how old is too old to be having sex.

Her answer? 40.

I laughed, and she said, “No, Mr G. Don’t tell me anything about you that I really don’t want to know.” As if I’d actually give her the details of my personal life. But then the little light went on over her head.

“Wait a minute. How old are you?”

“54.”

“And Sofie’s seven. That means…EEEEW!”

And if you think they think the idea of their parents having sex is disgusting enough. Just even hint that their grandparents might still be playing a little “sofa hockey.”

“Oh that’s disgusting, Mr G!”

“Why? Why shouldn’t your grandparents continue to enjoy life?” I’d ask.

“It’s just gross. I mean, all those wrinkles and everything.”

I look at them, I sigh, and then I ask, “Have you ever heard of a product called Viagra?”

“Yeah…” they all go tentatively.

“In general, who is it marketed to?”

“Guys who can’t…”

“No, no,” I say, cutting them off. “What age group generally has that problem?”

They haltingly say, not really wanting to admit it, “Old guys…eew.”

So to you teenagers out there who think that people like your parents (or grandparents) having sex is disgusting, think about when you get to be that old, which I hope that you all do. And admit to yourselves why there’s that lock on your parents’ bedroom door.

And all you parents of teenagers, mess with their heads a little bit. Just for fun, say, “Why don’t you go play outside.”

And watch them run, screaming, from the house.

Whiter Than Sour Cream?

Weird Al Yankovic was in town last month, and we had to go see him. All four of us. Even our seven-year-old daughter is a big Weird Al fan, and she thought it was absolutely “awesome” when he came and sang on our table. Not at it, but on it.

One of Weird Al’s songs is called White and Nerdy, which is a parody of Ridin by Chamillionaire, and it talks about how he is just too…well…white and nerdy. He goes so far as to describe himself as being “whiter than sour cream.” And I understood the joke. No, not the obvious one on him.

The one on me.

I complained back in March of last year about the friends and colleagues who said that I was one of the whitest black people they knew. I took this as a well-intentioned, but misguided, compliment, saying that I didn’t fit their stereotype of what black people should be like.

But one long-time white friend made me see the light when she said that it never occurred to her that I’d take it as a compliment when she called me the whitest person she knew. Not the whitest black person she knew, but the whitest person she knew. She was making fun of me.

There are certain stereotypes among white people about white people that they use when they’re making fun of themselves. And yes, for those of you who didn’t know it, they do make fun of themselves. And apparently this friend, and many other people I know, thought I did a lot of things that fit those stereotypes. Just check out stuffwhitepeoplelike.com.

I was whiter than sour cream.

I got the joke when I saw Weird Al. My friends and colleagues weren’t trying to compliment me by saying how white I was, quite the contrary, they were giving me some good-natured ribbing that I didn’t get.

What do you think? Check out Weird Al’s video for White and Nerdy.

Of course, some people will say that just being a Weird Al fan in the first place qualifies me.