Ladies, Get Over It!

OK, so this week I get to talk about my 25^th wedding anniversary, which was last Tuesday. 25 years married, and 27 as a couple. Not too shabby. And I’d gladly sign up for another 25. Of course, we’ll both be old and decrepit by then. On the other hand, people are looking good and functioning better for longer and longer these days. So who knows?

Anyway, our 25^th anniversary brings us back to that Cheerios commercial that caused so much of an uproar among certain less enlightened members of our population. As of this date, 15% of new marriages are interracial, inter-ethnic, or whatever you want to call it. In fact, I think we’ve reached a very important tipping point, and it will increase even more in the near future (anyone for 25% in 10 years?). The website wearethe15percent.com documents some of these marriages, and if you scroll through long enough, you’ll find a picture of the four of us…although we’re not happily posing with boxes of Cheerios, as one family did. And this brings me to something that Cheryl put on her Facebook page:

I want to say this about my anniversary. In the 25 years Keith and I have been married, we have had to face very few unpleasant racial incidents. I think I could count them on one hand. We have had a multi-racial marriage for 25 years and NO ONE CARES! I know other people have experienced unpleasantness, and their experience is their experience, but my experience is true and valid, too. Surely people have privately disapproved, but the support and friendship Keith and I have received has been overwhelming.

I’d like to take a little time to talk about both of those incidents. Yes, there were only two; and they both involved women. Black women. They were women who were offended at the sight of Cheryl with me because to them it represented her stealing something that was “rightfully theirs.” It represented me passing them up to choose someone from “outside the community.” And there are many of those women still around. In fact, a fair number of them came out of the woodwork during the whole Cheerios debate. They feel perfectly justified in their feelings, and don’t see themselves as bigots. Well, to those ladies, I have three words:

Get over it.

Really. I’m going to try to explain this is very small words so that they’ll understand me.

When I was in my 99% black high school, I dated black girls…or at least tried to. I was a little too geeky even for the smart girls in my school. When I moved on to college, I found a much wider pool of geeks to hang out with, and most of them were white. Obviously, you date who you know and hang out with, so I ended up dating white girls.

But here’s the very important point. In fact, it’s so important that it will be on the test. Whenever I found a black girl that I liked, and was considering asking out, it turned out that she was already seeing someone…someone who just happened to be white.

Now far from me taking offense at this, railing against the girl for passing me up for “one of them,” and at the guy for “stealing something that was rightfully mine,” I took a sense of validation from this. Why? Because if this girl was dating a white guy, it obviously meant that we shared the same set of values; values that judged people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Well…OK…we also judged by whether or not the other person was good-looking, but that’s just human nature.

These are values that the women who felt wronged by Cheryl, and who feel wronged every time they see a black guy with a white girl, don’t have. And this clash of values meant that we never would’ve gotten along in the first place. So ironically, they’re complaining about not being able to have something that they wouldn’t have wanted.

But there’s something more basic going on here. There’s something even more important that these women are missing in their kvetching and kvelling about people like me and Cheryl. This is where the test comes in. If every black girl I was ever interested in when I was in college seemed to already be dating a white guy, then what is the likely correspondence between black girls with white guys and white girls with black guys?

If you said 1:1, then you got an A+. Congratulations.

In other words, it was a total wash, and statistically no one lost out. The black girl who I would’ve been a good match for is not complaining that I ended up with Cheryl and I’m not complaining that she’s spent the last 25 or 30 years happily married to a guy whose last name just happens to be DelVecchio.

And if neither one of us is complaining, if we’re each happy for each other, then everyone else just needs to shut up and get over it.

So there!

Trayvon Martin and My Driver's License

Note: This was supposed to appear a few days ago, but I had a sudden issue come up with my hand that delayed everything. So here it is, two days late.

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If I had my druthers, I’d be happily writing about my 25^th wedding anniversary today, instead of about the Zimmerman verdict. Of course, if we all had our druthers, there wouldn’t be any Zimmerman verdict to talk about, because he would’ve stayed in his car, as he was told, and Trayvon Martin would still be alive.

But that ain’t the way it is, and so here I am, talking about it. And this is gonna be a longer one than usual.

Let me get this out of the way and perfectly clear right now, what Zimmerman did was wrong. Not just wrong, but heinous. I also believe that most of the jurors think the same thing. But…I’ve served on a jury, and you’re given very specific instructions about what you can and can’t consider, and just what fine points of the law the case is actually about. So even though your gut may say “String the mofo up,” the specific piece of law you’re looking at may say, “Not so fast, cowboy.”

And this is where my driver’s license comes in.

I don’t recall whether it was in getting my original New Jersey driver’s license (yes, I’m one of those drivers), or taking the written test to change it over to New York, but I recall reading about a concept called the last clear chance. What this means is that it doesn’t matter if the accident was entirely caused by the other driver; if you figured out that the other driver was going to do something stupid, but didn’t change your course because you legally had the right of way and “shouldn’t have to,” you had the last clear chance to prevent it from happening, and bear some responsibility for it.

I don’t know the details of the Florida Stand Your Ground law, and I don’t know exactly what instructions were given to the jurors, but if they were anything like the “last clear chance” rule that I learned when I got my driver’s license, then even though Zimmerman was morally wrong to get out of the truck and follow Trayvon, Trayvon had the last clear chance to avoid the altercation that ended up with him getting killed.

Note very carefully what I am saying here. I am not saying that Zimmerman was right. I am, however saying, as I said a year ago in You May Be Right, They May Be Crazy…and Armed, had Trayvon Martin not turned around and confronted Zimmerman, with the feelings of invincibility so common among young men that age…had he used his cell phone to call 911 instead of talking to his friend, he might be alive today. I am also saying that the verdict of “Not Guilty” is likely based not on whether or not Zimmerman got out of his vehicle to follow Martin, but on whether or not he was defending himself after Martin confronted him.

Let me say this again. As much as emotionally we want it to be otherwise, this case was not about whether or not Zimmerman got out of the car and basically stalked Trayvon. We all agree that he shouldn’t have, we all agree that this contributed to the final tragic result…but there’s no law against that. The case was basically about whether or not Zimmerman was defending himself when he shot Trayvon, after he, having all the wisdom, maturity, and cockiness of your average teenaged boy, allegedly turned and attacked the person who was following him.

My heart tells me that Zimmerman is culpable for the entire tragedy because he didn’t stay put, and leave the kid alone. But my driver’s license tells me that Trayvon had the last clear chance to avoid the confrontation that eventually took his life.

And that’s why Zimmerman was found “not guilty.”

But wait…suppose…just suppose…that for the rest of his life, Zimmerman noticed that wherever he went, he was being trailed by people wearing hoodies…

And openly packing Skittles.

Just Slightly Ahead of Our Time

A few years ago, I assigned Scott a project as part of his Independent Study in computer programming. I knew someone who was the art director at a magazine, and it seemed that no matter what he did, someone was always complaining about the photos or illustrations he used.

“Not enough people of color.” “Not enough women.” “Not enough senior citizens.” “Too many people of color.” “Too many women.” “Are you trying to push some sort of multicultural agenda on us?” No matter what he did, he couldn’t win; people were always looking for some reason, some subtext, behind his choices of who to use in his photos.

And so I suggested to Scott that he write a program that would take the choices totally out of my friend’s hands. He would say how many people he wanted, and it would randomly spit out at him people of various ethnicities and sexes. And because I had Scott do the work of getting the proper demographic information, it would do it correctly. This meant that while it was still very likely that a group of three people would be three whites, it could well end up being two Asians and an African-American. It could be two males and a female, two females and a male, or all of one sex.

And no one could blame the computer for having any bias.

Well, after he demonstrated how well that program worked, I set him off to tackle another, similar, task. Couples. Most couples you see in magazines are mono-ethnic. You know, two whites, two blacks, two Asians. It was a big deal for me and my wife when we saw an interracial couple on the cover of the now-defunct Marriage Partnership magazine.

So now Scott’s job was to write a program that would spit out couples that were statistically likely to happen. Yes…85% of the time they’d be mono-ethnic, but 15% of the time…yes, a whopping 15% of the time (and I say that without a hint of my well-known sarcasm), they’d be inter-ethnic. That meant that 1 out of every 7 couples “wouldn’t match.” And it wouldn’t be because either Scott or I had a hidden agenda to force these couples on people. Our only agenda was to let art directors know how often they needed to use one of these couples in order to reflect reality.

Oh…and by the way, it wasn’t enough for his program to simply say that a couple was inter-ethnic, it had to say who was what. It had to be very specific.

Well, I’m guessing that most of you know where I’m going with this by now…that Cheerios ad. What! You haven’t seen the Cheerios ad with the adorable little girl in the interracial family that drew so much hate mail to the General Mills website that they had to disable comments? Well here it is:

One of the comments…one of the less hateful comments…talked about General Mills “trying to shove multiculturalism down our throats.” Well, excuse me, but multiculturalism is here. It no longer means an Italian-Norwegian wedding, but Italian-Vietnamese, Hispanic-Norwegian, African-American-Native-American, and so much more than the 57 varieties that Heinz is known for.

The question, though, is how to present the multiculturalism that exists without doing it heavy handedly. How to do it without looking like you have an agenda that you’re trying to “force down people’s throats.”

That’s where Scott’s program comes in. Frankly, I think he should shop this around to a few advertising agencies, touting the advantages of having a program that takes that decision totally out of your hands, and leaves it totally up to the computer…to the unbiased computer. Then when the hate mail comes in, the companies can simply respond, “It was the computer and the demographics.”

I wonder how the haters will respond then.

Anna Jarvis Isn't Happy

Wait! Put down that box of candy. Forget about ordering those flowers. And whatever you do, don’t put that card in the mail! Anna Jarvis would not be happy.

What on earth am I talking about, and who the heck is Anna Jarvis?

For those of you who didn’t know Anna Jarvis is the woman who created our modern celebration of Mother’s Day. She also ended up hating what her creation had turned into, and spent the rest of her life trying to kill the “monster” she had created.

But let me back up a little bit.

She had intended Mother’s Day to be both a memorial to her own mother, who had died in 1905, and a day like many of the other observances that came out of the Sunday School movement of the time; things like Roll Call Day, Temperance Sunday, and Missionary Sunday, which have long been forgotten. As such, it was her intent that since it was on a Sunday, it would be a “holy day, not a holiday,” and a day on which people would write heartfelt letters to their mothers, telling how important they were to them.

However, within 10 years of Woodrow Wilson’s 1914 proclamation of the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, Jarvis was soured by what she considered to be the commercialization of her “holy day,” and actively campaigned against it. She had meant for it to be “a day of sentiment, not profit,” and was angered by the huge profits that the candy, flower, and greeting card industries were making off of her mother’s day.

She was incensed that it had become that most loathsome of all things…the dreaded “Hallmark Holiday,” a term which is horribly misused, because Hallmark didn’t create those holidays, they simply made a mint recognizing that many people would like cards to send out on them.

And that’s what pissed her off…the fact that people sent their mothers printed greeting cards rather than a heartfelt, handwritten letter. Or to quote her:

A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.

Now, I’m quite certain that if I wrote my mother the kind of letter that Anna Jarvis wanted me to, she’d be on the phone immediately, asking how many days I had left to live. I also know that if I wrote the kind of letter that Jarvis wanted us all to write, I’d have to double my insulin dosage for the day. My family is just not that overtly sentimental.

And that’s OK. For you see, the other thing that Anna Jarvis didn’t get is that for many families the candy, the flowers, and the dreaded greeting card, are symbols of what she wanted people to say outright. They are symbols of what is already understood within the families that use them, and that might even mean more than the handwritten note she insisted upon.

I can only imagine Anna Jarvis’s reaction to the grandmother of a friend of mine who would’ve seen the handwritten note as a sign that you were too lazy to go to the store and pick out a nice Hallmark card for her. She'd say "Write the note if you want…but make sure it’s in a proper card!"

Ironically, one of the reasons that Anna Jarvis didn’t get it was because she was never a mother herself. To her, Mother’s Day was always about her own mother, and was never something she got to experience from the other side, where she might have gained a different perspective.

She didn’t understand that once she’d let the genie out of the bottle, people would observe Mother’s Day any way they wanted to, whether it was the way she had in mind or not. And so she spent the rest of her life trying to stuff that all too independent genie back. She was so set on having Mother’s Day observed the way that she had intended, that she never paid attention to the joy millions of women got from the way that it actually was being observed.

And so if your mother, grandmother, mother-in-law, wife, whatever, enjoys the candy, the cards, and the flowers, I say run out and get them right now. Thank Anna for the idea, but then tell her that she's being a bit too much of a control freak.

For more information, you might want to check out these links:

For the Mother of Mother’s Day, It’sNever Been Just Right

Mother’s Day Creator LikelySpinning in Her Grave

Christians and Scientologists

Now, unless you’ve been living under a rock for years, most of you know that I’m a tad religious. I’d like to think that you also know that I’m not one of those people. Not one of those people who’s always in your face about why my group is right and yours has to be wrong. I’d like to think that you know that I maintain that the very definition of the word believe implies that you don’t really know for sure, but are putting all your money on it (in fact, I even discussed that in this blog a few years ago); and that that also implies that I could well be the one who’s wrong…but in good faith.

Well, I’ve had this thought experiment going on in my head for years about how to explain to certain other Christians that the people who just don’t get it, and who think that we Christians are nuts aren’t being willfully stubborn, and refusing to accept what has to be perfectly and obviously clear to them. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to come across any Martians to do this experiment with.

Martians?

Yes. My scenario involved plopping down a Martian here on Earth, and having her meet people representing Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and every other ism right on down to Pastafarianism; and then see which one she determined was true…or if she thought that we were all out to a seven-course lunch. Or…if she was biased by her own Martian beliefs, and started trying to proseletyze us.

My point here was that we’re all influenced and biased by what we grew up with, and of course we’re going to resist some new belief someone’s trying to tell us about, when it doesn’t fit in with what we’ve been taught for years…and especially when it doesn’t seem to make any logical sense.

But as I said before, I couldn’t find any Martians. I did, however, find a Scientologist.

Well not quite, but hear me out.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine who’s a very devout Christian was telling me about her friend George, an atheist, who seems to be resisting God’s call at every turn.

Now, before we go any further with this, let’s get away from the common practice of demonizing atheists. The “a” in “atheist” doesn’t mean against theism, it means without it. There are a lot of really nice, friendly, loving, and moral atheists out there. They even like puppies. They just don’t happen to believe in a god of any kind.

So now that I’ve gotten hat out of the way, as I thought about what my friend was saying, I suddenly found my Martian, but in a different way than I had expected.

I said to her:

Suppose you had a friend who belonged to the Church of Scientology. And suppose you found yourself, against your better judgment, starting to find some of its claims to be credibile. You’d start fighting too, because you’d feel that you were starting to be sucked into this thing that you knew couldn’t possibly be true. Well, that’s how George feels. Christianity is to him as Scientology is to you.

And let’s face it, we all do this. Most of us don’t take the time to take an honest, impartial look at all the other religions out there before deciding what we want to believe. We all come from a place where we have one set of beliefs, and will dismiss another set completely out of hand.

Just as most of us would dismiss Scientology.

And George is dismissing any kind of theism in general.

Just sayin’.

Turn it Off Already!

A few months ago I went to get the oil changed in my van, and as I walked into the waiting room at the dealership, I noticed the most amazing thing.

Silence.

Yes, silence. The TV was off and the two other people sitting in the room were happily reading books or magazines. I commented on that, and they both said that it was wonderful to have the TV off.

How about that? They thought it was wonderful to have the TV off. Why? So they could read.

There are many places where we’re held captive by TVs that are on, supposedly for our benefit. And ironically, these places also have stacks of magazines for us to read. Wouldn’t it be easier for us to read without the TV? I go to the offices of three doctors who have TVs on in the waiting area, and when I go there, I put soothing music on my iPod to drown it out so I can read.

My dentist, mercifully, doesn’t have a TV in his waiting room. The only thing that could possibly distract me from my reading is the music that the receptionists are listening to behind the desk.

There are so many places where we’re held captive by TVs that are on, supposedly for our benefit. I remember a ride on the Cape May-Lewes Ferry 10 years ago, where there was a TV on no matter where you went, and they were all set to CNN. There was no way to escape them unless you either went to one of the outside decks or went back down to sit in your car. But if you simply wanted to sit at one of the tables on one of the inside decks and enjoy the view, you couldn’t get far enough from the current day’s reporting of death, destruction, and mayhem…things that maybe I didn’t want my kids to have to deal with while we were on vacation. I complained saying that I didn’t mind there being a TV on the ship somewhere tuned to CNN, but it shouldn’t be in our faces everywhere we went.

But the iPod and its like are game-changers. Not only can I now drown out what’s on their TVs by listening to Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Bolero, or even Tubular Bells on my it while I read; I could listen to a podcast of my choosing. I could listen to Freakonomics Radio, The Bowery Boys, or selected downloaded segments from NPR’sMost Emailed Stories.

And irony of ironies, the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other similar devices allow us to even choose what I want to watch. I can watch Singin’ in the Rain, a TEDTalk, or an episode of Mythbusters. Privately, without inflicting it on anyone else. I can even watch CNN…but only if I choose to.

Now, for those of you who complain that this simply puts each of us into our own private little world, where we don’t interact with those around us, isn’t the same true of reading, that activity that many of you complaining have raised to almost sacred status? Whether I’m reading a book, watching a movie, listening to music, or even taking a nap, I’m in my own little world. So what’s the difference? I think that I should have the option of retreating into my own little world, or that my family should, without being held hostage by what someone else has chosen for us.

OK, wait, I know…you in the back seat over there. You’re gonna ask what the difference is between the car dealership and my dentist’s office…besides cars and teeth. What’s the difference between someone choosing the TV show I have to hear and someone choosing the music I have to hear.

Really? You’re really asking that question? The answer is so basically simple. The background music doesn’t require any of your attention. It can be there without intruding on your little world, and doesn’t force you to listen to it. The TV show or movie that you didn’t pick sucks you in despite of, and maybe even because of, all efforts to resist and ignore it. Perversely, the more you don’t want to hear a movie or TV show, the harder it is to tune out.

So for Pete’s sake people…enough with the TVs in captive public spaces.

Turn it off already!

Let's Hear It For The Shallowness of Facebook!

Time and time again I’ve heard people talk about the shallowness of Facebook. About how it fosters a sense of false intimacy by enabling us to have many relationships of precious little depth. And I’ve heard this spoken of as if it’s a bad thing. But as I look at the names of former students and former high school classmates among those on my roster of friends, I’m beginning to think that a little shallowness is not such a bad idea, and actually may be a pretty good one.

Why? Well let’s start out by considering my old High School. The East Orange High School class of 1974 had about 435 students in it. My wife’s entire high school didn’t have that many students in it. But going on, this meant that there were roughly 2000 students at EOHS. There was no way that I knew all of them…heck, I didn’t even know all of the kids in my own class…but I came into contact in some way with quite a few of them on a regular basis.

Out of the 400-odd kids in my class, I recognized maybe 200, knew maybe half as many, regularly traveled with 30, and was really good friends with about 15. But the fact that I wasn’t really good friends with Sharon didn’t stop me from greeting her in the hallway and asking how she was. The fact that Eric was in the class below me, and was really one of my sister’s friends, didn’t stop us from talking when we ran into each other at the library. And the fact that I only really saw Michelle in study hall didn’t stop me from playing Scrabble ™ with her in Dr Handleman’s room every day.

There was a lot of shallowness in EOHS because while you couldn’t possibly be everyone’s best friend, you could still know a little something about them and be nice to them.

Then there were the kids I spent up to nine years with at Ashland Elementary School, but who went to Scott High School because they lived on that side of the line that Ashland straddled. Even though Brent wasn't a regular part of my life anymore, it was nice to see him when we went shopping at Pantry Pride, or when I was riding my bike near Upsala College. I didn’t have to engage in deep conversations with people like him, but it was definitely nice to know what they were up to.

That’s the great thing about the supposed shallowness of Facebook…it’s like running into Sharon in the hallway, Eric in the library, Michelle in Dr Handleman’s room, or even Brent near Upsala. It’s not just about staying in contact with the 150 or so people that sociologists say are your real friends, it’s about briefly hearing about what Suzie’s doing, or seeing pictures of Paul’s grandchildren (am I that old?) without feeling the need to sustain a long conversation. It’s running into these people in the hallway again.

And let’s face it…some of us just try too hard to connect, or reconnect, anyway, and it feels awkward for everyone as a result. But if we can be as comfortable with the “shallowness” online as we were IRL, then it can be a wonderful thing. Maybe a quick little response to someone’s status update is really all that’s needed.

This is why I generally accept all friend requests from people I remember from high school…even if I didn’t hang out with them. We share a common past, and it’s great to be able to run into them in the hallway again. Yes…I still have my really close friends who I talk to all the time, but there’s something to be said for those “mere acquaintances,” and keeping in contact with them, no matter how tenuously.

And so I say, “Bring on the shallowness!”