I’m off to the Bay Area to spend time with my family, do some trail running, chase some cows, and go to the Cal-Oregon football game. I’ll be back on Sunday. I won’t have e-mail access at the ranch, so please don’t be offended if you don’t get replies from me.
Go Bears.
I’m thinking about Mark Foley again this morning. I have nothing to say about the political fallout of the case. "Who knew what when" is the old scandal game that I find very dull to play and discuss.
I am always, always particularly saddened when an adult crosses a sexual boundary with a teenager of either sex. I am stunned by the possibility that since the boys with whom he exchanged sexually explicit IMs were 16 or older, any act that may or may not have taken place between them would be legal in most states, given that 16 is the age of consent in most places. (This is not a post about consent, but I feel strongly that a 16 year-old may be able to consent to sex with an 18 year-old boyfriend or girlfriend — but not to someone over, say, 25 or 30. To me "consent to whom" ought to be a key part of the law. If I were — heaven forbid — to cross that line with a 17 year-old, I ought to go to jail for a nice long time.)
But as I’ve pointed out in other posts on the subject of being a youth leader, the tragedy of the Foley case is that it increases the suspicion we have of the interest that older adults show in teens. I read this week that Foley’s first emails to one page should have raised alarms, not because of their sexual content but because Foley seemed to show "excessive interest" in the boy. That troubles me — are we clear about what constitutes excessive interest?
I have the cell phone numbers of many of my teens. They have mine. (They do not have my home phone.) I have their emails, and, in some cases, their IMs. They have mine. And I do contact boys and girls, and they me. I ask about sports, I ask about family, I ask about grades, I ask about faith. I don’t send unsolicited emails, of course — I always invite the kids to contact me first. And I am scrupulous about the content of those e-mails and IMs. I always save the e-mails, always. I don’t save the IMs because I don’t know how, but I would if I could. In the extremely unlikely event of a false accusation of something, I want to be able to have a "paper trail."
We live in an era where an adult who shows genuine and sincere interest in the well-being of a young teenager is liable to the charge of pedophilic "grooming". ("Grooming" refers to building a relationship of trust with a child prior to making sexual advances.) The behavior of men like Mark Foley doesn’t help those of us who maintain and nurture loving, candid, safe relationships with teens of both sexes. But as I ‘ve said before and will say again, we’ve got to do more than lament the high incidence of betrayal and abuse. We’ve got to keep loving the kids safely and fearlessly.
The twin pitfalls for a youth leader at a time like this are self-righteousness and fear. On the one hand, it is vital to avoid defensive proclamations of one’s own innocence. When parents or other adults question our interest in their children, we owe them a frank and honest answer — it is our job to reassure and convince those who love teens and kids that we are safe. And in the current climate, that’s a lot of work.
On the other hand, we can’t let fear cause us to withdraw our hugs, our attention, or our love. I’m not going to stop asking Susie about soccer, or Billy about band, or Yesenia about yearbooks. I’m not going to stop making myself available to them via modern technology. If kids rely on technology to communicate, youth leaders need to be accessible. The risks of false accusations are real. But the risks of withdrawing our attention, interest, and affection are greater still.
The cameras have been coming around All Saints Pasadena a lot in recent weeks. Our famously progressive church has, as many know, been under IRS scrutiny for some months thanks to a 2004 sermon that may or may not have violated our non-profit status.
But the cameras and the reporters don’t come to Wednesday night youth group. And while it’s true that our inclusive, welcoming theology is hardly what is normally described as "evangelical", I am happy to say that our worship culture is being transformed. A few years ago, I felt like the token "Jesus freak" at All Saints; the theology of most of my fellow youth workers was more Unitarian than anything. Many of the older teens were openly hostile to any frank expressions of Christian faith; they preferred a youth group that was equal parts games, intellectual discussion, and group therapy. (Those are parts of a good youth experience, of course, but ought not be the sum total.)
In the last two years, the church has brought in some full-time youth ministers who manage to combine a respect for All Saints progressive political culture with an evangelical commitment to Christ. This year, our junior-high minister started a praise band, made up of himself and five kids from both the senior and junior highs. They’ve been learning basic worship songs, and last night, we had our first praise and worship time at All Saints in my eight years of working with the youth group.
My friends from the more charismatically inclined churches would have felt right at home last night. The band was good (we have a number of teens who attend arts "magnet" high schools and are nearly professional in their abilities), and the combined junior high/senior high group responded remarkably well. And the songs we sang! Most of the kids and the other adult youth leaders didn’t know them beforehand, but as someone who listens to Christian radio and has spent plenty of time in more evangelical settings, they were quite familiar to me. This one’s a favorite of mine, and it was a delicious bit of cognitive dissonance to hear it sung by 60 young voices at All Saints, many swaying and dancing as they did so.
At what may be the flagship parish of the American Anglican left, at a church where we regularly preach about the inherent goodness of humankind and where we deny the excesses of Calvinist doctrine, our 13-17 year-olds sang to Jesus:
I am full of earth
You are Heaven’s worth
I am stained with dirt, prone to depravity
You are everything that is bright and clean, the antonym of me
You are divinity
But a certain sign of grace is this
From the broken earth flowers
Come up pushing through the dirt
It’s lousy poetry, but it ends up opening a splendid praise song. Who says you can’t combine liberal politics, an open-minded understanding of human sexuality, and enthusiastic praise worship? Who says you can’t preach the theology of John Spong and sing lyrics that recall the theology of John Calvin? Isn’t adolescence partly about the triumphant recognition and embracing of contradictions? (Okay, I’m half-joking with that one…)
All Saints is gettin’ groovy.
Mary Oliver is one of our most anthologized and well-loved living women poets. Her poetry is very accessible, which means that some of us who love poetry tend to judge her unkindly as being "too popular." That’s not really fair. I love a lot of her stuff, but this one in particular is a goodie. As someone who struggles not merely to love Christ but to manifest His light, this poem is most welcome to me this week.
The Buddha’s Last Instruction
"Make of yourself a light"
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal-a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
Third post of the day.
For the second time in a week, a gunman has walked into an American school, forced all of the males out, and then assaulted and killed female students. It happened today in Pennsylvania, and last week in Colorado. The Times reports on today’s tragedy:
“There was some issue in the past” that had left the gunman with a desire to harm female students, Commissioner Miller said. He said that the murders were premeditated and that the gunman had called his wife — without telling her he was holding hostages in a school — that he would not be coming home.
It’s not clear whether or not this shooting was inspired by the events last Wednesday in Colorado, where a male drifter in his fifties molested several girls before murdering one. School shootings have often happened in clusters in the past, so it seems possible that the two events are related. While the killers at Columbine High School famously targeted "Christians and jocks", these two shootings have targeted young females. (It doesn’t appear yet that there was a sexual element to today’s event, unlike in the Colorado murder last week.)
I’m thinking this afternoon about Commissioner Miller’s words about today’s killer:
“There was some issue in the past” that had left the gunman with a desire to harm female students.
As a pro-feminist gender studies prof, if there’s one topic that depresses me more than almost any other, it’s just how widespread male rage at women seems to be in our culture. I have no idea what the "issue" was that the Commissioner refers to that would lead the shooter to target elementary-age girls. I’m not sure what particular perversity led the guy in Colorado last week to sexually molest his victims before killing one of them. But you don’t need a degree in abnormal psych to see that these men were deeply, profoundly, angry at women. Their victims were kids, but only female kids were selected. They became the victims of twisted fantasies of disturbed men, men filled with some sick and horrific sense of revenge and "justice."
Do I think there’s a legion of men out there whose fantasy lives are similar to those of the murderers in Colorado and Pennsylvania? Lord God, I hope not. I know that the misogynistic hatred that many men feel towards all women can be tremendously powerful. Until this week, I hadn’t imagined that adult men would target vulnerable girls in such terrible ways. And while these men are obviously anomalies, they are not entirely alone. We live in a culture where rape remains ubiquitous; where sexual harassment is a nearly-universal experience for many women in the workplace; where pornography that features the narrative of teenage girls being raped or overpowered is ever more available and popular. I don’t know what specific factors inspired these two shootings, but I do know that they are, in some as of yet inexplicable way, emblematic of a larger cultural problem.
I suspect a lot more feminist commentary is coming. We just need more time to mourn and reflect.
I was talking to my wife about the Colorado school shooting the other day. Without intending bravado, I told her that if a gunman came into my classroom and ordered me out, I wouldn’t leave until all my students could go with me. I asked her if she would want me to leave if we had kids of our own; after all, heroism is easier for the childless! My wife told me, "No, you should stay, regardless. There are some things even more important than living for your own children, and if you’re a teacher, protecting your classroom is one of them." She’s right on, my wife.
As a teacher and a youth leader, I take protecting young people very seriously. No one can really know what they would do in such a horrible situation, and it is my sincere hope that none of us ever face it. But for those of us who teach and give our lives to young people, there is a sense that the classroom is a sacred space. If someone is coming to hurt one of my kids, they will have to do it quite literally over my dead body. That is not false bravado; it’s the quiet but firm acceptance of the responsibility that my career and my avocation convey.
Aside from a lot of boring pictures of buildings, only one good photo came out from our trip to Chicago last week. I wear the UVA football hat a lot. Actually, when I’m not teaching or doing some other vaguely formal activity, I wear baseball caps fairly constantly.
I posted yesterday about my "bachelor regimen." My wife, as I mentioned, is out of town until early next week. I wrote:
…five things are guaranteed to happen when my wife goes on vacation:
1. My normally ambitious exercise program will move from the merely compulsive to the definitively obsessive.
2. I will live on peanut butter, coffee, rice cakes, protein shakes, pineapple rings, and Clif Bars.
3. As a result of #1 and #2, I will lose weight.
4. The bed will go unmade.
5. The television will be on all the time, set to CNN or ESPN News.
In the comments section, a "regular reader" took issue with this list. He or she is right, in a way. I spend a great deal of time preaching male accountability; I am generally suspicious of traditional gender roles. Then my own wife goes off to Europe for ten days, and it appears that all hell is breaking lose on the home front! The implication I left with my list is that it is my wife who makes the bed, my wife who keeps me well-fed, my wife who keeps my compulsivity under control. And that hardly jives with what I advocate as a pro-feminist man.
Our culture has a strong myth about male domestic incompetence. Particularly in families where gender roles are rigid, there is a perception that "a man on his own" will flounder in filth and risk starvation. (Carl’s Jr., always a good source for nasty advertising, had a slogan last year: "If it wasn’t for us, some men would starve.") According to the myth, men can’t do laundry, can’t cook a meal, can’t keep a home clean. It’s not a question of a lack of willingness, no, it’s genetically pre-determined lack of ability. And of course, it’s absolute garbage.
I was raised by a single mom. I often prepared small meals for my younger brother when my mother was teaching her night classes. I learned to do laundry (sort, choose temperatures, etc.) long before I moved out on my own. While I can’t say I’ve reached the point where I enjoy cooking or cleaning, I’m certainly capable of doing both activities reasonably proficiently.
I was raised in a family where women did not derive their self-worth solely from their ability to create a beautiful, nurturing home. In families where staying at home is mandatory, I’ve often seen women protectively guard the kitchen from the men in their lives. My first wife came from a very traditional family of mixed Filipino-Chinese origin. I remember the first time I went to her grandmother’s for dinner; when the meal was finished, I headed into the kitchen to start washing up. (I was raised that a good guest always volunteers with great enthusiasm to help clean.) My first wife’s grandmother literally pushed me out of the kitchen: "No men in here! Go sit!" I noted that my wife’s brother’s girlfriend, however, was encouraged to "come and help, please!" The family wasn’t interested in protecting guests from helping — only in making sure that the kitchen remained exclusively "female space". It was my first experience with the truism that in patriarchal culture, even those women who are burdened by traditional roles will often zealously reject any effort to alleviate the oppression! After all, if your chief source of feminine self-worth is closely linked to your domestic skills, any sign that a man is interested in encroaching on "women’s space" may arouse a territorial response!
So what does this have to do with my wife’s vacation? Well, I’m not going to eat a more limited diet because I can’t cook for myself. I eat a more limited diet when I’m alone because I see cooking primarily as a social activity — something one does for others, not merely for oneself. I am happy going an entire week not eating a hot meal; I am happy eating my tofu burgers raw and over the sink. Could I whip up a nice plate of something? You bet. But in my solitude, I have the opportunity to devote more time to activities other than food preparation. I’d rather take more time to work out, or read, than to cook for myself. That’s not male laziness or incompetence, that’s just a different set of priorities. When my wife is home, I need to think of her needs as well as my own; when she’s gone, I can live a bit differently.
The same is true with the bed-making. I don’t feel any need to make the bed everyday. My wife likes it made. That’s neither good nor bad, just different. So when she’s on vacation, it stays unmade; when she comes home, I”ll have put fresh bedding on and you’ll be able to bounce a quarter off the neatly tucked in, hospital-corner sheets. Marriage is, after all, a series of delicate compromises. One person is invariably neater than the other, and the former isn’t always the wife.
My slovenliness and my indifference to cooking, are, I suppose, stereotypically masculine traits. Yet it’s hardly a contradiction of feminist principles if I retreat to those traits in my wife’s absence. Feminism doesn’t require that men eat in a certain way, or make beds daily. What feminism asks is for honest conversations about domestic tasks, and it asks men to be willing to shoulder as much of the "load" as their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters. When my wife comes home, things will change around the house once again. That’s not an inconsistency at all — it’s merely a recognition that we all live differently with another person than we do on our own. I think that’s quite compatible with basic feminist principles.
XRLQ, commenting on the Mark Foley scandal, has a bit of fun at my expense today. He writes:
I may be a lone voice in the wilderness, but I think it is a terrible thing that Republicans are so quick to throw one of their own under the bus. OK, maybe he’s a sexual predator and all, but he’s also been a champion of federal legislation targeting sexual predators, much more so than the last Democrat who held his seat did, and more son than his likely Democrat replacement will. Foley’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch. Foley’s execrable behavior in private towards adolescent boys is objectionable and offensive. But his private sins don’t vitiate the public good he accomplished and is continuing to accomplish. Human beings are complex, multi-faceted creatures; of few is this more true than of Mark Foley. Is he a man who has repeatedly abused his power in sexual relationships with subordinates? Yes. Is this a man who has been an important ally on other issues? Yes. He’s not either a good or a bad man — he’s manifestly both. And we can honor the good in him and lament the bad at the same time without contradicting ourselves. We can work with him when he’s right, and excoriate him when he’s wrong. Foley’s private failings are better known than the failings of any other human being alive. But compared to the other living men who have served in Congress, he has clearly been the one most committed to protecting children from sexual predators. And for that, he deserves our — qualified — gratitude.
The X is riffing off my post two weeks ago about Bill Clinton. If the X man wishes to imply that he sees no distinction between sexual misbehavior with adults and with underage teens, it’s not my job to refute him.
I’ve linked to XRLQ for years,and he’s one of the very small number of true conservatives on my blogroll. He and I share one thing: a passionate commitment to animal rights. That’s not an issue that gets a lot of time in the blogosphere, and anyone (regardless of their views on other issues) who is dedicated to expanding protections for our domesticated and wild friends has my enthusiastic support. (One reason why I am not too saddened at the prospect of a Schwarzenegger re-election; he signed the bills the animal rights community cared most about this term.)
Sunday notes:
A. My wife is out of town for the week. She and her best friend left for Europe two days ago, and won’t be back until October 9. I miss her very much, but am glad she and her buddy get this time together. I’m often away from her on weekend retreats with my youth group, after all. We spend 50 weeks a year together; it makes sense to us to spend two weeks (on average) apart. Earlier this week, I mentioned to one of my gym buddies that my wife was headed off on a trip, and he gaped at me. "You let your wife go to Europe without you?" He was incredulous. I set him straight about the whole notion of "letting" as quickly as I could.
Now mind you, I’d be sad if my wife would always rather travel without me, but we’ve done a lot of traveling together in the past year (three times to the East Coast; to Africa; South America; England; Dubai) and we’ll be traveling abroad together again over Christmas break. We both know our lives will change radically when we have children, so we’re racking up the miles while we have the time. (Someday, I will post all of my tips for accruing and redeeming frequent flyer miles. Stay tuned.)
B. I’ll be taking a little trip of my own next weekend: I’ll be in Berkeley to see my beloved Golden Bears play their homecoming football game against the Oregon Ducks. Both teams are ranked, both teams have potent offenses, and it should be a good battle. It will also be my first game at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley in twenty years; I haven’t seen Cal play at home since the 1986 Big Game against Stanford, when I was a 19 year-old sophomore. Many of today’s Berkeley students weren’t even born then…
C. I ran to the top of Mt. Wilson again today, and have now logged over 50 miles since Tuesday. This makes me realize that five things are guaranteed to happen when my wife goes on vacation:
1. My normally ambitious exercise program will move from the merely compulsive to the definitively obsessive.
2. I will live on peanut butter, coffee, rice cakes, protein shakes, pineapple rings, and Clif Bars.
3. As a result of #1 and #2, I will lose weight.
4. The bed will go unmade.
5. The television will be on all the time, set to CNN or ESPN News.
D. Finally, I want to report that a memorial concert was held last night to honor my late father. A group of his chamber music friends gathered at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West to play a variety of selections that were special to my daddy. My father was dedicated to his cello; next to his family, it gave him the greatest joy of his life. The music was magnificent and wide-ranging: Dvorak, Somis, Schumann, and many others. (In our family, we really love Schumann.) The final piece, chosen by my father’s dear friend and teacher Nona Pyron, was Max Bruch’s achingly moving Kol Nidrei. Given that it was the (almost) eve of Yom Kippur, and given my father’s own deeply ambivalent feelings about his Jewish heritage, it was a magnificent choice. I knew most of the selections, but had never heard the Bruch. I’m ordering a copy now.
I am the eldest son of a man who was very widely loved in his world. As sad as I remain, three months after his death, I am awed and inspired by how much joy he brought to others. Last night’s concert — which I attended with my stepmother and one of my sisters — was a tremendous gift to our family, and a wonderful reminder of just how many people cared so deeply for my Dad. Words do not have the power to convey my gratitude.
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