Broccoli and Candy Bars

Recently I planted myself on the floor of the children’s section of our little Appomattox Public Library.  I spend most of my time reading books written long ago for children that are no longer in circulation and I wanted to balance that out by reading what’s offered to children today.  So I started with the A’s and read the first 150 books.  Here’s what I found.

Out of those 150 books, there were two that had a traditional family of mother, father and children represented.  There wasn’t a single reference to God or faith.  I specifically looked for a value or principle that was taught.  A handful of the books taught lessons in kindness.  But far and away, the overriding purpose of creating the books seemed to be sheer entertainment.

Which shouldn’t surprise me. I’ve noticed in many guidelines for parents written by educators and school librarians,  their #1 suggestion is to look for books that entertain.  And the publishing industry is satisfying that demand.  As I’ve read what children’s books publishers are looking for, their #1 criteria is also entertainment.  Their reasoning is that if a book isn’t entertaining, a child won’t read it.  So they add more glitter and more color and even more shock. Lately when I walk into the children’s section of a book store,  I feel like I’m walking into a big Saturday morning commercial.  And I ask myself , seriously, how many more dilemmas can the Disney princesses find themselves in?

In fact, one time I specifically asked a sales person if she could help me find a book that taught a moral or a value for my little granddaughters.  She took me to the wall of children’s books where we stood scanning the titles.  She shifted from one foot to the other, scratched her chin, and finally reached over and handed me If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, adding that she was pretty sure it had a moral in it.

Now I love If You Give Mouse a Cookie and my children loved it and my grandchildren love it.  But I somehow don’t think it’s going to be enough.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking.

If I hold out a stalk of broccoli in one hand and a candy bar in the other and ask my five-year-old granddaughter to choose, I’ll tell you which one she’ll choose every single time.  But what responsible parent would ever fill up their children’s dinner plates with candy because that’s what they like?  We teach them, rather, to acquire a taste for broccoli and we limit the amount of candy we give them.  Candy is enjoyable as a snack but hardly works as the main course.

We’re starving our children’s souls when we don’t help them to love the literature that demonstrates the how’s and why’s of happy living.

 Why do we see a breakdown in the family?  Why the exodus away from God?  Why the moral vacuum in our society?

To answer those questions, for starters I suggest spending a few hours on the floor of your own public library, starting with the letter ‘A’.

Using Stories in the Grieving Process

We took in a stray cat several months ago and named her Juliet.  Actually, it turned out we took in three cats, because she was already expecting.  My granddaughter, seven year old Kayleigh, immediately claimed her as her own.  She took her to bed at night, fed  her, played with her and loved her.  She even cleaned out the kitty litter.  When the mama cat was ready to deliver the babies, she delivered the first one in Kayleigh’s hair in the middle of the night.  Now, that’s a bonding experience.

We usually kept Juliet in the house, but one night she ran out the front door.  If you’ve ever owned a cat, you know you don’t coax a cat home if she’s not willing.  We kept opening the door and calling to her, but finally had to go to bed, hoping she’d come back when she was ready.

The next morning my husband left early before the sun came up, and there was our little Juliet, laying by the side of the road.  He said it was apparent she hadn’t suffered.  But our hearts hurt at the thought of having to tell Kayleigh.

Soon, I could hear Kayleigh’s footsteps upstairs as she anxiously ran around looking for Juliet, calling her name.  She came running into the kitchen: “Where’s Juliet?”  My daughter put her arms around her, and with lots of tears, told her what had happened.    

Kayleigh didn’t say anything, but ran into her bedroom where she drew a picture of Juliet lying on the foot of her bed, nursing her two little babies.  She glued it to a simple paper picture frame and hung it next to her bed.  There were tears on the picture.  Later in the day she created a little book by stapling some papers together.  The first picture was Juliet on the back patio when she found her. There was a drawing of the night the kitten was born in her hair.  And then came the hardest drawing of all–drawing a car with headlights and Juliet running towards it.  The final picture was out under the trees with the leaves falling all around where Juliet was buried.

Within a few days, Kayleigh’s dad came home from a deployment and the family moved back on the army base.  Dad said, “No more cats.”  He’s not heartless.  Just practical.  And Kayleigh became quiet and withdrawn. She continued to draw cats- hundreds and millions and billions of cats. But in the busy-ness of life and moving, the stories had stopped.   One day I suggested to her dad that he take time to ask Kayleigh to share the stories about Juliet and they started flooding out of her heart. She told him about the time Juliet left a ‘gift’ of a dead mouse on the basement floor.  And how, one time,  Juliet carried one of her baby kittens upside down-- by her bottom. She always told that story with a giggle.  And, of course, how the baby came to be born in her hair in the middle of the night.  And in so doing, once again moved along the process of healing a broken heart.

Kayleigh started smiling and laughing again.

Without the stories, raw emotions can be unbearable.  Stories help us sort through feelings and provide a means of releasing them.

Stories are a powerful heart-healer.

Thanksgiving and the Face of Evil

When we went to bed last night, my husband suggested we use one of our prayers to just thank God for our many blessings without asking for a single thing.

So I’ve been thinking about what I’m thankful for, and mingled up there at the top of my list which includes family, faith and health is my freedom. Which leads my thoughts to something I’ve been mulling over in my mind the last while.

We just finished another election and both sides are hurling accusations that the other side is ‘evil’.  Now, when I look at the word ‘evil’, I notice it is ‘live’ spelled backwards which pretty much sums up the problem with evil.  Evil is the opposite of live.   Instead of ‘living’, evil is about ‘dying’–dying hope, dying happiness, dying dreams.   Evil is a destructive force, not a creative force; it crushes spirits and suppresses energy.  But the question of the hour is, “What does the face of evil look like?”  Will I recognize it when I see it?

 For example, my daughter visited China awhile back and went to the tomb of Chairman Mao where she joined thousands of Chinese as they reverently filed past his remains.  She learned sometimes a hundred thousand people pass by in a single day.  How could this be?  Wasn’t the man ‘evil’?  Didn’t tens of millions of Chinese die under his brutal hand?  She carefully posed the question to a man next to her, who replied that, yes, many had died.  Mao had flaws.  But what he intended to do was good.  And for that the Chinese honored him.  I had previously read Mao’s own words.  He told the youth that as much as they thought their own fathers loved them, Mao loved them more.

I thought of other brutal dictators of the last century.  Hitler’s aim was for the ‘perfect society’.  He loved beautiful art, beautiful music, beautiful literature.  He was a gifted artist himself.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s daughter, Rose, saw Lenin up close and personal.  She said he was a “sincere and extremely able man” who dedicated his life to the passionate belief that he could create a society where “insecurity, poverty, and economic inequality shall be impossible.”

How can that be ‘evil’?

I’ve read the writings of Karl Marx.  He had seen firsthand the brutal heartache of poverty.  What if a society could be created so there were no poor among us?  Specifically, what if a mother, now stooped over trying to scrape together a few crusts of bread to feed her starving children could turn her energies to pursuing art and literature?  Is that such an ‘evil’ desire?

And yet, in their passion to do ‘good’, they did the work of pure evil where hopes and dreams were crushed and millions of lives perished in the wake.

So it brings me back to the original question:  What is the line that separates the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’?  What does evil look like? We have many do-gooders among us, all vitally interested in our ‘best good’.  How do we sift the ‘good’ from the ‘evil’ before the damage is done and we experience the fallout of their good intentions?

And this is what I’ve come up with so far.  I’m still applying the idea to  a variety of situations to see if the model works, and I ask you for your help in the experiment.  But so far I haven’t found an exception.   I believe the line separating good from evil comes down to the element of coercion or ‘force’.  You can have the most wonderful intentions in the world, but once you introduce the factor of force to the equation, you have turned those good intentions into evil.

Mao forced his ‘good’ ideas onto the Chinese people.  He destroyed their connections to the ideas of the past by destroying their antiquities and their books–he even had their grass and trees and flowers torn up and destroyed. He needed them to think like him.  He replaced what he destroyed with a little red book everyone was required to carry on their persons at all times and to study diligently.  How many of these ideas found in his little red book do you have a problem with?

“It is important for a country to retain modesty, and shun arrogance.”

“It is the duty of the Party to serve the people.  Without the people’s interests constantly at heart, their work is useless.”

“China’s road to modernization will be built on the principles of diligence and frugality.”

“A communist must be selfless.”

“The multiple burdens which women shoulder are to be eased.”

“In order to get rid of blindness . . . we must . . . learn the method of analysis .”

Hitler promoted motherhood and family. What can be ‘gooder’ than that?  He once said, ‘I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.”

And in the name of ‘goodness’, these men worked pure evil.

As Rose Wilder Lane summed it up: “The Soviet government exists to do good to its people, whether they like it or not.”

Christianity is a tremendous power for good until it is ‘forced’ upon people.  The Spanish Inquisition comes to mind. Once Spain purged the country of all their perceived ‘evil’, the country died.

 Who would take issue with any of the five pillars of Islam?  They believe in worshiping one God and of praying to him daily; of taking care of the poor; of looking on all people as equal in the eyes of God; of self-restraint.  Yet, once those ideas are ‘forced’ upon people, as some radical  Muslims have taken upon themselves, does it not turn the good into evil?

So if force becomes the line where good crosses into evil, it makes me question the wisdom of things like  compulsory education where learning is forced, for example.   And it certainly makes me examine many of the ideas being put out there by government officials, federal and local, under a new lens.

Obviously the idea needs to be explored a lot more than this and I’ve gone on far too long for a beautiful Thanksgiving morning like today.  But I’ll continue mulling because I pray that next year and the year following and the year after that will still find me writing about my gratitude for being free.

I have a feeling the realization of that prayer may be tied into how many people recognize the face of ‘evil’ for what it truly is before our freedom is lost.

LIGHT AND WARMTH

To continue with my thoughts on balancing heart and mind, if you live where it gets very cold in the winter, you know that you can step outside on a January morning and see the sun shining just as brightly in the middle of winter as it does in the middle of July.  Yet, without its warmth, nothing grows.

John Dewey who is recognized as the father of modern educational philosophy added his name to a document known as the Humanist Manifesto back in the 1930's.  What I draw from this effort is that a group of 'smart' people  decided if we can learn to be guided by our intellects, we can stop the cycle of repeating humanity's dumb mistakes.  From an intellectual standpoint, who would ever think war is smart?  This line of reasoning has carried into today's current focus on critical thinking skills and scientific facts in our schools.  What I see  happening is while the school's attention is placed on the mind (light), they're ignoring the heart (warmth).  And our schools are failing.

Just like plants in winter, human beings don't grow on light alone.  We need warmth. 

The danger of light without warmth is pointed out in the following thoughts of Oliver deMille, former president of George Wythe University:

"As Allan Bloom pointed out in his classic bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind, the last society to be highly trained [light] and as poorly educated [warmth] as the current U.S. was Germany in the 1930's.  A significant number of German engineers were highly enough trained to build cutting-edge weaponry, submarines, missiles, airplanes and so on, but not well-read enough in history to vote against Hitler or refuse to do his bidding.

"Same with German scientists, who understood chemicals and genetics enough to experiment on their neighbors when they were thrown immorally into prison camps, but not learned enough in ethics, morals, history, psychology or basic politics to not elect Hitler or refuse to torture their countrymen.

"Critics could say that by the time submarines were being launched and people were being tortured, it was too late to do anything.  But only the combination of top technical training [light] and poor Leadership Education [lack of warmth] could have allowed this all to happen.  A less highly-trained people could not have done it, and a truly educated people would not have done it. "

Put one more way, knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is knowing you don't put it in a fruit salad.

Light and warmth; mind and heart; knowledge and wisdom; reason and faith. 

The equation must be balanced if we want to start growing again.

JEFFERSON LIES?

I’ve been following with interest the discussion over Thomas Nelson’s decision to pull David Barton’s Jefferson Lies off the shelves and to stop production over ‘factual errors’.  As I’ve studied the errors in question, I find myself scratching my head as to why these things would warrant such a drastic measure.  Mostly, I ask myself, isn’t it really a matter of one opinion over another?

The day the news broke about the Jefferson book,  I happened to be reading the introduction to a book about Christopher Columbus written almost 120 years ago.   Even then, the world was divided over whether Columbus was worthy of admiration or scorn.   The author addressed this very issue of discerning the ‘facts’ of history.  He asked why it was that several well-educated, learned men can look at identical original source material and draw contradicting conclusions.  Washington Irving greatly admired Columbus and Von Humboldt offered nothing but praise while Harrisse had nothing but cold criticism and Winsor gave a ‘sneering invective’.

I believe his response is worth considering:

“Where this amazing difference in judgment?  Why does Mr. Winsor blame where others praise?  Mr. Winsor thinks that it is due to his own superiority as a critical and scientific historian.  Is Mr. Winsor right?  Where does the province of the critical and scientific historian lie?  In the gathering and sifting of historical evidence, in the full command of historical authorities, in the quick eye that sees historical contradictions and impossibilities, in the faculty sympathizing with the age and the feelings of the men he treats, in the power to see what under given environment is possible or impossible, is likely or unlikely.  All this will aid the historian to form a just and a correct idea of a hero’s character, and yet he may have all this, and err completely in his verdict.

“In every day life knowledge, human nature and knowledge of men is not the exclusive privilege of the man of many facts and varied lore.  Often the plain man of common sense, the man who has studied men in the concrete, living among them with open eyes and keen quick wit, knows his fellow men more truly and do them justice more fairly, than the scholar who has conquered ten thousand volumes and swallowed the dust of libraries for a quarter of a century.

“What is there to hinder the man of action, who has seen again and again how men act in real life, amidst difficulties, and struggles and crises and triumphs and failures,–what is to hinder such a man when put in possession of the facts and placed face to face with the innermost thoughts of any great historical character to judge him and judge him correctly?  Why may he not arrive at a fairer and truer verdict, than the scholar who has mastered dates and details, but fails to see flesh and blood, because the man of flesh and blood does not fit in with the imaginary world which the scholar has created in his mind?

“All honor to the critical historian, when he collects, compares and sifts testimony, but if his judgment of the world’s great men is to stand, he must prove himself to be more than a scientist and a critic, he must be a judge not only of books and facts, but of men–of their hearts, of their sympathies, of their feelings, of their passions, of their actions, of their judgments.”

(Taken from The Voyage of Christopher Columbus: The Story of the Discovery of America (1892))

As a storyteller and a sharer-of-stories with children, you will be called upon to make your own judgment and assessment of the great lives of the past.  Relying on the most credentialed scholar for the ‘truth’ may not reveal the truth at all. Sometimes, you just have to follow your heart.

And I’m pretty sure that somewhere in the world, I just made a scholar cringe.

INTRO BLOG

My grown-up children will marvel that their mother has finally entered the 21st century and is starting a blog.  I still prefer scissors and a glue stick when I cut and paste, but they’re working on me.  We really live in such a wondrous age of instant communication and I happen to have a few things on my mind.  Or, perhaps more accurately expressed, in my heart.  So here goes.

I am revealing my age when I tell you we were still using slide rules in math when I graduated from High School.  Just a couple of years later, when my husband and I were in college,  an enterprising salesman sat down in our living room to demonstrate an amazing new piece of technology: the calculator.  It not only added and subtracted, it multiplied and divided. That’s seriously all it did.  And we just had to have it, even though it had a hefty price tag of $75.00 in a day when we were earning a whopping dollar an hour.

I know, I know.  Get to the point.  You'll give me seven seconds and then  you’re done with me.  Which is exactly the point.   Amazing as our technology is—and I wouldn’t give it up for anything—it comes with a cost.  Researchers claim that young brains have become re-wired in one generation to accommodate the explosion of information that requires minds that are quick to access, assess and move on.  That's a good thing. It is the great age of the mind.

 What is being left behind is the ability to slow down, ponder  and especially feel.  The ability to empathize; to respond to the world in an emotional way is diminishing.   And that’s not a good thing.  Mind without heart is as dangerous as heart without mind.To you young minds that need documentation and verification–the research, the proof--of what I just said, it’s coming.  But not yet.  It’s going to take a little time to unfold these ideas.

So I hope you’ll stay with me.  All I will say for today is, I believe the prescriptive remedy for balancing out the equation between mind and heart---- it all starts with a story . . . .