The Sun Revolves Around Us

Turn It Off - Phantogram (mp3)
Dial - School of Seven Bells (mp3)

The sky is not falling. We are not the worst people in the history of the world. Things are not always getting worse.

As an educator, a father, and a spiritual seeker, I do not look for the worst in people or in situations, nor do I try and approach things naively or with unrealistic expectations. My approach is not unlike millions of others, who feel that experience and measured optimism are invaluable companions for all encounters.

But over the course of five straight hours this week, the petty clueless self-absorption of others became fairly cumbersome.

First it was a coworker.

Another administrator and I have been methodically moving forward and honing a plan to create some energy and idea generation in our departments. Due to budget constraints, we’ve all been fairly landlocked these past four years. No conferences, no school visits, nothing. So we pushed and got approval to plan several “summer field trips” where small groups would visit a series of schools over several days, and at the end of the summer, we’d have a day-long retreat where we compiled the experiences and ideas and pushed forward on our own paths to professional and program improvement.

The director of the other department is set to retire next spring. He has served our school loyally and well, and he is a fine man.

When it was clear that one school we needed to see was located in Massachusetts, he emailed us and suggested he should take this trip, that he should go alone, and that he could report his findings back to the team. Translation: he’d love to go to Massachusetts; he’d love to take his wife; he’d love to see the scenic Northeast, and he’d even visit the school since it would help pay for his fun trip.

I can think of no better way to build camaraderie, motivate a desire to improve, and create energy for an immobilized staff than for the boss to take the travel money, spend it, and come back to tell us all about his trip. Great idea. Can't believe I didn't think of that one.

Next, it was an awards ceremony.

My daughter was one of some 400+ students in the county recognized for her creative writing. Her captivating short story, “Cant Never Could” -- and yes, the apostrophe is intentionally missing because the main character’s name is Cant -- was selected. I don’t think we’ll be making it into a bestselling children’s book anytime soon. Not until BOTG gets one, anyway.

Roughly 1,200-1,500 teachers, parents, grandparents and students packed into a downtown venue for the event, and twice in the early stages, someone at the podium kindly reminded parents to turn off their cell phones and to, ha ha, also help the kids turn off theirs as well. Yet, within 30 minutes of that polite announcement, four cell phones had announced their proud existence to the masses, thanks to their impossible-to-ignore “unique” ringtones.

We hardly heard the keynote speaker, a rich woman who had recently self-published a children’s book, because three babies spent the entire time screaming. One woman actually carried her screaming baby all the way across the bottom of the stage as her other daughter walked across to get the award. Apparently her 2nd-grade child was incapable of walking across a stage without her guiding directions. Or maybe she was modeling her screamy child’s pink dress since we were all distracted by her anyway.

At churches, in restaurants, at events like this, I’ll never really understand why screaming babies are tolerated. Never -- and please note how rarely I use absolutes in my writing; I’m one of the most relativistic wimps on the planet -- have I allowed the screaming and crying of my children to penetrate the peaceful existence of an environment for more than 10-15 seconds before removing my child from said environment, at least temporarily.

My child is not their problem. My child’s screams are permitted to interfere with or even ruin my night, because it’s my child. That’s the devil’s deal of parenting: screamy demons who frequently provide us heavenly joys.

But these screamy demons BELONG to someone specific. The rest of us didn’t ask for that child. Yet there we all are, having our dinners ruined, or unable to hear the speaker or preacher or performance, because your sweet precious snowflake in diapers is more important than the rest of us.

When I express intolerance about these issues and the levels of self-absorption and inconsiderateness required, it sends me through the roof. Not because I’m self-righteous, but rather because I know damn well just how self-absorbed I can be. I’m the Lightning McQueen of self-absorption, and if on the highway of selfishness I see other cars zooming past me at twice my speed when I’m already well past the speed limit, it’s bound to horrify me.

It’s worth noting that in all these examples -- the trip planning, the cell phones, the screaming demons -- for every self-absorbed poop face at the center of my focus, there were any number of people who weren’t in it merely for themselves, people capable of sympathizing with and caring about how the shoe might feel on the other foot.

And to those people, I salute you. The ability to share looks of indignation and impatience and mockery with you when we are pulled into these aggravating moments of someone else’s self-absorption is often the only thing that keeps me from going postal.

Slippery Slope Park

String of Pearls - Soul Asylum (mp3)

This is the way a park ends
This is the way a park ends
This is the way a park ends
Not with a bang, but the convergence of nine police officers on two alleged drug dealers selling shit from the trunk of their car.

I took my family to Coolidge Park on Monday evening. We hadn't been down there in a couple of years, due to the complications of a newborn son and our daughters outgrowing bikes we could fit into our minivan. It's no longer the park I remember.

Four years ago, Coolidge Park in daylight hours was home to hippies and romantics and studious Christian college kids. You had drum circles, young kids playing guitars poorly, circles of girls and young women wearing those funky multi-color hippy dresses, families pushing strollers and singing songs from The Sound of Music. On the other side of the bridge, you had young kids and teenagers throwing frisbees and footballs and frolicking.

When we were there last night, I saw:

• a woman who was clearly either in the midst of or recovering from a serious meth problem. She was white and looked like a mix between Karen Carpenter and Skeletor, and she was walking with a black dude with dreds.
  
  
• a couple watching their young son run around the place and invite himself to ride our son's pushcar. They were nice enough. They weren't a day over 22. They were unmarried.
  
  
• a phalanx of police officers -- some of them in goofy bicycle shorts like Ponch -- descend on two black dudes who were "allegedly" selling drugs out of the trunk of their car. Only a few minutes after the cops arrived, a small crowd of young African-American guys and gals circled the scene at a safe 40-foot perimeter to witness it. We overheard one of the young guys say, "Damn, ***** just got out last week an' he's already goin' back."
  
  
• a group of about eight Latino teenagers walking around the carousel area, then sitting and talking.
  
  
• a baby about the same age as my son (1-2 years) playing around the fountains. This very young child was already eyeball-poppingly fat. And yes, "fat" is the correct word here. And yes, the parents were also fat. And no, I won't buy that this child was fat solely because of a genetic disorder, unless the genetic disorder in question is known as "parents who eat too much and feed their child too much every damn time he cries."
  
  
• two goth teenagers snuggling on a blanket and having their pasty flesh scorched slowly by the merciless if slowly setting sun.

Yes, I fully realize that my descriptions are teeming with the kind of judgmental bile that makes people hate snooty middle class honkies like myself. I have done this with some intentional exaggeration, but I can't deny that these are descriptions my uncensored self would offer. I also can't deny that everywhere I looked in Coolidge Park on Monday night, I couldn't help but conclude that the place had deteriorated. It was no longer drawing the same people to do the same things.

Four years ago, the park's population was appropriately diverse. I wouldn't say it perfectly mirrored Chattanooga's population breakdown, but it had to be close, both ethnically and economically. On Monday evening at 7 p.m., the population was very skewed. Poor. Minority. Sketchy.

It's gone from being Target to sliding right past Wal-Mart on the way down to the Brainerd Road Bi-Lo.

Such is probably the natural evolution of the city park. When it's a baby, everyone in town wants to come over and visit. Hold it. Sing to it. Watch it eat and coo and cry and poo. Then, when it's a toddler, people continue to stop by, but with less regularity and less balls-to-the-wall enthusiasm. By the time it's hit the middle school years, most folks are making excuses why they just couldn't quite find the time to visit... and they're also secretly talking bad about the little brat behind closed doors. Then, when it's a full-on teenager, it gets all sullen and starts smoking and drinking and hanging out with the wrong crowd and beating up weak nerds and scaring the little old ladies.

If Monday evening was any indication -- and maybe I just hit it on a totally bad night? -- Coolidge Park is fast approaching the zit-infested voice-changing 10th grade and doing so in full juvenile offender style. Already most concerned parents and schools have banned or strongly discouraged going there after dusk, even though the whole place is wide open.

And when a place spends its teenage years pushing all the right people away, it will get lonelier and increasingly dominated by a crowd less likely to attract Mr. Roger's Neighborhood than Mr. Robinson's. Maybe it's the inevitable and cyclical nature of parks: They're born. They plateau. They fade. They rot. They die. They revitalize with new money and new design and new attraction, or they die and are replaced by condos.

(My apologies to non-Chattanooga readers for such a town-specific write-up.)