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.)

Slugs On A Porch

Shortwave Set--"Glitches and Bugs" (mp3)
The Happy Planets--"The Summer Slime" (mp3)


I had seen slugs before.

No, check that. I had seen a slug before, never more than one, usually creeping up the Andy Warhol shower curtain in the basement bathroom. A quick blast of hot water from the shower head and he would have to let go and swirl around for a while before half-sticking in the drain.

But never slugs like these.

My wife had come in from the outside and commented casually, "There are a bunch of slugs on the porch."

Not something I would usually have responded to, but I had just finished the 7th and final episode of Generation Kill on DVD, and I was jacked up. Slugs on the perimeter? Trying to compromise our position? No, sir, not on my watch. I dashed to the kitchen to find the salt, my daughter trailing behind me, ready to take on the role of halogen flashlight holder.

"You're going to put salt on them?" my wife asked disinterestedly.

"Kosher salt," my daughter retorted, noticing that I was reaching for the good stuff, as if Kosher salt was like Holy Water, its rabinnical blessing giving it extra power for wet work.

No, never slugs like these had I seen. I could tell that as I soon as I opened the front door and saw their vague gray shapes in the darkness. There were way too many of them.

When my daughter stood almost over them and clicked on her flashlight, it was as if we had discovered, by plane, the Japanese fleet at Midway. Several large slugs with dozens of smaller ones surrounding them were charging toward my front door at a cruising speed of over 6 inches/minute (or .00568 miles per hour). These slugs were smart, organized, disciplined--and, even more clever, they all looked the same, but for the variations in size. It was virtually impossible to tell who the leader was. And with no hesitation, they were coming towards us.

It was quick decision time, either get out of the way of the onslaught or fight back. I chose the latter, guided by my daughter's steady hand on the flashlight and her even firmer resolve. She looked at me and she whispered angrily, "Enough is enough! I have had it with these muthafuckin' slugs on this muthafuckin' porch!"

And my salt rained from the sky.

I don't know if you've ever seen a slug run. Or the slug equivalent. All of the sudden the wet trail thickens and you can detect, if you get close, a veritable burst of speed that is detectable. I couldn't see it, of course; my vision was obscured by the saline blizzard I was unleashing as hard as I could, not only bombarding the main armada, but trying to take out some of the craftier ones that were on the brick walls. By now, they more than knew we were there, and each slug "ship" tried to scatter in a haphazard pattern, hoping to avoid the relentless assault. To no avail, I might add. We had them. Fish in a barrel.

Or so I thought.

It was then that the light caught the other side of the porch, where three slugs had taken a roundabout path, but were closer to the front door. So, the main armada was just a feint, a suicide mission designed to distract me, those slimy dozens willing to sacrifice themselves so that their brethren could get through. I saluted their sneaky valor, and then I salted them with extreme prejudice.

We stepped off the porch to survey our night's work. Just before we breathed a sigh of satisfaction, my daughter's precise light revealed that we had only compromised the front of that flesh-colored flotilla. They were coming out of the garden. The straight "hell from above" approach that I had employed so far would not work here. Our work was not yet complete! The most insidious remained. They were camouflaged among the mulch or creeping along the brick under the precipice. Having studied Midway, I knew that my only hope was to mimic the torpedo bombers and put horizontal fire onto these corsairs. At great expense of salt, I launched wave after wave of sideways attack, eventually lodging enough crystals along the top ledge of the slugs until eventually, the salt broke their hold on the brick and they fell.

It was over. The dead shriveled and the dying writhed, and I took grim satisfaction with the work we had done. But it was over.

What is to be learned? Only this: stay off my muthafuckin' porch...if you want to live.

Ain't Supposed to Die on a Saturday Night

The '59 Sound - The Gaslight Anthem (mp3)
Love U More - Sunscreem (mp3)

Music is my primary emotional siphon. Inserting those ear buds is akin to shoving a plastic tube into my gas tank, and what usually emerges from me are the heavy, unglamorous feelings of despair, agony, melancholia or fear. This musical bloodletting happens most often, appropriately enough, when I'm in my car. (Or, yes, on my scooter.)

Struggling to express ugly emotions with those I trust and who love me isn't unique. The world is full of people who keep the bad shit bottled up. What does seem ironic is that I'm somehow more comfortable weeping or screaming or punching the top of my car while on the road, inviting strangers to witness my little tirades, which probably resemble something like "The Fast and The Exorcist."

Songs that can at the right moment draw forth the poison from inside me are legion. Not like they're squeezing blood from a stone, fer Chrissakes. These songs are squeezing water from an overburdened sponge. In college, the Sunscreem song "Love U More" was on frequent repeat in my car, and I'd often drive blurry-eyed and wiping away tears. The lyrics are downright embarrassing at times, and the music ain't much better. But I'd just broken up with someone and haunted by the feeling I had failed to hold up my end of our relationship bargain. I didn't enjoy it coming to an end, but I couldn't see any other option. It felt like the lesser of two awfuls, but awful nonetheless. Something in that song helped siphoned out the poison.

Lately, "The '59 Sound" by The Gaslight Anthem has been getting heavy rotation in my ears when I'm alone in the car. The song's got teenagers, tragedy, and the mention of a gospel choir. It's a top-notch weeper that works even though it's not "quiet and minor and peaceful and slow."

Part of the reason this song has lingered on my radar is because, as Bob mentioned yesterday, our school celebrated the graduation of its Class of 2009 last weekend. The pending close of another year is always bittersweet and begs for emotional siphoning. Working with high schoolers, if one is committed to it and passionate about it, often makes you feel like Calypso. You've helped to shelter and care for these vulnerable sticks of dynamite. You've watched them grow stronger and more confident. You've glimpsed moments of their far-away mysterious home lives, some of which are less than dreamy, as Bob so wonderfully noted yesterday.

You release them into the world knowing full well there's plenty of growing up still to do, but you can't help them, and you can't even witness it happen anymore. Instead, you replace them with a new crop and start the damn thing over again. It's this weird "Time to make the donuts" "Groundhog Day" kind of feeling.

The chains I've been hearin' now for most of my life.

This particular senior class experienced some heavy shit on their journey. Two student deaths over a 2-year span, and both off-the-charts unusual and tragic. While the deaths of those boys were most especially painful to their parents and relatives, tragedies kill parts of everyone they touch, and those deaths touched every student in one way or another. Every adult, too, for that matter. "The '59 Sound" is the sound of tormented teenage souls, desperately clawing and fighting to accept the unacceptable.

As a sophomore in college, one of the more beloved guys in my dorm was killed in a car wreck. Drunk driver slammed into him. Jaws of life didn't live up to their billing. Bob had been dead mere hours when the news careened into us.

And I wonder, were you scared when the metal hit the glass?

Although I was by no means his best friend, we had spent plenty of time in one another's company. The weekend before he was killed, he'd been going through the dorm with permanent markers, writing his name on pillars and walls and doors. "Bob was here '72." He wrote the "'72" part in the hopes it would look like some old alum had returned to make his mark for old times' sake.

Maybe four nights before his death, Bob came into my room and wrote it several times on our loft. We talked for probably half an hour, and it was the kind of conversation that meant very little to me at the time. But the night of his death, as about eight of us gathered silently on the balcony and struggled to understand how to feel and how much of it to share, I desperately tried to retrieve that conversation.

Surely it was no coincidence that he was leaving his mark on that dorm mere days before he died. Surely it was no coincidence that my longest personal conversation with the guy happened mere days before he was gone. Yet I could only remember bits and phrases, and none of those orphaned pieces felt meaningful enough to justify the symbolism of a young man imparting some last crucial wisdom on his friends. I was still too young and clueless to realize that nothing he had said would ever allow his death to feel meaningful.

Young boys, young girls
Ain't supposed to die on a Saturday night.

No offense to the God in which I believe, but I can think of many worse things than getting to spend an eternity listening to my favorite songs, or even getting the gift of having one or two of them release me from life's waning moments. And sometimes the only way to swim through the sadness is to take great hope in the little things.

Faith Of Our Fathers?

Explosions In The Sky--"A Song For Our Fathers" (mp3)
Arthur Pope--"Lies Of Our Fathers" (mp3)

I usually get depressed every year at this time.

The first reason, as I've known for awhile now, is because in working with seniors, I am in the odd situation of mourning their departure at the very time when they are celebrating their graduation. The job is bittersweet; I start the journey over again every year. I start it today.

The second reason was confirmed concretely Saturday night. Those of us who work in schools, unless we are the ones who get most of the phone calls, get to operate in the mostly blissful ignorance of where our students come from each morning and return to each night or, in the case of boarders, where they go during weekends away and breaks. But Saturday night, at a reception for seniors and their families, I watched and was even a part of too many uncomfortable interactions between students and their parents.

There was the father pretending that he had heard his son talk of me many times, when it was clear he had little connection with the boy at all; in fact, neither father nor son was staying at the reception. Both were headed out with friends. And though the father gave permission to his son to go to Mellow Mushroom, it was clear that said was for my benefit. The son wasn't asking. There was the boy who had arrived here emaciated a year and a half ago after struggling through life with his alcoholic mother in New York City. He lives with distant relatives gracious enough to take him in, but I didn't see them at the reception. There was the boy who wasn't at the reception at all, who wasn't coming to graduation either, his alienation from the entire senior class largely due to parents who move him from school to school because no school ever recognized their son's talents and greatness, a circumstance neither they nor he could handle.

In a pamphlet called "Understanding Independent School Parents" that I read a couple of summers ago, author and PhD. Michael Thompson, who specializes in children and families, argues that if we, as teachers, are going to love our students, we've got to love their parents as well. It made perfect sense to me at the time, and, in fact, I spouted this wisdom on more than one occassion.

Today, I think it's pretty much bullshit. Yeah, it's an important stance for professional behavior, but if we were candid with ourselves, those of us who work with children spend a lot of our time trying to help children cope with the damage their parents have done to them. If we're lucky, we have the occasional opportunity to undo some of that damage. If we are aware enough, we have a chance to keep from feeding the fire.

To know that those children are sometimes trying to survive in the happy din of a graduation reception, perhaps dreading this night as much as any all year, perhaps putting on the necessary show to be part of the happy din, that is information I wish I did not have. And, no, I do not "love the parents" who are responsible for these situations. I do not love the parent who is selfish, childish, narcissistic, demeaning, destroying, disconnected.

But do I think I've got it figured out? Not really.

As Philip Larkin notes in his poem, "This Be The Verse:"


They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.



I appreciate Larkin's sense of irony. I appreciate the gentleness of his wisdom. And I think he's absolutely right. But it doesn't give me any sense of compassion for a parent or a set of parents who have put one of my students through hell this year. And the poem doesn't give me any feeling of superiority; Larkin has cleverly sucked all of us parents into his vision, even those who work at being good parents, at being selfless or involved or any other "good" quality.

You and me, good parents that we think we are, don't fuck 'em up any less, necessarily, just in different ways. And that is depressing. But, of course, I don't really believe that. And neither do you.

A How-To Blog From Your Old Uncle Bob

Walter Becker--"Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore" (mp3)
Bruce Springsteen--"Winter Song (unreleased)" (mp3)

After purchasing Neil Young's Fork In The Road on Itunes this week and trying to get into it and having to acknowledge to myself what a disappointment it is (more on that in another post, perhaps), I got so depressed that I spent the better part of Saturday night seeing what other Neil Young was out there. I had to know he wasn't finished. I didn't want to lose faith in Neil.

And thanks to YouTube, I didn't.

I don't know how often you use YouTube for its musical offerings, but the range and depth of music on there is almost beyond belief--classic performances on old TV shows, concert footage with good quality, but also what I call "collage songs." Collage songs are not really the visual posts one expects on YouTube so much as they are a way of posting songs. Of course, you can't just post the music, so you collect a bunch of still photographs and whatnot and have a slideshow while the song plays.

These songs tend to fall into two categories: the live stuff and the unreleased stuff. Both categories make my heart race a little bit. There are few things I enjoy more than discovering that there is more music out there by someone I admire than I knew that there was.

By the end of the night Saturday, I had downloaded 43 Neil Young songs from YouTube, all of which are now on my Ipod. So, if this is something you've never done, I thought I'd tell you how.

1. First of all, you need a program that will convert YouTube files to Mp3s. The one I've used with great success is at DVDVideoSoft.com, available here. When you click to download it, it will take you to a CNET page, but it's the same program.

2. Once you've downloaded and installed it, you're ready to go. Get onto YouTube and find something like an unreleased Springsteen song called "Winter Song," played solo on piano in 1973. Copy the address of the video and paste it in your YouTube to MP3 Converter.

3. You have the option of choosing the sound quality. Why not go for the best? It will take a bit longer, but the difference is probably noticeable on most tracks.

4. Once you've pasted it, you just click download and wait for it to finish. My tracks save to "My Documents\DVDVideoSoft\FreeYouTubeToMP3Converter" and when I go there, Bruce is waiting for me. I can import the song into Itunes.

5. Of course, there are other types of converters you can get--if you wanted to watch the clip on your Ipod or something. I've done that with some concert footage, but now I wish I just had done the audio, because then the songs would be in the mix with my other stuff.

If you're wondering about the legality of this, well, so am I. A little bit. These songs sometimes have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of hits, the software is readily available and not from some sketchy site, and it isn't like you're going to make money by having downloaded a song that, live or studio, was probably never released. You get to hear songs you never heard, concerts you couldn't go to. In the case of Neil Young, I got the audio of almost an entire concert he did just last year in Amsterdam, and hearing the range of new and old and never-heard-before-by-me songs performed with great skill reassured me that Neil Young is indeed still writing good songs and that I'll continue supporting him, in spite of Fork In The Road.

I suppose if the artist doesn't want the music out there, it would be an easy enough thing to contact YouTube and tell them to take it off.

Walter Becker, one of the geniuses behind Steely Dan, released Circus Money in 2008. Available at Itunes. Bruce Springsteen's "Winter Song" is available at YouTube.

Better Living Through Chemistry?

When It Falls Apart - Matthew Perryman Jones (mp3)
It's Only Me - Todd Thibaud (mp3)

The huge rise in allergies has been attributed to our society's increasingly antiseptic lifestyle. The irony is lost on no one. We fight germs and clean our counters and keep our kids out of the dirt, and biology mocks us by making our children's carefully-protected immune systems more vulnerable to more pathetic things. Like milk. And peanuts. And eggs.

Or, as some doctors say, stop worrying about making your children wash their damn hands before dinner. A little dirt never hurt nobody.

"A little dirt never hurt nobody" is my general approach to most of life, and my approach to health and medicine has always been similar. A little cold never hurt nobody. A little piggy flu never hurt nobody. A little gonhorrea never hurt nobody. This approach is clearly more philosophical than scientific.

But what good is science nowadays? Scientists can't even agree on things as basic as global warming or whether Sweet-N-Low causes cancer. You can read studies until you're blue in the face and still not know for sure whether women should drink more wine to protect them from Deadly Problem A or stop drinking wine to protect them from Deadly Problem B.

In much the same way Bob expressed frustration with professional athletes and the steroid problem, I've recently been wrestling with the issue of "neuroenhancement." The oversimplified definition of Neuroenhancement is: people who take ADHD-type medicines but don't remotely have ADHD so that they can do stuff better than they could otherwise.

Regular Harvard students (or students here in our own school) use Ritalin and Adderal et al to help them stay up and on task for ridiculous stretches. They use it to help them focus when taking tests, or when studying. Some professional poker players use it to intensify their attention while at the tables. Lots of people are using drugs never really intended for them in ways they deem beneficial to their brain and life.

At the gut level and my philosophical level, I'm strongly opposed to this. It feels like cheating. And not just "fudging a little," but outright cheating.

Well, there's also this little bitty other thing.

I can't deny that I'm forever scarred from the "Family Ties" episode where my hero, Alex P. Keaton, got addicted to speed before the first commercial break and was having a meltdown by the 20-minute mark. Even now, when I see those "5-Hour Energy" commercials, I have flashbacks to Alex wigging out in his room until Michael Gross steps in and smothers his son with his beard and cardigan sweater. (Insert Mallory and Tina Yothers jokes here.)

On the intellectual level, however, especially after reading this New Yorker article on the subject, I'm not sure if my reaction is justifiable. We have long ago let the horse out of the barn when it comes to granting medicine the right to fuck with every aspect of our lives. From asperin and penicillin to seratonin re-uptake inhibitors and blood enzyme regulators (a.k.a. "little blue pills"), we as a society seem plenty comfortable with drugs, drugs and more drugs, so long as they're manufactured by Glaxo instead of farmed by Fredo. Hell, we're totally OK with injecting botox, collagen, silicone, and God-only-knows what other unnatural substances into our flesh if it helps us be ready for our close-up, Mr. DeMille.

Neuroenhancement is, simply, mental steroids, mental temporary breast implants. It's adding chemicals to your brain that allow you (in theory) to do things better than you could without them.

But here's where my philosophical concern kicks in. I've long been a firm believer that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, that nothing in life is free. If these chemicals increase something in your brain, it's almost a certainty that they decrease something else, or they take a toll on the brain or body in order to render these results.

Steroids shrink your dick or make you stupid or violent. Cigarettes leatherize your skin and kill your lungs. Even marijuana, everyone's favorite cuddly illegal substance, the river otter of the drug world, has plenty of problems that come trailing along with the high it brings. I'd mention what those problems are, but I have the munchies and can't stop laughing. And these little bugs are crawling on my legs but I can't find them. (And if you've never had that last reaction, then I've uh only heard about it from friends.) Even when we do something to our bodies or brains that have no clear and undeniable side effect, it can still affect us emotionally or mentally in ways we don't grasp until it's too late.

Is my belief highly flawed? Sure it is. I can't think of any serious karmic consequences from taking Advil on a regular basis, for example. Certainly other medications and medical procedures have minimal cost for tremendous reward.

So maybe my objection is an egotistical and snooty one. Maybe I object to overweight people cheating by getting lap bands and lipo. Maybe I object to less intelligent people dosing themselves into a more agreeable study stupor. Maybe I object to less gifted athletes dosing themselves into studlier rainmakers. It all reeks of Icarus and the Tower of Babel to me.

But both of those are just myths. So maybe at some point I'm supposed to put aside my childish philosophies and accept the realities of modern science. I'll chew it over on my way to pick up another coffee from Starbucks...

Mixed Messages?

The Fray--"Heartless (Kanye West cover)" (mp3)
Continental Drifters--"Mixed Messages" (mp3)

Two events from today have convinced me that I need to respond to Billy's post:

1) a man in Taiwan sat down on the toilet in his house and was promptly bitten on the penis by a large black and gold rat snake that came up through the drain.

2) moral arbitrator Donald Trump decided that Miss California can keep her crown after all.

Now, the first event has no connection to this post, except to serve as a cautionary tale.

But the second, the defense of Carrie Prejean, serves as a kind of coda to Billy's remarks. While what Judge Trump has ruled would seem to only determine whether or not a "beauty"gets to keep her crown, it does, as Billy suggests, tend to cloud the major issues. Her statement yesterday that "I'm a model; I'm a Christian" is offered as some kind of duality that attempts to link the two when they do not link. Is it that "because I'm a model and my tits are Christian tits, and therefore what I do with them is beyond reproach?" Or is it that "because I'm a Christian, I operate on a higher plane than people who want to destroy the institution of marriage by having same-sex unions" and my modelling is irrelevant? Does being both allow one to use a public platform for "free speech" designed to curtail the rights of others? I don't know.

But the bigger issue is probably this: if you're expecting Donald Trump and his ilk to make the societal calls that will best serve our children, you're wasting your time and breath.

Ponder this. Each year, four guys go to New Orleans over Spring Break. One expectation of that trip is that each of us burns a mix CD of favorites for the other three guys. Now, suppose one co-founder of this blog put the Kanye West song "Drunk and Hot Girls" onto his mix, and one of the other guys plays the mix in his car while picking up his young daughters from elementary school. Those girls hear the song, in fact, like the song, want to hear it over and over, sing along with it, and know all of the words. Now, suppose the other co-founder of this blog has never, ever censored what his daughters have listened to, that, back in the day, he, too, used to drive around with his daughters and they had group-sings of Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me." Yes, we were all singing together, "Picture this/we were both butt naked/bangin' on the bathroom floor."

Do any of you, and I mean any of you out there, really believe that a repetition of these lyrics or similar ones or watching Brittney Spears videos or watching the implied co-habitation on S Club 7 will cause any of these girls to have a propensity for pre-marital sex or "sluttish" behavior?

I don't believe it. Not one bit.

Since the beginning of civilization, parents have been seeking to protect their children from the influences of the larger society. This is a good instinct, one that we should nurture. But the tendency to blame that society or even to claim that that society is worse than it ever was is both simplistic and misguided.

Here's a different look at the problem. I do not believe that there is a national epidemic of births out of wedlock. Now, I would be a fool if I denied that there are a lot of births out of wedlock. But an epidemic? No way.

"A prevailing cause of sexual activity and promiscuity in girls is a poor relationship with their fathers."

Here's why: an epidemic, a national disease, if you will, implies that the idea is spreading from one unmarried child to the next like the swine flu. Does the friend of an unwed mother think, "Gee, she had one, I guess I'll have one, too?" I don't buy it. If we want to get at the issues of promiscuity and the resultant preganancies, we've got to stop talking epidemic and start talking one case at a time.

You see, as my wife the Child Development major/social worker has often told me, and as simple Internet research yesterday confirmed, one prevailing cause of sexual activity in young girls is a poor relationship with their fathers. When we realize that when a father is absent, emotionally distant, physically intimidating or otherwise detached from his daughter, his daughter is more likely to do whatever is necessary with another male, to reassure herself that "at least one man loves her," then, I think we get at the heart of the problem.

I read the statistics in the Washington Post article: 38% of children in this country are born out of wedlock. It's a fact, but facts don't always tell the whole story. Are there, perhaps, portions of society where many of those illegitimate children are coming from, and are those portions of society unfortunately and tragically portions where fathers are predominantly absent? That is the issue.

Of course, our society is in many ways a wreck. Just as certainly, in many ways, it is as good as it as ever been. And the messages have always been mixed, always will be mixed, at least as long as we continue to worship the dual gods of Christianity and Capitalism. The thing that is clear to me, that is a completely unmixed message, is that, just as has always been true, if we are going to protect our children, it has to start with the family and not with the blaming of outside influences.

Continental Drifters are available at Itunes; the Fray cover is out there.