President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Is there a more empty family than the Trumps?

 

Five days in quarantine with Borat would be a very, very, long time.

It is relatively important. I realize in writing this that most of the people on this board are pretty comfortable when it comes to resources and overall quality of life. It's a good bet that you don't realize how much the experiences you are mentioning are not reliable givens to a big swath of the population in this country, much less much of the rest of the world. Our concept of "childhood" extends far past most cultures.

A month or two back, WriteThinking mentioned a young relative who told them how their generation will be remembered as one who overcame a lot. (I might be misremembering the poster and apologize if that is the case.) They were on the nose about that. The young people now, like those who had to deal with the peaks and valleys of life in the early Twentieth Century are going to come out of this with coping mechanisms we adults never had to develop.

I am not saying, "It's good fer ya! Builds character!" We have become too set in a pattern where we predicate our expectations on a comparative scale with those of our parents and grandparents. We forget that "The American Experience" as we know it is less than 100 years old. It's a blink of an eye in historic terms. Kids are sad at the loss, but the ones I know who are handling it are not being told what they are missing. They are being shown ways to connect, ways to rebuild, and ways to make things better.

This summer, I co-taught a module on archaeology with a former classmate for seventh through ninth graders. She's the PhD, I provided the patience and comic relief. At one point, we were discussing some of the recent discoveries in Western Europe that related to the Black Plague. The students, who were an inquisitive, continually curious lot, started connecting the dots in an on-the-ground, individual way. How things changed for them, how they may have started to think and act differently, and so on.

What we were discussing was long enough ago that it would have been easy to see it as an abstract, long ago thing. They weren't having it. How did those people deal with such a massive disruption? What did it mean for them? Almost all of the class would have been somewhere else doing something else if it hadn't been for the pandemic. Two best friends were slated to spend the summer at saddle camp, other children were supposed to attend various arts camps, a mini-UN, Governor's schools, and one girl was on track to start college early. The pandemic wiped out all of it.

There were kids who missed their friends and what they thought life should be and they cried and we took the stance that our time was theirs. We created space and an emotional buddy system so everyone had support and the option to talk it out with peers and us if they wanted. We were there to teach kids about protohominids and Monhenjo Daro, but we were also there to help these people stay engaged and connected and keep their synapses firing.

Our weekly tests were both data-based and creative. The week after we talked about the Black Plague sites, I wrote the creative question: We have seen how we are left with remains and artifacts to put together a people's story. The more we can observe and put these things in part of a bigger story, the better we know them. What do you think?

A seventh grader floored me with this response (paraphrased here because I don't have the original in front of me, but it's pretty close.):

Ms. Madison and Ms. Unger, remains aren't things, they're people. It's like if I left my house and never came back and it just set there for hundreds of years and then someone decided to go in and figure me out by what was there. People have always been through a lot. I see how things changed and they changed too so they could to live. My great-grandparents told me about wars and being poor and tornadoes. Someday, I will tell my kids and their kids and their kids about the time everything changed here.

My Dad said this and I thought it was good then I wrote it down. You can either live in the present or die with the past. What's happening now is not fair. You do what you have to now and then build a better world.

I want to build a new world.

Podding has already started. Some households are coordinating how they shelter and sharing their lives with each other. A few have not lasted. One friend in Louisville was in a cluster of five families that dwindled down as people were exposed and a few had people who tested positive in their households. Will this continue or be a trend? I don't know. If communal living was right for everyone, we'd see more co-housing and closed compounds.

 

Probably repetitive here.
Those 18-year-olds who couldn't go to the prom, etc. and had their high school graduation consist of standing in the front yard while friends drove by blowing car horns, are now eligible to vote. Those missed experiences will surely guide them.

 

Can't be said enough.

 

Thing is, I cannot respect gingerbread and OscarMadison more than I do now. I get their points.

But ... I didn't bother with prom either junior or senior year. No woman was interested in me, I wasn't about to muster up the courage to ask a young woman to go, I didn't want to spend a obscene amount of money to go and I worked weekends in food service (worked weekdays with an officials' organization - valuable skills keeping books in basketball and softball used in sports journalism down the road - and band obligations kept me pretty busy, a big reason I don't apologize for not trying to fill my itinerary nowadays). My band director was murdered in cold blood three months before high school graduation, so there was zero enjoyment there ... just basically get through all the BS associated with graduation and move on.

The former was my full responsibility and, even then, I knew that. The latter I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. It affected me almost 30 years ago, and I still have nightmares about it.

This isn't about me. But I am saying that we all have events that screw up our normally scheduled lives and we move on. Mine were more specific and, thank goodness, didn't affect millions or billions of lives like a pandemic has. But people have to adjust - like or not, fair or not - and move on. Not trying to preach "tough luck," just that "life happens." The whole point is to stay safe to make this an interruption as opposed to a more life-altering event.

 

We started to see this in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shootings, which begat March For Our Lives. The days we can just write off the youth vote as insignificant are long gone.

 

I really do get what everybody is saying. I tend to vacillate among points of view. Like you, I didn't go to my prom. I wasn't dating anyone at the time, so it seemed senseless to spend that much money on going with a friend. I attended my high school graduation but skipped the parties after. I was always so disconnected from my classmates. I had a few friends, but nobody I was that interested in seeing that night. I regretted that for maybe five minutes and moved on. I never felt any great loss for missing those experiences, though I know they are huge moments for many other people.

I had another long talk with my daughter about this last night. She is a senior in high school, and she keeps having to adjust her expectations. She has been in chorus since middle school This was the year she was going to be the senior who gets to give a speech and present a gift to the chorus director, who they all love. (He really is great, good at his job and easily the most likable teacher she has had in her academic career.) She already accepted that she won't get that moment. Winter indoor track is probably gone, too. She was going into the building every third day, but when they started having quarantines in the district due to positive tests, she decided that she wasn't getting that much more out of the days she was there in person and chose to go all-virtual. I thought it was a very mature decision.

My daughter has fallen back to wanting three things. She wants her senior season of outdoor track in the spring. She wants a prom. She wants graduation. She understands all of those will probably be modified versions of normal at best. She is frustrated and there have been some tearful moments, but overall she has been smart and brave about the whole damn thing. She is taking a responsible approach to her school work and college applications. She has made me proud. Makes me think her mom has done some things right, at least, but I do hurt for her. I am angry for her. I am angry at G-d, fate, and the world for this happening now and taking things from so many people, including my little girl. I am angry at the idiots in our country who have made this worse than it needed to be. More than anything, that makes me nervous and tense when I think about the election. I still stubbornly use the title, but my disdain for President Trump grows every day. Part of that is realizing that his selfishness and incompetence have hurt so many people. Part of it is thinking that one of those people hurt, though obviously in a smaller way than those who got sick, has been my little girl.

 

This isn't a "where were you when President Kennedy was shot/Challenger imploded/9-11 occured?"

This is much more of a Spanish Flu/Great Depression/World War II generation-changing event. Other than Vietnam, Boomers really didn't have anything close. Definitely no one younger than us has been through this.

Our lives will be different. But those people affected by the Great Depression and the war eventually rebuilt their lives. Our kids will, too. Let's hope they come out way better for the experience. I hope they find innovative ways to save the world.

 

Speaking of cocaine ...

 

Sam Mills 51, I'm sorry. It's wrenching to lose much-loved teachers way too soon.

I hope those people keep that fire going.

Sounds like she is brave. They need the space and safety to mourn. It's not as dire as dying alone on a vent or other things that have happened recently, but it is still a hole blown through someone's life. As we say around here, it sounds like y'all done good as parents.

 

I think they will.

 

I get what you’re saying. But at the same time, as we all get older, and have more life experiences, both good and bad, it’s easier to see something like missing one’s prom as just a little thing about missing a fancy party for one night in your life, or chalking up a missed graduation as just skipping a ceremony, because we know now that we’re likely to have some wonderful memories as we get older.

But to a teenager, whose mind is not fully developed anyways, who hasn’t had a lot of life experiences, and who have been thinking about those milestone days, it can be depressing as hell, because to a teen, you always think that nothing will ever top that moment. Even though we know as adults that it’s not true, as teens, those milestones, or even minor stuff, are major events they are dreaming about , and missing them makes them feel like they’re missing out and is devastating for them.

I wasn’t popular, by no means in high school, and Teenage Me dreamed for years of having a beautiful senior prom date and a romantic night. Turns out, I went with a friend, and we had a fun non-romantic time. I was fine with that (the couple we went with actually broke up that night, so there as that drama to witness) and grateful for the memory. Yet, I can’t imagine being a teen and not being able to even have any memory at all.