Giving until It Hurts

Tuesday was a good day. The American people spoke pretty loudly in favor of more conservative principles and less liberal/progressivist/socialist policies. Yay! I wanted reassurance that America hadn’t gone as far astray as the last presidential election indicated. It is my belief that when the truth is presented accurately, people are likely to choose wisely.

So it’s a matter of finding ways to express truth accurately.

Some of what we conservatives need to do is understand how the other side thinks, because we probably both want freedom, prosperity and civilization, but for some reason the words don’t translate into their minds. They say we’re racist, bigoted, hard-hearted, violent—and a host of other epithets that we know are not true. What do they get out of telling those lies about us? Or believing those mischaracterizations?

Except for maybe some clinically mentally ill, people tend to do what they think will make them happy. They want to feel good. So let’s go with the assumption that those who choose more government intervention do it out of interest in living better lives.

William Voegeli wrote the Hillsdale College Imprimis piece for October: “The Case against Liberal Compassion.” He gives an excellent, and probably accurate, description of the opposition mindset. He starts by pointing out, as we all know, the War on Poverty has failed. Government social programs are an utter failure. And yet the big-government set keeps asking for more of that failure.

I think he’s asking some very good questions:

All along, while the welfare state was growing constantly, liberals were insisting constantly it wasn’t big enough or growing fast enough. So I wondered, five years ago, whether there is a Platonic ideal when it comes to the size of the welfare state—whether there is a point at which the welfare state has all the money, programs, personnel, and political support it needs, thereby rendering any further additions pointless. The answer, I concluded, is that there is no answer—the welfare state is a permanent work-in-progress, and its liberal advocates believe that however many resources it has, it always needs a great deal more.

That’s a starting point for understanding. But the next question is, since there can never be enough, and programs actually fail, and waste money, why is that OK? He doesn’t assume it’s because liberals are bad people. He says,

Readers could have concluded that liberals are never satisfied because they get up every morning thinking, “What can I do today to make government a little bigger, and the patch of ground where people live their lives completely unaffected by government power and benevolence a little smaller?” …

If we make that effort—an effort to understand committed liberals as they understand themselves—then we have to understand them as people who, by their own account, get up every morning asking, “What can I do today so that there’s a little less suffering in the world?”

He quotes President Obama as saying, “Kindness covers all of my political beliefs. When I think about what I’m fighting for, what gets me up every single day, that captures it just about as much as anything. Kindness; empathy—that sense that I have a stake in your success; that I’m going to make sure, just because [my daughters] are doing well, that’s not enough—I want your kids to do well also.”

If the president wants to be believed, he ought not use the IRS and NSA to target anyone who has a non-liberal/progressive/socialist approach to bettering the interrelated causes of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. To us conservative targets, he seems a lot more tyrannical than kind. But back to Voegeli’s explanations.

Compassion, he says, is used as a political weapon against anyone who disagrees, because that works:

Arguments and rhetoric that work—that impress voters and intimidate opponents—are used again and again. Those that prove ineffective are discarded. If conservatives had ever come up with a devastating, or even effective rebuttal to the accusation that they are heartless and mean-spirited: a) anyone could recite it by now; and, b) more importantly, liberals would have long ago stopped using rhetoric about liberal kindness versus conservative cruelty, for fear that the political risks of such language far outweighed any potential benefits.

But here’s the important thing: using the compassion claim as a political weapon—to gain power—is the end; actually accomplishing compassionate ends do not matter. In fact, getting to that end would eliminate the powerful political weapon, and that isn’t even desirable. That’s a pretty damning accusation, so we’d better look at the rest of Voegeli’s reasoning. He uses the recent Obamacare website debacle as an example. He quotes liberal columnist, and then makes his observation:

A sympathetic columnist, E. J. Dionne, wrote of the website’s crash-and-burn debut “There’s a lesson here that liberals apparently need to learn over and over: Good intentions without proper administration can undermine even the most noble of goals.” That such an elementary lesson is one liberals need to learn over and over suggests a fundamental defect in liberalism, however—something worse than careless or inept implementation of liberal policies.

That defect, I came to think, can be explained as follows: The problem with liberalism may be that no one knows how to get the government to do the benevolent things liberals want it to do. Or it may be, at least in some cases, that it just isn’t possible for the government to bring about what liberals want it to accomplish….It may also be, as conservatives have long argued, that achieving liberal goals, no matter how humane they sound, requires kinds and degrees of government coercion fundamentally incompatible with a government created to secure citizens’ inalienable rights, and deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.

So we are, possibly, at an impasse. Liberals want to be compassionate, and conservatives see that their efforts are fruitless, as well as dangerous to our freedoms. Liberals think we should just keep pushing toward the goal—living out a definition of insanity by doing the same thing over and over, more and more, and expecting different results. Conservatives think we we’ve tried the bad policies long enough to prove to everyone that they don’t work. It’s a $3 Trillion going concern. We’re spending $10,000 per American per year, much of it on people are not, by any stretch, impoverished, insecure, or suffering.

Liberals think conservatives are evil for not continuing the failing “compassionate” policies. But there’s the error. Conservatives want to actually relieve suffering, not just relieve their own conscience by expressing compassion pointlessly.

Voegeli quotes Rousseau on compassion, and then explains:

As Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Emile, “When the strength of an expansive soul makes me identify myself with my fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that I do not want him to suffer. I am interested in him for love of myself.”

We can see the problem. The whole point of compassion is for empathizers to feel better when awareness of another’s suffering provokes unease. But this ultimate purpose does not guarantee that empathizees will fare better.

Sometimes altruism actually causes harm to the target of sympathy. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Sometimes failure to help is part of the equation: “This is why so many government programs initiated to conquer a problem end up, instead, colonizing it by building sprawling settlements where the helpers and the helped are endlessly, increasingly co-dependent.”

He quotes political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain as saying, “Pity is about how deeply I can feel. And in order to feel this way, to experience the rush of my own pious reaction, I need victims the way an addict needs drugs.”

So, what we have with all these compassionate liberals, then, is a large segment of the population addicted to the self-satisfaction of “caring,” not to help, but to feel better about themselves. Simply put,

Because compassion gives me a self-regarding reason to care about your suffering, it’s more important for me to do something than to accomplish something. Once I’ve voted for, given a speech about, written an editorial endorsing, or held forth at a dinner party on the salutary generosity of some program to “address” your problem, my work is done, and I can feel the rush of my own pious reaction. There’s no need to stick around for the complex, frustrating, mundane work of making sure the program that made me feel better, just by being established and praised, has actually alleviated your suffering.

I think Voegeli is right in his assessment of the liberal mind. He is also accurate about the insanity of squandering more and more money on programs essentially designed to fail.

What we as conservatives need to do, then, is not simply deny the accusation that we’re hard-hearted. We need to clarify the truth of the situation. We need to connect the dots between government welfare and increased pain. We need to make it clear that, any time an American tax dollar is spent on something extra-Constitutional, it has the unintended consequence of causing harm in place of alleviating suffering.

There are times when charitable giving is appropriate—but never through government coercion. It’s not even possible for government to coerce charitable giving; its not logically, by definition, possible. We want to actually alleviate suffering. We will do it by following the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. That’s what works.

Let's speak the truth clearly. Government “giving” hurts people, and mostly hurts the very people designated to be helped. So if you’re in favor of government welfare, you’re in favor of hurting the most vulnerable among us. If you want to think of yourself as kind, you need to change your ways.

So It Has Come to This



xkcd.com

One of my most entertaining friends finds occasion to say this, and shared the comic. It’s true; it works in more situations than you would expect.

I was thinking about this, to lighten the mood following a book I recently read for book club. I can’t recommend the book as great literature. It was, however, a novelized way of discussing a scenario maybe we need to look at. The book was One Second After, by William R. Forstchen. It’s about what could happen following an EMP strike, or electromagnetic pulse.

by William R. Forstchen

In case that term doesn’t mean anything to you, here’s a definition from the foreword:

When an atomic bomb is detonated above the earth’s atmosphere, it can generate a “pulse wave,” which travels at the speed of light, and will short-circuit every electronic device that the “wave” touches on the earth’s surface. It is like a super lightning bolt striking next to your house and taking out your computer, except infinitely worse, for it will strike our entire nation, most likely without warning, and could destroy our entire complex electrical grid and everything attached into that grid (pp. 11-12).

The book explores what would happen if we were suddenly plunged into a pre-electrical world. Cars stop running and roll lifeless to the sides of roads (or until crashing into something stops them). Planes fall from the skies. Communication ceases. Water pumps—gone. Refrigeration—gone. Sources and transport for food and medicine—gone.

Some of the gruesome parts of the book happen at nursing homes and hospitals, where death in disgusting lack of dignity ensues. There's also gang warfare and mayhem of various savage sorts.

People have to come up with new ways to survive, to ration resources, to protect each other and the resources. They have to rethink all kinds of ethical issues, often on life and death issues.

I don’t really like conspiracy theory worries. (This book was, coincidentally, mentioned just a couple of days ago on Glenn Beck’s show, which sometimes goes that direction: here, if you're a subscriber.) So a few weeks ago I asked son Economic Sphere, who has interest and information on such things, hoping for assurance that this was unlikely. Instead he said, yes, it could happen. And it could conceivably take from a few months up to one to three years to rebuild technology to where we are now (if unhindered in the effort to rebuild). So that was disturbing.

Meanwhile, I happened to read the March issue of Hillsdale College publication Imprimis, with an article by Brian T. Kennedy, called “Early Warning: The Continuing Need for National Defense.” Kennedy mentions several recent attacks as evidence. One was The San Jose Attack. I only vaguely remembered this news story:

Last April 16, just outside of San Jose, California, a group of terrorists or soldiers, operating on American soil, attacked the Metcalf transmission substation in a military action aimed at disabling a part of America’s electrical infrastructure. The operation began at 1:00 a.m., when the attackers cut underground fiber optic cables, disabling communications and security systems. Thirty minutes later, using high-powered rifles, they began a 20-minute assault on the substation’s extra-large transformer and the cooling system that supports it. Police arrived at 1:50, but the shooters disappeared into the night. To this day there is no trace of them.

John Wellinghoff, then chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, would call this attack “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involved [America’s electrical] grid that has ever occurred.” Obviously it was a professional operation by skilled marksmen… with training in reconnaissance, stealth, and evasion. That the plan went undetected, the casings from the spent shells bore no fingerprints, and the perpetrators have not been caught, suggests a high degree of intelligence. Damage to the facility forced electricity to be rerouted to maintain the integrity of power transmission to the Silicon Valley, and repairs took several months.

The political response to the attack ranged from an immediate dismissal by the FBI of the idea it was a terrorist act—puzzling given its sophistication and its proximity in time to the Boston bombing [the day before]—to recognition by a bipartisan but small group of U.S. Senators and Representatives that defending America’s electrical grid is an urgent priority….

Kennedy also mentions the EMP possibility:

Such an explosion placed over the center of the U.S. could destroy the infrastructure that distributes electricity to consumers and industrial users in every state except Alaska and Hawaii. This phenomenon has been well understood sing the 1960s….

He also mentions that a severe solar storm, called Coronal Mass Ejections, could cause similar damage, and we’re overdue for such a storm. We had a near miss just last July.

Why should we worry? According to a 1990s EMP Commission, without electricity the US “has the industrial infrastructure to provide for only 30 million of its 300 million citizens.” Let that sink in a moment. Kennedy adds this question:

Given the potentially devastating consequences of failing to defend our sophisticated but vulnerable electrical grid, citizens might well wonder how it is that our government, which doesn’t bat an eye at spending billions of dollars on the most frivolous and wasteful projects, fails year after year to do so.

So, what can we learn from this electrical vulnerability?

·         Government isn’t reliable to “take care of” all our needs.

·         We’d better learn to be self-reliant and prepared.

In Forstchen’s book, he looks at what might have been:

Anyone with even the remotest understanding of EMP and the threat to the nation should have been going insane before it hit….The threat was a hundred times worse [than the possibility of saboteurs during WWII] and they did nothing, absolutely nothing….

If people knew the simple things to do on Day One, [a leader] already trained to react to an EMP, mobilize his forces and react quickly…if they had but a few simple provisions stocked away, the same way anyone who lives in hurricane or tornado country does, would they be in this mess?...

Food, bulk food, just a fifty-pound bag of rice or flour, shoes, batteries, an additional [insulin] test kit… dog food, a water filter so they didn’t have to boil what they now pulled out of the swamp green pool…I should have had those on hand (p. 258).

At least this makes me feel a little better. We live in hurricane/tornado territory. Especially since 2005 when Katrina hit, followed a couple of weeks later by Rita, people have paid attention. Plus, our Church has spent the last century encouraging members to gather a store of food. Start with a three-day emergency supply, a 72-hour kit. In fact, it was our Church that first taught people at the annual hurricane preparedness conference, about 72-hour kits. Now everybody seems to have caught on, and most people have some version of a go-bag for emergencies.

We were also taught to build up a month or two of stuff on hand. And then build up to a year’s supply. We were told it would be today’s version of Noah’s Ark, to have that supply on hand. Obedience, rather than fear, is the motivation. But, still, there’s some fear involved.

We resupplied our food supply back when we had the larger family living with us. There’s still some fear involved for me; I can’t eat any grains. There aren’t very many canned foods I can eat. Some that I used to be able to eat are now (just recently) starting to explode in my pantry. So I have some re-supplying to do.

We have a good freezer, but that requires electricity. During Hurricane Ike, 2008, when we lost power for eight days, we used a generator to keep our freezer, and our neighbors’, going for about ten hours a day. But we still lost a lot of food. Mr. Spherical Model says next time he will evacuate me, because I’m a lot of trouble to worry about.

That was short-term. It’s hard to picture getting through one or more years. And, while we garden, it’s not easy here in the clay-soiled back yard. Still, Mr. Spherical Model has a lot of experience as a Boy Scout leader and camper. He’s resourceful. We wouldn’t be the first to go. Although, I might need a couple of medical miracles once my three-month supply of certain things run out.

My real concern is civilization. It would take some serious readjustment to live without technology. But people have done it before—most of the millennia mankind has existed. And we have people among us with needed experience. Civilization is helped along by infrastructure, but it isn’t dependent on it. Civilization requires a people who are accountable to God first, and good to each other—by choice. In order to rebuild, we will need a people who choose to be good, and caring toward one another, and willing to work together.

Government could help protect us, better than it does. But, failing that, it’s not likely we can turn to government to inculcate us with needed humanity. We have to find that within ourselves.

It’s harder to be kind and thoughtful of others when we’re stressed, hungry, tired, hot or cold. We get irritable. We might get desperate. So, maybe we can use this relatively secure time to build our reserve of inner civilization—so it will be there when it’s most needed.

 

Personality Divide, Part II

In Monday’s post, we talked about the philosophical differences between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, and how their worldviews translate to a today’s political dichotomy.

Burke is about being thankful for whatever works, and conserving that in any effort toward improvement. Paine is about being outraged by whatever isn’t perfect, because scientific progress gives us no excuse for whatever doesn’t meet expectations.

It’s good to understand how different minds work, so we can find common ground and work together. But it might be true that one way of thinking leads to better outcomes (the one in which thinking and evidence are more valued than emotion and intention). So, in defense of the more-or-less Burkeian conservative mind, here is Part II.

There’s a tendency to think of “conservative” as boring, staid, unadventurous, and to think of “progressive”/liberal as trendy, “with it,” and up for revolution. Yet if you look at the ideas behind the American Revolution, what you see is the man-of-action effort to maintain the individual freedom Englishmen were supposed to have been guaranteed (see the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence), rather than lose them to the whim of a dictatorial monarch. They worked through all the institutional pathways first, but then they risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to separate from the Mother Country and live by the known principles of freedom in the New World.

You can see a similar sense of “revolution” in today’s public school debate. It might seem to go against expectation, but conservatives are much more open to alternatives to public school institutions. Maybe it’s because public schooling is a relatively new and not demonstrably successful (in fact often demonstrably less successful) system of educating the next generation. So you have people concerned about education, and finding better and best practices, open for experimentation—among “conservatives.”

And among conservatives you find both “conservative” and “fast action” personalities. There are those who patiently work for incremental changes—more local control, more school choice, vouchers for private school tuition. And you also find those with no faith in public schooling, who are willing to see radical reform—abolishment of public schooling, turning to all private schooling, homeschooling, combinations of classroom and online learning, and whatever a parent decides will work for their children. That “conservative” side, the “northern” hemisphere, accommodates both types of thinkers. (By personality, I’m typically more conservative, yet I was radically willing to pull my kids out of school and educate them myself for a decade, because kids only grow up once, and you can’t mess around and lose the opportunity.)

But in the public school debate, what we see is democrat/liberal/progressives absolutely bound to protect the status quo. Odd.

So the “progressive” experiment, which threw out the parent-run education system that had led to the great thinkers of our founding (and pretty much throughout the millennia), and replaced it with a “new” factory-style model with centralized one-size-fits-all control, hasn’t actually been an improvement. Yet there are “bitter clingers” who refuse to let go so the system can be improved. And those change resistors are the self-proclaimed “progressives.” Hmm.

There’s something about faith in science/knowledge and politics about the Spherical Model south (maybe a prideful refusal to acknowledge God’s hand in our lives), and sometimes Paine-type thinkers are led there. We know, from evidence, principle, and scripture, that tyranny, lower prosperity, and social decay lie in that southern hemisphere.

While I was exploring this idea of two types of minds, I reread the December Imprimis article, “A Rebirth of Liberty and Learning” by Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn. He begins with the assertion, “There is a proper way to educate and there is a proper way to govern, and they are both known.” His piece is about where we’ve gone wrong in governing and educating, and how to get redirected.

Dr. Larry Arnn, President of Hillsdale College
photo from Imprimis

What classical education seeks is ultimate good—and identifying how to live as a good person. There is an assumption that ultimate truth exists, and we should seek it. We are aided in this quest by building upon a core set of knowledge passed down through the ages, recognizable by its beauty—it’s ultimate goodness.

The “progressive” new way is to throw out the idea of educating for the purpose of building better human lives, and instead educating for career preparation—“students chiefly as factors of production.”

Dr. Arnn makes the comparison for us:

Although we all wish productive jobs for our children, as parents we know that they are not chiefly job seekers or factors of production. After all, how many of us, if we were given the choice of our children earning a lot of money and being bad, or struggling economically and being good, would choose the former?

Then he spends half a page quoting from a modern teachers guide for AP English, which says some nonsense about helping students “construct their own realities” that will somehow “help them live in a mad, mad world.”

Dr. Arnn summarizes:

Could the difference be more stark between the older and newer ways of education? Between leading students toward an understanding of the right way to live in a comprehensible world, and telling them they must shape their own values and make their own reality in a world gone mad? And by the way, think of the definition of “reality”; then think of making one’s own reality. Do you see that it destroys the meaning of the word to use it that way?

Then he show similar contrasts in ways of governing:

One way to see the difference is to see that laws in America used to be simple and beautiful. They were written with care, and citizens could read them quickly and understand their meaning. Of the four organic laws that founded America—the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Northwest Ordinance, and the Constitution of the United States—none of them was more than 4,500 words long.

Clear, understandable by those affected, based on long-held principles—those are the ways that tie in with ultimate good, truth, and beauty. That is the older way, yet it seems fresh and clear and connected to human dignity even centuries later. Then there’s the new, bureaucratic, central control way preferred by the “it’s old so let’s throw it out and do our own thing” seekers of progress. For instance,

…the Affordable Care Act, which when it was passed in 2010—and this does not include the countless rules and regulations it has generated over the past three years—ran to 363,086 words. This law—and in the true sense of the word it wasn’t a law at all, but something different—was not readable or comprehensible to any member of Congress who voted for it or to the citizens whose lives it was aimed at manipulating in a detailed and intrusive way. Could anything be uglier? And is it surprising, being governed in this way, that the richest nation in human history is going broke?

James Madison clearly declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” and then simply listed the God-given unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and he declares government’s purpose to defend these rights, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope, he misconstrues that clarity this way:

Implicit in [the Constitution’s] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or “ism,” any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course.

You can’t get from that point A to that point B; there is no such path. As Dr. Arnn put it, “How did Barack Obama come to believe something so foreign to America’s heritage as the idea that in the name of liberty we must reject absolute truths—which necessarily includes rejecting those truths I just quoted from the Declaration?”

Here’s what I think. There are known ways of living together as human beings that lead to the best (though still imperfect) outcomes. We can have freedom, prosperity, and civilization by living according to these known core principles. But we’d better teach these core principles far and wide, because, as truth and freedom seeker Ronald Reagan used to say,

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Books Worth Reading

This past week was Banned Book Week. Often an interesting list—often with the specific purpose of ridiculing the very idea of limiting books for children. I agree that banning Huckleberry Finn is pretty ridiculous (because it contains the “N” word, along with a whole lot of anti-racist perspective, beautifully told). But that doesn’t mean that every book should therefore be available and recommended.

One of the well used shelves in the home library

I’ve been thinking about youth literature again. Some weeks ago I read Hillsdale College’s Imprimis newsletter, which featured a piece by Meghan Cox Gurdon, the children’s book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. The piece was called “The Case for Good Taste in Children’s Books,” which was adapted from a speech given at Hillsdale in March. Here is some of her introduction:

[There’s an] increasingly dark current that runs through books classified as YA, for Young Adult—books aimed at readers between 12 and 18 years of age—a subset that has, in the four decades since Young Adult became a distinct category in fiction, become increasingly lurid, grotesque, profane, sexual, and ugly.

Books show us the world, and in that sense, too many books for adolescents act like funhouse mirrors, reflecting hideously distorted portrayals of life. Those of us who have grown up understand that the teen years can be fraught and turbulent—and for some kids, very unhappy—but at the same time we know that in the arc of human life, these years are brief. Today, too many novels for teenagers are long on the turbulence and short on a sense of perspective. Nor does it help that the narrative style that dominates Young Adult books is the first person present tense—“I, I, I,” and “now, now, now.” Writers use this device to create a feeling of urgency, to show solidarity with the reader and to make the reader feel that he or she is occupying the persona of the narrator. The trouble is that the first person present tense also erects a kind of verbal prison, keeping young readers in the turmoil of the moment just as their hormones tend to do. This narrative style reinforces the blinkers teenagers often seem to be wearing, rather than drawing them out and into the open.

If there is one thing teenagers do not need, it is encouragement to be more emotional and less cerebral. “Follow your passions” is about the worst advice in the world for someone who doesn’t yet know how to temper that with a wise, considered decision.

I agree with her about the ugliness of youth literature. I like reading a lot of YA fiction. Some of the better things being written are aimed at the YA audience. But she’s right that a lot of it is too intense, and too ugly for young people without a better, clearer world view.

She makes a very good point further into the piece, about decisions of taste:

Books tell children what to expect, what life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave—what the spectrum is. Books don’t just cater to tastes. They form tastes. They create norms—and as the examples above show, the norms young people take aware are not necessarily the norms adults intend. This is why I am skeptical of the social utility of so-called “problem novels”—books that have a troubled main character, such as a girl with a father who started raping her when she was a toddler and anonymously provides her with knives when she is a teenager hoping that she will cut herself to death. (This scenario is from Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 Young Adult novel, Scars, which School Library Journal hailed as “one heck of a good book.”) The argument in favor of such books is that they validate the real and terrible experiences of teenagers who have been abused, addicted, or raped—among other things. The problem is that the very act of detailing these pathologies, not just in one book but in many, normalizes them. And teenagers are all about identifying norms and adhering to them.

Suppose you have some young people (and there are many) who grow up in broken homes, with some chaos and ugliness in the home. Not enough expectation of honesty, or hard work. Not enough hope for things to get better. Nothing like an example of good fathering and mothering working in tandem to successfully raise children to fully launched adults.  There is a dearth of literature that tells children what a healthy household looks like. The stereotype now is broken and troubled homes. How do young people get the idea of a healthy norm if they get it neither from their real-life culture nor from their literature?

Mr. Spherical Model thinks I would be using my time well to write such children’s literature. That’s an appealing idea. I have gone so far as to invent some characters, and some of the surrounding milieu and action. I haven’t yet envisioned the story that will take over my life until I get it written. So, we’ll see. But I’d like to see more of that kind of story.

This past Thursday I came across an article that furthers Gurdon’s point, “Common Core-Approved Child Pornography.” Often when I find articles that make important points, I save a copy; however, while I recommend this one, some of the content in it is so graphic that I don’t want it permanently in my home. This PolitiChicks piece provides examples (with warnings about graphic content—these are in italics, if you must skip them) from a recommended youth novel, so you know there’s no exaggeration. It’s from the point of view of a child rapist, without judgment, so the reader can identify with the point of view of the perpetrator—including graphic descriptions of the violent sex acts, using words like “friendly,” “innocent,” and “tender.” If you are not nauseated, then ask yourself what you’ve been numbing yourself with.

The article itself asks the logical question about why anyone would think this was appropriate reading for children.

Using just the smallest amount of common sense we can deduce that if the book cannot be read aloud in the class, could not be viewable if it was a movie and couldn’t be played on the stereo if it was a CD, then why is it okay for it to be read and discussed; in school of all places! In fact, according to one lawyer, if the incidents in this book were a movie or a picture there would be a very clear cut case for prosecution for child pornography.

A library, not to mention the money needed to stock a library, is a scarce resource. Why use scarce resources on things that defile the mind—of anyone? If there are any parents out there that disagree and think this graphic portrayal of sex and violence is necessary to the education of their child, can’t they just buy it themselves and expose their child to it, without requiring the purchase of it by the rest of us taxpayers, and the subsequent exposure of it to our children, against our will?

When we’re talking about school bookshelves, there are plenty of books that ought not to be allotted real estate there. But rather than concentrating on what gets banned, I suggest we spend more energy and resources hunting for the literature that feeds and civilizes a growing mind, something that normalizes and exemplifies civilization. Let the searchers and selectors be parents and maybe trusted teachers—never some distant so-called expert.