Weekend Coffee Share: Welcome, Newcomers!

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I don’t have a whole lot of time to talk. I am on my way to NOLA (that’s how we say “New Orleans” on the internet) for Little Jedi’s birthday. If you don’t know who Little Jedi is, he is Diana’s youngling. My grandson is a year older, and he is also a Jedi, but since internet handles must be unique, we just call mine The Kid.

These two have their birthdays in the same month. One at the beginning, one at the end. And they always celebrate at least one or the other in company with one another.

I’d tell you I was so pleased the Weekend Coffee Share was featured on the WordPress Daily post this week. It generated so much interest I had to stay up way too late answering comments on the thread. Also: Sharing the link all over Facebook and writing this post.

And I’d tell you I have plans. I’ve got a post coming on children and gaming at Comparative Geeks as soon as I can finish it. Another one on cultural literacy outlined for Part Time Monster. You’ll just have to wonder about until I get it figured out.

Oh yeah. Me and Hannah are still scheming big-time. And eventually, when things settle down, the Feminist Friday Project is coming back. So lots to look forward to as we get later in the year.

Here, and on Facebook if you pay attention to me there, you can expect the political chatter to get hot again soon. I’ve taken a break to let things settle and do other stuff this week, but I haven’t forgotten the politics. Wisconsin votes Tuesday.

I’m gonna rip the Mississippi Legislature a new one soon over a boneheaded “religious freedom” bill which will accomplish nothing except cost our state millions of dollars in federal court.

I am not done with Donald Trump, either. I’m just getting started on him.

You coffee share regulars need to be mindful of new faces on the scene for the next couple of weeks and welcome them. I did my best on that Daily Post thread to give everyone who expressed interest a personal response and encourage them to join in. Me and Diana can’t hover over the linkup this weekend, because we’re both out doing the same thing with the same kids.

So take a minute to encourage a blogger you’ve never met, if they happen to pop up on the linky list or on the hashtag.

Have a fabulous weekend, and a piece of NOLA history.

An Open Letter To the Rest of You

I don’t care how you swing politically. Liberal, conservative, anarcho-syndaclist, socialst, communist, capitalist, Republican, Democrat. I just don’t care. I’m talking to you.

Our politics have gotten quite corrosive and infuriating lately. I am tired of it.

I had a conversation on this Facebook thread with a Republican yesterday. And basically we’re in the same boat. We both feel as though we aren’t represented in any meaningful way at present and we both feel as though we can agree on three general goals and work together to achieve them.

Here is what we want:

1.  A return to a rising standard of living for the general population of the U.S.
2.  More and better opportunities for young people of all races, genders, sexual orientations, and economic conditions.
3.  A rational foreign policy.

If you want these things, I don’t give a damn where you fall on the political spectrum.These are only general agreements and we will have profound disagreements about how this stuff gets done. I understand and accept that.

I am willing to negotiate in good faith, and I think the way these things get done is through negotiation.

Meme discovered at Eco-Style Life Beau Monde

If you are a beleaguered Republican moderate watching your party implode before your very eyes, I am sorry this is happening to you. All I want, in the simplest terms, is these three things. And I am totally willing to negotiate when it comes to how they get done.

I am extending my southern leftist hand to you, Republican moderates. You kinda want to take my hand. This is the best offer you’re getting this election cycle.

Done.

Little Pitchers have Big Ears

I’ll tell you a little story while we wait for the polls to close and election returns to come in.

If you’ve started following this blog recently, you might not know that I have an elementary-aged grandson who I spend copious amounts of time with. He’s truly precocious when it comes to analyzing things. That’s because he’s one of those mechanically-inclined little dudes who prefers math to language arts. And because I’ve been teaching him to pull complex ideas apart and look at their constituent pieces as a way of finding their meaning since before he could speak in grammatically-correct sentences.

Photo by Gene’O, 2015.

The little fella is aware there’s an election on. We’ve done our best not to talk about it in too much detail with him. My approach has been to not bring it up, but when he does, to give him honest, age-appropriate answers. So he knows I’m voting for the Dem in November, but we’ve not talked in any detail about  the various candidates.

The sort of political talk you’ve been seeing here and on my Facebook timeline these last few weeks is not the sort of stuff you’ll hear in my house if the kid is awake. And we do our best to minimize his exposure to the news, because most nights, it’s full of horrors. I don’t think I’m doing him a disservice by waiting until he’s 9 to let him watch the full news every night.

The reason we do things this way is because while we want him to grow up to be a tolerant, engaged citizen who understands his rights and sees the inequalities all around him, we don’t want to just put our politics in his head until he’s old enough to think about politics critically. I’ll be happy if he grows up to agree with my politics 100%. But I don’t want that to happen because I told him to, or because we have such a strong emotional bond. I want him to form his own political views rationally and to know why he takes the positions he eventually takes.

He knows I write and publish things on the internet for anyone in the world to see if I can grab their attention, and he’s fascinated by the whole thing. If I allow him, he’ll stand and read over my shoulder as I write. (I’ve had to explain to him recently that writers find this annoying.) So, yesterday he saw me editing a post I’m working on which includes this image:

He decided, since I was obviously writing about the election, to give me his opinion on Donald Trump. So of course I had to shut my editing session down and interrogate him about where he got his information and how he formed his opinion. What follows is a lightly-edited transcript of our conversation.

Kid: I HATE Trump.

Me: You know we don’t hate people. Not even people we dislike. Because there’s a little good in even the worst people, and hating folks makes us want to fight instead of talking and listening.

Kid: Well, I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, REALLY dislike him. I dislike him all the way to Pluto and back. (He seriously uses this many “reallys” to express strong emotion. If anything, I’m understating. I sometimes have to interrupt the “reallys” and tell him I understand to get him to continue with his thought.)

Me: Okay. Tell me why you feel that way.

Kid: Trump wants to be one of them president-kings and he will command us all to use the n-word.

Me: *Shocked and alarmed, but proud of the racial sensitivity there* Where are you getting this? Are you talking to other grownups about this that I don’t know about?

Kid: No. That’s just what I think.

Me: Talking about it with your friends at school?

Kid: *Shakes head unconvincingly and stands up from his chair so he can march around the room while he delivers this next bit.* He will make us all sing “Trump! Trump! Trump! He is the greatest! Trump! Trump! Trump! He is the greatest!”

Me: You MUST tell me why you think these things. If you’re getting them from someone else, that’s a thing your Paw needs to know about.

Kid: I can just see it in his eyes.

I interrogated him a bit more, but he insisted these opinions are his own, formed from overhearing snippets of network news and seeing the occasional photo of Trump while eaves-watching my blogging and Facebooking.

I believe he came up with this on his own, or else got it from other kids just based on the language he used. He has good recall when it comes to remembering exactly what others say, and I can generally tell when he’s repeating something he’s gotten from adults.

Just for example, when he asked me who I was voting for several weeks ago. I told him either Clinton or Sanders. His response: “I like Bernie Sanders. He is an intelligent man.” And when I asked him how he felt about Hillary Clinton he said “She is untrustworthy.” I knew, based on the language, not only that he was repeating something he’d heard a grownup say. I even knew which grownup.

This Trump thing is different. It’s either an honest, original assessment from a very perceptive little boy, or a pastiche of things he’s heard on the playground. I have extremely mixed feelings about this. I’m proud of the overall awareness the little dude’s showing here and pleased he’s come to the same conclusion as me without my direct intervention.

I’m also sad that a second-grader is looking at the Presidential election and this is what he’s seeing. My first real political awakening was at about his age, during the Carter-Reagan race in 1980 (I wanted Carter to win). So on balance, I can’t say whether all this is a good thing, or a bad thing. But it sure is interesting.

An hour after we were done with our conversation, it came to my attention that the owner of Humans of New York has published a withering critique of Donald Trump and vowed to work against him. Aside from the part where Humans of N.Y. is warning us not to let Trump off the hook when he inevitably tacks to the center, the statement pretty much says what the kid said, only in the language of a sophisticated East Coast journalist. I was struck by it.

And today I found this. If you need further confirmation that yes, what’s going on at these Trump rallies is not only corrosive, but dangerous, here’s your sign. It’s about a guy who went undercover to a Trump rally to try and figure out why his followers are acting the way they are and better see them as humans, so as not to just demonize them because he disagrees with what they’re doing. A long read and it will make you a little sick to your stomach. But worthy of your time.

I’ll have stuff to say on Facebook once the polls close tonight, and a post here about it tomorrow or the day after. Everything I’m posting about this election on Facebook is public. You can find me here if you just want to follow along. And I have a fairly open policy for accepting friend requests.