ARMS AND THE TEACHER: READING, WRITING & MARKSMANSHIP

(Caution! Trigger Warning: This post is about firearms in schools. Some passages may seriously agitate, irritate, exasperate or infuriate, particularly If you have the Second Amendment tattooed on your shooting arm, or routinely strap on a Smith and Wesson when stepping out to water the plants. In the interest of your health and my safety, you should probably leave now.)

The Washington Post reported today that Beth Dixon, a 63-year-old teacher at Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley Christian School, accidentally left her holstered pistol in a school bathroom, fully loaded and resting on the top of the toilet tank. The facility in question, police told the Post, was a single-unit, unisex restroom, the kind set aside in Virginia and North Carolina for transgender patrons, with or without guns. At Cumberland Christian, this bathroom is also used by elementary school students between the ages of 6 and 8. One of those kids spotted the teacher’s piece on the tank and alerted school authorities. Ms. Dixon quickly reclaimed her weapon and quit her job.

The incident, however, got the school thinking about what kind of a policy it should have on guns in the classroom (and bathroom). It might have been the last school in America without such a policy. The Associated Press reported that Cumberland Christian now wants to ban guns except for those specifically authorized by the administration. All things considered, that’s a pretty progressive gun standard.

The federal Gun-Free Schools Act of 1994, theoretically banned guns from school property, but contained a gaping loophole that was quickly filled by a slew of loopy state legislatures. In effect, if a state lets people carry guns in public, they can carry them right into the schoolhouse. The Washington Post reported two years ago that 20 states have laws expressly permitting licensed adults to bring guns into schools.

In Claude, Texas, there is a sign on the schoolhouse lawn boasting that the faculty is armed. Despite a growing concern over the quality of our schools and lack of sufficient funding, many districts are requiring teachers to take in-service training at shooting ranges. Johnny might not be able to read, but his teacher can hit the bullseye at 50 yards. Sadly, this rush to arm the faculty did not pause for reflection after an Idaho State University instructor accidentally shot himself in the foot during chemistry lab.

On the other side of the bullet, many schools are proudly enforcing a zero tolerance standard when it comes to students and guns. Forget that the teachers are armed to the hilt; these kids have to learn that guns are bad. A seven-year-old boy who brought a water pistol and a Nerf gun to school in Portsmouth, Virginia was suspended for 10 days and is now facing expulsion. A five-year-old girl was suspended from Kindergarten in Brighton, Colorado after she carried her pink Princess Bubble Gun into her classroom. While Texas teachers are packing heat, a seventh grader in suburban Houston was disciplined for wearing a “Star Wars – The Force Awakens” shirt because it depicted a Stormtrooper holding a weapon.” If the Stormtrooper had been a certified teacher, it might have been okay.

This all becomes even crazier at the college level. The carrying of concealed handguns is now legal in Texas higher education classrooms. However, it is a violation of Texas law for a student to possess a dildo or similar sex toy. That duplicity earned the University of Texas in Austin major agitation by returning students this month. Their irresistible campaign theme: “Cocks Not Glocks”. Not quite as poetic as “Make Love, Not War”, but the point is well taken.

This continually escalating domestic arms race is beyond baffling. Guns,, once an instrument of war, crime fighting and food gathering, have evolved into an angry political symbol. All the mass shootings, which now occur with the regularity of a sunrise, bring new calls to arm the populace. If it happens in a school, arm the teachers; if it’s a bar, arm the drinkers, a workplace, arm the workers. It’s like a bizarre science fiction movie. And you just know there won’t be a happy ending.

WELLS FARGO CEO: THE MINIONS DID IT

Anyone who really hates banks has got to love Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. The guy went public today for the first time since his company was accused of major shenanigans. He made Old Man Potter, the villain banker from “It’s a Wonderful Life” look like a good Samaritan. Wells Fargo was fined $185 million last week after it was caught creating more than 2 million bogus accounts without customer consent.

After several days of silence, the bank’s boss told the Wall Street Journal that neither the company’s culture or values were to blame. No, not at all. The dirty rotten scoundrels were the miscreant employees who dared to sully the Wells Fargo brand by their corrupt actions. He wants the world to know that the bad apples were immediately fired. All 5,300 of them. That’s right: thousands of low level employees somehow simultaneously created more than 2 million fake accounts, presumably in the dark of night without anyone at an executive level being any the wiser.

With a straight face, Stumpf broke all corporate records for throwing the most employees under the bus at one time. Additional busses had to be summoned. “I wish it would be zero,” the CEO told the Journal, “but if they’re not going to do the thing that we ask them to do – put customers first, honor our vision and values – I don’t want them here. I really don’t.”

And just what, pray tell, would the Wells Fargo vision and values entail? According to a lawsuit filed by the City of Los Angeles, the bank imposed a goal on its employees of selling at least eight financial products to each customer, calling it the “Gr-eight Initiative.” The suit says district managers monitored employee progress toward the goal so closely that they reviewed their performance with them four times a day, at 11 a.m., 1 p.m., 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. “The sales pressure from management was unbearable”, a former employee told CNN. Jobs were on the line.

The lofty sounding term, “goal” is a euphemism in most sales environments, meaning that those who don’t meet the goal are fired. To keep their jobs, 5,300 employees created phony credit card and other accounts for customers who never authorized them or knew they existed. This cross-sell campaign was so successful for Wells Fargo that its executive vice president for sales, Carrie Tolstedt, made $9 million in total pay last year, a reward, according to CNN, for “continued growth in primary checking customers” and other metrics. She is scheduled to retire at the end of the year with a $124 million package. The fact that Tolstedt’s performance came, at least in part, on the backs of the 5,300 discharged minions who phonied up all those accounts apparently squares just fine with Wells Fargo’s “vision and values”.

The company paid the regulatory fine without admitting or denying guilt. Even banks, of course, are entitled to mount a defense while maintaining the presumption of innocence. On the other hand, if I were a juror, and applying common sense to these facts, there is no way I could find that 5,300 employees independently came up with the same scam at the same time, allowing a totally innocent corporate management to benefit, right up until they were caught. There is but one guilty party in this caper and that is the Wells Fargo vision and values that pushed employees to reach a goal at any cost.

BODY SHAMING THE NEWS

America may be on the verge of electing its first woman president, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that rampant sexism has left the building. That point was just pounded home in a very personal way. A child kidnapping case that gripped the hearts of Minnesotans for 27 years was solved last week. The man who snatched, sexually assaulted and murdered 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in 1989 confessed and led authorities to the child’s body. I lived in Minnesota when Jacob was kidnapped and know only too well how visceral that crime was – and is – to Minnesotans. News that his remains had been found quickly sucked the air out of the entire state. It was all anyone talked about.

Well, almost. That, and the couture of a young female television reporter. The diversion came from a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist who noted that Jana Shortal wore jeans on TV while reporting Jacob’s story and didn’t look good in them. Cheryl Johnson, whose column is called simply “CJ”, wrote that somebody at the local NBC affiliate “didn’t do Jana Shortal any favors with that wide camera shot. . .She looked great from the waist up in a polka-dot shirt and cool blazer, but the skinny jeans did not work. I was among a number of media types who found them inappropriate and, given the gravity of the day’s subject, downright jarring.”

So much for Minnesota Nice. So much for Jana’s bold and daring efforts to abandon what she calls the “lady uniform” as a prerequisite for delivering the news, a lingering legacy of the Roger Ailes school for women in broadcast journalism. Jana, who has been doing a daily breaking news show for the past year, goes on camera in her own clothes because the emphasis is on what she is reporting, not on how she looks. That should not be, but unfortunately is, a revolutionary move for television news in 2016. There was, to say the least, a major firestorm over the C.J. column, which the newspaper promptly pulled from its website and replaced with a full-throated apology.

It is so sad that there are still forces measuring the worth of a woman by how she looks, and a man by what he does. I wrote a research paper on this subject in 1983. It described and quantified a societal tyranny in which women had to either conform to the way a male-dominated culture insisted they look, or pay the price. Mostly, they paid the price. The currency was life threatening eating disorders, chronic stress and/or repeated rejections for the better jobs as a result of not looking the part. The phenomena back then was called “lookism,” and it painfully enforced this toxic double standard. Today, the term is “body shaming” and, as the newspaper columnist demonstrated, it is every bit as insidious.

I gathered the studies more than 30 years ago, all of them showing how companies made hiring, pay and promotional decisions on the basis of how women looked and on what men could do. The empirical evidence was staggering, but not surprising. I was a morbidly obese man when my journalism career took off in the 1970s. Despite being between 200 and 300 pounds overweight, I had the choice of beats on my newspaper and won countless awards and accolades. Women just as capable, if not more, were held back if they were carrying an extra 25 pounds or just didn’t have the “right look”.

Nearly two generations later, not much has changed. Jana Shortal is critiqued not on the quality of her reporting, but on the cut of her jeans. We have a Republican presidential candidate who insults men based on their behavior, but reserves adjectives like fat, ugly and disgusting for the women he wants to diminish.

I cringed when I read Jana’s Facebook reply to the CJ column. Although eloquent and poignant, it was painfully obvious that the columnist’s words hit her hard. A short snippet from her post: “I wore my clothes. The clothes it took me a very long time to feel comfortable in no thanks to the bullies like you who tried to shame me out of them.”


Here was this bright, strong, young woman, anchoring her own news show in a major regional market, and doing it her way, making it about the journalism instead of about herself. And right smack in the middle of reporting the biggest local story of the year, she is attacked by a veteran columnist for not looking good in skinny jeans. It stung something fierce because, far below the intellectual surface of gender equality, complete with its admonishment of body shaming, lurks this ancient notion that women, no matter what else they do, must “look good” doing it. It’s a notion that needs to die. Now.

CLOWNS: AN UNMEASURED DEMOGRAPHIC

As if this crazy season of identity politics wasn’t screwed up enough, somebody in the Carolinas decided to send in the clowns. You may have missed the New York Times’ exceptional coverage of this alarming clown crisis. After all, it’s barely been 24 hours since Apple revealed its decision to omit the headphone jack from the iPhone 7. A person can take on only so much emotional trauma at one time. So here’s a recap:

It started two weeks ago in Greenville County, S.C. with multiple sightings of “creepy clowns”. Depending on the report, the clowns either offered children money to go into the woods with them or simply stood under a late-night streetlight and waved. Once, the Times reported, a clown jumped out of nowhere and stared at a woman as she left a laundromat. Then the action moved to North Carolina where Winston-Salem police responded to a number of calls complaining of clowns offering treats to children. No arrests have been made, and the Times described the situation in both states as one of “panic.” It noted local news reports from Greensboro, N.C. of a man with a machete who chased a clown into the woods but did not catch him.

(As an aside, the male pronoun is being used here because eye witnesses described the clowns as men wearing white overalls, white gloves, large red shoes with a white face, bushy red hair with a matching red nose. With that disguise, however, there is enough gender ambiguity that these clowns need to be very careful in choosing a public restroom in North Carolina. It is a crime there to enter a loo not designated for your birth sex. A wise clown would do well to tape a birth certificate to his seltzer bottle; an even wiser clown would stay the hell out of North Carolina.)

It took less than 36 hours for this bozo calamity to evolve into a political issue. Enter one Michael Becvar, with the clown name of Sir Toony Van Dukes. He runs the website Just For Clowns and he told the Times that his people are being unfairly profiled and persecuted. He wondered aloud to a Times reporter what would have happened “if instead of clowns, people were dressing up as aliens, witches, zombies or doctors? What if they were wearing hospital scrubs, lab coats and a stethoscope around their neck? Would the news report that doctors were hiding in the woods trying to lure kids with candy?” Mark my words: Sir Toony will have a “Clown Lives Matter” sign on his clown car before the end of the week.

This must be driving the pollsters crazy. North Carolina is a swing state where Clinton and Trump are running neck and neck, but nobody has been measuring the clown/anti-clown vote. Given the white face description of the suspects, along with the speculation that they are men, it would be easy to assume that the clown vote will break for Trump, particularly if they never graduated from clown college. Then again, we have no way of knowing what is under that disguise. Peel off the white face paint and you might find a female Latino with an advanced degree in theology. But it is highly unlikely.

Of course, this election is not just about identity politics. It’s also about fear. The demographic of people who are afraid of the Great Other – anyone who doesn’t look, talk or act like them – is breaking big for Trump. He might just tap into that constituency by promising, within 30 days of taking office, to round up all the clowns and send them back to wherever they came from. “Make America Clown Free Again!” would fit well on a red baseball cap. In other words, Trump could end up with both the clown and anti-clown vote. Where does that leave Hillary? Right back on Saturday Night Live, singing the chorus from that old Stealers Wheel tune:

“There’s clowns to the left of me,
Jokers to the right, here I am
Stuck in the Middle with you.”

SUBCONTRACTING THE AMERICAN DREAM

Just when we thought this whole craze of farming out good American jobs to third world countries couldn’t get any worse, the Air Force is now giving uniformed pilot work to Afghan and Iraqi subcontractors. The New York Times reported yesterday that the reconnaissance missions against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups are largely piloted by local drone contractors. And I thought it was bad when newspapers shipped out the copy editing function to people in India for $4.95 a day, even though they didn’t know if Snelling was a street, an avenue or a nail salon.

At least the defense department has some internal limits on subcontracting, a seemingly foreign concept in the private sector. According to the Times, the contracted drone pilots can’t be used to kill someone. They can go on spying missions and locate the target to be killed, but the button that actually obliterates the enemy – and any civilians who get in the way – must be pushed by a real, live Air Force employee. Still, it seems that we are perilously close to being able to completely contract out the next war.

Of course, that would be a real bummer for the economy. World War II was one of the country’s biggest economic booms. It created so many jobs, even women were allowed to work, at least until the guys came home. But, whether in war or peace, nobody in charge is really giving much thought to what happens when all the real jobs are gone.

The University of Michigan’s Gerald Davis has a new book (“The Vanishing American Corporation”) addressing what might well be the most urgent and perplexing problem facing our economy: the permanent disintegration of employment. Gone are the days, Davis says, when employees were the lifeblood of a corporation. Instead, they are anathema to the new corporate goal of serving only the economic interests of shareholders. And that, Davis notes, is much better done with contractors, collaborators and any other source that can be kept off a permanent payroll and benefit schedule. Following the lead of Nike, Apple, Sara Lee and others, the dominant industry trend right now is for companies to focus on design and brand management with a drastically scaled down employee force, and then contact out all manufacturing and other work to east Asia or a similar venue.

To make matters worse, according to Davis, the new digital startups all follow the same personnel architecture: a very limited number of employees and a gazillion-and-a-half freelancers and contractors. He offers a staggering illustration: the combined workforces of Google, Facebook, Yelp, Zynga, LinkedIn, Zillow, Tableau, Zulily and Box is less than the number of employees who worked for Blockbuster in 2005. In other words, millions of jobs have gone and are not coming back. The growing trend is quickly moving from stable employment to serial and multiple contracting gigs. Think Uber and Airbnb mixed with, say, freelance landscaping. For many, the American Dream has become a struggle to meet basic security needs.

The most frightening thing in this election year – well, one of them anyway – is the total silence on how to overcome this toxic structural employment problem. Hillary Clinton has proposed massive retraining programs for people needing a job, but has said nothing about where those jobs may come from in this employment-adverse economy. Bernie Sanders pushed for a major jobs program through infrastructure repair, a meaningful but incomplete and temporary fix. Donald Trump says he will create “really, really great, jobs, I mean totally terrific jobs” without offering a hint as to the how or what.

Meanwhile, the “sharing economy,” with its low-pay-as-you-go contracting and no retirement plan in sight, keeps right on growing and, by default, rewriting and rewiring the new American Way of Life. Surely there must be someone on Capitol Hill or in the White House who can stop this train long enough to figure out how to build an economy that serves us all. If there isn’t, maybe we can contract someone to do it for us.

QUARTERBACK SNEAK CAUSES RENEWED FOCUS ON POLICE BIAS

Fueled by a life-long anti-sports bias that is difficult to explain, even to myself, I ignored initial news reports about a football player refusing to stand up for the national anthem. I caught only the headline, so I knew this was a protest over recent police shootings of young black men. That’s an issue I’ve tried to follow, but I wasn’t all that interested in whatever it was that a professional jock had to say about it. A few days later, the headlines changed. The guy was now kneeling for the national anthem out of respect for veterans. I immediately read the story and then caught up on the earlier reports. I don’t care much for football, but I’m a sucker for shrewd political strategy.

Colin Kaepernick, I learned, is a San Francisco 49er quarterback. That may explain why he seems unusually adept at distinguishing a strategy from a tactic. If I get the game right, a pass is a tactic. Standing alone, all that does is put the ball in the air for a small period of time. A strategy is a detailed way of executing the pass so that the ball eventually ends up in the desired destination. I have no idea what kind of a quarterback Kaepernick is, but off the field, I have to say I like his moves.

Politically, this player’s goal was to crank up the heat on what he and many others see as police racism: the profiling, the brutality, the shootings. That strikes me as a noble objective. Now, wait a minute! Before you slam your electronic device against the wall and delete me from your address book, hear me out. Most cops are decent, hard working public servants who have no racial animosity and are highly skilled in defusing tense situations with minimal force. People who say that all police officers are racist are as wrong as those who say none are. That we have a significant community policing problem in desperate need of being addressed is beyond dispute. Most political figures throughout the spectrum – Donald Trump included – acknowledge that.

Yet, this country is in the throes of serious attention deficit disorder when it comes to acting on this matter. The push for reform was on after Michael Brown was killed by a Ferguson police officer two years ago. The momentum quickly died. Then Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police. Talk of change started again and then faded. And the pattern continued through the deaths of Tony Robinson in Madison, Eric Harris in Tulsa, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, and on and on and on. These countless deaths should have had a cumulative effect on our national psyche, pushing us into action, just as the AIDS death toll eventually did in the early 1990s. Instead, it has numbed us into the same kind of ritualized pattern response of shock-and-move-on that we have applied to mass shootings and gun control.

Then into the game comes Quarterback Kaepernick with his Star Spangled Banner sit-in. And the world goes crazy. Everyone is taking shots at him, calling him a traitor and much worse. Google “Kaepernick News” and you will get 23 million entries from media outlets throughout the world. Each piece focuses on the issue of racial police bias. Days later, the quarterback decided to drop to one knee during the anthem out of respect for veterans. A fellow teammate, a veteran, joined the protest, creating a whole new round of media coverage. Yesterday, the Santa Clara, CA police union threatened a to stop patrolling the stadium, giving rise to even more exposure for Kaepernick’s cause. Same thing happened today when the city’s police chief reminded his force of the quarterback’s free speech rights.

The bottom line is that there has been more sustained public discussion of race and police policies these last couple of weeks than there has been since Ferguson. And it didn’t take another death to do it. To be sure, Colin Kaepernick is not winning any popularity contests with his antics; neither did the civil rights activists who took to the streets in the 1960s. The fact of the matter is that there has never been a racial wrong righted in this country without sufficient turbulence to nudge the issue to resolution. Right now, love him or hate him, this quarterback is moving the ball down the field.

PUBLIC RESTROOMS: PHONES, NO; TRANS, YES

I’ve had it with cell phones in public restrooms.  I nearly lost control at the urinal the other day when a ringtone version of the Marines’ Hymn started blaring next to me. Frantically searching for his phone, my urinal neighbor’s hands were flailing all over the place at a very inopportune moment, another reminder that men were not built to multitask. Then comes the Busy Executive who commandeers a stall as a second office.  I encountered one recently who sat on the throne, barking commands into his phone and punctuating them with intestinal sounds only a gastroenterologist could appreciate.  The kicker of the month, however, was a young male millennial shooting a selfie in the mirror above a communal sink.  There’s a chance I may have accidentally photobombed him.  If so, it may be my unauthorized debut on Tinder.

This is all so annoying.  Can’t we make public restrooms a cell-phone-free zone?  How about having a separate facility for people with electronic devices?  It will never happen.  It’s just not in the cards.  Instead, there is a full court press to bar Gavin Grimm from using the boys’ bathroom at his high school in Gloucester, VA.  Gavin never caused the slightest restroom disruption.  He just did his business and went back to class, like everyone else.

Yet, there are those in Gloucester who insist that Gavin is not at all like everyone else.  You wouldn’t know that from his pictures in the Washington Post.  He looks pretty much like a central casting version of a high school boy: short curly hair, chubby cheeks, wire rimmed glasses and a slightly bored expression.  All of the commotion is over the fact that Gavin was identified as a girl at birth, an identity that has been forever foreign to him.

According to the Post, Gavin never thought of himself as anything but a boy.  He refused to wear dresses and didn’t understand why he couldn’t join his twin brother on the football field.  He started transitioning in middle school with the full support of his parents who helped him obtain a legal name change.  As a sophomore in 2014, Gavin used the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High School without incident and with the full blessing of the principal.

Unfortunately, the kid ran smack into the last gasp of a bruised, beaten and frustrated religious right.  Adults who don’t know Gavin have taken out after him with a fevered pitch as part of their campaign against transgender rights.  As a result, he is spending his senior year banned from the boys’ restroom while the U.S. Supreme Court decides which bathroom he can use.

Sadly, we seem incapable in this county of having a meaningful conversation about human rights without inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on the children forced to serve as pawns in a battle they never asked for.  Kids Gavin’s age just want to be who they are; they yearn to fit in and belong.  Unfortunately, the historical path to securing a more just and equitable country is one of making unwitting trailblazers out of youngsters like Gavin.

That’s why many schools looked like war zones in the 1960s. Armed federal troops held back segregationists determined to keep black children from entering all-white schools. Ruby Bridges was all of six when she became the first black student in a New Orleans elementary school.  I was in the fifth grade then and dealing with my own angst of having just transferred to a new school where I didn’t know anybody.  That’s one reason the pictures of little Ruby, school bag in hand, walking up the steps of an all-white school while surrounded by federal marshals, was forever seared into my memory.  I can’t begin to imagine the trauma, the fear, the trepidation she must have felt.  No child should have to face that kind of abuse.  But because Ruby and countless others did, – The Little Rock Nine at Little Rock’s Central High School, Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama, James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, to name but a few – the Jim Crow notion of “separate but equal” was finally laid to rest.

Or was it?  Gavin Grimm was offered a small, single-user toilet, along with the stigma of being the only student in his school prohibited from using a regular bathroom. Separate, we learned more than 50 years ago, is inherently unequal.  I totally get that the LGBT movement is moving too fast for some people who aren’t gay or transgender.  Folks were just starting to accept the notion that same sex marriage is the law of the land when along came the T’s insisting that they, too are entitled to equal rights under the law. And so, in this volatile summer of 2016, we are fighting over the use of a bathroom, the last stand in the culture wars being waged by those who would like life to go back to the way it was during the days of “Father Knows Best”.

There are those in Gloucester who say it is not natural to change your gender.  Of course, the people in New Orleans who tried to keep Ruby out of the whites-only school said it was not natural for the races to mix.  There are an estimated 1.4 million people in America who identify with a gender that is opposite of their birth sex.  To them, the most unnatural thing in the world is being forced to be something they aren’t.

If your cousin Henry suddenly transitions to Helen, you don’t have to understand everything about her metamorphic journey.  It’s okay not to get it right away; change is hard for everyone.  Yet, you can still accept Helen’s decision on the basis that it is something she needs to do, something that is essential to her well-being, because that’s exactly what it is.  One recent study showed that 41 percent of the transgender population has attempted  suicide, compared to 4.6 percent of the general populace.  This is about so much more than bathroom use.  It’s about each of us having the right to authentically own our identity.  It’s also about supporting people in our lives who had the courage to break away from a gender assignment that never fit.

Just in case the Supreme Court is reading this, I would, without the slightest hesitation, share a men’s room with Gavin Grimm any time, as long as he turns his cell phone off at the door.

THE DIFFICULT HUSBANDRY OF HILLARY AND HUMA

 

There was media speculation today that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign might be jeopardized by the fact that both she and her top aide are married to men who cheated on them.  I wouldn’t have given that nonsense a second thought if it had appeared in the National Enquirer, the official organ of the Trump campaign.  Instead, it was on the front page of the New York Times. It  was in a piece about Anthony Weiner once again getting caught with his iPhone at crotch level.   The sexting former congressman is married to Huma Abedin, Clinton’s longtime assistant. This from the Times:

“Mr. Weiner’s extramarital behavior also threatens to remind voters about the troubles in the Clinton’s own marriage over the decades, including Mrs. Clinton’s much-debated decision to remain with then-President Bill Clinton after revelations of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”

Really?  Does our culture change that slowly?  It took 144 years for women to win the right to vote in this country.  They’ve been given a ballot since 1920, but until a few weeks  ago, not one of them has ever been nominated for president by a major political party.  Hillary Clinton finally breaks through the ceiling’s last shard of glass, only to be told that she should have kept her husband from straying if she wanted to be president.  Either that, or divorce him.

Bill Clinton not only cheated and lied about it, he was subsequently rewarded with a 73% approval rating in his second term.  But Hillary is somehow disqualified  because she didn’t stand on her man or kick him to the curb.  And now poor Huma is in the same sinking boat, a powerful woman too busy with her career to properly service her poor husband, who had to go out and find an app for that.

This is all very reflective of American life in the 19th century, except for the app part.  Marriage was an asymmetrical institution, more about property rights than partnership.  A wife was supposed to tend to her husband’s every need in exchange for his bringing home the bacon or, in vegan households, an appropriate soybean substitute.  A husband who frequently strayed from the marital bed brought disrepute upon his wife for not taking sufficient care of him.

I totally get where we have been.  What I don’t understand is why is it taking us so long to move on?  Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin are among the most powerful people in this country.  To blame them for the caddish and ribald choices their husbands made seems so yesterday.

Look, this is not a paid political advertisement for the Clinton campaign.  Although I look forward to voting for her, I respect legitimate objections to her candidacy.  Many of her public choices have landed her in jams she could and should have avoided.  If you don’t trust her, don’t vote for her.  If you don’t like her position on trade, don’t vote for her.  If you don’t like her tax plan, don’t vote for her. But rejecting Hillary Clinton on the basis of her husband’s sins is taking us back to a place we should have left a long time ago.

IN THE BEGINNING

And so it came to pass, in the twelfth month of retirement: I started a damn blog!  It was either that or take up Jewel Dash, and all of those sparkling colors give me a headache.

Well, it was a little more than that. It all started with Facebook, the gateway drug for verbal sharing addicts.  After a lengthy hiatus, I returned to the site in June.  Like the prodigal son, I tried to make it right.  Okay, the truth is that I broke a couple of ribs and could barely move without screaming.  I needed something to take my mind off the pain.  Percocet worked, but Facebook had fewer side effects.

For the first couple of weeks, I quietly lurked about, trying to absorb the culture of social media.  I checked out the baby and cat pictures, the political diatribes, the casserole recipes and the weather reports from various vacation spots.  I knew, at some point, that I needed to yield to that little box at the top of the page, the one that kept asking the same question:  “What’s on your mind?”  That was a challenge for me.  It wasn’t that I had nothing to say; the problem was figuring out how to say it to a diverse audience.

At last count, I had 252 Facebook friends from a variety of demographic sources:  relatives, neighbors, former classmates, people I worked with.  Their ages span at least four generations.  In that mix are Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Libertarians and Socialists.  There are those who think Donald Trump is an idiot and those who see him as a gift from God.  Some of these friends have been personally and viscerally pained by police shootings of young black men this summer. Others are proud family members of police officers, concerned about the tarnishing of those they love with a brush they don’t deserve.

How, I wondered, do I say what’s on my mind without hurting people I care about, without adding more divisive noise to a world that seems to be drowning in it?  So I decided to violate Facebook protocol and write in paragraphs instead of sentences.  I knew I shouldn’t take up a lot of space on a site designed more for rapid scrolling than ponderous reading. Still, I needed more than a bumper sticker if I was going to explain my thoughts in a way that would not scorch any earth with those who held a contrary view.

I’ve been a FB pontificator now for almost three months, waxing away on issues of the day, everything from Trump to lesbian farmers, from the death of a governor I once covered to the transformative powers of a summer rainbow.  The ribs healed several weeks ago but I continued to write.  As I did, I received a number of kind comments suggesting that I start a blog.  I suspect this was a gentle way of saying I was writing way too long for FB, and I was.

So here I am, on the verge of turning 67, struggling my way through yet another technological adventure.  In my quick research, I was stunned to learn that almost everyone already has a blog. At least it seems that way.  There are blogs about yeast infections, overactive bladders, anger management and adult men who are way too involved with My Little Pony.  Those bloggers – and you – have my solemn word that I will never touch those subjects in this space.

Instead, I will do what I had been doing on Facebook. I will give you a few paragraphs of prose every now and then, crafted, if I’m lucky, with a tablespoon or two of insight, along with an occasional dash of irony and wit.   If you are looking for a shrill voice to slap down those with contrary opinions, this isn’t the place.  You may, instead, want to check out one of the anger management blogs. Or, better yet, the My Little Pony sites.