Lift Up Your Hearts!

It has not been a good couple of months for my relationship with spiders.

I grew up on Be Nice to Spiders, the delightful story of how cleaning up all the spiderwebs at the zoo made the animals miserable because the flies multiplied out of control.  We read it to our children, too, which is why Heather hesitated to take action when the spiders multiplied out of control at her house.  That was my job when I visited in September; heartless Grandma, oblivious to Jonathan's plea, "If there are any wolf spiders, don't kill them!"  I'm afraid I didn't take the time to ask for identification as I tackled the basement infestation.  We left plenty to take care of the flies, and I'm pretty sure none of them were wolf spiders.

Of this one I'm not so certain. (Click on the image for an up-close-and-personal view.)

I hope it's not a wolf spider, but I'm afraid neither Porter nor I managed to get a good look at its eyes.  We like spiders, we respect spiders, we're grateful to spiders ... but at 5 a.m., in the shower, without one's glasses on ... when one sees something this size scuttling about at one's feet ... some more primitive instinct gets in the way of both scientific curiosity and the desire to be kind to animals.

I'm just glad it was Porter who was in the shower, not me.  My own Close Encounter involved a palmetto bug (giant cockroach) and a bra, and I wasn't thinking about being nice to bugs, no I wasn't.

No, I'm not really leaving Facebook.  It's too useful a tool for keeping in touch with people I would otherwise be prone to neglecting.  I think it best to keep my participation minimal, however.

I've never done apps, for example, because I mostly find them annoying.  Today's Wall Street Journal provides another good reason to avoid them, a massive security breach.

That revelation was enough of a push to make me rescind my previous decision to share my blog posts as notes on Facebook.  Not that the recent breach had anything to do with notes; it merely makes me less comfortable with the platform and less willing to take whatever risks there might be when I've seen no discernable benefit.  Having my posts duplicated on Facebook does make them more accessible to some people, but (1) Facebook usually posts them in clumps, so that most are hidden under a "see more posts" link; (2) there are few comments made, so if people are reading them I rarely know about it; and (3) I prefer to have all comments here, anyway, to keep the conversations in one place.

So, I apologize to the few of you who I know do read my posts on Facebook, but after this one posts I'll be stopping the feed.  Please come here instead; you are more than welcome.

I'm awed, amazed, thrilled, and grateful for the successful rescue of the 33 trapped Chilean miners.  I really am.  But there's a disquieting thought that keeps intruding on my celebration.  It seems curmudgeonly, at best, to point out that for most of their ordeal the miners have had contact with the surface, food, water, tobacco, medical advice, a very expensive and intense rescue effort, and the good will of the entire world.  I admire the men no end for managing to work together and survive such a horrendous experience.

But when I read over and over the concerns about the men's mental health, and how they will bear scars for life because of their ordeal, and of all the effort put forth to help them, including training in how to deal with the media (another tribulation!), I can't stop thinking of the men who for longer months endured captivity and torture during the Vietnam War.  Or the 444-day ordeal of the victims of the Iranian Hostage Crisis.  Or [fill in any one of a number of terrifying imprisonments].  Where was the concern for them?  Where the effort to ease their return to society?  Where, even, the money pouring in for interview, book, and movie deals?

Maybe we've become more concerned and compassionate over the years.  Maybe we just like a good, dramatic story.  I wouldn't take anything away from the support given these miners—but wouldn't it be nice to see that solidarity, that love, that attention, and those financial resources poured out for the ones who suffer even now, all over the world, mostly in obscurity?

Non Campus Mentis:  World History According to College Students, compiled by Anders Henriksson (Workman Publishing, New York, 2001) (Later retitled Ignorance Is Blitz)

This compilation of major historical events was pieced together from the essays and exams of students at a variety of colleges in the United States and Canada.  If you know a reasonable amount of world history and geography, you will find it hysterical, at least till you get to the quiz in the back of the book.

It would be a good book to read aloud at a party, although you would miss some pretty funny misspellings.  Reading it aloud in the car, however, as we did, would be unwise:  If you think texting puts the driver at a disadvantage, you should see what happens when he's doubled over with hysterical laughter.

Here are some excerpts, in roughly historical order, for your enjoyment.

Zorroastrologism was founded by Zorro.  This was a duelist religion.

The history of the Jewish people begins with Abraham, Issac, and their twelve children.  Judyism was the first monolithic religion.  It had one big God named "Yahoo."

Moses was told by Jesus Christ to lead the people out of Egypt into the Sahaira Desert.  The Book of Exodus describes this trip and the amazing things that happened on it, including the Ten Commandments, various special effects, and the building of the Suez Canal.  Forty centuries later they arrived in Canada.  This was the promise land of milk and chocolate.

Pythagasaurus fathered the triangle.

Augustus (a.k.a.Octagenarian) founded the Roman Catholic Empire.

When they finally got to Italy, the Australian Goths were tired of plungering and needed to rest.  Italy was ruled by the Visible Goths, while France and Spain were ruled by the Invisible Goths.

During the Middle Ages everyone was middle aged. ... Power belonged to a patriarchy empowering all genders except the female.  Nuns, for example, were generally women.

In a Romanesque church the stone roof is held up by a system of peers.  The usual design was a long knave split by a crosshair.  Without the discovery of the flying buttock it would have been an impossible job to build the Gothic cathedral.

Finally, Europe caught the Black Death.  The bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras.  It was spread from port to port by inflected rats.  ... Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. ... Death rates exceeded one hundred percent in some towns. ... The plague also helped the emergance of English as the national language of England, France, and Italy.

Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granola, a part of Spain now known as Mexico and the Gulf States.

Calvin was born a generation after Luther and is seen as one of Luther's greatest predecessors.  He accepted all Luther's ideas except that of birth.  Calvinists were the only ones who believeed in pre-detonation.  It is not surprising that their preaching consisted mainly of dogmatic explosions.

The Popes, of course, were usually Catholic.

Henvry VIII survived an assault from the Papal bull.

The Thirty Years War began with the Defecation of Prague. ... Prague was the capitol of Bulemia.

These good times ended when England suffered Civil War between the Musketeers and the Round Ones.  Oliver Cromwell solved this and other problems by removing prominent things from people who disagreed with him.

Next time you hear Porter shout, Queen of Hearts-like, "Off with their prominent things!" you will know why.

East of the back of the beyond were the Russians, who knew nothing at all during this period.  A factor in this was their use of the Kinetic alphabet. ... Russian nobles wore clothes only to humour Peter the Great.  Peter filled his cabinet with accidental people and built a new capital near the European boarder. ... Catherine the Great rose to power only because her husband had been murdered by his clothiers for failure to incubate.

Americans, of course, wanted no involvement in the French and Indian War because they did not want to fight in India.  ...  The Boston Tea Party was held at Pearl Harbor.  The Quebec Act was an Intolerable Act becaude it would have required Americans to learn French in School. ...  Benjamin Franklin, already famous as inventor of the light bulb, persuaded French King George III to help the USA.

Another problem was that France was full of French people.  Dickens made this point in The Tail of Two Sisters, which he required us to read.

An example of the importance of women during the industrial revolution was the work of Spinning Jenny, a young girl forced to work more than 40 hours a day.

Another man to influence the state and others was Karl Marx, who advanced his theory of dialectical maternalism. ... According to Marx the stages of history are canabalism, slavery, fuedalism, capitalism, and back to canabalism.  These are the moods of production.

Nearly everybody breathed a sigh of relief when the Communists were able to restore chaos.

When the Davy Jones Index crashed in 929 many people were left to political incineration.  Some, like John Paul Sart, retreated into extraterrestrialism. ... The New Deal was an idea inspired by President Franklin Eleanor Roosavelt.

Stalin, Rosevelt, Churchill, and Truman were known as the "Big Three."

John F. Kennedy worked closely with the Russians to solve the Canadian Missile Crisis.

Mohammed Gandi...was the last British ruler of India.

[T]he fall of empires has been a good thing, because it gives more people a chance to exploit their own people without outside interference.

The Civil Rights movement in the USA turned around the corner with Martin Luther Junior's famous "If I Had a Hammer" speech.

East and West made mends with each other. The Berlin Mall was removed. 

Can you believe I get tired of hearing that my blog is absolutly brilliant, and the commenter can't wait to share it with his friends?

Well, I do, and so I'm trying out comment moderation.  If I'm going to have to spend log in several times a day to remove spam, I might as well spend that time approving comments.

The down side is that if you write a comment here, you won't see it right away, at least not at first.  Jon has enhanced the moderation software to allow previously-approved commenters to bypass the moderation process, though you'll have to go through it again if you write from a different IP address.

I trust it will go smoothly, but if your comment gets lost, please let me know.

This resolution has been coming up on my agenda for months, only to be replaced by what seemed to be a more urgent or appropriate idea.  But now its time has come.

I love you.

What a powerful phrase—perhaps the most blessed concept in any tongue.  But what does it mean?  What do we mean when we say it?

• I want you.
• You're sexy.
• I like the way you make me feel.
• I want you to love me.
• I need you.
• I like the power I have over you.
• You make me happy.
• You're good to me.
• You're good for me.
• I want to live my life through your accomplishments. 
• I know what's best for you.

And so on.  How often is what we call our love for another person mixed up with our own needs and desires?  In my case, too often.  Why else would I worry so much about what others will think of what I do, say, or write?

Mind you, there's some good in that concern.  It's good to consider the consequences of one's actions.  But I think many of us spend far more time asking not what affect our actions have on others, nor what they think of our words and deeds, but what they think of us.

You can't run a business that way, you can't teach a class that way, you can't raise children that way—at least not with much success.  Maybe you can't live a life that way.  For certain you can't love that way.

I've caught myself up short, sometimes, thinking, "Who am I more concerned about in this interaction, the other person, or myself?"  This resolution is an effort to make that question second nature.

 

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Progress Report

#1  Read More Books  September was a very good month, with nine books read.  Some were of more substance than others, but all were read for their own sake, not for swelling the list, so I'm happy about it.  The count stands at 44 books for the year, so I think I have a good chance of meeting my one-book-per-week goal (eight more), though going into the long holiday season, it would be a real stretch to meet the more ambitions five-per-month goal (16 more).

#2  Rediscover Feasting  About the same.

#3  Learn to Relax  Ditto.

#4  Like More Things  I'm beginning to understand why people like to run.  I've always liked walking, but to enjoy running is new.  I also realized this month that I actually enjoy drinking wine and can now answer the "What do you think of this wine?" question a little more intelligently than, "Eh, it's wine."  I don't think I"ll ever be enthusiastic about it—certainly not the way I am about chocolate—but as with soda, it is good to be able to enjoy it occasionally, rather than actively disliking it.

#5  Pay Attention  Status quo.

#6  Cast Away Fear  The same.

#7  Talk Less, Listen More  Several times in different conversations I made a consious decision to do this, which I regard as progress.

#8  Enjoy Spontaneity  Not much to report.  Perhaps a step backwards, as my GTD system is fraying around the edges and needs a tweak.  GTD is the best resource I've found yet for enabling me to enjoy spontaneity.

#9  End with the Beginning in Mind  I've made a point of starting a new book as soon as I finish one, which may help explain September's progress at #1, though to be honest that was probably more influenced by being sick for more than a week.  I've also discovered that having clearly defined, small, "next actions" are important here.  Having a big project all lined up to go in the morning can lead to neglecting other projects and a return of the nagging worries GTD is supposed to eliminate.  What I really need to do is discipline myself to make progress, however small, on all fronts worthy of being called active projects, then give extra attention to the one that is currently grabbing my attention.

Can it have been almost four years since Kelly James, Brian Hall and Nikko Cooke died in a blizzard on Mt. Hood?  I'm not usually one to follow closely television's relentless coverage of unfolding tragedy, but knowing Kelly's brother, Frank, made the events personal.

In the Shadow of Mt. Hood is an article written by Frank James in the September issue of Christianity Today.  (It's available online if you follow that link.)  I'm a bit reluctant to provide excerpts this time, as there is nothing he says that's not important.  (Those of you who know that I knew Frank when he was an elder in our PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) church, and know how I feel about most PCA sermons, will understand how significant it is for me to make such a statement.)  But here is a taste, anyway:

Grief is a relentless predator. Those who have lost loved ones tell me that one never completely escapes it. Strangely, a part of me does not want the grief to stop, because the grief itself is a connection to Kelly. Yet another part of me is so weary from carrying the burden of a broken heart.

In the midst of our family tragedy, I made a peculiar discovery. One would think that grief and disappointment with God would lead to bitterness against him. In my nightmare, I not only prayed intensely in private but also publicly declared my faith and confidence in God on CNN—but Kelly froze to death anyway.

There is disappointment, sadness, and confusion, but oddly, there is no retreat from God. Instead, I find myself drawn to God. To be sure, he is more enigmatic than I thought, but I still can't shake loose from him. There seems to be a kind of gravitational pull toward God.

"Harm reduction," a new term to me, though not a new concept, is a controversial approach to social problems, in which illegal, immoral, or otherwise harmful behaviors are attacked, not at the root, but at the branches:  distributing condoms to slow the spread of AIDS, needle exchange programs for drug addicts, and legalized prostitution, for example.  It is palliative care: attempting to ameliorate the symptoms of an apparently incurable social disorder.

Whether you approve of the idea or think it only exacerbates the problem—like Needle Park in Zurich, one of Switzerland's early experiments, which succeeded in reducing AIDS infections and drug-related deaths, but attracted addicts and professional drug dealers from all over Europe—the following story is heartwarming.  It brings to mind Mother Teresa, who, if she couldn't cure the ills of the lowest and the poorest in Calcutta, at least gave them the touch of a loving hand, and a clean, safe, comfortable place in which to die.

Meera Bai's story has a title shocking in itself:  Why I Help Addicts Shoot Up.  A nurse, she works at Vancouver's InSite:  "a safe, health-focused place where people inject drugs and connect to health care services – from primary care to treat disease and infection, to addiction counselling and treatment."

InSite has been shown to be a successful public health initiative in more than 30 scientific research reports published in peer-reviewed medical journals. Such reports demonstrate that InSite users are more likely to seek long-term addiction treatment and to stay off the street, than users who choose to inject outside. The HIV rates in [Vancouver's Downtown Eastside] are on par with many African nations. Such blood-borne diseases are spread by sharing needles—something that is banned at InSite. And instead of using puddle water from urine-soaked alleys, participants are provided with sterile water, which reduces various kinds of horrific infection.

Clean supplies, safe rooms, friendly staff supervision during injection and compassionate nursing care help injection drug users to learn how to value their bodies, and thus themselves, even as our society generally tells them they are worse than useless. The choice to stop using drugs is a decision that many addicts cannot even imagine making, but InSite provides reachable steps toward a healthier life, offering participants a chance at redemption of both body and soul.

It's where I choose to work as a nurse—and as a Christian. Trying to follow the command of God to seek out and care for those in need of mercy has led me to find grace and pass it on among these people in the streets of the Downtown Eastside, the very definition of a marginalized population.

Something about seeing people at their lowest and most desperate, half-clothed from turning tricks for drugs while hating themselves for it, opens into a profound level of intimacy. I am blessed to enter the darkest place of people whose sins are far more public than those of the rest of us. Constant humiliation makes the people I work with especially vulnerable, and vulnerable in almost every way: to violence, to exploitation, to false hope and finally to despair. When allowed into these dark places, it is my privilege, and that of all InSite staff, to communicate worth and love instead of judgment and scorn.

The day nurse asks me to keep an eye out for a specific participant—a regular who comes in several times a day. She hadn't been seen yet. Later that night, the woman finally comes in, and she's beaming. "I went to see my daughter today! And I didn't use all day! F---, soon I'm gonna get off this s---!" We break out in applause and cheers, celebrating her triumphs with her—as she mixes her drugs to take in a few minutes in our facility. Other participants in the room are excited as well; two of them come over to hug her.

Another regular later chats with me in the treatment room as I dress his abscess, trying not to cringe away from the overwhelming odour he emanates. "It would have been my anniversary with my wife today, if she hadn't gone missing. We've both been down and out, but she took care of me out here. Now, I got nobody to talk to. This is the first human touch I've had today." I look up, startled. I am wearing gloves, holding my breath, cleaning his sores with a 10-inch sterile Q-tip. Even this, my deficient attempt to heal, is taken as love by a man desperate for human connection. I am ashamed.

I finish dressing the wound, clean up, remove my gloves and give him a hug. I hop up on the treatment bench next to him and we sit together and talk for another 15 minutes: about life, love and faith. He says goodbye, and then asks for a referral to an exit program. I give it to him. He knows the referral is merely one point along our journey together, and that I will listen to his story whether he goes to the program or not. As a Christian, I know that his life is part of God's real story of redemption. InSite is one of the few places where I get to hear it openly spoken, with trust, without judgment.

Well, it's beyond "fair use" to quote the whole article!  I do recommend reading it all, though.  (H/T John Stackhouse)

 

I haven't time for a long post this morning, so here's the story I alluded to yesterday.

There is one upside to allowing several months to elapse between visits with the grandchildren:  the thrill of realizing how much they have grown in the interim.  During my recent visit, all three of the young Daleys surprised me.  This is Jonathan's story.

The assignment:  clean up the boys' bedroom, which is also the playroom, especially the craft area.  Crafts are probably second only to Legos as a Daley favorite activity, and papers, beads, pipe cleaners, stones, cereal boxes, paper plates, and other supplies were spread wide, intermingled with precious "I can't possibly throw that away" creations.  After a psychologically draining couple of hours, the job was done, but my favorite part came at the beginning.

Jonathan explained that the reason papers were piled up on the craft table was that their plastic file pockets had fallen off the wall.   I suggested he go ask Daddy to put them back up.

"No," Jonathan replied. "I'll take care of it."

He clattered down the stairs from the attic to the basement, and returned bearing the electric drill and a box of bits.  After selecting the correct bit, and affixing it to the drill, he proceded to drill two holes, insert two screws, and hang the file pockets once more.

Jonathan did accept a small amount of help, in the form of (1) allowing Mom to provide two new screws when he discovered that his own stash did not have the right kind, (2) allowing Grandma to hold the file pocket up while he marked the location for drilling the second hole, and (3) bowing to a reminder that the job is not complete until the tools are returned to their proper locations.  But truthfully, we were just hovering, and he could have managed it all on his own.

Not bad, I say, for a guy still a few months shy of his seventh birthday.

Free-Range Kids:  Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, by Lenore Skenazy (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2009)
Paperback subtitle:  How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)

I've been following (and blogging about) Free-Range Kids for quite a while now, so it's about time I finally read the book.  First off, in case you don't bother to read the rest of this post:  Get a hold of a copy of this book and read it.  If you are tempted to dismiss the free-range movement as crazy, irresponsible parenting, this will reassure you.  If you're already sold on this idea, it will open your eyes to how we got to the point of needing it.

Being so familiar with the Free-Range Kids blog, and even having made some contributions myself, I thought I knew what to expect from the book.  Boy was I wrong.

I was shocked.

It was a revelation nearly as great as the one I had seven years ago, when I discovered the sea change that had taken place in childbirth practices since our children were born.

Lenore Skenazy, dubbed "America's Worst Mom" (google it) and made the center of a media storm for daring to let her New York City-bred, public transit-savvy, nine-year-old son take a trip on the subway by himself; Lenore Skenazy, Ms. Free-Range Kids herself, is ...

Tame.

Tame.  There's no other word for it.  That someone as mild and safety-conscious as Skenazy is considered dangerously revolutionary shows just how much has changed in the last 30 years.  She sings the praises of car seats, never suggesting that, for example, Pennsylvania's laws requiring them for children up to eight years old borders on the ridiculous.  She wouldn't hear of letting a kid ride a bike without a helmet.  She trusts government studies and mainstream medical associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics, never questioning the back-to-sleep campaign, nor the current childhood vaccination schedule.  I'm not saying she's necessarily wrong (though I certainly don't always agree), but she's hardly radical.

Here's an example of what she's fighting, where she stands, and a scenario many would call crazy (though I call it wonderful).  Let's begin with her description of the Lou and Lou Safety Patrol videos available online from Playhouse Disney.

The Lous are a brother and sister of maybe three or four years old who call themselves the "Safety Patrol."  They spring into action when their six- or sevenish sister actually wants to make their dad breakfast for his birthday.

"Not so fast!" squeak the safety-loving sibs as their sister tries to cook some eggs.  "Never touch a pot or pan on the stove.  Let a grown-up."  They plunk an orange safety cone in front of the stove to keep her away.

Undaunted, the sister drifts down the counter and reaches for a knife.  "You have a safety violation!" chime her bad cop-bad cop siblings.  "You should always stay away from sharp knives and let a grown-up help if you need to slice something."

Skenazy's response?

Now, I'm not saying that six-year-olds make the ideal short-order chefs and let's let 'em loose near the french-fry vat.  But the constant refrain of "Get a grown-up!  Let a grown-up!" reinforces the whole idea that, rather than trying to learn any kind of real-world skill, kids should sit back and leave it all up to the adults."

Of course, she's right, and apparently it needs to be said.  But contrast this with a scene I observed on a recent visit with our daughter's family.

Our granddaughter, barely two years old, is helping cut vegetables for an omelet.  With her small paring knife, she hacks contentedly at a mushroom while Mom works on the rest of breakfast.  She has been begging for months to be allowed to do this job, and her mother has recently decided she has the coordination to begin her apprenticeship.  At her current skill level—about 10 minutes per mushroom—her contributions are small, but her brothers, ages four and six, began at the same age and are now safe, effective, and  enthusiastic vegetable choppers.  And stove users.  (Not to mention that the six-year-old is a dab hand with an electric drill, but that's another story.)

Now that might be considered radical—but 40 years ago I babysat a couple of British boys, ages three and five, who fixed their own dinner, including heating vegetables on the stove.  I wonder what their parents thought about their American neighbors' kids—and vice versa.

Read the book, and you'll get a glimpse of what children are up against these days.  Read about the sixth grader, assigned to design and execute a "free-range" project.  Feel her fear of the strangers on the sidewalk as she walks solo to the grocery store (half a mile away from home) for the first time in her life, and feel her humiliation when one of them asks, "Where is your mommy, young lady?"  Sixth grade.  Since Skenazy neglects to mention that this was a six-year-old prodigy, I assume the girl walking without her mommy was at least 11 years of age.

Or consider this report, written by another girl from the same middle school class.  She had taken her dog to the vet, where at first she was merely ignored.

"Good morning," Emma said and the vet turned sharply around.

"Hi. Where is your mommy, little girl?"  Her sharp voice echoed against the green walls.  A little surprised by the vet's tone, Emma answered that her mom was at work.  The vet looked troubled.  "Do you have your mom's phone number with you?  I might have to give her a call."  She quickly dialed the given number.  "Hi!  This is Dr. S.  Your daughter is here.  Can I actually give her instructions?"

In the end, the vet wrote a page of doggie dos and don'ts and handed it to Emma.  "Oh wait!"  The vet snatched the letter back.  "Can you read?"

I could quote pages and pages of this kind of story.  But I won't.  You'll enjoy them much more if you read the book, because Skenazy is the kind of writer I want to be.  She writes well, she writes seriously—and at the same time she's so funny I'd have enjoyed the book even if I didn't agree with the premise.  I know that, because I still laughed in the sections were I disagree vehemently with what she says.

Read about how DVD's of the original Sesame Street shows are labelled "intended for adults"—because they "model the wrong behavior," e.g. "Alistair Cookie" with his pipe, children playing in a vacant lot, a girl riding her tricycle without a helmet.  Take a look at how television (news and other programming) begat and nurtured a culture of fear and a totally skewed view of what's dangerous in our lives—and what's not.

TV historian [Robert] Thompson [says], "I don't think there's a single episode of Law and Order that could have even been shown before 1981."  That's because, until then, [its] graphic images were taboo.  In fact, they were the stuff of porn.

[O]nce we see horrific images, only half of our brain takes the time to say, "Wow.  That makeup person did an incredible job with those puncture wounds." ... The other half of our brain just takes in those gruesome images wholesale and files them under "Sick World, comma, What we live in."

In his book The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner explains that once an image gets into [the] "reptilian" part of the brain, not only can you not shake it, you also can't extricate it from all the other images and feelings jostling around in there, either.  After all, it's only been the last hundred years or so that the brain has started seeing realistic-looking images (TV, movies) that weren't directly applicable to its fate (lions, spears).  So it hasn't figured out yet how to separaae the real form the manufactured.

Thanks to the news media, we have absorbed a completely false view of the chances a child will be abducted and murdered by a stranger.

According to Warwick Cairns, who wrote the book How to Live Dangerously:  if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped and held overnight by a stranger, how long would you have to keep her outside, unattended, for this to be statistically likely to happen?

About seven hundred and fifty thousand years.

How about the Hallowe'en candy scare that altered trick-or-treating forever? Razor blades in apples, poisoned candy?  The truth?

There has never been a single substantiated instance of any child dying from a stranger's poisoned Halloween candy.

Never.

And here's one after my own heart:  The danger of salmonella from eating raw cookie dough?  Much too low to deprive our children of one of life's glories.

The next excited me, too, because even 50 years ago eating snow was a forbidden pleasure.

Joel Forman, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on environmental health, was quoted as saying, "I can say that I'm not aware of any clinical reports of children becoming ill from eating snow.  And I looked."

On the other hand, when I was a child the snow was picking up residue from atomic bomb tests, so I can't blame my parents for a little paranoia.

If you study the odds, the one thing you will not let your children do is go anywhere in an automobile, car seat or no.  But that's not going to happen, which may explain why we prefer to avoid risk calculations.

Our misguided hysteria is not all the media's fault.  Lawyers can take a hefty share of the blame, as many bizarrely restrictive policies are the direct result of lawsuit-phobia.  Such as school buses that will not drop children off unless they are met by a "responsible adult"—if not, the child is taken back to school.  And the demise of really exciting playground equipment, and diving boards at swimming pools.  Here's one for the record books:  a release form from California.

I fully understand my minor's participation may involve risk of serious injury or death. 

That's for a piano recital.  What are they afraid of?  The ghost of Beethoven causing havoc over a mangled Für Elise?

While we're assigning blame, let's not forget greedy capitalists.  Like the "professional babyproofer" who promoted toilet lid locks on national television by intoning, "On average two children a week die in toilets."  The stats from the Consumer Product Safety Commission on accidental drowning in toilets of children under five?  Four per year.  Or the sellers of the "Thudguard," a helmet to protect toddlers learning to walk.  Dr. F. Sessions Cole, chief medical officer at the St. Louis Children's Hospital, reports that of their sixty-five to seventy thousand patients per year, exactly none were toddlers with significant head trauma from instability while learning to walk.  (No statistics available on the instability caused by wearing a helmet while trying to learn to walk.)

There are hucksters everywhere happy to take advantage of parents with more money than sense.  Don't trust your own hand to make sure the bath water is safe for your child?  Buy a turtle bath toy that will flash, "too hot!"  Don't trust your child's natural padding (and unnatural diaper padding) to protect his little bottom from falls while he learns to walk?  Someone will sell you a harness to hold him up while he toddles.  Too busy or too frightened to let your little girl experience the joys of water firsthand?  "Baby Neptune exposes little ones to the wonders of water in their world—whether they're stomping in the rain, splashing in the bathtub, playing 'catch me if you can' with the tide on the beach...."  And how does Baby Neptune accomplish this feat, safely and dryly?  It's a video of other children doing all those wonderful wet things.

Still another culprit inciting us to terror:  the busybodies who not only encapsulate their own children, but feel it their duty to do the same for yours, even to the extent of reporting you (anonymously, of course) to Child Protective Services.  Unfortunately, as I learned on the FRK blog, that's not a baseless fear.  But, like much of what terrifies us, it is an uncommon occurrence.  More common are the other parents who will merely try to shame you for taking the shackles off your kids.  As John Holt said,

One of the saddest things I’ve learned in my life, one of the things I least wanted to believe and resisted believing for as long as I could, was that people in chains don’t want to get them off, but want to get them on everyone else. “Where are your chains?” they want to know. “How come you’re not wearing chains? Do you think you are too good to wear them? What makes you think you’re so special?”

Skenazy has some good advice for this problem, too.

Blamers thrive on shame.  Take away their power.  Do not be ashamed of making parenting choices based on who your kid is, rather than on what the neighbors will say.  Why are they talking about you anyway?

Did I say Lenore Skenazy's book was tame?  Well, yes.  It is.   But that doesn't mean it's not vitally important, on the order of Last Child In the Woods.  If you have young children, read it.  If your children are grown, read it anyway; it will make you laugh, and your grandchildren will thank you.  But don't waste any time bemoaning what you wish you had done differently.  I've done more than my share of that, and it's counterproductive. That's another message of this book:  Children are amazingly resilient, and their well-being does not hinge on every parental decision we make.  It really doesn't. We don't have that much power—and we shouldn't want it.

One more quote and the sticky notes bristling from the pages of Free-Range Kids will be gone.  Free-ranging is not about irresponsible parenting, any more than unschooling is about leaving children without educational support and guidance.  (emphasis mine)

Free-Range Parents are not hands off.  We give our children the tools to be safe and independent, and we listen to them too.

Jonathan's birthday is coming up, and he told me what he really wants:  a real Boba Fett costume, from the local costume store.  (Perhaps it was Jango Fett, or Olive Fett, or some other miscellaneous Fett.  I lost track of the Star Wars characters once inflation set in and Episode 1 became Episode 4.)

I expressed my surprise, because he had already created wonderful costumes—headgear and jetpacks—for himself and his siblings, out of cereal boxes, styrofoam cups, and pipe cleaners.

"I am only creative," he replied, "because I don't have what I want."

Bingo.

There, from the mouth of a six-year-old, is the driving force behind innovation.

Not long ago, my lovely external monitor gave out completely.  I suppose I could complain about how nothing lasts well these days, but it lasted a lot longer than the Gateway computer it originally came with, which self-destructed after 19 months of an 18-month warranty.^*

One does not need an external monitor, and I was prepared to do without for a while, but Porter, God bless him, cares for his wife's desires as well as her needs...and an external monitor is especially nice when the regular one is a small laptop screen.  So we ventured out shopping.

And blundered into a CompUSA monitor sale.

At first I was very disappointed, because my old monitor was essentially square, and every single new one was rectangular, with more width than height.  I've always found height more important, as it reduces scrolling—and square even better.  But apparently the rest of the world does not agree with me.

We decided on a ViewSonic VX2250 22" widescreen LED monitor.  (The link takes you to Amazon, but we actually bought it from CompUSA.)  And I've decided it's cool.

Really cool; that was a selling point.  My office gets hot from all the computing equipment, and it's lovely not having the monitor pour out detectible heat.  So we're saving energy at two levels:  the monitor and the air conditioner.

And, in the spirit of New Year's Resolution #4 (Like More Things), it turns out that I love the widescreen format!   Much credit goes to Porter, who pointed out that I now can have, in effect, three screens, by dividing the new monitor into two, side-by-side windows.  It's not a perfect system, because the resulting windows are a bit smaller than I like, but I can easily switch between that and full-screen mode as needed.  It's really helpful not to have to keep flipping back and forth among screens.

I understand that the main reason for the popularity of this screen shape is for watching movies.  The ability to watch movies does not even make the list of what I look for in a computer monitor, but it's true that if I'm watching something by myself, there's no point in turning on the television—this screen does very nicely, thanks.

 

Fruitless Fall:  The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, by Rowan Jacobsen (Bloomsbury, New York, 2008)

Fruitless Fall had been my "to read" list since mid-2009 and, thanks to generous family, on our bookshelves since Christmas.  I loved Jacobsen's Chocolate Unwrapped, so why it took so long to begin this book is beyond me.  Once begun, however, I couldn't stop, and finished it the same day.  There are a few compensations for being sick and not having the energy to tackle much of anything else.

Speaking of feeling sick ... Fruitless Fall is scarier than The Omnivore's Dilemma, Food, Inc., and Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal combined.  Or perhaps the effect is cumulative.

That's not to say the book isn't a delight to read, doing for honey and beekeeping what John McPhee's Oranges did for the citrus industry many long years ago.  (I wish someone would write an update, as McPhee's book ends when frozen concentrate was king.)  The overall theme is the recent precipitous and inexplicable decline of bees and beekeepers, with many side notes (some delightful, some frightening) along the way.

Did you know that bees make great minesweepers?  They can be trained in two days, can cover vastly more territory than dogs, are as accurate as humans, and don't get themselves blown up.  This may not be the most important reason for us to worry about their health and safety, but I find it incredibly cool.

Bees, and consequently beekeepers, have faced a daunting couple of decades, especially in Europe and the Americas.  Loss of habitat, savage mites, virulent viruses, the stress of industrial agriculture, widespread pesticide and antibiotic use, and the still unexplained Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), have dealt a near-fatal blow to bees and the crops that depend on them for pollination.

It's a terrifying story, but maybe too much to take in all at once, especially when food is still plentiful on the grocery store shelves.  Here's something more immediate (and familiar) to make you think twice before buying your kids Honey Nut Cheerios.

[I]f you asked [beekeepers] to list the biggest challenges they face, development wouldn't even make the top three.  CCD wouldn't necessarily be number one, either.  That honor would go to China and its deluge of honey—real and otherwise. ... Almost 70 percent of the honey consumed in the United States is imported, with China the top source. ... And Chinese honey producers sell cheap.

That's "cheap" as in about half what it costs to produce honey in the U.S.  Lest you think that this bad news for American beekeepers is good news for American shoppers,

A powerful drug used to treat anthrax and other severe infections, chloramphenicol is banned for agricultural use in the United States, Canada, and Europe to prevent bacteria from developing resistance to it.  It also can cause deadly aplastic anemia—bone marrow failure—in people. ...  Between August 2002 and February 2003, FDA agents seized massive amounts of chloramphenicol-contaminated Chinese honey from several importers....

A February 2003 raid is particularly distressing.  Back on August 19, 2002, the FDA had informed the packer that its honey might be contaminated with antibiotics.  But the packer continued to sell the honey, including 155,000 pounds to Sara Lee, which put that honey into five hundred thousand loaves of bread that were sold to consumers before Sara Lee finally stopped using the honey ten days later.  On September 18, 2002, the FDA informed the packer that its honey was indeed contaminated with antibiotics.  Why it then took the FDA five months to seize the honey, and how much was used in the meantime, is unclear.

A tariff, and a temporary ban on Chinese honey, allowed the price to rise some, but "honey laundering"—sending Chinese honey to the U.S. through other countries—was rampant.  Then, on the strength of a Chinese promise (will we never learn?) to stop using chloramphenicol, the ban on Chinese honey was lifted.  And a loophole was found to circumvent the tariff.

[T]he honey packers, the middlemen, resolved that they would never again be caught short.  Honey ... can stay good for decades.  So now we have walls of Chinese honey in Florida and warehouse after warehouse of clover honey in the Dakotas, ensuring that whatever happens on the world market, industrial honey in the United States will remain cheap.

You may not want to eat it, however. ... In January 2006, [a leading food safety lab] analyzed a random sample of Chinese honey, taken from a Florida honey packer, and found 48 parts per billion ciprofloxacin in it.  Yes, Cipro, the last-defense, über-antibiotic used to treat the anthrax attacks in 2001.  [The top German food safety lab] has found Cipro in numerous batches of Chinese honey.  [That honey, rejected by the EU, eventually came to the U.S.] Apparently Chinese beekeepers are tossing it into their hives to deal with the raging bacterial chaos simmering in a country with rampant pollution, spotty sewage treatment, and few agricultural standards.

An estimated 70 percent of Chinese beekeepers use antibiotics.  One entrepreneur leased a nature preserve of acacia trees from the Chinese government and recruited forty-five beekeepers who agreed to make honey in the reserve without antibiotics and without metal storage containers, which can contaminate honey with iron and lead.  For his troubles, he was ambushed by fifteen other local beekeepers who didn't like the competition, beaten, and left with a concussion.

Does this next situation sound eerily familiar?  It should, because it was just such a situation with home mortgages that precipitated the recent financial crash-and-burn.

Of course, on an ingredients label for honey-mustard dressing or honey-baked ham, you have no way of knowing who made the honey.  Thanks to the international shell games, neither do the food manufacturers.

It gets worse.

[The product] may not even be honey.  Honey is expensive to produce, while corn syrup is cheaper than dirt.  Honey producers in the 1900s got rich cutting honey with corn syrup ... but methods for detecting it soon developed.  Then the adulterators got better. ... [In 1998 American honey buyers received an offer from] a company in India to supply "honey analog" by the ton.  This analog, made from corn or rice syrup, was "enzymatically processed" to resemble honey, physically and chemically.  The company assured buyers that the syrup would pass any test for natural honey....

Sometimes the fraud is chemical, as when rice syrup is doctored to resemble honey, and sometimes it's ontological.  For instance, what is honey?  If you answered something like "a syrup made entirely out of nectar by bees," then consider yourself hopelessly out of date.  Let me introduce you to "Packer's Blend," the latest offering from China.  It appeared on the market in 2006, shortly after the [tariff] loophole was closed by Congress.  Chinese honey may be subject to tariffs, but if a product is less than 50 percent honey, it isn't covered by the law.  This "funny honey," as beekeepers call it, is between 40 and 49 percent honey.  The rest is syrup:  corn syrup, but also rice syrup, lactose syrup—whatever's on hand and cheap.  The importers who bring in these blends may sell them to manufacturers as blends or as pure honey, adding some nice American or Canadian clover honey to give the blend a semblance of the real thing and get it past the manufacturers.

Packer's Blend sells for forty cents a pound and may be in more foods than any of us realize.  You won't see "Packer's Blend" on an ingredients label.  You may see "rice syrup" and "honey," listed separately, or you may just see "honey."  Do food manufacturers understand what they're getting when they buy Packer's Blend?  Are they being told it's honey?  Do they know they're using Chinese honey that may be contaminated?

We can't say for sure.  But what we can say is that American beekeepers can't compete.

The price for industrial-grade honey remains depressed, and one reason ... is that honey laundering is out of control.  Millions of pounds of illegal Chinese honey continue to enter the United States.  The honey is first shipped to the Philippines, Thailand, Russia, India, Australia, and other countries, where papers are forged falsifying the country of origin.  Then the honey is shipped to the United States.  Some of the smugglers know it is contaminated with outlawed antibiotics.  "There is definitely this problem," one Chinese shipper wrote to his U.S. importers.  "I'm worried whether the FDA or USDA may get involved.  Our future shipments will definitely have this fluoroquinolones, and it may take a couple of years to improve."  The honey was sold to major U.S. food companies.  So far, the USDA has made a few arrests, but not enough to staunch the flow of illegal honey.

Nor is our own government squeaky-clean:

[Florida's state apiarist decided]   to quarantine any Australian colonies coming into Florida until he got a cycle of brood out of them, just to be safe.  He was told that if he did that he'd be sued by the government for disrupting international trade.  Somebody really wanted those bees here.

I can't end on such a depressing note.  Much as Polyface Farms is the bright jewel of hope in The Omnivore's Dilemma, Kirk Webster's apiary in the Champlain Valley of Vermont is the sun and air of this otherwise dark story.  As Joel Salatin's Christian faith infuses his farming practices, so Webster's Buddhism led him to conform his practices to nature, rather than the other way around.

[Webster writing] "In my own search for a healthy beekeeping future, I have found the World of Nature herself, the old beekeeping books and journals, and the original accounts of the pioneers of modern organic farming to be far more helpful and inspiring than most of what has been published, talked about and done by the beekeeping community during the last 8 or 10 years.  Here were people who worked hard to solve their own problems in a creative way, often with very few resources.  They looked deeply into the world of Nature searching for examples of balance and stability, and always gave their crops and livestock the last word."

[Sir Albert Howard, father of the modern organic movement, believed] successful farming and food production—healthy plants, animals, and people—required balance.  Any agricultural enterprise must achieve a state of equilibrium that mimics nature if it is to survive and prosper. ... When an imbalance took hold, Howard believed, nature let you know.  The heralds of this imbalance were often pests and disease, which could get a foothold only if something was out of whack in the system.  In this way, pests and disease are not the enemies of the farmer; they are actually allies, helping to illuminate weaknesses in the system before irrevocable damage—exhausted soil, genetically weak crops or animals—is introduced.

In 1998 [Webster] decided to stop fighting the mites and instead see what he could learn from them.  By his own admission, he might not have done it if an easier solution had presented itself. ... "I decided this whole thing was a freight train heading for a wreck, and that I was going to go through the wreck early.  And hopefully recover early."

Recover he did.  The years of letting nature take its course and in the process breeding more robust bees were years of poverty, and even now, with a healthy, prospering, sustainable apiary of mite-resistant bees, he's not going to get rich.  Fortunately, he doesn't want to.

For decades ... honey bees have been selected for traits that had little to do with resilience.  Maximum honey production tops the charts, with maximum bee production closely linked to that.  Gentleness is essential.  Qualities that contribute to self-reliance—resistance to pests and disease, overwintering ability, frugality—are less valued because it's more efficient to rely on petrochemicals to solve such problems.  Who needs bees that can overwinter when it's cheap to truck them down to Florida for the cold months?  Who needs to worry about self-reliant bees when it's more cost-effective to buy new [bees] from Southern breeders or Australia in the early spring?  Why find forage for bees when high-fructose corn syrup is cheap and plentiful?  Why spend years breeding mite- and disease-resistant bees when the chemical conglomerates have all these miticides, fungicides, and antibiotics available right now?

You can manipulate a natural system into doing things it wasn't designed for, but you're always running the risk of collapse.

[Webster again] "Beekeeping now has the dubious honor of becoming the first part of our system of industrial agriculture to actually fall apart.  Let's stop pretending that something else is going on.  We no longer have enough bees to pollinate our crops.  Each time the bees go through a downturn, we respond by making things more stressful for them, rather than less—we move them around more often, expose them to still more toxic substances, or fill the equipment up again with more untested and poorly adapted stock.  We blame the weather, the mites, the markets, new diseases, consumers, the Chinese, the Germans, the (fill in your favorite scapegoat), other beekeepers, the packers, the scientific community, the price of gas, global warming—anything rather than face up to what's happening.  We are losing the ability to take care of living things.  Why?"

Did I say that the decline of bees was the overall theme of Fruitless Fall?  Perhaps it is.  But there's a supertext also:  We need to stop working against our environment and start working with it; to observe carefully and take heed to the ways of the natural world, rather than assuming we always know best and can run roughshod over it with impunity; and to recognize that Creation is not a commodity, but a community.  Joel Salatin would call this "honoring the bee-ness of the bee."

 

Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites ...and Other Lies You've Been Told, by Bradley R. E. Wright (Bethany House, Minneapolis, 2010)

Frankly, my expectations were not high when I picked up this book.  The title may be eye-catching, but for that reason it doesn't inspire confidence that there's serious writing between the covers.

There is, however, and serious research, too.  Bradley Wright is a sociologist, a professor at the University of Connecticut.  His words are aimed at the layman, not the academic, and he writes with a nice sense of humor; even so, the array of facts and graphs and studies is dizzying.

Why are we so quick to believe bad news, and to propagate it?  Bad news titillates, and what titillates, sells.  Bad news also frightens, and that sells, too.

Wright tackles several areas in which both the secular and the Christian world have been flagellating the church:

• Is American Christianity on the brink of extinction?
• Are we losing our young people?
• Are Evangelicals all poor, uneducated, southern whites?
• Do Christians think and do Christian things?
• Have Christians gone wild?
• Do Christians love others?
• What do non-Christians think of us?

Although his research is specifically about Evangelicals (and his definition is problematic; see below), the statistics and studies he uses reveal a broader picture as well.

As you might expect from the book's title, Wright's studies reveal that on nearly all these fronts the news is much better than we have been led to believe, and gets better still with increasing frequency of church attendance.  Contrary to what bombards us almost daily from the media, when you look at well-ordered studies, Christians are doing significantly better than average with respect to personal habits, the strength of our marriages, charitable behavior, and the character of our children.  We are reasonably orthodox in our beliefs.  Young people are not leaving the church in droves, even though many continue to follow the age-old pattern of sloughing off as they gain their independence and returning to the church when they start families of their own.  We are a diverse lot, and on the whole are better thought of by others than we think we are.

The bad news? We still have a long way to go with respect to the second of the greatest commandments:  loving our neighbors.  We're measurably prone to forgetting that the second part of "hate the sin, but love the sinner" is as important as the first.

We're also far too gullible, believing anything that's written down, that comes from a "study," that throws around statistics, or that is said by a popular Christian leader.  Many misleading or blatantly false statistics are used (presumably with the best of intentions) as advertising gimicks by those in our own camp.

A four-page advertisement in evangelical Christianity's flagship magazine boldly states:  "Christianity in America won't survive another decade unless we do something now."  Why?  "This generation of teens is the largest in history—and current trends show that only 4% will be evangelical believers by the time they become adults....  We are on the verge of a catastrophe."

Where did this 4% figure come from?  Ten years ago a seminary professor did an informal survey of 211 young people interviewed in three states.  The question was poorly worded, and the study probably used a convenience sample.  In terms of quality, this statistic is about as valid as someone putting a survey question on their Facebook page and then having their frinends and acquaintances answer it.  There's nothing wrong with doing it, it's just not very trustworthy.  Motivated by this questionable statistic, a Christian organization was asking tens of thousands of youth pastors around the country to spend $39 to attend a conference on how to avoid this coming catastrophe.

What's more, we worry too much about what others think of us, which causes us to circle the wagons, further weakening our attention to the neighbors it is our job to love.

Ever the professor, Wright gives the Church an overall grade of B.  Not what we'd hope for, not what we should settle for, but more than enough reason to work diligently rather than to drop out in despair.

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the book, pulled without any of the surrounding statistical justification, so feel free to question them, per Wright's instruction—or better yet, to look them up yourself.

No doubt because of the statistical studies which are available, Wright uses a standard classification system, based on denominational affiliation, to define "Evangelical" and distinguish it from "Mainline Protestant."  Unfortunately for the statistics, this skews the results of many who would self-classify as evangelical but attend churches in "mainline" denominations.

Evangelical parents worry about the faith of their children, and understandably so.  For some, this leads to attempts to shelter the child from "secular" society and its various religious perspectives.  Ironically, however, engaging society might actually be the best way for Evangelicals to strengthen their faith.  Evangelical parents:  Do you want your child to stay with the faith?  Perhaps one of the best things you can do is make sure he or she is well-educated.  At the very least, sending your children off to college is not necessarily something to fear (at least for their faith—for your finances, yes, run away screaming).

Membership figures for the Catholic Church have remained remarkably steady, but that's deceptive, the way climbing a mountain is a level hike, on average.  The Catholic Church is losing people in large numbers, but they are being offset by new immigrants, who are mostly Catholic.

Catholic women were the least likely to have had an abortion, with about 1 in 5 of them having done so.  About 1 in 4 Protestant women have had abortions, and about 1 in 3 religiously unaffiliated women and members of other religions have had an abortion.  Among both Protestants and Catholics, abortion rates dropped considerably with increased church attendance.  About 1 in 3 Protestant women who rarely attended church had abortions compared to about half that rate, 1 in 6, of the weekly attendees.  Likewise, among Catholic women, abortion rates drop from about 1 in 4 to about 1 in 8.

Wright cites these statistics to support his case that church affiliation and attendance measurably affect behavior when it comes to abortion.  And so they do.  But what dreadful statistics!   In the very best case (weekly-attending Catholics), one out of very eight women (your pew, or maybe yours and the one in front of you), has had at least one abortion.  This is not so much an indictment against the church, which is in the business of accepting sinners into the family, but of the sheer number of abortions that are going on.  I guess it's like the federal deficit—too large to comprehend.  Following Wright's advice, I seriously questioned these numbers, but even the Alan Guttmacher Institute, which is obviously not using the statistic to raise an alarm, admits, "At least half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by age 45, and, at current rates, about one-third will have had an abortion."  Given that such numbers are far more likely to be under- than over-reported, this is mighty scary.  I actually support leaving desperate personal decisions in desperate personal circumstances up to the primary people involved—but these numbers bespeak decisions made with less thought and research than goes into deciding which college to attend.  In making abortion legal, we appear to have made it almost casual.

Overall, non-Christians view Christians surprisingly positively—surprising, that is, if you have any connection with academia.

In 2007, the Institute for Jewish and Community Research surveyed the religious beliefs of over twelve hundred faculty members at various American colleges and universities.  As I understand it, this study was looking for anti-Semitism among faculty members, but they instead found something surprising:  a strong intolerance toward Evangelical Christians. One of the questions asked faculty members if they had negative feelings toward various religious groups....  [O]ver half—53%—of the faculty members reported having negative feelings toward Evangelical Christians, and this was far more than toward any other group.  Twenty-two percent of faculty members had negative feelings toward Muslims, 18% toward atheists, 13% toward Catholics, 9% toward non-Evangelical Christians, 4% toward Buddhists, and 3% toward Jews.  The study's authors concluded that "if not outright prejudice, faculty sentiment about the largest religious group in the American public borders dangerously close."

Wright enjoins us not to fear statistics, and not to trust them if they don't jibe with our experiences, especially if we have reason to doubt the motives or biases of the person citing them.  Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites... is not light reading, but a solid weapon for the arsenal of those who hope to counter fear-mongering and hand-wringing with knowledge and intelligence.

Micro Mobility Systems makes classy scooters, and look what I discovered when I ventured onto their website from a FRK article:

I like to take the bus to the airport, but the mile and a half walk to the bus stop is hard on luggage wheels.  They're not designed to take long distances on concrete.  But this is!  It's a scooter, zipping one to the bus stop and then folding to cabin-baggage size.

On second thought, it wouldn't really solve my problem, as cabin-baggage isn't that hard to haul to the bus; my real problem comes whenever I have to bring a bag big enough to check—the weight is much greater and the wheels no better.   With Lufthansa having an 18-pound carry-on weight limit, the scooter part probably adds an unreasonable amount of overhead, anyway.  But it's still a cool idea.

Micro Mobility's scooters in general look pretty classy.  They might make a nice addition to bicycles and trams in the Swiss commuting arsenal.