Lift Up Your Hearts!

In a comment on my previous post, my sister-in-law introduced me to Vicki Hoefle. In trying to figure out how to add a video link to the comment—I couldn't; it appears to be exclusively on Facebook—I came upon an essay on Vicki's website that also addresses the issue of immunizing our children against the risky behaviors that are all-too common among peer-socialized teens. She doesn't used the term, "peer-socialized," but there's a lot here that reminds me of Gordon Neufeld's Hold On to Your Kids.

The bottom line? It's all about a child's connection as a contributing member of his family and immediate community. Here are a few excerpts from "Teen Fads: Parents are talking about all the wrong things."

The public response to these fads is usually to call the teenagers “stupid”, assume their own child would “never do something so absolutely idiotic” and then blame the fad on social media or their friends, the media, the college, or the companies who sell the products. Because who in their right mind would actually do something so risky and downright dumb?

Answer: They’re not dumb. They’re not from bad families. They’re average kids who are seeking connection and purpose. These kids are desperately looking for a place to belong. They want to be noticed not simply for attention, but for a bond to others that will satisfy their needs for a social network where they feel valued.

The first opportunity for your children to develop a social network is at home. Your family and immediate community is the first social network in your child’s life and if they don’t feel connected as a contributing member, they’ll search for their social network elsewhere.

• What are you doing as a parent to ensure your child feels connected, capable and like a contributing member of your family?
• How are you interacting with your child to enforce the idea they belong, they are important and they are accepted – exactly as they are today?
• How are you supporting the development of essential skill sets so they feel competent and comfortable contributing to the success of their family?
• How are you ensuring they feel valued, listened to and appreciated for their perspectives, opinions, and preferences?

There's more of value in the essay, but I'm pushing the boundaries of fair use with what I've quoted here. (It's a short essay.)

It's the American way, and even more so the Japanese way, and apparently the Swiss way also: the professionalism of parenthood. School is no longer so much the place where one learns specialized skills that can't be picked up at home or on one's own, but a place expected to teach children nearly everything a society deems important. The Four R's: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic ... and all the Rest. Because, well, you know, the professionals can do it so much better, and who has the time, anyway?

Society is beginning to take notice that our children are getting to the once-upon-a-time age of adulthood without many of the life skills we take for granted, skills that enable them to live independently and hold down a job. Employers have noticed this for years, but the rest of us are finally beginning to catch up, if only in our derisive sneers at "Millennials." Is it the job of public education to teach these skills? Of course not—though I agree with those who insist that any institution that takes away most of a child's life, practically from the cradle, should be expected to return a lot more benefit from such a huge cost. But when a social need is found, it's likely to get dumped on the schools.

Enter the Let Grow Project for Schools, created to address this need. This is actually something different from the norm, in that the schools are only the vehicle for spurring action by parents and children. It begins with this basic homework assignment: Go home and do something your parents did at your age. The suggested activities are shocking: cooking, cleaning, buying something from the store, playing outside unsupervised, riding a bike in the neighborhood, briefly watching a sibling, walking to school. Shocking, apparently, for parents who have been conditioned to believe that such activities are too dangerous to think about; shocking, definitely, for those of us who grew up doing them in a world statistically more dangerous than the one we live in today.

Parents aren't stupid. They want their children to grow up to be independent, competent people. But it's hard to live against the grain, when the media, friends and colleagues, and sometimes even the laws of the land are telling you that overprotecting, even coddling children is simply good parenting. What the schools are doing here is giving parents permission to take that first step.

My only concern is that some parents will approach the project without common sense; the best way to learn to swim is rarely to be thrown out of the boat into deep water. (I know someone who was taught to swim that way, but she doesn't recommend it.) If our grandchildren are extraordinarily competent—and they are—it's because they've been taking baby steps toward independence all their lives. A child at age 11 can go through the steps faster if he wants to, but it still takes time and training.

I haven't seen it mentioned in the literature on this subject, but my theory is that a major contributor to over-dependent children is the modern trend toward small families. When parents have only one or two children, it's all too easy to do for them things they should be doing for themselves. (Mea culpa.) Larger families simply cannot. Training children to do their own laundry, to wash dishes, to shovel snow, to cook meals, and to entertain themselves is a matter of survival. And it pays big dividends, for parents as well as children. As my daughter (mother of six) proclaimed, referring to her then thirteen-year-old son, It was worth all the work (and that work did include tears, it's not like I'm forgetting) in training him in the kitchen from a young age to be able to say now, "Please make dinner on Thursday night. Quiche would be nice."

There's no reason why this can't happen in smaller families, of course. But it's like exercise.  Once upon a time, people got plenty of good exercise without having to think about it, because their daily lives were so active; now, our sedentary lives mean that this essential element of health and happiness requires deliberate action.

May the Let Grow Project help more families find the "child competence exercise program" that fits them best.

Carl Lutz, together with his wife, Gertrud, was instrumental in rescuing some 62,000 of Budapest's Jews from the Nazis, after he was appointed Swiss Vice-Consul there in 1942. This is largely unknown, even in his native Switzerland. I certainly had never heard of him before this BBC News article. Perhaps Lutz's List isn't a good movie title.

I understand why Switzerland has chosen to be a neutral country, and there are many reasons why such countries are needed, despite the widely-attributed (and mis-attributed) aphorism, "The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality." The Lutzes are ample evidence that political neutrality does not necessarily lead to personal, moral neutrality.

(from the BBC article)

As an envoy for neutral Switzerland, Lutz represented the interests of countries who had closed their embassies in Hungary, including Britain and the United States. So he began by placing under Swiss protection anyone connected to the countries he represented. ... But to save Budapest's Jews, Lutz needed to go further. He persuaded the Germans to let him issue diplomatic letters of protection, 8,000 of them. He then applied the letters not to individuals, as the Germans had intended, but to entire families. And once he reached 7,999, he simply started again at number 1, hoping the Nazis would not notice the duplication. Historians estimate the letters saved up to 62,000 people. "It is the largest civilian rescue operation of the Second World War," says Charlotte Schallié. ... Lutz's efforts frustrated Nazi officials in Budapest so much they requested permission from Berlin to have him assassinated - although this was never carried out.

As it became clear that Germany would lose the war, Nazi operations in Hungary became more and more brutal. Rather than organise deportations, they began taking Jewish families to the banks of the River Danube and shooting them. In response, Carl Lutz set up 76 safe houses. Technically in Switzerland's territory, the shelters took in thousands. Sweden and the Red Cross set up safe houses too. Altogether there were 120 across Budapest.

Sometimes the work became more personal.

(from Wikipedia)

One day, in front of the fascist Arrow Cross Party militiamen while they fired at Jews, Carl Lutz jumped in the Danube River to save a bleeding Jewish woman along the quay that today bears his name in Budapest (Carl Lutz Rakpart). With water up to his chest and covering his suit, the consul swam back to the bank with her and asked to speak to the Hungarian officer in charge of the firing squad. Declaring the wounded woman a foreign citizen protected by Switzerland and quoting international covenants, the Swiss consul brought her back to his car in front of the stunned fascists and left quietly. Fearing to shoot at this tall man who seemed to be important and spoke so eloquently, no one dared to stop him.

There was a hero, indeed. Not that his own country was eager to recognize him as such, fearing damage to their neutrality, and danger for other Swiss diplomats in Budapest, who had been arrested by the Russians. Another reason, according to historian Francois Wisard, is that the Swiss are reluctant to celebrate heroes. (They clearly make an exception for William Tell.)

"In Switzerland you do not like the cult of personality. Other countries may have more of this. I think what he did was quite extraordinary, but I am reluctant to use the word hero."

I'd use the word hero. But the Swiss may be on to something. If they are too reluctant to recognize heroic actions, Americans are far too eager to embrace even modest good works as heroism, and to glorify people to the point of idolatry.

The story of Carl Lutz is proof enough that great deeds do not make one immune to temptation to personal betrayals: Shortly after the end of the war, Carl Lutz divorced his heroic Gertrud to marry one of the women he rescued.

Perhaps it's better to look at the flip side of that: It does not take a hero to accomplish heroic work. It takes a normal, flawed human being who is willing to do what is right. As Carl Lutz's step-daughter said about him (back to the BBC article again),

"He was a very shy man, it was not necessarily in his nature to do what he did. But he saw the misery of the Jews and he thought he had to help."

In 1944, my grandparents moved across the continent from Pullman, Washington to Rochester, New York, where my grandfather worked until he retired in 1969. This film, made in 1963, gives glimpses of their Rochester. The Rochester they watched as it developed.

We visited them at least once a year when I was young, but I remember little of the city from then. Most of my memories are from my own time in Rochester, from 1970 through 1983. That's close enough to 1963 for this video to have sparked many memories, from the Midtown Plaza Clock of the Nations to Letchworth State Park to the Spring House restaurant, where we had our wedding rehearsal dinner. Not to mention the University of Rochester, the Lilac Festival in Highland Park, and the old familiar industries and landmarks.

By the time our daughter returned to attend the Eastman School of Music at the end of the century, Rochester was a different city, with much of the industry gone or on the way out. A telling quote from Wikipedia about the Eastman Kodak Company, once virtually synonymous with Rochester, is this: Although Kodak developed a digital camera in 1975, the first of its kind, the product was dropped for fear it would threaten Kodak's photographic film business. They had forgotten, perhaps, the film's admonition that if a company (or a city) does not change, change will come in ways unexpected and unpleasant.

Rochester is still a lovely city, and I sure miss "the splendor of a Western New York apple," though I don't think anyone's bragging about the traffic situation anymore. Our children, and perhaps even my siblings, are too young to remember when life was like this, but I hope they'll still enjoy this bit of history, which is part of the world of my childhood. I only wish I could talk with my grandparents about the Rochester they knew.

Since mid-November, my reading has been rather light, there being nothing intellectually challenging about my last 13 books. (Well, Boys of Blur could be—I need to re-read Beowulf—but it was enjoyable enough without going into all that.)  I had planned to continue that trend for a while, not from any particular desire for easy reading, but because I want to re-read all the existing Green Ember books before the new one is released.

My eldest grandson, and the library, changed all that.

His current all-time favorite book series is Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time.  With that kind of recommendation, I thought it would be good to check it out. Recently our libray sent notice that my hold for the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, had come through, so today I ventured out to pick it up.

The librarian didn't quite need a hand truck to bring it from the back room.

The book is 670 pages long.

I hope I like it, because 670 pages will be a long slog if I don't. But I'm more than half hoping that I don't like it too much, because there are 13 more books in the series, plus a prequel and a companion book.

Long gone (though only five years past) is the time when I could sample his taste in reading by whipping through half a dozen Animorphs books in a few days.

I need new jeans. This is a perennial situation; I've been looking for new jeans for years, waiting for comfort to come back in style. I mean, we're talking jeans here. Not high fashion. Jeans are supposed to be comfortable.

When will the skinny jeans fad end?

For some inexplicable reason I thought I'd try my luck again today. Tell me, what kind of an oxymoron is "plus size skinny jeans"? Just plain moronic, I'd say.

Listen, folks. I wouldn't want to look as if my jeans were painted on even if I had the best of figures. But in what bizarre nightmare did you dream that a plus size woman might want to feel every ounce of flab she owns from the waist down—and display it all for the world to see? Even the models in the ads look ugly, stuffed into skin-tight pants.

One more, little hint you might want to take seriously: Adding big rips in the knees does not make the jeans any more attractive, no matter what the size. On plus sizes it looks beyond stupid.

I've been waiting over a year for the next book in the S. D. Smith's Green Ember series. As I said at the end of my review of Ember Falls,

Bring on the next book! Bring on the next Kickstarter appeal. I'll be there. #RabbitsWithSwords

The time has come. Ember Rising is finally in the home stretch. The book is written, artwork done, cover chosen ... there's just that little matter of publication. Once again they are funding this through Kickstarter, which I see as a great way to support a good author and play a small part in getting these wonderful books out of his head and into the world. 

I'm now officially an S. D. Smith fan. I don't support projects for the sake of the rewards, any more than I donate blood for the t-shirts and gift cards. But they're still nice to have, and this time I chose a level with rewards that duplicate things I already have—such as Kindle versions of the books—because it also gets me physical copies of all the books published so far. I had some, from previous campaigns, but gave them away, because why take up bookshelf space when you have the Kindle versions? Unless, of course, you have decided that you really like the books, and you're a true bibliophile, and still love the feel of a real book in your hands. And want to be able to lend the books to friends, or attract the eye of a visiting grandchild. That sort of thing. You can read a Kindle book, but you can love a physical book, and some books deserve to be loved. Hence my extensive collection of George MacDonald, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Ransome, Miss Read....

Anyway, here's the Kickstarter link and accompanying video, should you want to join this exciting project.

On an out-of-the-way street in a suburb of Lucerne, Switzerland, hides a small, by-invitation-only restaurant called Chez Stücklin. It was there that we were privileged to celebrate our 43rd wedding anniversary.

Well-dressed, cheerful greeters met us at the entrance and led us to our private table. This was located in the Sun Room, which was on this day a misnomer, as the sunshine was primarily of the liquid variety. 

No matter; the room was well heated and we were offered warm slippers to protect our feet. Note the blue, personalized place card, the beautiful roses, the amusing pig-shaped candle, and the fancy-folded napkins.

The menu at Chez Stücklin is fixed. Here is what was served on our special night. (Click on any image to enlarge.)

The elegant, semi-refined wait staff lit our candle and took our drink orders. They were attentive to our drink needs throughout the meal—to me, the hallmark of a great restaurant.

Soon they brought in the first course: Mermaid Blossom Potage, "seasonal soup with a trefoil of select seasonings."  It was delicious, and reminded me of the curried pumpkin soup we traditionally enjoy at Thanksgiving time, but with lighter seasoning.  During the soup course, the youngest kitchen apprentice came by with a bowl of potato chips, solemnly handing us each a single chip.

The main course, Pizza on the Head ("homemade pizza with Mama's favorite crust and toppings worth jumping about"), was prepared tableside, as we watched. The dough had been previously prepared, but the staff rolled it out to perfection, one of the crusts even being in a "hidden Mickey" form in honor of our home town. They then added sauce, cheese, and a personalized assortment of toppings.

While we waited for our pizzas to bake, we enjoyed the restaurant's varied entertainment. Seldom have I been so pleased with the volume of restaurant music, which is nearly always too loud. Here, it was pleasant to listen to and did not interfere with normal conversation.  If the quality of the performances varied somewhat, there is no doubt that the cuteness factor was as high as I have ever experienced.

I regret that a few of the acts are missing from the following montage. The restaurant has a policy that discourages videotaping of the older staff, so you will not get to see some delightful piano and harp performances. There was also an incredible duet between the head waiter on keyboard and Waitress V on tin whistle. I'm told that it was a completely unrehearsed, impromptu performance, but Waitress V was so sensitive to the music that she picked up the rhythm and even some of the melody simply through listening to the piano. I'm really sorry not to have filmed that—Waitress V would love to have had it recorded—but by the time I realized what was happening, I was simply too entranced to pull out my camera. We also missed a comedy routine I'm told was hilarious, but apparently the comedian was overcome by a sudden attack of shyness.

My pizza was all I could have hoped for. I could easily have eaten it all, but accepted the suggestion of a take-home box because I knew that dessert was part of the anniversary dining package. Team Vanilla Chocachilla, "a generous portion of vanilla ice cream with hagels and chocolate sauce," was the perfect finish to a perfect anniversary dinner.

Chez Stücklin, Lucerne's hidden gem, receives my highest possible, five-star rating.

I guess I should end this year with a serious post, some profound commentary, philosophy, or at least a glimpse into my hopes and dreams for 2018.

Instead, you get MarbleLympics.

This is thanks to our Swiss grandchildren, who are huge fans of Jelle's Marble Runs.

The whole family enjoys them, but Joseph (7) and Daniel (4) are obsessed, watching the videos when allowed, running their own marble races with their Hubelino sets, in the sand on the beach, or on the bare living room floor. The family received a beautiful, 3D map of Switzerland for Christmas; in Daniel's eyes, the Alpine valleys were just so many marble runs.

For months, Joseph has been teaching himself Dutch through DuoLingo, hoping for a chance to visit to Jelle Bakker himself in the Netherlands.

Porter and I have also been captivated by the MarbleLympics. Here's the opening ceremony and first event of the 2017 games; from there you can find much more to watch than you'll ever have time for. It's all very cleverly done, and I love the commentator, who not only calls the events like a professional, but reports "an injury on the field" when a collision results in a chipped marble, and issues a serious call for better stadium security when some marbles fall out of the stands and "rush onto the field."

Enjoy!  And have a happy New Year, too.

What happens when good quality musical instruments are found under the Christmas tree. I'm sorry for the back-of-the-head shots, but if I'd brought the camera to where it was visible, it would suddenly have become the center of attention.  It's a little hard to hear the keyboard, but it is providing the music that they are jamming with.

Famed theologian Dr. R. C. Sproul once said to us that the first question he'd ask God on arriving in heaven was, "Why sin?"  I can still picture that moment vividly, though I remember nothing more of the conversation than that one question.

He now knows the answer, but is no longer sharing his considerable knowledge with the world. Robert Charles Sproul died yesterday.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau once said, "Living next to [the United States] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt."

Going to the same church as R. C. Sproul was like that. He eventually left that church, as did we, though on different paths. But his influence was great, for good and for ill. Personally, I owe him a good deal, for it was in large part due to his efforts that our family came to know and love liturgical worship.

I don't think our children realized how famous he really was until they went off to college. To them, he was, "the guy whose son taught my Sunday school class," "the composer of that hymn I like," "my friend's grandfather," etc.

R.C. was a great man. By no means do I imply that I liked or respected everything he said or did. Like many people who accomplish much in this world, he was larger than life.

Oh, are you wondering about the title of this post? It comes from this obituary in today's Washington Post. Here's the full quote:

He offered his lectures and classes on what were called cassette tapes for audio listening. He pioneered Bible teaching on VHS tapes for TV viewing. He was figuring out distance learning many years before people would take online classes or listen to podcasts.

R.C. was older than I am, but if I needed any further evidence than morning stiffness to prove that I have been around longer than much of the Post's audience, it is that the author felt it necessary to explain cassette tapes.

Requiesce in pace.

Especially for Faith. How does he DO that?

Lenore Skenazy has a new site (relatively new—I've fallen a bit behind) called Let Grow. I haven't explored much yet, but the Let Grow Resolution deserves all the publicity it can get, so I'm (uncharacteristically) lifting it in its entirety here.

The “Let Grow” Resolution:

 Our children have the right to some unsupervised time, and we have the right to give it to them without getting arrested.

Statement of findings

1. It is good, healthy and normal for kids to walk and play outside, and run some errands on their own.
2. Violent crime is at a 50 year low.
3. It is not low because we are keeping kids inside. All crime — even against adults — is lower now, and we are not keeping adults inside.
4. The risk of child abduction by strangers is very low.
5. Being in a car accident as a passenger is the leading cause of death among children, not stranger danger.
6. Lack of exercise is a contributing factor to short term and long term health risks for children.
7. It is in the public interest for children to walk and cycle to their day-to-day destinations, and to play outside on their own.
8. When kids do that, they learn social skills, problem-solving, creativity and compromise — the skills they will need in college and beyond that they do not get in adult-run activities.
9. Because we can’t always prepare the path for our children, we must prepare our children for the path, by giving them freedom and responsibility, so they gradually learn to be independent, resourceful and resilient.

Right of Children to Freedom of Movement

1. Therefore, this legislature decrees that it supports letting children walk, cycle, take public transportation and/or play outside by themselves, with the permission of a parent or guardian.
2. Allowing children to exercise these rights shall not be grounds for charges against their parents or guardians unless something else is found to be amiss.

Questions, comments? Contact Lenore Skenazy at Lenore@LetGrow.org .

That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth;
The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him Who with us sideth:
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also;
The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever.

Mostly, I like the great Reformation hymn, Martin Luther's A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Good music, powerful words.

Too powerful. I have a problem singing the middle line of the above verse: Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also. Usually I manage to sing it by faith, but sometimes thinking about beloved kindred causes me to choke into silence. I'm pretty sure my devoted Christian friends, strong as ever in their faith, are still choking a bit as they watch their two and a half year old son struggle in his battle with leukemia. The hymn is still true: The body they may kill: God’s truth abideth still, His kingdom is forever. It's just hard sometimes.

But I really thought my problem was with the kindred part. I didn't think I'd have so much trouble letting the goods go.

We are in the process of replacing our stove, which has served us exceedingly well for over 40 years. Eventually I may tell the story of its replacement, but first things first.

It was a General Electric stove, one of the very first with a regular oven on the bottom and a microwave oven on the top, and we bought it as part of improving a decidedly-unacceptable kitchen in our very first house, in Rochester, New York. At a price of something over $700, it was quite a splurge back in 1977, but if you ignore the cost of electricity and a couple of repairs, that works out to less than $20 per year for roasting meats, simmering stews, baking bread, boiling eggs, and making cookies and birthday cakes.

It still worked, mostly, after 40 years. The automatic oven cleaning feature started to get a little wonky, so we disabled it in 2001 when we temporarily rented the house out during our time living in Boston. When we returned in 2003, we left it that way in the interest of safety. The part of the oven door that holds it up when open went on strike, and after a couple of strikebreaking efforts that didn't last long, I learned to hold the door with a strategically placed knee as I maneuvered food in and out of the oven. A few years ago, the front left burner stopped working, and defied attempts to diagnose the problem. But it was when the two back burners started to act up that we decided, reluctantly, that it might be time to think about a replacement.

There's a saying, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that if you lined up all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion. The same has been said about Langdons. I am a chief example, and the stove decision was no exception. Partly because I find shopping—even online, though that's better—absolutely agonizing, and partly because, well, because the stove still worked. When you have a working microwave, an oven that can bake and roast and broil, and one and two-halves burners, what's the rush? We started our new stove search well over a year ago, and the reason the search reached a conclusion at this most inconvenient time of the year is the Porter decided that I must make the decision now. So I did—I hadn't been wasting all those months and had done a fair amount of preliminary work—but as I said, the new stove is later story.

I'm happy with the new stove, but it was still a wrench to let the old stove go. It was foolish, perhaps, but I cleaned it one more time, with a heart full of thanksgiving: a labor of love, like that of women in bygone days who gently prepared the bodies of their departed for burial. If we could have found it a good home, as we did with the 1999 Chevy Venture we recently had to part with, I'd have been okay. But we learned long ago that no one is so poor as to desire our cast-off furniture, including appliances that work much better than this old stove. I mean, I know people really are that poor, but charities are not interested in meeting their needs in that way. Our city wouldn't accept it for recycling or even hazardous waste, but did give Porter the name of a company that buys old appliances. Great! we thought, even though we had to transport it to their site ourselves.

Which Porter did, today. And discovered that they weren't interested at all in the fact that much of it was still operational; all they wanted was the scrap metal. They paid him 14 pieces of silver—I mean dollars. That was better than our having to pay someone to dispose of it, but my heart breaks to think of our faithful stove, which could still do most of what it had been created for, crunched up into a small metal cube.

Let goods and kindred go. Right. If I can't even do it for a 40-year-old appliance....

At first I didn't participate in the "Me Too" campaign on Facebook (and elsewhere)—meant to reveal the magnitude of the problem of sexual harassment and assault in our country and now featured in Time magazine's "Person of the Year"—because, well, because I'm not a joiner, and I don't like chain letters, even if they don't promise me that blessings will come my way if I pass it on, and that misfortune is sure to follow if I don't.

Later, I thought it might not be such a bad idea to highlight a problem that has been ignored too long. Here's the Facebook exchange that started my thinking:

S: Me Too.

If all the women I know who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "me too" as a status... and all the women they know... we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

Stop the silence. Stop the violence.

L: How do you define, "harassed"? There are days when I feel that being whistled at while walking down the street, or approached by a stranger trying to pick you up, is sexual harassment. And how about being kissed too familiarly by a drunk relative? "Felt up" by an overeager teenaged boyfriend at the movies? I could understand the last two being called assault, but I suspect many people wouldn't. At any rate, all of the above are unwelcome and ought to stop. But they are so many orders of magnitude below rape and other forms of what is clearly sexual assault, that I fear to muddy the waters and appear disrespectful of the pain of the latter victims. What is your take on this?

K: My view is this: any time one individual relates to another individual on an exclusively sexual plain, that individual demeans the other and diminishes their humanity. Although there are many degrees of disregard, the bottom line is that one person is being treated as something less than fully human. It's a way of thinking about people that is at the heart of sexism, racism, ageism, etc. As a human society we must insist on asserting the wrongness of that way of thinking. At school we define sexual harassment as any action of a sexualized nature that makes the target feel uncomfortable - from whistling to name calling to inappropriate touching to lifting someone's clothing and much more. It is important not to confuse harassment and assault. And important to distinguish what is legally prosecutable from what isn't. But we make too many excuses and allowances for behavior that is unacceptable. I think it is time to draw the lines about unacceptable behavior that falls short of rape far more clearly than we do.

L: I think life has gotten a lot harder since the 1960's. I could certainly say "me too" to the definitions of harassment you've given. But nothing compared with what I hear from others ... and no worse than non-sexual harassment, which I would call plain rudeness.

That was helpful, but I wasn't convinced.  I have friends who have to live with that kind of pressure in their work environment, or have actually been raped, and I didn't think it right to put my own experiences in the same category as theirs. Mine fell into the more general category of "bullying," though with a sexual dimension, because bullies will strike wherever they find a weakness. That, and "the guy was too drunk to know what he was doing, and would be mortified if he knew."  It seemed like putting into the same category of "wounded in the war" both the man whose arm was nicked by a piece of shrapnel and the one who had both legs blown off. It's true, but is it helpful?

The broader definition of sexual harassment certainly cuts right to the heart of the problem, and goes along with what Jesus said about both lust and murder. But is it helpful to draw the line around all women, at least of a certain age, and quite a few men as well?  Maybe—but I still didn't feel I could participate.

And then, today, I remembered.

I made the comment, in a discussion at choir rehearsal last Sunday, that one of our members, who teaches physical education, sure doesn't fit the stereotype of a female gym teacher. And I got to thinking about what I thought of as a stereotypical female gym teacher, and remembered the bane of my existence from high school.

I've repressed a lot of memories from high school gym class, and I won't name names because I really have managed to forget many of the details. But if the teachers, themselves, were not outright abusive (though it felt like it to me), the system that they participated in certainly was. I suspect it was not uncommon at the time, and it certainly never occurred to me that it was something I could successfully object to—it was just one of the many miserable things teachers were allowed to do to students.

And lest you be wondering what fearful revelations I'm about to make, I'll relieve your minds: It may even seem minor to you, and I don't think I bear any significant scars, other than those inflicted by gym class in general. But there's no doubt in my mind, looking back, that it was an abusive, even a sexually abusive, situation.

By the time we were in high school, we were required to take showers after gym class. I could see it for the guys, but we girls almost never perspired enough to need showers—and the process wouldn't have gotten us clean if we had. No doubt gym class has changed over the years; I certainly hope the bathing situation has.

This is a rough plan of the shower room. Stripped naked, we were forced to give our names to a student monitor, who dutifully checked us off, then walk through a gauntlet of shower heads and out the exit. That's it. No soap—it slows down the line. In fact, the object was to run through as quickly as possible, minimizing our exposure to both water and the prying eyes of everyone else in the room. It was bad enough that we had to change into and out of our gym clothes in a public locker room, but the showers were an extra refinement of torture. Once a month we were allowed to avoid that humiliation, but that required us to announce to the monitor, and all within earshot, that we were having our periods.

If our gym teachers had been male, no one would question that this situation was wrong. I fail to see that them being female made the forced exposure of our young bodies and private matters to their eyes and those of the entire class any more acceptable.

Age, and having gone through the process of giving birth to our children, have since made me less sensitive to what other people see and think, but I still appreciate the private changing areas that are now provided in public pools and gyms. No one—especially no pubescent child—should have to go through what I, and my classmates, endured.

So yes, "Me, too."  It's insignificant compared to what others have experienced, but it's part of a pattern of disrespect that needs to end. Jesus had it right, you know. It's our heart attitude that matters. When we wink at smaller offenses, we promote an atmosphere in which heinous acts proliferate.

It's time for national repentance, and a good place to begin would be with the highest office in the land. If that's not forthcoming—a grassroots effort is probably better, anyway.