The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/169641
Opinion C-2 Wednesday, September 11, 2013 The Press-Dispatch Observations by Thomas Sowell Unintended consequences One of the many unintended consequences of the political crusade for increased homeownership among minorities, and lowincome people in general, has been a housing boom and bust that left many foreclosed homes that had to be rented, because there were no longer enough qualified buyers. The repercussions did not stop there. Many homeowners have discovered that when renters replace homeowners as their neighbors, the neighborhood as a whole can suffer. The physical upkeep of the neighborhood, on which everyone's home values depend, tends to decline. "Who's going to paint the outside of a rented house?" one resident was quoted as saying in a recent New York Times story. Renters also tend to be of a lower socioeconomic level than homeowners. They are No spin zone—by Bill O'Reilly Katiedid vs... by Katiedid Langrock Tools at the pool My state, like many, has been plagued by government layoffs. Teachers have gone on furlough. Police officers, firefighters and EMTs handed pink slips. Librarians, left without work, have been forced to yell at children playing outside to be quiet. But there is one place my local government has refused to make any cutbacks. One job that is held in such high-esteem, at a locale so sacred, no government penny pincher would dare take one penny from it: the local pool. I didn't notice the ample pool staffing when I rented out the grassy area of my community pool for my son's first birthday party. If I had noticed, I'm sure I would have seen it as an asset. In this time of hemorrhaging layoffs, it's nice to see one place with a generous number of employees. My overstaffed pool has assigned one worker to each minuscule job in an attempt to hide that the workers are prime pickings for pink slips. It would be a lot easier to ignore this tactic if the pool's staff members weren't such tools. And by "tools," I strictly mean the Merriam-Webster definition of "something used in performing an operation necessary in the practice of a profession." Why? How did you think I meant it? For example: The woman at the front desk acted like a tool when she physically barricaded the pool entrance after having lost the proof of my payment. Nothing could get past this lady. FEMA should hire her for the next Katrinalike disaster. We could forever eliminate the use of sandbags to reconstruct dams. Of course, after I suggested she call the main office using another tool, a telephone, she found my proof of payment and allowed my guests to enter. But not before first bringing out the diaper-checking tool, whose job it was to pull down the pants of the kids—many of whom were potty-trained—to make sure they were wearing swimming diapers. Once we finally were allowed to proceed to the grassy area, a genuinely lovely pool tool assisted us in setting up canopies over the picnic tables. As soon as he left, a second pool tool came over to take down the canopies. Apparently, we didn't have permission for our babies to be shaded from the hot August sun. A third pool tool said we had to pick which picnic table we wanted to use to eat cake. Despite our having rented out the grassy area, it wasn't fair to pool guests for us to monopolize both tables. I said I would happily share the space with any patron interested. No one was. But we still had to move. There was the tool who yelled at us for leaving towels by the pool. Another tool yelled at my friend's kid for using a kickboard. A different pool tool's job was to inspect our food before it entered—you know, in case Continued on page 3 Back to school It used to be that most kids hated early September: those back-toschool ads all over the place and the dreaded specter of another long year sitting in front of Ms. Crabtree or whomever. Most baby boomers like me equated Labor Day with a trip to the dentist. No longer. These days, many urchins actually like school. They look forward to getting up early, hopping on the bus and learning their buns off. How is this possible? I think I know. Simply put, many American children want to get away from their parents, some of whom micromanage every move they make. These days, everything is set up for the kids. No longer do they have any freedom. It's play-date this, sporting activity that. Camp here, seminar there. Climb a tree? You could be arrested—and you might even get dirty! So children experience more freedom at school than they do at home. In the hallways, they can relate to other kids and engage in actual conservations and horseplay without Mom hovering around. Also, the high-tech gizmos in many classrooms give kids some power over their academic performance. So school is cool and much more stimulating than home. My high school experience was mainly tedious. I had to take Latin. Amo, amas, amat. I am bored; you are bored; he, she or it is bored (loose translation). Five days a week, I fought slipping into a coma. But when I got home, the fun began. My mother wanted me out of the house. The rule was be home by 6 and don't assault anyone. I ran wild. Tackle football without equipment, stickball in the street and competitive basketball on a cement court. It was nonstop action with no adults in sight. Why would anyone want to go to school? Today, adults are swarming their kids like ants on Haagen-Dazs. The tykes are rarely unattended. Instead, they are shuttled from venue to venue in enormous SUVs driven by mothers holding a huge cup of Starbucks in one hand and a cellphone in the other. Leisure time is often contrived and full of pressure to win a black belt or master perfect ballet moves. Wouldn't you rather be in school? The obsession with offspring is part of an overall narcissistic plague that has infected the USA. Children are now extensions of their parents' egos. They are scorecards. The parents win if their kids do well in whatever. The children feel this very personal pressure so much that school demands are almost a relief. So three cheers for the beginning of the school term. After a summer of smother, the urchins are finally free to express themselves in classrooms all across America. Amazing how things have changed. Points to ponder—by Ford Bond Sexualizing Our Children The attention and preeminence that Western Culture places upon uninhibited sex is little more than worshipping the Canaanite fertility goddess god Astaroth, who Israel was forbidden to give sacrifice. All of the "sexual sins" that are listed in Leviticus were also prohibitions taught by the Church. Without controversy, all have been cast aside except bestiality and pedophilia, but I suspect they, too, will fall. Beginning with this year's school session, Chicago Public Schools will include sex education, which was supported in 2003 by then Illinois state senator Barak Obama. When asked in 2007 (then candidate Obama) about teaching sex education, he reminisced, "I remember when I ran against Alan Keyes—and remember him using this in his campaign against me, saying, 'Barack Obama supports teaching sex education to kindergartners.'" "And you know," said Obama, "I didn't know what to tell him. But it is the right thing to do, to provide ageappropriate sex education, science-based sex education in the schools." There you have the wisdom of the ages; it is the "right thing to do." The right thing to do is for government to mandate our children at age 5 to be exposed to "age-appropriate" science based, sex education. A woman's perspective—by Mona Charen Why Miley Cyrus matters Some defenders of Miley Cyrus' VMA performance don't understand what all the outrage is about. Justin Timberlake tweeted, "She's young. Take it easy on her." Lena Dunham worried about "slut shaming." Russell Simmons wrote "Just saw @MileyCyrus. What did I miss. She was having fun. #twerkmileytwerk." And Adam Lambert tweeted ". . . Listen if it wasn't our cup of tea—all good but why is everyone spazzing? Hey— she's doin something right. We all talkin." Cyrus seemed to endorse Lambert's any-attention-is-good-attention rationale. She boasted on Twitter that "Smilers! My VMA performance had 306.000 tweets per minute. That's more than the blackout or Superbowl! #fact." Doubtless if Cyrus had undressed completely and performed a literal (rather than pantomime) sex act on stage, her Twitter numbers would have been even higher. Ditto if she had twisted the head off a small animal or defecated live and in color. A product of the celebrity culture, she seems incapable of making judgments based on anything higher than buzz. If she did either of those things, would Lambert wonder why everyone was "spazzing," and would Dunham condemn "slut shaming"? It's hard to say. How many of Cyrus' young fans will interpret her behavior as a normal part of growing up? How many will confuse lasciviousness with sexual maturity? Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Wall Street Journal's wise children's book also less likely to join neighborhood groups, including neighborhood watches to keep an eye out for crime. In some cases, renters have introduced unsavory or illegal activities into family-oriented communities of homeowners that had not had such activities before. None of this should be surprising. Individuals and groups of all sorts have always differed from one another in many ways, throughout centuries of history and in countries around the world. Left to themselves, people tend to sort themselves out into communities of like-minded neighbors. This has been so obvious that only the intelContinued on page 3 reviewer, noted in a recent Hillsdale College speech that there is a vein in "young adult" fiction of ugly, horrific and sexually revolting material aimed at kids between 12 and 18. Girls cut themselves with razors until their bellies are a "mess of meat and blood," and boys don magic glasses that reveal "impaled heads and other blackrot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises." The authors and publishers justify these themes as "heartbreakingly honest." The subversives who undermine good taste always seem to invoke "honesty" or "reality". But as Gurdon rightly objects: "Books tell children what to expect, what life is, what culture is, how we are expected to behave—what the spectrum is. They form norms . . . And teenagers are all about identifying norms and adhering to them." No one who has ever observed a group of 15-year-old girls—nearly identical in their hair styles, clothes and speech—can doubt this. Miley Cyrus' performance was not just another case of a salacious and degrading bid for attention. Because of who she was—a Disney star with a loyal following of young girls—and because of what she did, she has introduced something even darker to the mainstream culture. She is indirectly legitimizing child porn. Miley Cyrus became a sensation as "Hannah Montana," a wholesome Dis- ney pop star. Millions of pre-teen girls adored the show and followed Cyrus' career. She is hardly the first celebrity to attempt to shock her audience by shedding her ingenue image. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and others have plowed this ground. But Cyrus did more than cast off her innocence. She used innocence itself as a lecherous come on. Cyrus, 20, began her vulgar dance by appearing in a teddy bear costume with dancing teddy bears as back up. She later exchanged this for a flesh-colored bra and panties and a large foam finger that she put to lewd uses. I haven't ever seen child porn, but I would bet that a great deal of it uses images of innocence and childhood— like teddy bears—for the delectation of its audience. Cyrus has now taken this perversion mainstream. Child porn, like every other kind of pornography, once relegated to a seedy underworld, is now as close as a cellphone. It's bobbing along in the twilight, close to the surface of American lives, but kept from full view by the last remaining shreds of propriety that our culture enforces. The existence of the Internet has probably already eroded some of the shame that pedophiles once felt. Learning that hundreds of thousands of others share one's perversion must be cathartic. But how much more liberating to see the themes of child sexual abuse portrayed approvingly at the VMA awards? American popular culture continues to prove that there is no rock bottom, and everyone who shrugs that it's no big deal is a little bit complicit. Sadly, President Obama is right; that is not to mean we must sexualize our children, but parents must counteract the obscenity that the music/entertainment industry panders as art, which is nothing more than soft-core pornography. Who deserves to be the poster child for sexualizing the children or for the next sex-ed poster? Madonna? Na, she's getting old. Lady Gaga? Na, she wants to be a ham sandwich. Brittany Spears? Na, she's nuts. How about sweet, reserved, innocent, child star turned adult Miley Cyrus? Yes, how could we go wrong with Hannah Montana the darling of millions of prepubescent girls and tweens? I am sure millions of followers along with a few parents watched the Video Awards last month just so they could see their idol sing and dance with Robin Thicke. What a surprise and education they received. Who would have thought a foam hand and finger could be used in a dance routine? It came in handy as Cyrus obviously had a case of the jitters or hives and was forced to rub all over herself. And it was a good thing Thicke was behind her when she bent over. She could have fallen backwards. I am sure many girls ask their mother why Cyrus's tongue flipped around like a snake. The answers must have been scientific and age-appropriate. Rachel Campos-Duffy in her Huffington Post column "Why Miley Cyrus Is Actually a Good Role Model for Girls" had this take Cyrus's performance: "Miley's performance may have been raunchy, but no one can deny that she seemed to be enjoying flaunting her sexual power and prowess. She would be no man's sexual victim. She modeled for our girls that even a sweet Hannah Montana could grow into a sexually confident young woman who was having a very good time with her sexuality." Are you kidding; a good role model-stimulating sex on stage? That is what every mother wants her daughter to imitate? One fan tweeted, "People close to Hannah Montana say they knew she was doomed as many as four years ago when Cyrus, then 16, pole-danced during the Teen Choice Awards. Another tweeted, "Cyrus gyrating with a man old enough to be her dad is the Continued on page 3 The P Dispatch ress- MR. AND MRS. FRANK HEURING, PUBLISHERS ANDREW G. HEURING, EDITOR JOHN B. 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