DemocratDad

Toilet Training and World Politics

Just think of it: whatever the culture, whatever the religious beliefs, whatever the living conditions, the world over, parents have to teach their children when and how to go.

Some parents, as is reflected in this new trend, teach their babies in their first months how to go "diaper free." We didn't do this, though I have no doubt that it works. If you have ever watched the movie Nanook of the North, and you are a parent, then you have admired with growing envy the skill of Eskimos in carrying their children on their back without any need for diapers.

It would be fascinating (well, perhaps that's the wrong word -- revealing?) to read a study comparing the techniques of all the nationalities in the world when it comes to toilet training. I am certain that it would speak volumes about each nation's outlook on all sorts of political issues... If nothing else, we might gain new insight into the friction between the "poliics of fear" and the "politics of hope." (That about captures the politics in our home when my wife and I are discussing whether to skip the diaper during George's naptime these days.)

In lieu of such a study, I leave you with this glimpse into contemporary Japanese toilet training techniques. I have to admit that the way the parents talk excitedly of a funny feeling, while rubbing their bellies, is eerily familiar from our house. It's a small world after all:

Superhero Costumes We All Wear

This morning my oldest, George, arrived as school with something missing. He was wearing a plain pair of jeans, a shirt with a cheetah on it, underwear, socks, shoes.

That's it. No "S" on his chest. No spiderwebs. No cape.

It was hard for him. He looked down at his feet. He was suddenly shy when his friends approached. Poor little guy. His mom barely got him to accept that at least he could chase his friends "as fast as a cheetah!" With some doubt still registering on his face, he took off running, long cheetah strides and all.

What happened? Why no "S"?

Well, yesterday my wife and I tried to create an incentive to get George to make the final step towards complete toilet training. We said that if he used the toilet consistently (even at naptime -- which was the problem) for a whole day, then he could get a new, 3-year-old-sized Superman costume (he has been fitting into the same worn, now hopelessly flooded Superman costume since he turned 2). The catch was: no superhero costumes, not even the old ones, until he showed us he was ready.

No orange "fish-scale" shirts. No Batman utility belts. No Flash costumes with the yellow gloves. And no Superman.

For most boys, this probably wouldn't be a problem. But George (like me when I was his age -- genetic? socialized?) insists on being a superhero... not occasionally, mind you, but every day. This has been going on for a year.

What my wife realized today when she dropped him off at his preschool, is that the superhero costume acts as a kind of buffer for him against the worries and pressures of his day. When caught offguard or confused by a teacher's request, or bumped by another child, he can always assume the hands-on-waist imposing stance of Superman, or the ironic, lifted eyebrow of Batman, or the speedy, exaggerated run of the Flash. Without the costumes, he is just a 3-year-old boy in a huge world.

This got me thinking about the superhero costumes that we all wear, even in adulthood. My last post was on Gore and Clarence Thomas and their different ideas of honor -- based on integrity or reputation. What are these but superhero poses, embodying different idealizations of their actual selves, with slightly different enumerations of powers?

What is my "superhero costume" as I write this post? Am I a Defender of the Left, whose power is to use my X-ray vision to expose hypocrisy on the Right? Or am I a Concerned Parent whose power is asking questions... questions that act as a heat-ray to melt the facade of daily life and reveal our shared understandings behind? I guess I would hope to have a variety of costumes, from which I can choose on any given day (and sometimes change them minute by minute -- just like George does!).

What about you? What "superhero costumes" do you wear at work, at home, with your children?

Of course we all know that our children aren't fooled by our costumes any more than we're fooled by theirs. By about 12 years (or earlier?), I expect, they will know with certainty that I'm just Dad, a man who happens to have lived longer than they have and who loves them very much.

I would just hope that, when that day comes, they will have the same reaction I do when the superhero shirt squeezes over George's head and settles on his shoulders: I know he may not actually be Superman, but when he hugs me I know that his powers are far better than knowing how to fly.

And at least his mom and I can check kryptonite off the list of things to worry about.

By the way, here's the current favorite youtube video in our house. You'll soon see why.

Integrity vs. Reputation

The awarding of the Nobel peace prize to Al Gore today caused me to reflect on two different understandings of honor that are floating around in our contemporary culture.

To me, Al Gore represents the kind of honor which is rooted in his own private sense of self. It is inward-looking. When, for example, Gore conceded the 2000 election to Bush, he acted in a way that was no doubt painful when considered from the perspective of his public life, but which his inward sense of honor told him was right.

For some, his concession forever branded him with the stigma of a "loser." (Who can forget the bumperstickers and signs we saw during that time saying "Sore/Loserman"?)

I felt that, on the contrary, we witnessed, on live TV, a true act of patriotism; whether right or wrong, Gore made his decision based on what he believed was best for the country at the time. Gore's honor is strongly associated with the idea of integrity.

Consider another kind of honor that competes with Gore's. This other honor requires the vigorous and constant defense of a person's public image. Justice Clarence Thomas makes clear in his recent book that he believes that great harm was done to his honor in the Anita Hill controversy. He carries his bitterness with him even today. But what harm could possibly be done to his honor if he simply carried himself in a dignified manner, acted as he saw fit, and told the truth? Justice Thomas' idea of honor -- traditionally heralded as "a man's sacred honor" -- is strongly associated with reputation.

The tension between these two conflicting ideas of honor -- one based on integrity and the other based on reputation -- lies beneath many of the cultural skirmishes we see playing out in our national debate. The media promotes reputational honor above all else -- because this kind of honor requires an active defense on the part of those who feel their's is under attack, and that helps ratings.

As a result, most TV talk programs (spanning the political spectrum from Bill O'Reilly to Keith Olberman) present everything as a debate between opposing sides. One side says something shocking, and the other side defends itself.

In our private lives, however, many people continue to cherish the idea of a quiet, private sense of honor based on integrity. We tear up when we hear stories of dedicated parents who provide for their children, without any recognition, in the face of enormous hardships and even humiliations.

This cuts across both political parties. Republicans and even the religious right do celebrate integrity-based honor when they see it in a working family who quietly cares for the poor in their charity work. The left celebrates honor based on integrity when they see someone working for an unpopular cause such as ensuring a woman's right to choose to have an abortion, despite the protesters outside the door.

Both also celebrate the kind of honor based on reputation: members of the Republican Party, reflecting the values of the Old South, talk of facing down opponents almost as if they wish to fight a duel -- as Limbaugh did last week when he called for Harry Reid to act like a "man" and to come on his program to discuss the "phony soldiers" comments personally. Democrats celebrate honor of this kind too when they vaunt Hillary's "experience" over Obama's naivete. What is naivete but sticking to your own sense of what is right in the face of tough odds (in other words, showing integrity)?

As a father, I hope to teach my children to value the kind of honor that Gore shows. I sense that it starts, for Gore, with childhood, for this is the reference for our most closely-held sense of identity.

My sense is that the other kind of honor, the one based on reputation, starts not in childhood but in adolescence. It recalls our first victories and embarrassments among our peers. It is suggestive of high school shenanigans.

Reputation is a poor substitute for integrity.

Raising Children Right... or Left

Do we make our children liberal or conservative by the way we raise them -- even before we ever discuss politics with them expicitly?

I would argue that we do give them an outlook on the world which likely predisposes them one way or the other.

But there are too many dimensions to politics, too many values informing our positions, for our children's political views, once they emerge, to conform perfectly to our own. Thank golly.

Into this teeming mix of values and lessons and clashing political views -- familiar to parents with teenagers, I imagine -- comes a new theory. It is worth examining from a parenting perspective.

Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, has proposed a theory of morality which involves 5 "moral axes." They are: harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity. His ideas were discussed in the New York Times's Science section a few weeks ago, and the article generated a storm of commentary on the internet.

Haidt claims that liberals and conservatives, answering the same questions (you can do the test yourself to see where you come down) will find that their results cluster around different axes. Liberals will, according to Haidt, put far more emphasis on avoiding harm and ensuring fairness. Conservatives will add to these concerns a strong feeling for ingroup loyalty, a respect for authority and an interest in preserving sacredness/purity.

So Haidt would suggest that we are influencing our children's politics by the values we teach them.

"Of course," I wanted to say when I first read this. "Values inform politics, what else is new?"

But something about Haidt's approach continued to nag at me in the week after I read about it. Then I finally realized why. He suggests that conservatives have more moral axes, more resources for decision-making, than liberals -- five rather than the stunted two that I favor.

Here's how I counter Haidt's theory:

A dear friend of mine had a birthday recently, and I was thinking about his great qualities. One of his qualities is his deep loyalty and steadfastness towards his close friends. Suddenly, I remembered the Haidt moral axes. And so I asked myself, "Does this loyalty that my friend shows make him more moral in my view?" My answer was no. I realized from this that I do not consider loyalty to be a moral quality, merely an admirable personality trait.

With this thought-experiment in mind, the three "conservative" axes, (loyalty, authority, and purity) seem to me more tied to personality traits than they are a sense of morality.

Haidt (and cultural conservatives) would argue of course that I am so steeped in the contractual model of morality that I simply can't see these for what they are -- axes of moral decision. But the burden is not on me. It is on Haidt to demonstrate that his "5 axes" matrix is truly an exhaustive list of moral axes. Otherwise it's just a cute exercise.

Has he done that? I don't think so.

Why not add a few more "moral" axes, such as flexibility/rigidness, or openness to difference/desire for homogeneity? These two suggestions have a bias towards recognizing culturallly "liberal" acts of generosity and kindness as opposed to the Haidt axes of purity and authority and loyalty, which are biased towards recognizing conservative virues. But aren't they just as legitimate?

I would bet that we could generate a list of some 20 or 30 axes which would be borne out in studies as distinguishing liberal vs. conservative inclinations about morality. In short, the whole thing reeks of the typical weakness of psychology: mistaking labeling for insight.

Certainly, by encouraging, say, "openness to difference" rather than "ingroup loyalty," I am predisposing my children to political views on the liberal side of the spectrum. On that we can agree. But I am not making them morally deficient. They have the two crucial "moral axes" covered: minimize harm and try to be fair. The rest are a matter of taste. And some, like the cult of sacredness/purity, are not to my taste at all.

President Hillary

Just over a year from now, Hillary Clinton may be elected the 44th President of the United States of America.

My first reaction to that prospect is relief.

But once I get over my relief that it is not President Guiliani or President Thompson, what about President Hillary Clinton herself?

I feel mixed.

First, the good. I would argue that there are, to put it very bluntly, two competing narratives in American history: rights and power.

The Clintons, whose political education took place in the civil rights era, are part of the "rights" narrative.

This narrative, the Clinton narrative (and my narrative), goes something like this:

From its pinched beginnings (see the denigration and destruction of the indigenous people's way of life, the institution of slavery, etc.), America has steadily expanded the rights accorded to its citizens. Our ideals continue to live precisely because they are still unfulfilled ideals which require new efforts every day to acheive them. The Clintons' narrative is one of progress through process.

By contrast, under Bush and Cheney, we have had seven years of a "war" narrative. This shadow narrative of America, which takes aggressive form on Fox News every day, emphasizes above all the history of this country's ever-expanding power -- political, economic and military. Our greatness is our greatness.

So rather than think of ourselves as humble citizens, we are encouraged to think of ourselves as fighters for the cause of Freedom in a conflict waged overseas (so as not to interfere with our other "sacred" role as cheerful consumers).

History is written by the victors, so the war narrative looks pretty grand in retrospect. The genocide of the Indians was, well, an unavoidable consequence of Manifest Destiny. We crushed the British, the Mexicans, the Spanish, the Kaiser, the Nazis and the Japs, and our ideological figurehead Ronald Reagan vanquished the Soviet Union. (We'll skip over the Koreans, the Vietnamese and a certain bearded irritant named Fidel Castro.) We stand against Europe and the Arab World to defend our friend Israel and its efforts to establish a... well, if not a pluralistic democracy, then at least a stategically important outpost of empire. And so on.

Insofar as she rejects this war narrative in favor of a rights narrative, the prospect of a President Hillary Clinton is good.

But here's the bad part. Over her past seven years as a Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton has:

authorized the war with Iraq (which has led to a foreign policy disaster that is still unfolding);
refused to renounce the K Street culture of lobbyists in D.C. (the number of lobbyist has grown exponentially);
recently voted in favor of a resolution declaring the Iranian Republican Guard a "terrorist organization" (paving the way for a reckless military escalation sometime in Bush's final year);
and on the campaign trail, used the now familiar political techniques developed over the 1990s by the Republican Party (quoting out of context, knowing distortion of the facts, repetition in the face of denials) to label Senator Obama as "naive and irresponsible".

None of this is shocking.

Each of these can be explained by reference to that hoary old phrase: bare-knuckle politics. Clinton is willing to make concessions to the war narrative as necessary to secure political gains.

She knows that, as a woman running for President (as she has been all along in the Senate), she cannot seem weak on security. Hence the Iraq war and recent Iranian Republican Guard votes. She knows that money drives politics in Congress. Hence the position on lobbyists. She knows that she needs to get through the crowded field of the primaries to be the one Democratic candidate. Hence her treatment of Obama.

Indeed, the tone is familiar. The Clinton's, for all of their concerns about civil liberties and equality and inclusiveness, for all that they value the "rights" narrative of America, are ruthless political players if nothing else. They decided long ago that means justify the ends in politics.

Is this the only way to power in the current political world? I don't know. I do know that, if they are right, then the political model upon which this Republic is based is simply broken.

Who can feel triumphant about the future of America if politics has devolved into a charade, a game, a contest of wits. If that is so, how can we expect policy to lead to progress?

*

Here's where the parenting side of this post comes in. I would ask the moms and dads out there to look at their own homes as an analogy to this country as a whole. Can you raise healthy, loving, confident children in a household that functions on white lies and subterfuge? Even with the best intentions, parents who lie to their children undermine the basis for their family's love and closeness. Then they wonder why the children grow apart and stop calling.

In their many concessions to power, the Clintons concede too much.

I will vote for her if she is the nominee. I will feel relief and even a little exhilaration. But I will also feel a sense of sorrow. America the ideal will have to wait. We'll be back in the right narrative for this country, but it will be one with little momentum, little pace, and lots of maneuvering.

Torture, First Principles, and Our Children

The New York Times today revealed the existence of "secret memos" in the United States Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzales, which authorized "enhanced interrogation techniques" for use on terrorism detainees. "Enhanced interrogation techniques" is of course a euphemism; the same phrase in German, "Verschaefte Vernehmung" was used by the Nazis during World War II.

In either language, it means torture. The United States of America, our beloved country, now belongs to the long list of nations which have used and continue to use torture as a tool of public policy.

How does that make you feel?

The specific techniques -- a word that is far too sterile and scientific-sounding as a description for the sweat-stained, shit-streaked, brutal actions involved -- which Gonzales' Justice Department authorized, and the Bush administration used, include:

keeping detainees naked and shivering uncontrollably in extremely cold cells;
keeping them in a sleep-deprived, semi-deranged for extended period of time;
playing non-stop loud music;
hitting them on the head repeatedly;
and waterboarding.

This brings to mind the question of how to instill moral "first principles" in our children. By first principles I mean bright lines over which we simply cannot cross without losing a sense of who we are.

I believe that opposition to the torture of another human being is a moral first principle (just as the stirring statement in the Declaration of Independence about those rights which we hold to be "self-evident" represents a political first principle).

Let's examine what morality is at its core. I would argue that it starts with that most unique human characteristic: our capacity to empathize with other human beings by way of our imagination. It is this capacity, coupled with our pre-cognitive instinct to protect other human beings from harm if we can imagine them facing harm, that is the source of morality. With this small imaginative leap -- "Oh, that sharp stick will hurt him if I poke him, just as I have felt sticks hurt me when I am poked!" -- we begin a huge project, taking place mostly in our formative years but also throughout our lives, to build a sense of moral interconnectedness to others.

If you follow me so far, that the basis for morality is our capacity for empathy (by way of the imagination), then I am sure you will agree too that there can be no clearer violation of what we term "morality" than the intentional causing of severe pain to another person. If we do not renounce this act unequivocably and unmistakably, then morality becomes nothing more than a strategy for advancement, a code for proving loyalty to our own in-group. But morality is something else than a strategy or a code. It is a stop, a boundary, a means of knowing who we are.

Of course there are scenarios in which we would be tempted to physically hurt another person, even severely, for some larger cause. If you have watched a recent debate between the Republican Presidential candidates then you have been conditioned to think reflexively of the example of the nuclear device primed to explode in a major metropolitan area, and the one man that can defuse it glaring at us with defiance. Guiliani relishes this hypothetical -- there is a glint in his eyes when he brings it up. In such a situation, I would not predict how any of us would act. I suspect that most of us would do something that would qualify as torture under those circumstances. But this act -- which we must remember is an unlikely occurance, as it would require an astonishing constellation of events to create this scenario -- must be considered outside of our moral range. it would change the person doing it forever. It should be viewed as rupture of our moral principles rather than an adaptation within them.

For someone to claim that this would be a morally justifiable act shows that his or her sense of identity is simply not bounded by first principles. He may be a charming person; she may live a generally admirable life; but such a person, I would argue, missed out, at some formative stage, when it came to establishing a bedrock upon which to build a coherent moral outlook.

So back to the initial question of this post. How do we instill first principles, particularly moral first principles, in our children?

Already, when faced with an altercation between our 3-year-old and our 2-year-old (his birthday's today!) my wife and I say things like, "There is no hitting in this house!" But those are just rules, and they are understood as such. I believe that first principles are not taught through catch-phrases or "time outs." My sense is that first principles are taught by the everyday reinforcement of the values which define the relationships in the home.

If, as I would like to think, our compass needle points regularly to the practice of love and concern for others, then when the needle spins the opposite direction to the practice of dehumanization and cruelty to others our children will have an immediate gut reaction that something is off.

Those times in my life when I have managed to dehumanize someone enough to be cruel, I have felt an uneasy feeling, a gathering creepiness, inside. You can't always put it into words, but you know it.

I believe that it is up to us, as parents, to encourage empathy, to ask questions about other people, to speculate about our children's friends' feelings with them -- "Why was Jack crying? Was he upset that his bubbles spilled?" In short, to create a sense of a larger world of sentient human beings -- in which each of us happens to inhabit only one body. When we do this -- in a million ways, by the way we make sure they share their birthday cake as well as the vigor with which we wave goodbye -- we create the sense of first principles without ever overtly discussing them. The outer boundary, the web that holds our moral self together, if you will, is woven from countless, subtle, daily interactions, not from spoken rules.

In this way, as parents, we create citizens who would simply not endorse the physical abuse of detainees as matter of public policy. It is not even arguable -- regardless of the perfect-constellation hypothesis about a ticking nuclear bomb pitched by Tim Russert or Brit Hume on any given night.

One wonders what the parents of the polite, articulate John Yoo, architect of the legal memoranda in the Justice Department supporting these secret memos, did NOT do. Surely they taught their son manners. Surely they taught him how to succeed in the world. Surely they taught him much about equipose and patience. But why did he not acquire a set of first principles which would exclude torture? I would find it very interesting to know how much value, if any, John Yoo's parents placed on the imagination (and the capacity for empathy) when he was growing up.

Memories of Burma and the Impetus Behind Politics

One thing I did not mention in my last post is that I traveled in Burma with my family when I was young. It was 1981, and I was 12. The memories I have are so vivid -- and, what is more relevant to this meditation, they are from a child's perspective.

I believe that the direct, non-analytical nature of these experiences, even dating back 26 years, adds to my feeling of connection to the people there today -- and my sense of political urgency about the situation.

Let me share some of my memories with you:

In Rangoon (now Yangon) we stayed in a creaky, gorgeous colonial British hotel. It had slowly circling fans in the lobby, where we drank lime juice on ice to stay cool. Vintage 1940s and 50s cars lined the streets -- used without thought to their antique looks, but simply because those were the models of car available. I suffered a mysterious allergic reaction (never repeated) one night as we returned to our hotel room, and I began breathing frantically, trying to get air. In retrospect I can only imagine how frightening that was for my parents. I remember they called the front desk to try to get medical assistance, but by the time they had communicated the problem my attack had subsided.

I remember the beggers and the monks, the gleaming, gold surface of the central Buddhist temple (the Schwedagon pagoda), the talk of the Buddha's tooth once preserved there. We then traveled north to Mandalay, and we also visited the most fantastic place I had ever seen, Pagan (now called Bagan).

There are hundreds of temples dotting a flat dusty plain in Pagan. They have secret stairways, ornate carvings, impossible balconies, and dark tunnels. Each one is different in design. My sister (a year older at 13) and I raced around these temples, laughing and gasping for air while my parents took a more leisurely pace and considered the history.

My sister and I felt as if we had discovered the real Disneyland, the one that wasn't at all ersatz -- a true lost kingdom with crumbling stone and stange aromas and odd shafts of sunlight. We rode from temple to temple in a horse-drawn cart, with our driver occasionally giving rides to villagers. The people smiled and some spoke broken English. It was the most memorable single day I experienced in all the travels that my family took through Asia during those years (we lived in Hong Kong from 1979 through 1981 and took the chance to travel extensively in the region).

How do these memories bear on politics?

The simple point I take from this excursion into my private archive of sights and sounds is this: We are driven poltiically as much by what we FEEL as what we think. I feel sorrow (and anger too) when I think of Darfur -- as when I watched the documentary by a friend of mine, Annie Sunderberg, "The Devil Came on Horseback," at Sundance this year. But because I have no direct, sensory connection to that part of Africa, my motivations are more analytical than visceral. When it comes to supporting aggressive action again the regime in the Sudan, I am all for it -- but out of calculation rather than the force of conviction. When faced with similar suffering Burma, however, my childhood memories provoke me to brood on it more. I am more inclined to talk about it with loved ones, check to see what my government is doing about it, even take to the streets (if the chance arises).

This makes me think of a great essay by Richard Rorty on human rights. It's called "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality." Read it if you want to be provoked.

Rorty's argument is, in a nutshell, that we should forget claiming that we are on the side of reason, that we are "right" and those who abuse other human beings are "wrong" in some absolute sense. Rather, the only effective way to change people's behavior (short of the use of force) is to appeal to sentiment. Show them photographs of their victims. Make them confront what they are doing directly through some method of storytelling (film, TV, theater, writing). Get them to see, and smell, and feel the consequences of their actions. And then ask a simple follow-up question to provoke them: Is THIS the world that you would like to live in?

As David Hume famously wrote: "Reason is the slave of the passions." It doesn't work as well the other way around.

When it comes to Burma, I find that my reason is at work, trying to find ways to alleviate the suffering, because my passions for that country were ignited 26 years ago as a child.

What passions are we igniting in our children today that will motivate them 26 years from now?

Burma, Assault Weapons, and Our Kids

The crackdown on monks and other protesters by the military junta which rules Burma (Myanmar) raises questions for me as a parent.

The obvious first question is: What would I do? The people of Burma do not have weapons with which to defend themselves. They are trying to confront a brutal regime which has shown no compunction about taking murderous action against innocent civilians. To name only one area of past human rights abuses by this regime, this same military dictatorship deliberately engineered the systematic murder, rape and forced labor of many villagers in its efforts to build the Yadana gas pipeline (assisted by Total S. A. and the American oil company, Unocal, now merged with Chevron).

It does not get more ruthless than this regime. They possess the will and the weaponry.

By contrast, the civilians of Burma are only in possession of their lives and their hopes.

But would I, with three young children, join in the movement for democracy in Burma? Would I risk losing my life and leaving my children? The fact is, I don't know if I would. None of us does without being in that situation.

This question of what I would do -- and the fear that it generates in me to contemplate taking life-threatening action -- makes me think of my support for a ban on assault weapon in this country. This has always been a clear-cut position for me: Why would regular citizens need assault weapons?

But what if our country deteriorated into a dictatorship? The growing politicization of the military, the rise of military options outside of civilian control (Blackwater), the increasing links between the Christian right and high-ranking military officers... It may be unrealistic to imagine a dictatorship anytime soon in this country, but it's not impossible -- which is shocking to consider.

And then, what defense would we have? What means of persuasion, other than lofty rhetoric and Constitution-thumping, would we have to confront this take-over of our democracy?

In the end, I still believe that the value of regulating assault weapons – and the resulting lives saved in the short term – outweighs the value of protecting the possibility of armed resistance to an imagined coup d’etat (or, perhaps more likely, an insidious and creeping authoritarianism). I’m sorry, I just don’t think criminals should be able to outgun police.

But the question is not an easy one, and the events in Burma this weekend make it increasingly obvious to me that at some point I might reconsider.

*

Crackdown. What a casual word for the gashes, the holes in the head, the blood, the pain. We can hardly picture the horror felt by those who are in it.

The other question that this “crackdown” raises for me is: How do I talk to my children about the horrors in the world, the cruelty, the violence?

My oldest, George, is only 3 (my two younger ones are Cole, 2, and Adeline, 5 months). But in just a few years they will hear of events like these and ask for explanations. I could shield them from it. Dismiss it with a quick sketch, and a passing reference to good people overcoming bad people. But that won’t do, and I know it. I believe that I will need to confront these events directly.

Of course there are numerous hardships in our daily, more immediate lives. But macro-events, world-historical events, are important too. They shape our view of those things and people whom we never meet. They shape our sense of right and wrong by providing hypotheticals and extreme examples. They give us a sense of the grinding, inexorable consequences of history as it is made outside the home.

So I guess I will say now just what my impulse is. I want to sit down with my kids. I want to get out a globe or an atlas. Show them Burma. Show them monks in photographs. Tell them about Buddhism. Tell them about colonialism. Tell them about governments that rule by force and governments that rule by laws, and how they both mix it up together. I want to tell them about the courage of these Burmese who are resisting. Tell them about the fears of those who are hiding in their houses and apartments, as well as the fears of those boys who are hiding behind the steel mesh of their helmets and behind their machine guns. I believe that the more honest talk we give our kids, the more we allow them to reframe and advance the conversation in their own lifetimes.

Maybe someday they will face a crackdown like the one the people of Burma face, but here in our own country, on our own streets. And maybe, unlike their Dad, they will know that, despite the risks, they need to join the crowd on the streets. Weapons or not.

Why Democrat Dad?

This blog will explore the intersection of politics and parenting. I invite other dads, moms, or anyone else who is interested, to contribute to the conversation. My intention is to write every day on some issue which connects politics with parenting.

Why "Democrat Dad"?

I am a citizen and a Democrat, and I believe that these are not mere labels. They are important aspects of myself.

Why is my political identity so important that I feel compelled to write a blog about it? Well, I believe that we all have a responsibility to take politics seriously.

Those of us worried or enraged or disillusioned about our country cannot simply escape, drop out, or (romantic as it sounds) "drop off the grid," without losing much of what we cherish about ourselves.

I agree with Aristotle here (see his Politics) that human beings, choosing to exist outside of their community, are abdicating part of themselves. They are living as either "god or beast" -- the lives of monks or hermits, but not something that is recognizable to me.

My values are informed by the opinions of others; and this is not a point of shame. We are social creatures. We respond to praise and blame. Our participation in society is a pre-condition of language and a basis for morality.

I am enamored of our country and its laws. When I think of it... when I picture the whole whirring, clicking machine going like crazy on any given day... I am inspired to believe the best of my fellow-citizens and our future, all over again.

Through multiple decisions at many municipal, state and federal levels, through checks and balances of the different branches of government, through experments in legislation taking place concurrently in the states and in Washington D.C., through elections for offices ranging from a seat on the local school board to the Presidency of the United States -- through all of this never-ceasing activitiy -- our system of law provides what I like to think of as a perfect fit.

Think of it as a complex, ever-adjusting, digital map of the analog curve of our collective needs. And it is all thanks to the best "software" ever designed for the organizing of human beings and their diverse interests: the Constitution.

I am a citizen of this country, and proud of it. And politically, I am a member of the Democratic Party.

Hence, Democrat Dad.

Please join me. I look forward to thinking through parenting from a political perspective -- with you as my fellow-parents and fellow-citizens. Fellow Democrats of course are invited. Republican Dads and Moms too! Let's get started!