Driving from the baseball field, where I’d dropped off Nine, to the place where Five and I were supposed to go to Nursery Rhyme Dance, I saw the police officer’s motorcycle in my rear view mirror. I didn’t think about it at the time, of course, but now I remember how Claire Wolfe, one of my favorite freedom writers, talked about not having a car and how wonderful it was to have freedom from the blue light in the rear view mirror. Ah, but our government taxfeeders do love to make us late for things and to miss things all together, just for the privilege of driving on their roads, of course. Here I was, a law-abiding mom just trying to get my children to where they needed to go, and totally and completely following the rules of the road. Except, of course, for the cell phone use rule. I’ve written about this ridiculous law when it was first passed in California, but now, things have really gotten out of hand. On a day when the stock market took a strange plunge, I began to see what our country is coming to: a totalitarian mess in which little old ladies, moms, and other innocent folks can be stopped, detained, asked for identification, and treated like a criminal. I did, of course, sign the document that said I was guilty of the crime, with no jury trial; not doing so may have gotten me arrested and harassed even longer by the people whose salary my tax dollars pay.

What really got me about this particular stop, my first in California (although I have gotten a camera ticket), is that the officer was so very polite in his zero-tolerance mess. I was very polite back to him, of course. The officer seemed void of intuition, as if his common sense had been politely brainwashed out of him and he even had to give a ticket to someone who probably is a lot like his own wife. If you’re not familiar with zero tolerance, it’s this crazy thing that’s all the rage in government schools these days. In fact, I read the other day that a kindergartner or first grader (I forget exactly which) was expelled for hugging another student. I help to manage and coach a t-ball team and yes, the children can get a bit huggy sometimes; and sometimes, they can hit each other too much. However, I always let them know, very gently, that hugging and hitting and all those touchy feely things aren’t allowed on the t-ball field. We’re there to play t-ball and that’s it. I don’t expel them, but I do warn them that if they continue behavior that has nothing to do with t-ball, they’ll have to sit out the rest of practice. This kind of thing has worked (so far!) every time and the t-ball players generally stop whatever annoying distracting behavior they’re doing and get down to business, at least for a couple of minutes. In the zero-tolerance atmosphere of the government schools, however, there is indeed no room for common sense. Thus, the student who brings a knife to school, or who hugs another student, or who hits another student is now being shown the open door back to his or her parent’s house for a few days, where students belong in the first place.

I mention the zero-tolerance atmosphere of the government schools because it is one that we are all slowly going to have to get used to. The last time I was pulled, for speeding as we were going through Arizona to North Carolina, the officer saw that I was an innocent mom, driving while my husband and sons slept. I told him that we were trying to get to our motel that night (it was after midnight). He very nicely gave me a warning ticket and I went on my way, extremely careful about not speeding. That was a couple of years ago, however. If you’re expecting this kind of common sense behavior to continue from those whose loins are girded with tax money, you need to wake yourself out of your stupor.

I was woken up yesterday, as I was very nicely treated as a criminal in front of two of my children. The very polite officer, who was, of course, just doing his job, was more than likely fulfilling a quota. He had been sitting and waiting for someone like me, someone who believes the cell phone law is ridiculous and hasn’t bothered paying to get a hands-free device or didn’t want to put the phone on speaker, neither of which makes talking on the cell phone much safer. Make no mistake: if I’d told him that I was trying to get a sick child to St. Joseph’s Hospital and I’d called the dad to tell him, this officer would not have budged. After all, he had a quota to fill. No doubt, Burbank revenue is now declining in this economy and the tax-feeding officer was up front about telling me that they are now ticketing heavily for cell phone use. In fact, when I finally made it to ballet and tap classes (unfortunately, we missed Nursery Rhyme Dance), I found that another mom had received a cell phone ticket just three weeks ago, with the same line from the officer about how Burbank is now ticketing heavily for cell phone usage. Translation: Burbank needs money and will extort it from those who drive within its confines, all the while making innocent people, in the supposed comfort of their own private property, into lightweight criminals.

I’d heard, as have others I talked with, that the cell phone use fee was $25 or so. But he told me that my ticket would be $130; the other mom I talked with told me that her ticket was $141. As our car registration is due this month, the officer reminded me that I must park my car after May 10th and not drive it until I receive the proper registration information. Yeah. Right. Mr. Thinking Mama, btw, said that we have until the end of the month. There is no doubt that the taxfeeding officer saw what a target I really was and took it upon himself to remind me that I could become even more of a victim by the state of California. Having said all this, the taxfeeder did not pull me out of the car and frisk me or anything like that and in these days of Amerika as a police state, I should certainly be thankful for that. Still, it was a humiliating experience and the thing I’ve learned is that I now have to buy the more cumbersome "hands-free" device, which I was trying to avoid, and that I need to use the speaker and put my cell phone in my lap or in my console. A very well-meaning Facebook friend suggested that perhaps Burbank is trying to eliminate cell phone accidents, and I’m sure that any taxfeeder will tell you that’s the case, but I don’t believe that for a minute. In fact, I can tell you that if he’d been trying to do that, he would have done exactly what the officer in Arizona did: Give me a warning ticket. A good p.r. campaign could lower those accident rates, but the government would have to spend money to do it; by giving tickets, the government prospers.

On a related note, I happened to be going the wrong way on the very confusing Chandler Blvd. in Burbank the other day. A very sweet woman pulled up beside me and made me aware of what I was doing. I quickly got into the correct lane and continued, promising myself to be more careful in this neck of the proverbial woods. And yet, what would a police officer have done? Give me a ticket, no questions asked or answered. I’m thankful that zero tolerance has not yet crept into the general population and the woman was helpful to me. When my father-in-law tells me, as he did just the other day, that the government is just trying to protect us, I almost have to laugh out loud. If the government were trying to protect us, they wouldn’t be fining us at every opportunity. It’s hard to believe that there was so little going on in Burbank at 5:30 p.m. that the officer had nothing better to do than give a mom a ticket. As more and more laws are created by those we elect to serve us, this situation is only going to get worse.

And so, if I’d been eating a hamburger or putting on make-up, I would have been okay. But talking on the cell phone with my husband cost me $130 and took away Five’s and my Nursery Rhyme Dance class for the day.

I know that a lot has been said lately about Arizona and its new draconian law that allows anybody at anytime to be asked for papers please, but you don’t have to go to Arizona to be treated like a terrorist. If your particular jurisdiction hasn’t yet come around to the revenue-boosting zero-tolerance attitude yet, it certainly will. Remember this: The government is not there to protect you; it’s there because you pay it to be. I’m becoming more and more disgusted with the way it’s treating its customers.

Tricia Shore [send her mail], a former English lecturer at North Carolina State University, lives in Los Angeles, where she has become hip enough to be on MySpace and Facebook. She’s a comic mom and thinking mama to three curious sons and the lucky wife of Mr. Comic Mom, all of whom live in the Gingerbread House with some rather ornery cats.

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Evidently, his success at finding a job so quickly in a crappy economy makes him one of those evil capitalists, the kind that folks who write for the statist Los Angeles Times seem to loathe. Specifically, I found out recently that we made the wrong move by working so hard to employ him so that he and I and our three young sons can eat and have a roof to sleep under at night. It would have been better, according to Times’ darling Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the rather depressing titles, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream and Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, if we’d become poor.

Funny how just last night, I was telling Mr. Comic Mom about Karen De Coster’s excellent article, "A Nation of Helpless Idiots," and then today, I learned that we are not helpless enough, according to Ehrenreich. We had both laughed last night about how, despite De Coster’s excellent and insightful writing, the Times would probably never publish her writing. I don’t know why we laughed about this strangeness; it’s not that funny when you think of how undiverse the Times is, but then again, when I’m dealing with the statist propaganda of the Times, I have to laugh or else I’d tear the paper to shreds in anger.

So, how did we nasty capitalists screw up by attempting to provide for our family? According to Ehrenreich, it is not progressive thinking to look at finding a job as a job in and of itself. In fact, her article is indeed titled: "Trying to Find A Job is Not A Job." We should have been community organizing something; we should have been angry and petitioned our rulers; we should have been demanding that Emperor Obama give us free health care. Mr. Comic Mom wanted to receive unemployment benefits instead of a paycheck about as much as he wanted to stand in line at a soup kitchen instead of sitting at our table with our own food.

In most parts of the world, from Paris to Beijing, mass unemployment brings the specter of mass social unrest. Not here, though, where 13 million people have accepted joblessness with nary a peep of protest.

Yep, that’s us. Mr. Comic Mom was one of the 13 million people who was too busy trying to feed his family to waste time carrying signs that protest . . . what? Well, we should have been protesting something instead of sending those résumés. Ehrenreich’s supposedly progressive attitude would have had us joining "one of the emerging efforts to organize the unemployed, like Food AND Medicine in Maine, the Unemployed and Anxiously Employed Workers’ Assn. of Allen County, Ind., or the nationwide group United Professionals," the latter of which was started by none other than Ehrenreich herself. Instead of sitting down to a healthy dinner at the Gingerbread House, we should have "[pitched] in with one of the several organizations fighting for single-payer health insurance, or at least a huge expansion of public health insurance for the unemployed." Instead of planning and working toward finding a job, we should have taken unemployment benefits for as long as possible and banded "together with laid-off friends and co-workers to discuss how [we] would design an economy that [makes] use of people’s precious skills instead of periodically tossing them out like so much trash." I know; I know. We are capitalists and as such, we are awfully, awfully selfish.

Nowhere in the article does Ehrenreich discuss how this whole single-payer health insurance thing is to be funded; nor does she have much faith in people’s ability to be creative and make money without the government’s help. She seems also to skip over any information about how governmental regulations and economic manipulation by the Federal Reserve may have resulted in this economic mess. No, it’s much easier to tout socialism as a solution to all our problems. And in a world in which Emperor Obama is worshipped by almost everyone, why let nasty old outdated capitalism get in the way?

As a result of Mr. Comic Mom’s new job, we can now stimulate the economy without using a dab of governmental assistance. We were able to pay a comic friend of mine, whose day job of a landscaping business was slow, to do some major yard work. If Mr. Comic Mom’s job continues to work out, we’ll pay my friend more to help us redesign our front yard. We were also able to pay for some electrical work that gave us a safer and more beautiful home. And we hope soon to pay for a badly needed sliding door at the Gingerbread House. Ah, but these are capitalistic things that we pay for with money that Mr. Comic Mom has earned. As everybody in Obamaland knows, we should instead be applying for some kind of governmental grant.

It’s hard to find an article in the Times these days that doesn’t praise the Emperor who has no clothes. Even an article about Yusuf, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, reveals that years of supposed enlightenment lead to believing that the Emperor does have clothes:

"I wanted to sing out," said the artist regarding his reentry into the music business, "for a more peaceful world again and looking at it, it’s still very bad and we’ve got to do something to change that. But already, the fact that America has a dynamic new president — who happens to be a black man and who happens to have a middle name of Hussein — has said that the world can change . . . It’s great."

Photo Credit: Mr. Comic Mom

And isn’t it, though? The world is changing so much because we no longer have a nasty white guy as Emperor. The world may indeed seem more peaceful despite the fact that Emperor O. seems to like to kill people in other countries just as much as his predecessor, King Jorge. There’s been no end to any war that I know of in Emperor O.’s first 100 days. But that’s okay. Those folks who are dying are on the other side of the world, aren’t they? So, they don’t really count. And really, isn’t it more important that we raise a ruckus about giving everybody supposedly free health care than worry about the people whom our tax dollars help to kill?

After all, if we don’t look very closely, it almost seems as though the new Emperor does have clothes. We should forget about our own selfish desires to provide for our family and trust Emperor O. to provide for us. We should all stop driving our cars and ride on the socialist bandwagon. We should protest and complain about something instead of looking for a job. After all, isn’t that what Jesus Obama would do? Come on now; I can almost hear everybody singing Kum Ba Yah.

Tricia Shore [send her mail], a former English lecturer at North Carolina State University, lives in Los Angeles, where she has become hip enough to be on MySpace and Facebook. She’s a comic mom and thinking mama to three curious sons and the lucky wife of Mr. Comic Mom, all of whom live in the Gingerbread House with some rather ornery cats. You can see her in "Mommy’s Night Out Comedy" at the Ice House Annex in Pasadena this Thursday night at 7:30 p.m.

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The well-educated, homeschooling, breastfeeding mom at one of the Southern California homeschool park days that we attend, has summed me up as a libertarian. I use the small "l" variety only because I’ve yet to register as an actual Libertarian: "I like what I’ve read about Libertarians," she told me, "but I have a problem with the gun thing."

Uh-oh.

"The gun thing" is something that I thought I understood until I met my capital "l" Libertarian husband over ten years ago. "Guns protect us from the government," he told me, which I thought at the time was a statement made only by anti-government freakish types. I now respect such supposed freakish types much more than I used to. In any case, I thought he was really nice and that he’d make a great father. Three children later, I still think he makes a great dad and I’m even more fond of him these days, but my ideas on the gun thing have changed.

I grew up in rural North Carolina, close to the mountains, where almost everybody hunts. Indeed, everybody has a gun. When supposed gun safety advocates tell us that our guns should be behind twelve or fourteen locks and placed in a high corner that is only accessible by ladder, I smile. Gun safety at the house I grew up in consisted of saying, "That gun can kill you; don’t touch it." Those eight words were all I really needed. As much as life sometimes got me down, I really liked living. I still do. As a child, I wanted to grow up. I wanted to have my own children. A gun could put a stop to that. So, I never touched it, and it stayed in its place, leaning against a closet wall in the utility room.

That was pretty much it as far as gun safety went.

When I went to college, I learned that politically correct people don’t like guns. I learned that guns were awful and evil and that I’d grown up in some kind of abusive home, supposedly, because our shotgun wasn’t behind all those locks.

During my last semester of graduate school, I met the man who would become the father of my children. But there was the gun thing that I had to just accept about him. I didn’t understand what he meant about all this guns-protecting-us-from-the-government stuff. Guns were for hunting, I reasoned, and if you have a license for a gun, then you should be happy, right? We didn’t talk much about the gun thing for a while.

Our first son was not quite a year old when the September 11th tragedy occurred. While nursing his younger brother a couple of years later, I began to read on the Internet. I read about freedoms that I had thought I’d always have. I read about the loss of those freedoms, especially after September 11, 2001. I thought about how free we were, even as high school students, to make mistakes, to ride around town, to go through high school without signing a paper that says I have to agree to a random drug test if I want to participate in extracurricular activities.

Only a couple of decades later, a friend’s daughter, who goes to a high school close to the one that my friend and I attended, must sign a paper saying that she’ll agree to a random drug test. The closest town to where we grew up in North Carolina has banned cruising and signs tell you that you can now receive a ticket if you drive through town more than once; I noticed a similar sign near the ever-communist West Hollywood the other day. There is now zero tolerance for mistakes.

Things have definitely changed since I was in high school; freedoms are being lost faster than Confederate flags are being banned. People watch television and don’t put up too much of a fight about these freedoms.

But what about guns? As I read more, I saw that Ruby Ridge, Waco, and other such tragedies, including the recent one in which several children were taken from their parents in Texas, are all about government control over people. The mainstream media make the victims of these things look crazy, and sometimes that’s not hard to do, but the reality is that they are people who want to do their own thing while doing no harm to others. Why should the government care?

The more I began to read, the more sense that guns made to me. Would I have to worry, for instance, about a Virginia Tech shooting scenario happening if I carried a gun? If someone came in a classroom with a gun and all the students were armed, how many students would a lone gunman be able to kill before he was killed? Could we not have avoided the campus lockdown thing and many deaths if guns had been encouraged on campus?

Besides the gun thing, there is the other-parts-of-the-Constitution thing. I’m beginning to understand now that many people are not into the Constitution these days; it’s become somewhat passé in our current police state. Another homeschooling mom that I was talking to earlier this week seemed to think that I had a novel idea in citing the Fourth Amendment if a social wrecker comes to my door, asking to come in without a search warrant. Ah, the Constitution is great, when people remember it and apply it in their lives.

Here’s what that wonderful document that men shed blood to write says about guns:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This kind of writing makes the gun permit that many of my friends and family in North Carolina hold so sacred seem silly. Why does anyone need a permit when the right to have a gun should not be infringed? Guns are powerful tools that allow us to defend ourselves and our families. Imagine how those who were alive during biblical times would have loved to have that kind of technology.

I currently live in California, where even those who value the freedom of homeschooling often fail to value the freedom of having a gun. Or twelve. Or a hundred. All owned sans government control. Such a scenario scares far too many folks. Many people in the Southern end of the Golden State believe that guns cause problems and that the world will be a much better place when only government-deemed police officers are able to legally obtain guns. Most people don’t think, although it could easily happen, that if the police break into your house in the middle of the night, a gun might protect you from them. Many people fail to see that if you’re at a traffic light and someone carjacks you and your children, a gun might scare the would-be-thief away much more easily than a scared and desperate call to a 9-1-1 dispatcher. Maybe the problem is that not many people think much about guns anymore; we simply accept what the government and mainstream media tell us.

What will happen to us as a society when we’re completely unarmed and the only armed folks are police officers who have been well-trained by federal officials — as most police officers are these days — the federal officials who, ignoring California state law, for instance, come in and close down perfectly legal and thriving marijuana dispensaries? What will happen when federally-trained police officers, many of whom have been trained to kill in the unconstitutionally declared Iraq war, come to your door demanding your children, as officers did recently in Texas? Do guns look so terrible, so ominous, when these things occur? Does defending ourselves against an out-of-control government seem silly when that government is threatening your family?

Photo Credit: Mr. Comic Mom

Turns out, my husband was right about the gun thing. Although many people have a hard time understanding this idea, government works much better when we are armed, the way that our Founding Fathers intended it. An armed citizenry allows government to truly be by the people: Think about how much the government does what you want; then think about how many people walk around unarmed these days. The fewer armed citizens there are, the more powerful the government.

Tricia Shore [send her mail], Comic Mom, is the breastfeeding, homeschooling, thinking mama of three sons and the wife of their dad, Mr. Comic Mom. Currently living in Los Angeles, where she has recently become hip enough to be on MySpace, she misses the sweet tea and barbecue of North Carolina.

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When the elite want something, they are not above cheating their way to it. We see this example easily with mainstream media’s blackout of Ron Paul and Mike Gravel as presidential candidates, despite the candidates’ novel ideas. Candidates not elite-anointed are dismissed as crackpots and ignored by the Los Angeles Times and other mainstream propaganda outlets because they do not further the elite’s plans, which include tracking and surveillance that closely emulate plans laid out by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

One sneaky way that the elite obtain their goals is to use a voice vote, which is what recently happened with H.R. 3825, a giant step toward the Brave New World that Huxley described. H.R. 3825 and S. 1858, soon to be rubber-stamped by King Jorge unless there is a massive protest along with a miracle, gives the federal government authority over every newborn’s DNA, without parental consent. Not only the average Oprah and Dr. Phil watcher, but many alert citizens are also unaware of this horrid legislation, which will make any newborn’s DNA government property. This massive intrusion into privacy and family will be funded by yet another massive federally-funded program, paid for by the money that the government forces from you.

I find it especially interesting, when considered along with this recent Orwellianly-named "Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act" that in the government’s latest attempt to separate families en masse, government social wreckers are forcing over 400 children to have their DNA tested:

More than 400 children taken from a polygamous sect’s ranch will undergo DNA testing this week, an attempt to determine who their parents are and if any sexual abuse took place.

Officials plan to begin taking DNA samples Monday at the coliseum in San Angelo where the children are being housed, but may need three or four days to complete the job.

The fact that this horrid invasion of privacy is being done, even to children who are still breastfeeding, without parental consent and without an established accuser or proof of any abuse, tells me that there are far too many people hooked on mainstream media. Otherwise, there would be blood in the Texas streets. Just 100 years ago, an alert citizenry would have protested the taking of these children and their DNA by showing some social wreckers what the end of a gun barrel looks like.

In post-Constitutional America, however, where habeas corpus, that long-standing idea that we’ve had around for a few centuries, has gone the way of the dinosaur, people are okay with taking children from mothers and forcing these children, many of whom are not even old enough to say no, to give the government their DNA.

"A Critical Analysis of the Implications for Genetic Privacy and Consent Rights in Congress’ Proposed u2018Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007′" states how the government plans to treat the DNA of every newborn, even those whose parents are completely aligned with the mainstream:

• Establish a national list of genetic conditions for which newborns and children are to be tested.
• Establish protocols for the linking and sharing of genetic test results nationwide.
• Build surveillance systems for tracking the health status and health outcomes of individuals diagnosed at birth with a genetic defect or trait.
• Use the newborn screening program as an opportunity for government agencies to identify, list, and study "secondary conditions" of individuals and their families.
• Subject citizens to genetic research without their knowledge or consent.

Since my firstborn’s birth over seven years ago, I have read a lot about our government’s roots of freedom and a truly free market and I have acquired great disdain for our current government and mainstream media; I wish that were not the case. However, a country focused on the false choices of Hillary, Obama, and John, as if there’s a dash of difference among the three, does not protest a bill that claims to save lives of newborns. Nor do these people care much about taking DNA from innocent children who’ve been separated from their parents, with no accuser identified and no solid evidence of abuse. I realize that I’ve mentioned the last part of that sentence previously, but it’s important enough to state twice: The Constitution states that we have the right to face our accuser, an impossible thing to do when there is not one.

That’s the way that things work, however, in post-Constitutional America, where a King that seems to be elected by the people rules through Executive Orders and the elite have their way, whether rushing legislation through, as with the Patriot Act, or taking an underhanded voice vote, in which legislators are not forced to take responsibility for their vote.

Photo Credit: Mr. Comic Mom

Unfortunately, most people are too concerned with the junk food that mainstream media are feeding us to worry much about the database that the government is building, using their descendants’ blood. The United States’ forefathers expected us to be an intelligent, literate folk. But the literacy rate was much higher two hundred years ago than it is now, proving what a wonderful job that the government schools have done. People don’t much read anymore and they certainly don’t care. In the near future, the elite will pass legislation that requires microchipping of every newborn and Oprah will say how wonderful it is and there will be some kind of "saving lives" rhetoric added to the bill and people will think that microchipping is fabulous.

Despite the massive power that the elite pretend to have, in reality, we have only ourselves to blame.

Tricia Shore [send her mail], Comic Mom, is the breastfeeding, homeschooling, thinking mama of three sons and the wife of their dad, Mr. Comic Mom. Currently living in Los Angeles, where she has recently become hip enough to be on MySpace, she misses the sweet tea and barbecue of North Carolina.

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"Ruling sends chills through home-schooling community," says last Friday’s Los Angeles Times headline. If there’s any reason to subscribe to the propaganda piece called the Los Angeles Times, it’s for headlines such as these. The brouhaha, and it is a big one, is all about a recent California Appellate Court case, about which Steven Greenhut has so eloquently written. "If the ruling stands," according to the Los Angeles Times, "home-schooling supporters say California will have the most regressive law in the nation."

That seems to be reason enough to leave this crazy state, for my family and for many others.

Communist as its reputation is in other parts of the country, California is currently a land of freedom in some respects: Homeschooling has been one of those. The Times describes current law correctly:

"The California Department of Education currently allows homeschooling as long as parents file paperwork with the state establishing themselves as small private schools, hire credentialed tutors or enroll their children in independent study programs run by charter or private schools or public school districts while still teaching at home."

California’s allowance for homeschooling, which demands only that parents take a few minutes each year to fill out a form that registers a homeschool as a private school with the state, is one of the most lenient in the United States. Heretofore, the state has mostly left homeschoolers alone, which is the way we like it. As degrading as public schools are becoming across the country, and one need only read a bit of John Taylor Gatto to figure out that particular fact, parents should have to write permission notes for their children to attend government schools. Not so, however, in a culture of Oprah worshippers. Ask your neighbor what he thinks of compulsory, i.e., forced, government education; chances are good that the neighbor will place it right up there with the convenience of sliced bread as being one of the many things that keep America happy and free.

Tricia and the Boys with John Taylor Gatto in Santa Barbara, September 2005

A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, who, not surprisingly, agrees with the California judges’ ruling, states what we’d expect for someone whose job depends on governmental approval: "What’s best for a child is to be taught by a credentialed teacher," saith the U.S. Department of Education’s faithful lackey.

For those of us who believe in freedom, Mr. Duffy’s words are chilling indeed. What’s usually best for a child, and has been so for millennia, is to be taught by the folks who helped to create said child, i.e., the child’s parents. Over the decades of forced government education, public schooling has dumbed us down so much that many parents have forgotten this noble responsibility of parenthood. In other words, many of our brainwashed society will wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Duffy. After all, he is an educator.

When you read the official court document, it’s easy to see that the whole case seems to be some sort of strange non sequitur. Abuse of children, which seemed to start the court case, and homeschooling are conflated in the ruling; in reality, the two are quite separate.

The ruling purports to solve a problem that started with supposed abuse and ended with a ruling against homeschooling with the lack of a state-credentialed mother, as if mere credentialing by the state can solve any truly abusive situation. I’m quite confused about how a family who was initially charged with abuse has ultimately been charged with the failure to be taught by a credentialed teacher, as if that in and of itself is some sort of abuse. I don’t know if the judges even care about this lack of logic. Evidently, the judges haven’t read about all the credentialed teachers that have been convicted in the past few years of sexually abusing their students. Then again, I suppose the judges have better things to do than read about reality.

So, why the emphasis on homeschooling in this ruling? Many public-schoolers are abused by parents and teachers and yet, to my knowledge, there has been no ruling that vilifies the government schools for any atrocities. Whatever the reason for the verdict, or the story behind the case, the judges’ ruling has opened a Pandora’s box on homeschooling and Oprah watchers, judges, and homeschoolers across the country are waiting to see just what California does as a result.

Here are a few key passages from this monumental 18-page treatise. This particular ruling cites other rulings regarding homeschooling:

Nor was the Turner court persuaded by the parents’ contention that the education being provided to their children in their home was as good or better than the children would have obtained in a public or private school or through a credentialed tutor, and therefore the purpose of the statutes was satisfied. The court stated California’s legislative scheme makes no such exemption to attendance in a public school. (Turner, supra, 121 Cal.App.2d Supp. at p. 868—869; accord Shinn, supra, 195 Cal.App.2d, at p. 694, where the court stated that "[h]ome education, regardless of its worth, is not the legal equivalent of attendance in school in the absence of instruction by qualified private tutors.")

Here we see Duffy’s statement paraphrased in an official court document. What’s best for the child may be what’s not best for the child — if that statement seems illogical, it is. Many homeschooling moms, myself included, have multiple college degrees, although that particular feat is not necessary to be a good homeschooling parent. But the court has said that even if the child receives a better education at home, the child is not exempt from being forced to attend either public schools or a private school with a credentialed teacher. It’s not about the child’s best interest, but about the state’s best interest.

In another passage, the judges state that individual freedoms are not important. Therefore, we must raise or children the way that the educational program du jour wants us to. Therefore, if you want your child to avoid the rampant efforts of California to change the definition of family, for instance, or whatever other new theory comes down the proverbial pike, you cannot. You must be assimilated comes to mind:

We agree with the Shinn court’s statement that "the educational program of the State of California was designed to promote the general welfare of all the people and was not designed to accommodate the personal ideas of any individual in the field of education."

This quote from the ruling would be just fine and dandy in the former USSR, but in a country that is based on individual freedoms?

Although many homeschoolers are being optimistic, here’s what the ruling says regarding parents who fail to obey:

Because parents have a legal duty to see to their children’s schooling within the provisions of these laws, parents who fail to do so may be subject to a criminal complaint against them, found guilty of an infraction, and subject to imposition of fines or an order to complete a parent education and counseling program . . . Additionally, the parents are subject to being ordered to enroll their children in an appropriate school or education program and provide proof of enrollment to the court, and willful failure to comply with such an order may be punished by a fine for civil contempt.

Another option for those who wish to homeschool legally in California seems to be to become Amish. According to the judges’ ruling, it’s okay to be an "Old Order Amish" and claim that your religious beliefs are the reason that you homeschool, as was decided when the Amish fought for their right to end compulsory education at eighth grade. The Amish decision was cited in this latest ruling. It’s okay to be Amish and claim religious freedom, saith the judges, but for other religions, not so much:

The parents in the instant case have asserted in a declaration that it is because of their "sincerely held religious beliefs" that they home school their children and those religious beliefs "are based on Biblical teachings and principles." Even if the parents’ declaration had been signed under penalty of perjury, which it was not, those assertions are not the quality of evidence that permits us to say that application of California’s compulsory public school education law to them violates their First Amendment rights. Their statements are conclusional, not factually specific.

This statement shows that I wouldn’t make a good judge: I would have never thought to divide statements regarding religious freedom into two factions: conclusional and factually specific, whatever those terms mean. Perhaps this is a kind of judges’ rhetoric that even those of us with a master’s degree in English find difficult to understand. But the sentence that follows this passage is even more chilling to those of us who believe in freedom:

Moreover, such sparse representations are too easily asserted by any parent who wishes to homeschool his or her child.

Evidently, in the land of the free, it’s far too easy to claim religious freedom and to claim educational control over the child that you helped to create. According to the three judges, having control over your child’s education is something that should be very difficult for parents, which explains why parents need the very educated educators that the government school system so easily provides. Perhaps the boys and I should be looking for our own Amish Paradise, preferably one that will appreciate our Honda Odyssey as much as we do.

What will become of this bizarre decision will be up to those of us who truly believe in freedom in California. Before you do anything, however, you should read a wonderful synopsis of the options for homeschoolers, written by lawyer and homeschooling mom, Debbie Schwarzer, on the Homeschool Association of California site. Most likely, legislation is not the answer to the problem that the three judges have started.

As Steven Greenhut has pointed out, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has not otherwise been exactly friendly to the freedom movement in California, actually seems to support parental choice in education: "Every California child deserves a quality education and parents should have the right to decide what’s best for their children. Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children’s education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts and if the courts don’t protect parents’ rights then, as elected officials, we will." Despite perhaps the supposed best intentions of our governor, it frightens me when an elected official claims that he is going to protect me, especially when he plans to use other elected officials to help him.

Photo Credit: Mr. Comic Mom

Many homeschoolers are scared about this decision, as we rightly should be. What has happened to a country founded on individual freedoms when judges rule that parents should have no control over their children’s education?

Tricia Shore [send her mail], Comic Mom, is the breastfeeding, homeschooling, thinking mama of three sons and the wife of their dad, Mr. Comic Mom. Currently living in Los Angeles, where she has recently become hip enough to be on MySpace, she misses the sweet tea and barbecue of North Carolina. Tricia loves to present her informative seminar, What’s So Funny About Grammar? to corporations and other groups who care about the English language.

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In what now seems like that long, long ago land before I gave birth myself, I babysat for a wonderful family. I had known their daughter since she was eight months old and I adored the mom and dad. I was teaching freshman English at North Carolina State University when I started babysitting and I was still teaching when their firstborn started school. The proud mom showed me a story that her daughter had written, while still in kindergarten. I started reading it and noticed a lot of misspellings. "It’s okay about the misspellings," the mom had told me, seeming to read my mind, "teachers now just want students to express themselves and worry about the correct spelling later."

As a teacher of first-year students at NCSU, I knew that later would probably never come. At that moment, I began to understand why many of my freshmen didn’t know the difference between "hear" and "here" and other such homophones; I began to see that if spell check didn’t catch it, a mistake wouldn’t be caught.

Nonetheless, the mother and her also well-educated husband didn’t seem concerned that their child was learning to spell incorrectly.

Fast forward to a California homeschool park day a few weeks ago when a mom who used to teach first grade told me that handwriting books have arrows for a reason: When a child is learning to write, he or she needs to start at the top and go toward the bottom, following those helpful arrows. "It’s easier to learn it the correct way first," she told me, "It’s difficult to go back and relearn handwriting."

What, I began to wonder, is the difference in learning to write wrong and learning to spell wrong?

I was talking about this learning-to-spell-wrong thing yesterday as I presented a session, "What’s So Funny About Grammar?" at the California Homeschool Network’s Family Expo in Ontario, Calif. A dear audience member told me that learning to spell wrong has a name these days: Invented Spelling.

I took a few minutes from my session to ponder aloud what was going on here. I remember a dear and wonderful writer friend of mine whose son sent my child a note once, with my child’s name misspelled. One thing that I learned reading Dale Carnegie books (hey, I was a bored 13-year-old, okay?) is that you should always spell someone’s name correctly. Always. And if you don’t, you can always apologize. The sweet note from my friend’s son had indeed spelled my son’s name as it sounded, not as it’s actually spelled.

So, what’s the problem with this invented spelling stuff? And why are well-educated middle-class parents putting up with it?

When I asked this question of another friend the other day, whose child is also learning to spell wrong, she told me that "the teachers have master’s degrees and Ph.D.s," as if an education degree means that a person is qualified to help shape children’s minds. How can an educator with a master’s degree allow a child to spell incorrectly? A parent doing the same thing will probably soon be charged with child abuse by our overzealous, taxpayer-funded, grossly misnamed "Child Protective Services."

But it’s okay if a child learns it at school. Why?

Could it be that "Invented Spelling," also known as learning to spell wrong, is part of the giant plan to dumb us all down? Taking a look at Charlotte Iserbyt’s work, one begins to see how it’s in the government’s best interest if we don’t know how to spell. Iserbyt worked with the Department of Education during the Reagan era and had believed that Reagan would shut down the Department of Education. He didn’t, of course, and Iserbyt made some interesting copies of documents that describe plans for government schools, some of which are just now coming to fruition. Guess what? Those plans are not for your children to achieve their full potential.

Invented spelling and other whims of education are quite effective in making students into ineffective communicators. Writing is a direct reflection of thinking, and learning to spell correctly is imperative to learning to express oneself effectively. When students learn that it’s more important to express themselves per se than to do so correctly, what ensues are very expressive individuals who behave like boorish idiots. Supposedly intelligent talk becomes the emotionally-based regurgitations one hears on Oprah or the rude shoutfests of AM talk radio. It’s no wonder that mainstream media look upon the intelligent, thoughtful, calm, and rational Ron Paul as a dinosaur. The argumentative logic of Aristotle has been replaced by the emotional pleas of a Britney Spears meltdown.

I am making sure that my children learn to spell correctly. We talk about how a word sounds and how it would seem to be spelled versus how it’s actually spelled. Our informal spelling lessons, which take place everywhere, from the car to the bathroom, sometimes lead to a trip to the regular old standard dictionary, where we can find out the origin and meaning of a word, and sometimes they lead to a trip to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on compact disc, where we can learn more about how a word came into our language. I required the OED from anybody who wanted to marry me. My now husband gave me a copy of the OED and I said yes to his marriage proposal. After almost ten years, things seem to be working well on both sides of that bargain.

Photo by Morris Vaughan

As we were leaving Ontario on Sunday, we happened to be following an SUV. On the dusty rear window, someone had written "We are fucken awsome." Maybe I should have been concerned about the profanity, but what struck me more was the spelling. It’s hard to be awesome when you don’t know how to spell the word.

Tricia Shore [send her mail], Comic Mom, currently lives in Los Angeles, but misses the sweet tea and grits of her home state, North Carolina. Despite her academic and corporate background, she has recently become hip enough to be on MySpace. Her book, What’s So Funny About Grammar is scheduled for publication later this year. She is a thinking mama to three energetic sons.

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I trust the government. Completely. It doesn’t matter which Bush or which Clinton is in office. There’s really nothing that the government can do wrong. I’m convinced of that. I believe it. I place my full trust in our government leaders.

The previous paragraph is exactly why I’m not at all worried about the REAL ID, one of the fabulous provisions of the Patriot Act, an appropriately named bill if there ever was one. Both iterations of this bill passed Congress so overwhelmingly that, frankly, I have to trust that my Congressional Critters were looking out for me. They always are. That’s why I’m pleased when they vote themselves raises. They deserve every penny that I can give them, and more.

My complete and total trust of the government is also why I’m so angry at rabble-rousers like Ron Paul, who ruin everything by trying to stick with that outdated piece of paper called the United States Constitution. Besides, Paul’s a Republican. Everyone knows that Republicans are always up to no good. Except, of course, for our beloved shepherd of the free world, King Jorge, and his obedient sheep in Congress.

My total faith in the government leaves me no choice but to worry about more important things. Believe me, more important things are all over the place. If you don’t think this is true, take a look at American Idol. There’s democracy in action!

Because I’m so very, very proud of my Congressional Critters, and supportive of every carefully crafted vote that they make, and because I listen so carefully to every elegant, erudite word that King Jorge states, I can focus on matters more important to my family and me, chiefly, Britney Spears and her shaved head.

As everyone knows, Britney’s head is indeed a most important matter. The shape of it. The tattoos. Well, it’s all important, you see. What could be better for my children than their knowledge of Britney’s hair, or lack thereof? If there are strands sold on e-Bay, well, all the better. This kind of thing is so much more important than that silly biometric stuff that the government will have legal rights to place on our driver’s license come May 2008. Who cares? So what if the government wants to track us?

Maine has rejected this terrorist-stopper, the REAL ID, by the way. Other states are considering rejecting it. I say, move to a place like California! I can’t imagine our beloved Governator turning down an opportunity to track us, especially after King Arnold, a true Californian despite his birth in a foreign country, made this watchful quote: "People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave." Now, ain’t it the truth? I’m so proud to say that neither North Carolina, where I’m from, nor California, where I now live, has succumbed to the backward thinking of those who worry about having a national ID. What, really, could be safer than having the government know where you are at all times?

Frankly, with the government taking care of things so easily and efficiently, Britney’s hair is what’s most important to me. Oh sure, our family updated our passports earlier this year, but it’s a mere coincidence that we narrowly avoided the microchip that our fascinating government is placing in our passports. It must be a good thing that this same wonderful government is forcing us to show those passports when we re-enter our great and free country after visiting socialist Canada and Mexico. It’s those microchipped passports, after all, that allow us to keep our freedom.

From what I’ve read, England has started tracking people via license plates. I say, bring that nifty device across the Atlantic! After all, what have I to hide? It’s great that the English can be imprisoned if they try to tamper with these tracking devices on their cars. May this kind of terrorist deterrent soon be on American soil!

I’ll happily comply when the Department of Motor Vehicles starts requiring me to bring my state-issued birth certificate and other documents to prove that I am who I say I am. Let them fingerprint me; let them scan my retina; let them take my blood and urine, or whatever. It’s all in the name of freedom, after all. Those who are lame enough to refuse this terror-stopping, freedom-oriented REAL ID will not have the right to travel via airplane or Amtrak and won’t be allowed in federal buildings. Well, good riddance, I say!

When we have true freedom, we must sacrifice our rights from time to time, right?

Some people complain that states are forced to pay millions of dollars to protect us, via the REAL ID, from terrorists. But you’ll hear no complaints from me. Those nasty terrorists could be anywhere. I’ll gladly give up more of my income to help fight them, if that’s what our leaders deem necessary. After all, our masters do know best.

Photo by Morris Vaughan

Meanwhile, I’ll keep my eyes on Britney’s head, even while she takes a well-deserved break in rehab. With our beloved government protecting us, we can turn our heads to more important matters, such as the status of Britney’s gorgeous locks, whether they are attached to her head or not. I’m so thankful for Amerika, the land of the free! It’s the only place in the world where we have the freedom to worry about the truly important things in life.

Tricia Shore [send her mail], Comic Mom, currently lives in Los Angeles, but misses the sweet tea and grits of her home state, North Carolina. Despite her academic and corporate background, she has recently become hip enough to be on MySpace. Her book, What’s So Funny About Breastfeeding? is scheduled for publication later this year. She is a thinking mama to three energetic sons.

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I’m not, by nature, a war or military aficionado. There was a time, a few years ago, however, when, as scared as everyone else after planes smashed into the World Trade Center, I thought that a war on terror was, possibly, a good idea. It seemed important to defend our country, our children, ourselves, from those supposed terrorists. And after listening to one too many neocons on the radio, I thought that maybe, much as I don’t like war, this particular one was necessary.

After giving birth to my third son almost two years ago, however, I turned off the television and found myself in front of the computer. I nursed and nursed and nursed and read and read and read and discovered sites such as archive.lewrockwell.com and suddenly, the neocon propaganda machines didn’t make nearly as much sense as they once had.

A year ago, my children, their dad, and I were at an airport when we saw many U.S. soldiers, dressed in camouflage outfits. When my then-four-year-old asked why they were dressed that way, I responded that they were soldiers, that they were “defending our country.”

I sort of believed what I said at the time. Then again, I didn’t really know what else to believe.

Today, I know. Today, I saw in the September 24, 2006 “California” section of the Los Angeles Times, the obituary of Army Pfc. Hannah L. McKinney. What caught my eye was her picture: Twenty years old, very pretty. She was also a mom. Her son was only one year old when she was shipped out last November. She had believed, after giving birth to him, that “the military would never send a young mother to Iraq.”

It seems as though she was given all the right reasons that she should join, that “her son would be best served by the pay and benefits she could earn in the Army.” My guess is that no recruiter made much mention of the fact that a few months before she was shipped out, the military had managed to fall more than a few soldiers short of their recruiting goals.

Oh, well. An honest mistake, right?

Here’s how the obituary described her death: She “was killed the night of Sept. 4 after she left a guard tower at a logistics base in Taji, north of Baghdad, to go to the latrine and was run over by a Humvee. After the accident, she lay gravely injured on a darkened perimeter road.” Well, I suppose one could argue that one could just as easily die going to the latrine in the United States, that is, if one were not a soldier fighting for, well, whatever it is that U.S. soldiers unconstitutionally occupying other countries fight for these days. Freedom? Democracy? Homeland Security? Still, I wonder how much Hannah thought about those vague reasons for this war as she lay there, missing her baby, dying.

Even in high school in the eighties, the military seemed cold and impersonal to me. Sure, they were recruiting women then, but what woman in her right mind wanted to go? That sneaky Selective Service Registration thing was reserved only for boys. In hindsight, it was a clever little system that allowed the government one more tool, pre-Internet, to check up on guys. It made me very glad that I didn’t have a penis.

High school recruiting has improved quite a bit with the lovely No Child Left Behind law, which basically gives military rulers carte blanche to government school students. Evidently, Hannah, who dutifully graduated in 2003, was dazzled and recruited and told what a good thing that she was doing. For her son and for her country.

Her baby’s father, also in the Army, didn’t stick around and so she married another man, another Army man. Hannah’s baby seemed destined to be surrounded by war and its consequences. Hannah’s husband said that every time he talked with her, “from day one until the last time . . . she was as depressed as she could get.” Gee, you think? Let’s see what’s supposed to be happening, according to nature, to a mom of a toddler. Well, ideally, she’ll still be breastfeeding, a task made much more difficult when one is, oh, an ocean or two away from one’s baby for months at a time. Breastfeeding a child actually releases hormones that help a mother feel much better. As a breastfeeding mom, I can tell you that it’s true.

There’s another interesting thing about being a mom: Children give you little time to be depressed. Taking care of those whom we help to create gives a mom not much of a chance to navel gaze. When cleaning up dining room messes occurs so frequently that the vacuum cleaner doesn’t go back into the closet, being depressed for days on end becomes almost impossible. When you are taken away from your child, hearing about his milestones via cell phone, knowing that he thinks you’re just a voice on the phone, depression becomes easier, almost required.

What had been a huge and distasteful jump for me in high school wasn’t such a leap for Hannah. She had been accepted to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. The Army, as I’m sure a recruiter pointed out, would finance this education. Being away from her child for months at a time would be okay, as I’m sure she was conditioned, subtly, to believe at her government high school. After all, mothers are no longer really important, with a unique relationship to our children that can never be replaced. Take a look at the parent-oriented magazines, television shows that feature a nanny who teaches bumbling parents how to treat their offspring, the booming daycare business-moms are merely caregivers, equivalent to high-paid nannies. Anybody can give care to a child-right? In our brave new world, are mommies even necessary? It’s clear from Hannah’s recruitment, deployment, and death that the military doesn’t seem to think that we are.

The link between government schools and the military is not so far-fetched as one may imagine. In fact, my thinking first began to change on the war last year when I read John Taylor Gatto’s excellent online book about our educational system, The Underground History of American Education. The more I read and thought about things, the more that I realized how closely our government schools resemble the military. Both institutions condition people to be part of the group, eschewing individualism and true freedom. I also note each fenced-in government elementary facility that my children and I drive by, how much these institutions resemble prisons.

But to Hannah’s child, would there have been a huge difference? Whether mommy was in prison or in the army made little difference to him. Later, he may hear accolades and cheers about his mother from his stepfather, if he survives the Army experience, or from his maternal grandparents, who are raising him. Either way, deep inside, he’ll find it difficult to believe all those cheers. What his psyche is hearing now is what will stick with him: Where is my mommy? Government schools, prisons, and the military seem to do an excellent job of destroying families, whether for an entire day, a few years, or, in Hannah’s son’s case, for a lifetime.

The government schools have certainly done their job with Hannah McKinney. They convinced her that the Army was a good career choice and that she would be safe there, as safe as in her government school. The military took her young, vulnerable, childbearing body and made it into a statistic. One would think that the military might have mercy on a child whose mother was killed in what has been promised to be a decades-long war. But I doubt it: The military marketers will try to recruit Hannah’s son one day as well.

In June of this year, my husband and I took our children to North Carolina, which now officially bills itself as the “most military friendly state.” I was listening to some war propaganda on talk radio and the host, who seemed open-minded, took my call. I merely brought up the fact that many of our civil rights had been taken away after the supposed terrorist attack of September 11 and that I am glad that my homeschooled children will not have war marketed to them in government schools. The host appreciated my call, but a later caller did not, admonishing me for keeping my children away from military recruiters. Treating me as if I were a spoiled little girl, the caller felt that I had been “misled” and wondered if I knew that this war and our soldiers were the reason that I “had the freedom to make that very phone call.”

photo by John Thomas

It’s a connection I don’t quite understand — how the freedoms that are quickly leaving the United States are somehow protected by soldiers who are fighting in other countries. If the soldiers were truly fighting for our freedoms, wouldn’t they be stationed at the White House, reading the U. S. Constitution to the Bush administration, the Supreme Court, and Congress?

Nonetheless, Hannah’s son will continue to wonder: Where is my mommy? Except that now, he won’t even hear her voice on the phone.

Tricia Shore [send her mail], Comic Mom, is a North Carolina State University graduate who is happy with her momly life. Her new book, The Breastfeeding Diaries, a collection of funny breastfeeding stories from women across the United States, is due out in May 2007. Currently residing in Los Angeles, Tricia misses the sweet tea, grits, and barbeque of the South. You can read more of her thoughts and comment on her article here.

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It’s a quaint little document, really. One of its major problems, of course, is that it was written by white males and as everyone knows, there must be ethnic and gender diversity in anything worth keeping these days. And so it goes out the window, this little document that’s been holding our country together for a couple of hundred years or so.

I say good riddance. Why, really, do we need something that protects us, for instance, from searches and seizures that are unwarranted? So many of us sheep, really, are thankful that our Masters protect us from the big, bad, ugly terrorists. Nobody thinks anymore that our Masters should be protecting us from, well, from our Masters. Some of the used-to-be-sheep have figured out that maybe, just maybe, those delightful, deceitful Masters of ours have actually allowed such atrocities as the whole 9/11 thing to happen.

Nonetheless, it was a quaint document, that Constitution. It said something about how the people’s right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." In other words, someone can’t just go x-raying my underwear at random, unless my underwear has been doing something it shouldn’t. There needed to be, in the days of the Constitution, some probable cause that my underwear was guilty of something. Guilty these days means that you ride the subway or board an airplane.

Yesterday’s government-schooled children, who have now become obedient adults, think it’s entirely reasonable to submit your keys and pocketbook to be searched. The police commissar, excuse me, commissioner of New York City, claimed, evidently with a straight face, that “common sense prevailed” when Manhattan subway riders were subjected at random for searches of their private property. “At a fitting moment,” commissar explained, “the court upheld the constitutionality of the bag inspection program, one of our key strategies for deterring a subway attack.” Evidently a key strategy for dismantling the Constitution as well. But really, who’d notice?

When the recent supposed terrorist attack plot resulted in people who had to give up their bottled water and wine before boarding an airplane, we are now expected to acclimate ourselves to the new travel restrictions. Jamie Bowden, a former terminal manager at London’s Heathrow Airport, said the new rules may be here to stay. "I think certainly here in the U.K. and certainly in the States as well, people are now getting used to kind of a new way of travel . . . I think, although the airlines certainly don’t want these kinds of restrictions, if they believe through government intelligence that it’s much safer to fly like this, that may be a new way that people are going to have to get used to flying."

A new way, indeed! And people have been primed for such searches by allowing attendants at such fabulous places as Disneyland to perform cursory searches of our belongings. Our children are being conditioned to believe that our private property belongs to everyone.

The airlines are supposedly independent entities, but the reality is that they are partially funded and controlled by the government. They have every right to ask passengers to do whatever they wish; passengers have every right to take another form of transportation. The problem with this latest government intrusion on airline travel is that no one seems to be complaining. Maybe our Masters are seeing how far we’ve drifted into servitude.

As some have suggested, perhaps the next step will be for our Masters in the TSA to ask us to travel nude. Oh well. Whatever! say the sheep, who are afraid to seem baa-aa-aad to government officials. Those officials tell us over and over, and we believe it, that if we have nothing to hide, we have nothing to fear. The propaganda is working. Most people interviewed by mainstream media seem happy that their sodas are being confiscated: A college counselor made the inane statement that the loss of liquids via TSA search is “part of the price you pay for traveling during a time like this.” Yes, in post-Constitutional Amerika.

I should have known we were in trouble a few months ago. I read a story in the Raleigh News and Observer regarding sobriety checkpoints for cars. But it’s unconstitutional! I wrote the author of the story. To his credit, he was also under this evidently arcane belief, the idea that the U.S. Constitution has some degree of influence in our society. But an overwhelming majority of his readers told him that to question the Constitutionality of checkpoints was to endorse drunk driving. Oh, brother! Or rather, Oh big brother!

And so it should not have surprised me when I found out that people who had to throw out their bottled water before boarding a flight deemed it merely an "inconvenience." And they actually believed that somehow, throwing out that water would save their lives.

photo by John Thomas

A little note here: When I spent a summer in Manhattan during college, I had a boyfriend who used to fly from North Carolina to New York to visit me. He used to bring a certain herb that our Masters have deemed illegal. Personally, I always thought it quite odd that our Masters could tell us what we could and could not grow on our own property. Nonetheless, he brought some of this herb when he came to visit me. He has gone on to be a father, and a husband to someone else. And I have gone on to be a mom, and a wife to someone else. Neither of us has time to fret much about that particular herb anymore, but neither have we nor anyone else suffered one iota from his bringing it on the airplane. A few years later, bottled water is now deemed illegal to bring on an airplane. Yes, bottled water. Do I want my progeny to grow up in a country that has limited so much freedom in so little time?

I have little hope for the sheep of this country, few of whom seem to be noticing that our Constitution, the basic document of freedom for our country, is becoming what George Bush said it was a few months ago: merely a piece of paper.

So it goes. But if the supposedly freest country on earth is no longer free, where might those of us who truly love and believe in freedom place ourselves? Please let me know. I’m longing to visit my dad and my friends in North Carolina soon. And I don’t want to submit my bottled water to a TSA screener.

Tricia Shore [send her mail], Comic Mom, is a North Carolina State University graduate who is happy with her momly life. Her new book, The Breastfeeding Diaries, a collection of funny breastfeeding stories from women across the United States, is due out in May 2007. Currently residing in Los Angeles, Tricia misses the sweet tea, grits, and barbeque of the South. You can read more of her thoughts and comment on her article here.

Private preschools
and kindergartens and such can run you $20,000 per year easily.
You are often judged as a parent based on your child’s preschool.
Yes, the preschool. People have every right to do this, of
course.

I’ve heard
many moms tell me that they dropped their three-year-old off at
preschool with the little one crying for mommy not to leave. “But
I had to,” one mother dramatically said, “It’s for his own good!”
At three? That particular mother spoke two languages and
yet, she evidently found it beyond her reach to think about teaching
her own child the alphabet of either language. Or anything else.

These parents
have, no doubt, believed all the First
Five of California propaganda that we’ve heard these past few
years. They believe that if they don’t make their child go to preschool;
learn to socialize, whatever that vague term means; and have their
child reading by age five, that little Johnny or JoEllen will be
merely a dumb mass of unfulfilled neurons for the rest of his or
her life.

Prop. 82, on
the Tuesday, June 6th ballot, will attempt to extend this kind of
thinking to everyone, proliferating the thought processes of those
who spend $20,000 or so on preschools with
chickens and with rooms decorated as if they were featured in last
month’s Architectural Digest. Why should only the very
wealthy believe that their progeny must feel the pressure to succeed
by age six? If Prop. 82, heavily promoted by former sitcom star
Rob Reiner, passes, then every four-year-old will have a chance
to sit in a classroom at least three hours each day, listening to
socialist propaganda that their change agent teachers will tell
them. And of course, this schooling must come at the government’s
expense.

Preschool fever
has so hit California that most parents believe that we’re not smart
enough to teach our own children. We proletariat types may not be
dumb enough to pay $20,000 so that our child may have contact with
a chicken each day, but we’ll certainly take the free preschool
that our local government prison, I mean government school,
dishes out. After all it is free!

Diane Flynn
Keith,
who has not only written extensively about Prop. 82 and its negative
consequences, but who
also encourages parents to teach their children at home, especially
in the early years, is one of many smart mamas who is vehemently
against Prop. 82. On her
blog, a kindergarten teacher fears that if Preschool for All
comes into being, “children will be raped of their childhood.” I
worry about this as well. I’ve noticed that the heavily preschooled
often have trouble talking with adults. I was with a group of homeschoolers
the other day and noticed that the children talked with me as easily
as they talked with other children. Imagine what wonderful things
are in store for the three and four set when the government takes
over their mind for three hours each day. Building a bridge out
of Legos will no longer be merely a fun learning activity; it will
be an assessment that a child can be slotted into civil engineering,
or whatever is needed on the School-to-Work agenda.

While many
in California are oblivious to the harm that lots of preschool,
and I don’t mean the occasional Mothers Morning Out, can do to their
child, some see the problems with early childhood education outside
the home. There are thinking mamas, such as homeschooler Karen Taylor,
who realize that placing their young children in the care of others
can have unintended consequences:

“I took my
son to the local community college plant sale today. There were
a lot of kids, but mine was the only one with his own mother. The
others were preschoolers, several classes of them, each tied to
the other so that they wouldn’t get away from their adults. We watched
one class walk in, while we were deciding which tomato plants to
buy. The teacher said slowly to the kids, “These are veg-e-tables.”
She selected the two closest tomato plants with no discussion, and
as she left, with the kids following her, another adult asked what
color the plants were. That was it. The field trip was over, but
I imagine they’ll tell the parents that they went to the college
and learned about gardening and plants. And the parents will be
so pleased that their children are in school at such a young age,
and learning important things.”

I happened
to read Karen’s story on the same day that my five-year-old and
I had gone to a garden center. As he and I looked at and talked
about the plants, even with my limited horticultural knowledge,
I talked about farming and gardening and how important plants are
to us and to our survival. In his secure familial environment, my
son learned more in a few minutes than he would have in an entire
day of public preschool.

In crazy, socialist
California, however, smart, thinking mamas are not the norm. Between
parents who are so strapped due to our high tax rate that both need
to work; and parents who hire nannies to take care of their children,
one of these told me that she had a nanny from 5 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.
each day; there’s hardly any reason for parents in California to
reject Reiner’s attempt to force schooling on three- and four-year-olds.
Of course, Reiner and First Five tout that it’s a voluntary program
only for four-year-olds now, but if it ensures the “right of all
children to receive” one year of preschool, how long will it remain
voluntary? How long will it be before the age is lowered even further?

B. F. Skinner
concocted a world in Walden Two in which children were taken
from their parents as babies and conditioned to be exactly what
society wanted them to be. When I used to teach this book to my
students at NCSU, we all thought it was a sort of behaviorist science
fiction attempt, and not an extremely well-written one at that.
After being in the real world for a few years, with children in
tow, I can’t help but wonder if Skinner was writing more of a how-to
guide. And if our politicians and former sitcom stars, such as Reiner,
are slowly and subtly promoting its contents.

I could go
on and on, of course, about how strange it is to force money away
from those who have more, to give to those who have less. Those
individuals who are making over $400,000 or the couples who are
making over $800,000 will pay for this “free” preschool. But that’s
okay. They’re rich. What’s that thing about forced wealth redistribution?
My publicly schooled mind just doesn’t seem to remember.

I could also
mention the flaming
tower of controversy that’s plagued California’s First Five,
ever since before they started telling us via a
massive media campaign, that failing to send our children to
preschool would doom them to prison. Do you actually know people
who didn’t go to preschool and managed to avoid prison?

Don’t tell
the First Five folks. They’ve made everyone think that if we don’t
send our children to government indoctrination plants by the time
they are four, our children will be good for nothing except independent
thinking. Without early indoctrination, children may even begin
to see through the horrid and unnecessary War on Drugs and War on
Terror. There may be a revolt in this country as we haven’t seen
since 1776 or so. There may be blood shed in the streets because
people care so much about freedom.

But wait a
minute! As most people know, independent minds, such as the ones
that helped to create our great country, are now deemed a danger
to our society. We drug them and make them pay attention in classrooms
all day, perfecting supposed critical thinking skills and making
what is easy to learn seem hard to learn, as John
Taylor Gatto points out that Socrates so aptly predicted would
happen, when teachers earn money for teaching.

We simply must
manage the populace, however. Independent thinkers do not a good
socialist country make. Without proper management, learned early
in the government schools, how will we continue our slavery to governments
and corporations?

How better
to continue this management program than to indoctrinate the very
young? We’ve all heard that little ditty from Hitler about “When
an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly
say, ‘Your child belongs to us already’.” Hitler, to be sure, wasn’t
talking about homeschoolers with this quotation. No, in order to
lay a whole propaganda campaign on children, there must be mass
indoctrination of children. That kind of thing can only occur via
mass forced schooling.

And from parents
who believe they are too dumb to teach their child the alphabet.
After all, if certified teacher and change agent knows best now,
perhaps one day doctor will know best and patient will not question
doctor or look for alternative treatments. Change agent teacher
teaches, subtly, that government knows best. And then when children
grow up, having learned to trust authority figures but not themselves,
perhaps Marine commander will know best when he says shoot to kill,

even when the killing involves a pregnant woman. Early schooling
destroys our ability to trust our own hearts and minds, to make
our own independent decisions.

The ugly truth
for Los Angelenos, who hire nannies at a rate rivaled only by Manhattanites,
is that young children need their mommy and daddy. The security
that comes from a young child’s being around his or her parents
all day is much better incentive to learn than giving the child
to change agent teachers who take the child with ten other young
humans on a leash and walk them to the library; the teacher will
be lucky to remember a child’s name in ten years.

My children
and I saw some of these children-on-a-leash as we went to storytime
recently at our local library. I can’t imagine a less subtle or
more effective way of telling these children that they are more
like animals than humans. Sure, placing children on a leash provides
safety, but then again, so does locking your child in a closet all
day. Still, I wouldn’t suggest either one. Perhaps preschool, especially
when it is supplied by the government, is a doggy obedience school
for children.

 
photo
by John Thomas

The propaganda
that Reiner and his ilk have come up with regarding this proposal
convince me that more’s at stake here than a supposedly free preschool
for children. Training future socialists can be quite profitable for
the power elite. Slowly lowering the age at which our children begin
their terms in the indoctrination centers and opening this supposedly
free program to all children will produce fewer free thinkers
and more socialists.

Spread the
word: Vote NO on Prop. 82 if you live in California; and if you
live elsewhere, watch carefully for legislation that will soon try
to indoctrinate your state’s youngest members.

June
5, 2006

Tricia
Shore [send her mail],
a North Carolina State University graduate, is happy with her momly
life. Currently residing in Los Angeles, Tricia misses the sweet
tea, grits, and barbeque of the South. You can read more of her
thoughts and comment on her article here.

Recently, while
quickly flipping through People in my dentist's office, I
had one of those hating-that-I'm-right moments. One of the speculators
in the article about why Winkler killed her husband brought up post-partum
depression, or PPD for those with a propensity for abbreviated mental
states.

Why we women
allow people to subject us to such silly stuff is beyond me. Blaming
post-partum depression for killing someone and other horrid behaviors
is supposed to, I'm guessing here, elevate women to some fragile
social status. But why? What will we accomplish when women who have
children can so easily be diagnosed with mental problems? Why aren't
women rebelling against such labeling and subsequent drugging?

I'm not saying
that no woman ever cries at a sad news story more quickly after
childbirth than she would have before becoming pregnant. And I'm
not saying that extra hormones don't contribute to some funky behaviors
from time to time, but this post-partum depression mania that's
sweeping the nation; it's enough to make a mom like me, well, depressed.

Most women
are strong. Men are strong too, but in a different kind of way.
And yes, I do realize that my belief that there are differences
between men and women obliterates my run for the presidency
of Harvard. But I think that media propaganda and the government
schools are sapping our strength as women, strength that helps us
to conceive, birth, and breastfeed our young.

Advertisements
continually tell us how we're lacking — we're not smart enough,
thin enough, or whatever else enough. The government schools raise
us and/or our friends and in these halls of supposed education,
where we learn all kinds of things: we're pitted against each other
for such silly supposed honors as homecoming queen or cheerleader
and the schools themselves take us away from our families and our
homes, where we really need to learn life's important lessons.

Women are conditioned,
subtly, to believe that we are not strong. We take tests in magazines
that tell us how sexy or how worthy of a boyfriend or husband or
how mentally healthy we are. We read articles by the supposed experts
that tell us how to be more this or that, or less this or that.

We follow celebrities,
especially when they tell us how we should think. One reason for
the recent post-partum depression epidemic, of course, is mental
health spokesperson Brooke Shields. Brooke, really, should know
better than to prostitute herself to the mental health industry.
And Oprah, if I may use the psychological parlance, should know
better than to enable her.

Although I
didn't have a problem with Brooke's nudity in Blue Lagoon,
I have
a real problem with her promoting post-partum depression and
so easily taking the medications that made everything bright and
cheery again, supposedly. The old-fashioned kind of prostitution,
sans government intervention, harms few people. With the newfangled
Brooke Shields-mental-health-prostitution, many new moms read her
book and say, "That's me!" And then the moms jump on the
post-partum depression bandwagon themselves, along with the little
pills that supposedly cure the depression.

By the way,
breastfeeding your newborn helps your hormones to return to normal,
but how many times do you read this fact when you hear about post-partum
depression? Instead of promoting this natural hormone regulator,
Brooke was paid by the formula industry to promote bottlefeeding.

Being around
family and friends also helps hormones to return to normal, but
how many times do people reach for a prescription instead of the
hand of a family member or of a friend? A blood test for thyroid
often reveals a physical problem that can affect one's mental state,
but how many times are moms placed on pills, with nary a blood test
in sight?

I used to be
a staunch believer in the mental health industry, but now I have
my doubts. At one point, I even wanted to be a social worker. After
all, social workers had been a part of my life from before I was
born, convincing my mother that she wasn't good enough to keep me.
Later on, when I just couldn't figure out what was wrong with me,
I had eleven years of talk therapy with a social worker.

And yet, I
had not one bit of medicine until after the talk therapy ended,
while I was in graduate school. Some of you may know that the pressures
of graduate studies, and in many cases, undergraduate studies, can
send any sane person to a psychiatrist. Besides, as with many of
my female friends, I really wanted to be a mom. But I was busy in
graduate school, trying to make the ever-important A and trying
hard not to listen to my body, which was telling me, in many ways,
to have a baby.

This kind of
conflict, which I imagine happens as much with women in the military
as with women in graduate school, causes confusion. A good deal
of confusion is best dealt with by a good deal of deep hard thinking,
something not normally done in the superficial culture of most graduate
schools, places where grades seem more important than life itself.
And so, fearing deep hard thinking, I found myself face to face
one day with a psychiatrist.

She asked me
some questions and soon I had a prescription for something. There
was no medical exam, no blood test. There was not much of anything
except a sophisticated form of a Cosmopolitan or Self
magazine evaluation. And then there was the prescription.

I was sure
that the pills would help. That's what the psychiatrist told me.
After I found myself waking up every night at 2 a.m., bitter in
ways I'd not been before, I wasn't so sure about their help. I wrote
a poem that later received honorable mention in some contest, but
other than that accolade, not much good came out of my first round
of legal psychiatric drugs. Never mind. The psychiatrist changed
my medicine and suddenly, I was on another kind of drug. It was
a milder, gentler drug, and I stayed on it for a year, believing
that it was helping my sanity.

Now, I'm not
so sure. Perhaps the talk therapy and year of pills helped, but
it's amazing how much finishing graduate school, finding a wonderful
husband, finding my natural parents, and having a baby helped my
mental attitude, with nary a therapist or pill in sight!
While many will call me insane for questioning the validity of the
mental health industry and of post-partum depression itself, I find
that my skepticism of this industry, especially in light of the
present executive branch's focus on the New
Freedom Mental Health Initiative, is quite healthy. Even if
you haven't heard of this Orwellian
term, you'll soon feel its tentacles. Unless you work to stop
it and its funding, it will soon be coming to your state.

Recently, legislators
in Illinois passed a mental health bill, in the same spirit that
our U.S. Congress Critters passed the so-called Patriot Acts: In
hindsight, many Illinois legislators claimed that they had no idea
what they'd voted for. Their ignorance led to a law in which, despite
numerous protests in Illinois and outcries from groups opposing
mandatory screening, all
pregnant women and all children will be screened for "mental
health," whatever that vague definition means.

In Illinois,
no child or childbearing woman will be left behind. If what happened
in Illinois doesn't scare you, and it should, take
a look at what's happening in New Jersey.

What I find
especially interesting about the celebratory atmosphere regarding
this latest draconian measure, which promises to screen every mom
who's just given birth in New Jersey, is that there is no mention,
nothing at all, about its connection to the larger picture, to the
government's plan to screen everyone. Yes, everyone.

Leviathan has
a willing accomplice in a New Jersey state senator's wife, Mary
Jo Codey, herself a supposed victim, although less glamorous than
Brooke, of this supposed post-partum depression. Codey claims that
at one point she wanted to place her infant in a microwave.

While I must
admit that even in my most frustrating times as a mom, my fertile
imagination has never pondered such a thought, the good senator's
wife received praise for her confession. Those of us who
are lesser minions to Leviathan would have probably received a visit
from our nearest child protective services social worker if we'd
confessed a similar thought. One writer received a visit from a
social worker after stating that
her house was messy.

Needless to
say, my plans have changed about becoming a social worker. And I'm
not planning to enter talk therapy or take any little pills soon.
I am thankful for that choice. I am beginning more and more to doubt
the mental health industry's effectiveness, and even its necessity.
Nonetheless, Leviathan plans to reach its slimy fins around our
minds and souls by legislating mental health.

When the government
has the power to deem our thoughts and feelings acceptable or unacceptable,
we’re crazy if we think that the mental health industry may be making
us think we're sick when we're not. We’re crazy if we think that
women are strong enough that we can survive childbirth and the first
few months of a new baby's life without being medicated for some
supposed mental illness. We’re sane if we want to make women into
victims.

As trumped
up illnesses such as post-partum depression continue to make women
feel as though we're victims, we will spend our time talking in
support groups instead of fighting for our dwindling freedoms. Instead
of educating our children ourselves and keeping them away from the
government schools, we will believe that we are too dumb and too
mentally fragile to teach them. Instead of fulfilling our God-given
abilities as nurturers of our children, we will hire people to perform
that awesome responsibility for us.

When the government's
mental health minions diagnose us as depressed or incompetent or
whatever, we will accept our fate and do the bidding of Leviathan.
After all, we're willing victims. If someone tells us we're sick,
we'll swallow the prescribed pills. As with most heavily-Leviathan-induced
people, the senator's wife seems to be doing good. As all women
are screened for this supposed illness and as Leviathan places many
of these women on questionable
anti-depressants, the senator wife's seemingly gleeful attitude
may soon reflect the soma-induced state of women in New Jersey.

From People
magazine's pre-trial indictment of Mary Winkler's mental state to
Mary Jo Codey, who whined her supposed depression into a new law,
the path has been paved for the nation's women to be diagnosed,
for another level of government to creep into our minds and bodies.

 
photo
by John Thomas

"Today,
we're changing the rules,” Codey's husband said as the New Jersey
bill was signed into law, following this prophetic statement with
the ominous “Today, every mother can get the help she deserves;”
it's important to add something that he didn't say: whether she
wants it or not. Women “facing the fear and uncertainty of post-partum
depression will have someone looking out for them.” Codey said.
Unfortunately, it will be that giant monster, Leviathan — dressed
in the clothing of a very tender and loving sheep.

May
2, 2006

Tricia
Shore [send her mail],
a North Carolina State University graduate, is happy with her momly
life. Currently residing in Los Angeles, Tricia misses the sweet
tea, grits, and barbeque of the South. You can read more of her
thoughts and comment on her article here.

And really,
who cares that the Department of Homeland Security not only is planning
to track us with the REAL ID in 2008 — something that the American
people rallied against only ten years ago, but now accept without
protest — but is also planning to track our movements via vehicle.
And you thought 1984,
Brave
New World,
and all those other utopian sci-fi novels were mere
fiction?

Well, whatever,
anyway we obviously have MUCH bigger fish to fry here in the U.S.
If you saw Good Morning America recently (and I am thankful
that I have better things to do in the morning — taking my basal
body temperature, for instance), you know that the big story was
the “Mommy Wars”! Really, I’d rather worry about some elitist female
propagandist telling me that my children will be better off AWAY
from me all day, in the care of some institution, than to worry
about losing my freedom and privacy. Oh, and by the way, I’m wasting
my talents and education by doing something so banal as raising
my children. My brain is withering as I write!

I am curious,
though. Why is it that people assume that taking care of children
isn’t fun and fulfilling? By the way, what does it mean when one's
life is fulfilled? Does a fulfilling life only include being a corporate
drone for 40 or more hours each week?

As a mom who
is mainly at home, I can tell my children about Shakespeare as easily
as I used to tell my first-year college students. Or I can teach
my children the alphabet. Or numbers. And guess what? Unlike my
former students, my children know where I live. And,
my children will know where I am years from now; I will know where
they are. You get my drift — there's some permanence in teaching
my children that I never had teaching strangers, wonderful as some
of those students were. And yet, people like Linda Hirshman are
just sure that what my little educated self is doing is a) bad for
me b) bad for society, and c) bad for my children.

In case you
can’t stomach the
article, I’ll give you one of my favorite lines: Hirshman thinks
that those of us who have degrees and yet, choose to raise our own
children are part of “a trend that is a tragedy not only for the
mothers, but ultimately their children and women as a whole.”

See? It's not
King George and his posse who are providing us harm, it's me. Oh,
and the other moms who choose not to hand our children over to others
all day. Before you read Hirshman, you may indeed have a different
view of things. Here's my thinking prior to Hirshman's admonishment
of me: Our Constitutional rights out the window? A tragedy! Our
president’s spying on us? A tragedy! Mothers who raise our own children
. . . A tragedy?!? B.F. Skinner must be cackling in his grave over
Hirshman's words. Imagine! A nation full of mothers who want
nothing more than to fulfill themselves by turning their children
over to an institution, as close to birth as possible.

I can only
say that this kind of blather would have never made network television
prior to the so-called feminist movement of the 60s and 70s. I’ll
remember the first time I questioned that movement. My now five-year-old
was a mere three months old at the time and I was having lunch with
a friend of mine who had a daughter a few months older than my son.
I was supposed to return to work from maternity leave the next day
and I wasn’t too happy about it. I said something about the feminists
and she said that she had never really been one. Suddenly, all the
socialist feminist propaganda that I’d gleaned from way too many
years in school cracked. I was ecstatic to find an intelligent woman
who didn't consider herself a feminist!

Since then,
I've found a few more. I realized with my friend that day that I
didn’t have to love the feminists. Thanks to her eye-opening comment,
I began to realize that anything I did was because I did it, not
because some supposed bra-burning women’s libber had paved some
metaphorical road for me. I could be a woman and not believe all
the feminist crap — how liberating!

I could tell
Ms. Hirshman, of course, how I've met few women who were happy and
fulfilled by leaving their child in daycare or with a nanny all
day. Most of the women I know who have to work outside the home
would be much happier spending time with their children, if they
could afford it. I know it's hard for someone like Hirshman to believe,
but there are some of us who actually like being around our children.

That's not
enough, of course. Loving to be with our children and to teach them
is bad news for those of us who are educated; and evidently, we
are way too stupid or conditioned or something to make our own choices:
"Prying women out of their traditional roles is not going to
be easy," Hirshman says. Then why bother? Really, what
business is it of Hirshman's what I do with my education? Maybe
we are choosing traditional roles because, well, they're traditional.
Perhaps the fact that they seem to have worked well for thousands
of years makes them attractive to many of us. Maybe some of us see
women and men as contributors to our family, but not as equals per
se. Therefore, if men rule the corporate world, maybe, just
maybe, that's okay with some of us. Some of us are quite happy to
have the privilege of raising and teaching our offspring.

But it's not
okay with Hirshman. In fact, taking care of the children that we've
created makes us traitors to our class, unless, of course, we are
in the "lowest caste." According to her words in The
American Prospect, it is better to pay someone else to do
the dirty work with our progeny:

" . .
. these daughters of the upper class will be bearing most of the
burden of the work always associated with the lowest caste: sweeping
and cleaning bodily waste. Not two weeks after the Yalie
flap, the Times ran a story of moms who were toilet training
in infancy by vigilantly watching their babies for signs of excretion
24-7. They have voluntarily become untouchables."

Even though
I can hardly be called a daughter of the upper class, the elite
to which Hirshman refers supposedly affects me greatly, as part
of what she calls the "regime effect," or what I like
to call trickle-down choices. In other words, when those who've
gone to Yale start staying at home with their children, all the
rest of us — too dumb, of course, to make our own choices — will
follow, wreaking supposed havoc on humanity.

I can't help
but wonder if Hirshman realizes how demeaning her comment is to
the women who actually do the childraising while the moms that Hirshman
so admires are off fulfilling themselves. Oh, never mind, you
go off to your office and let Helena take care of your children
all day. After all, she only has an associate's degree in some childhood
education program. But you, you, my darling, have a master's! As
a result, you must never ever touch poop. Instead, you must go and
teach socialism, I mean, sociology all day. If you weren't there
to teach those little darlings, then they might be taught by — horrors!
— a MAN! And if that were the case, then you wouldn't be able to
tell them how victimized we women are! If you weren't there to tell
them how to think, then they may just learn to think for themselves!
We can't let that happen! You MUST give your child to the woman
with less education and go tell the masses what to think!

As with so
many modern-day women, many of whom took women’s studies classes
as part of their degree, Linda Hirshman is frittering away her own
talents and skills by becoming a professional feminist. Instead
of doing something really useful for the world, Hirshman is busy
telling women that being a mom and raising your own child is simply
bad business. It's her privilege to say what she wants, of course,
but how much better might her talents and skills be used in, say,
keeping the government out of all our lives, no matter our gender.

 
photo
by John Thomas

It's been a
while since the world had a Margaret Sanger running around, supposedly
helping women by telling them to stop reproducing so much. But I
do believe that Hirshman is a valid contender for a Sanger award
of some sort. It's sad, indeed, that Hirshman was able to have so
much airtime on national television, especially when our freedoms
are dwindling, zooming away from us faster than King George's defenses
of his unconstitutional searches fly from his mouth. The real tragedy
of Hirshman's desire to tell educated mommies that what we do for
our children is a huge waste of our talents and skills is that anyone
bothers to listen.

March
7, 2006

Tricia
Shore [send her mail],
a North Carolina State University graduate, is happy with her momly
life. Currently residing in Los Angeles, Tricia misses the sweet
tea, grits, and barbeque of the South. You can read more of her
thoughts and comment on her article here.

The defendant
was a grandmother, a 53-year-old woman who'd had some neighbor troubles,
not an unusual thing in Los Angeles, where houses are much less
than a stone's throw from each other. There was some fighting between
one of her grandchildren that she was raising and one of the neighborhood
children, no doubt one of those lovely results of our being forced
to put up with each other in the confinement of government schools.
Grandma had warned her unwelcome neighbors not to come around again,
or that she would "cut them." And they did come around
and she did live up to her promise, telling the paramedics that
she called after she stabbed two neighbors, "They're gonna
need some paramedics, u2018cause I was chopping, honey."

Not once did
Grandma show remorse, according to my husband; she had a subtle
sort of pride about what she'd done. She was defending herself and
her grandchildren, in her eyes. Her neighbors were intruding. She
had seen one of her neighbors holding a knife, or so she said on
the witness stand, although she'd not told the police this information
initially. No one else had seen a knife, however, and so the assault
charges held. No one, without a reasonable doubt, could prove that
she had actually meant to kill her neighbors. But the jury also
could not find her innocent, believing that she did not completely
act in self-defense.

After my husband
told me this story, I must say that the calls to last-minute babysitters
so that I could go to a work meeting, the difficulties in reaching
my husband via telephone this past week, and my fears of how long
the trial would last, went out the proverbial window. I was proud
of him and proud of the process.

Despite Grandma's
guilt, however, I couldn't help but think about Grandma in contrast
to my husband. He slept with his wife and children in our cozy bedroom
last night; Grandma slept in a jail cell. Grandma will not be spending
Christmas with those grandchildren that she, in her mind, was trying
to do right by. My husband will be spending Christmas with the children
he helped to create, and with their mom.

Despite the
sadness of Grandma's situation, the system had worked. Grandma had
been tried by a jury of her peers and found not guilty on a couple
of counts and guilty of two others. Hearing the story from my husband,
I grew to respect this system and be thankful for it, a last vestige
of our fading Constitutional rights.

I couldn't
help but contrast Grandma's inability to be home this Christmas
with the air marshal's ability to do what he wants for the holidays,
the air marshal who put a bullet through a man who had not been
given a jury trial, a man who was killed before being found guilty.
I haven't seen much in the media about this air marshal, but my
guess is that he'll be spending Christmas at home, or maybe at work,
keeping our skies safe from suspicious folks, from anyone who doesn't
quite fit with Leviathan's idea of normal.

As with Grandma,
however, this officer had a unique perspective of the situation.
Every initial report that I read of this situation has said that
the officer shot the man because he said he had a bomb. John and
JoEllen American, who have been conditioned since 9/11 to cheer
any Leviathan plan that claims to fight terrorism, automatically
say, "Oh, well, good for the air marshal!" In a similar
way, if Grandma's story had been backed up by the neighbors, we'd
be saying, "Good for Grandma!" But it wasn't. No one else
reported seeing the neighbors with a knife shortly before Grandma
did her cutting. Oddly enough, no one else heard Mr. Alpizar, a
missionary, say that he had a bomb. Hmmm.

Mr. Alpizar's
neighbors all had good things to say about him. Despite being diagnosed
as having a mental illness, our missionary man had yet to cut anyone
with a knife in his neighborhood. And he had not, to anyone's knowledge,
ever shot anyone dead. In fact, according
to the witnesses, Alpizar said nothing about a bomb as he ran
up the aisle; some say he said nothing at all.

For sure this
situation makes for an interesting jury trial. Or rather, it would
have. Trouble is, Mr. Alpizar, unlike Grandma, won't be spending
the night in jail. He won't be facing twelve of his peers, with
their judging his every word and action, or lack thereof, to figure
out his guilt or innocence. No, that would be a bit too complex,
wouldn't it, to have allowed this missionary to have his Constitutional
rights.

Better, it
did seem, to just shoot him.

And to kill
him. One of my kind readers told me that air marshals are trained
sharpshooters. It looks as though, perhaps, someone trained as a
sharpshooter might have just thought, maybe, to shoot a suspect
in the foot, or even in the hand. That way, and I'm no gun expert
here, but it seems to me, as I wallow in gun ignorance, that if
Alpizar had a bomb, then shooting him in an extremity might, just
maybe, have given him the benefit of the doubt. Shooting him in
both hands would have made it hard for him to detonate a bomb; but,
he would, at least, have had those wounded hands to touch his wife.

Mr. Alpizar
was almost a decade younger than Grandma and yet, he is dead. He
won't be in a jail cell this Christmas because he isn't alive. He
leaves a grieving widow and many puzzled neighbors. And an air marshal
who probably got a promotion and a raise. If the air marshal has
shown signs of remorse, I've yet to read about it.

I don't know
if Mr. Alpizar was guilty or innocent. I only know what the witnesses
said about him. But I don't think that he's any less deserving of
his right to a jury trial than Grandma. In early 2000, when I was
newly pregnant with my firstborn son, I boarded a plane without
bringing any food on board. Pregnancy and hunger, I soon learned,
don't mix well. I was so hungry that I yelled at my husband. It's
not my proudest moment, and eventually I calmed down when the pretzels
came around, but then again, what would have happened if I had tried
to get off the plane, asking to go back and buy some food. What
if I'd been hungry and pregnant after the so-called Patriot Act
passed? Would I and my yet-to-be-born child have been shot and killed?

Mr. Alpizar
certainly didn't have the excuse of pregnancy for his behavior,
whatever his behavior actually was, but he deserves to give his
side of the story. Or rather, he deserved to. While Grandma's
husband may look forward to a quick phone call or visit this Christmas,
Mr. Alpizar's wife cannot. He is dead. There is no trial, no jury.

 
photo
by John Thomas

Yes, Grandma
was convicted of committing a crime and yes, she'll have her punishment
meted out. But tell me, please, what crime Mr. Alpizar was proven
to commit. As with Alpizar, the air marshal will probably never
face a jury. Unlike Alpizar, the air marshal is alive and well and
thriving. So besides Grandma, tell me who the other criminal in
this story is. No one's been convicted, of course, but my money's
on the one whose salary we pay with our taxes.

December
23, 2005

North
Carolina State University graduate Tricia Shore [send
her mail] is happy with her momly life. Discuss this article
at http://www.livejournal.com/users/comic_mom/.

My husband
and I have decided to become healthier this year. Okay, really I
have decided that we would become healthier. You guys should
know that when you marry us, we will make you healthier. I believe
that's really why guys who don't ever get married stay bachelors – they
don't want some woman telling them what to eat. Fortunately for
me, my husband was totally ignorant of this women's ploy.

And so he's
stuck. He's had a physical and lost twenty pounds as a result of
the doctor's advice. He's heard me complain when he orders a hot
dog – see what you bachelors are missing?!? And he's started to drink
raw cow's milk. For the uninitiated, that means the milk is not
pasteurized or homogenized.

Neither one
of us is going to stop drinking milk any time soon. My husband can
probably blame his milk drinking habit on cereal as well, but he
drinks much more than I do. And he drinks it from a glass, not just
with cereal or in tea. And then there are our two older boys, with
the third soon to begin drinking cow's milk, following in their
daddy's footsteps already.

If there's
one thing about breastfeeding moms that you should know, it's that
for the most part we really care about what goes into our body.
We have to. Breastfeeding moms often study such stuff and we make
our long-suffering husbands and children go along with us. And here's
the thing – we're often right.

Studying up
on things has hardly been easier than with the Internet. I learned
a lot when I was busy obtaining three academic degrees, but I didn't
learn the important stuff. I didn't learn that raw milk, when produced
in a clean dairy, is much healthier than the pasteurized stuff.
There are people who would argue with me. And if you're not sure
where your milk is coming from, then it might be a good idea to
go with the stuff that's been heated so much that all the bad stuff
is mostly gone. When I first heard about pasteurization as a child,
I thought it had to do with pastures. The problem with pasteurization,
named after famed Frenchman Louis Pasteur, is that all the good
stuff is gone as well. So-called "raw milk" gives you
everything, the good with the bad, or the not-so-bad if the dairy's
clean.

The astute
reader at this point will wonder how all this is connected to the
South, for which I am growing more homesick every day. The other
night my four-year-old said, "I'm not from North Carolina,
mommy, you are." Okay, I must admit that he's right
about that, technically anyway. Never mind that his maternal grandparents
are alive and well in North Carolina and his mom was raised there.
His father's mother is from Nebraska, nowhere near the South. His
paternal grandpa is from Memphis; my children are three-quarters
Southern.

And technically,
yes, he and his two younger brothers were born and bred, and if
you want to be nosy, even conceived in California. And so even though
my firstborn seems to love North Carolina barbeque – Eastern North
Carolina barbeque if you want to be picky – I must tell you that he
is indeed correct: Mommy is from North Carolina, but he is not.
Yet.

And then, even
more recently, we were looking at a map of the United States and
I was showing my four-year-old where the South is and telling him
that's where he's from. Okay, so I exaggerated a bit. And like any
good four-year-old, he caught me: "No, mom, I'm from your tummy
and Cedars-Sinai," referring to the Los Angeles hospital where
I gave birth to him. My tummy, and the rest of me, is from North
Carolina, but Cedars-Sinai is not.

Much as we
love our currently rising property values in Southern California,
my husband and I know that the booming real estate market's not
going to last forever. Anyway, we miss the barbeque. That I can
say for both of us. And even though the barbeque, and the sweet
tea and grits that I miss immensely, have little to do with our
burgeoning good health, we miss the South.

And what does
all that have to do with raw milk? I thought that moving from state
to state would have little to do with raw milk, actually. In fact,
I believed that raw milk, with its scrumptious cream on the top,
would be one comforting thing wherever our abode. I assumed nationwide
access to raw milk until I went to Florida this past summer. Shopping
at the Wild Oats Market, the Miami equivalent of Whole Foods, I
didn't see a bit of raw milk on the milk shelf. Never fear, my husband
said, they sometimes put the raw milk in a separate part of the
refrigerated section. Sometimes. At least in California. Raw milk
can easily be found in California, until it sells out, which is
usually the same day it's placed on the shelf.

When I inquired
about the raw milk, or lack thereof, in Florida, I was told that
it was illegal to sell it in the grocery store, that some, perhaps,
could be bought from a dairy, but not from a grocery store. Needless
to say, I was puzzled. It wasn't, after all, marijuana, which also
shouldn't be illegal, but is. A mom of three has little time to
worry about marijuana laws, as she once did, but the cow's milk
thing – well, that's something to think about.

Having said
that about marijuana, I must admit that maybe the two aren't that
dissimilar. Milk and marijuana, after all, other than the super
obvious – beginning with the same middle-alphabet letter – are natural
products. You can't say that about, say, Paxil. But it's evidently
a lot easier to obtain unnatural Paxil in North Carolina than it
is to buy natural raw milk.

Ironically,
as part of the La Leche League of North Carolina's 2005 Annual Breastfeeding
and Parenting Conference at which I was performing recently, I attended
a seminar on nutrition. The seminar leader talked about Westin
Price and his research into diet and one thing that came up
was the importance of drinking raw milk. When I looked in the North
Carolina Whole Foods, however, I saw no raw milk. This time, I was
afraid to ask.

When I returned
to California, I
looked it up on the Internet. Sure enough, my fears were confirmed
and I learned that North Carolina is a state in which it is illegal
to sell raw milk, even from a farm. Silly, isn't it? Should Our
Masters tell us what we can and cannot buy in the grocery store?

After all the
government-sponsored supposed drug education programs, a mom feels
as though she must say she's against illegal drugs, even
the natural ones, even if she thinks that the government has no
business regulating foliage. But milk? People have been drinking
raw cow's milk for hundreds of years. The trouble with regulating
what we buy and sell is that once Our Masters begin to control these
things, they really forget how to stop. And slowly, but surely,
we forget the freedoms that we once held sacred.

I want my raw
cow's milk. And I want my North Carolina barbeque. And in a free
country, such as the United States supposedly is, I should be able
to have both, no matter what state I claim as my own. I am not advocating
here a Constitutional Amendment that says each state must allow
freedom in milk; the last thing we need is another commandment from
Leviathan. I'm just wondering how we've gotten ourselves to the
point where we allow the government to decide what we can and cannot
place in our body. And what else will we allow Leviathan to do to
take away our freedom to choose?

North
Carolina barbeque tastes good, and there's no substitute for it
that I've found in Southern California. But it's not illegal for
any California cook to try and outfox any North Carolina cook. The
fact that it hasn't been done pays a real tribute to the power of
good pulled pork barbecue and to the people in North Carolina who
cook it. Do North Carolina's cows and the people who drink their
milk deserve any less? I love the taste of North Carolina barbecue,
but right now, the freedom to choose my raw cow's milk tastes even
better.

November
14, 2005

North
Carolina State University graduate Tricia Shore [send
her mail] is happy with her momly life. Discuss this article
at http://www.livejournal.com/users/comic_mom/.

Mind
you, my friend's daughter hasn't been tested yet, but the random
threat is there. And from the high school scuttlebutt that I've
been privy to, it's the ones who are the smartest, most dedicated,
and least likely to mess with illegal drugs who are tested.  By
the way, does anyone believe the random part? Does anyone really
expect them to pull names out of a hat? It's probably only a matter
of time for my friend's child, not that she has time to use drugs,
with all her extracurricular activities. Nonetheless, the sword
of drug-testing Damocles dangles over her golden locks.

I
was so impressed by this supposed improvement to Leviathan's indoctrination
system that I decided to sit this one out with my own children.
If I can help it, they will not be going to government school; nor
will they be subjected to having their bodily fluid examined for
illegal substances. Perhaps I should be concerned about what's
in my children's urine, but the government has no reason to be.
Despite lame excuses to the contrary, the government has no business
checking out my children's body fluids.

But
what about me?  I was recently asked to work on a technical
writing and editing job. I negotiated a flexible schedule so that
I could work at home (read: at night and in the early morning hours,
while everyone else is asleep). It was a writing job working with
engineers. I like working with engineers, so much so that I married
one, although now he is disguised as a technical writer himself.
 Just before I received the offer, however, the recruiter told
me he'd forgotten to say one thing — the company required a drug
test. I've told them that I don't want to take it.

The
recruiter sent me all the documents to fill out, the tax stuff,
the stuff that says I'm a native American citizen, as if my Southern
accent never gives that away, and other stuff, including
a "Drug Free Workplace" form that I must sign, promising
that I will not "illegally engage in the manufacture, distribution,
dispensation, possession, or use of a controlled substance while
at the workplace." I’ve gladly signed that document.

Let's
face it, folks: If I were selling, or even taking drugs, legal or
illegal, I sure wouldn't be planning to be 20 miles from my home
every morning at 7:30 a.m. to meet with the project manager and
the systems engineer. If I were selling drugs, well, I wouldn't
be looking for a job, would I? Unless it was a cover. But really,
I don't have the time to cover for selling drugs. I've got
three sons under five; my husband and I barely had time to have
champagne for our wedding anniversary this week. Why does anyone
need to examine my bodily fluid?

Not
that I particularly mind giving bodily fluids for a good cause.
Last fall, I ended a little over nine months of pregnancy with the
birth of an 11 lb. 1 oz. son; that included nine months of giving
a urine sample each time I went to the doctor, to check for protein.
This test, I didn't mind. If there had been a significant amount
of protein in my urine, then the doctor would have known that something
was wrong; he could have examined things further. It made sense
for me and for my baby-to-be; and I took it voluntarily.  When
my two older children asked me about it, I told them exactly why
mommy had to pee into a cup.

I
don't know what I would tell my children if I had to take them to
the drug "screen," as the recruiter so euphemistically
called it. I imagine this conversation with my four-year-old:

Well, mommy
has to pee into a cup

Because you're
pregnant?

No, not this
time. Now, it’s because, well, because someone wants to hire me.

You're going
to work as a person who pees in a cup?

Well, no,
I'm going to write.

But mommy,
you write already. Why do you need to pee in a cup to do that?

They want
to make sure I'm not using illegal drugs.

What are
illegal drugs, mommy?

They're
drugs that aren't approved by pharmaceutical companies and Brooke
Shields.

The
logic of a four-year-old can be so much better than that of major
corporations. How can I explain this drug test in a way that makes
any sense to my child? Trying to explain the inane may indeed be
why people lie to their children. At this point, I can't help but
think of a wonderful man who responded to one of my articles by
saying, "You're raising freedom-loving sons." Great! But
do freedom-loving sons have a mommy who allows corporate America
to search her body?

I
could do the where does it stop argument at this point. And
where does it stop? But I'll just leave that for you to ponder and
I'll say that my husband was subjected to a drug test in his position
with a U.S. Navy contractor. He filled me in on the Navy's attitude
toward drug-testing. Because he was a civilian, he was allowed privacy
to pee into his cup. Navy personnel – officers and enlisted
– were not allowed this privacy. What this means is that if
you're in the armed services, someone watches you pee.

What
you do in your own private time should be your business, but I can
tell you that whenever I've been in the bathroom with a friend,
we've had this sort of unspoken deal where you don't watch
each other pee. My four-year-old has become very private when it
comes to ridding his body of wastes and I completely respect that.
My thinking is that a little boy who wants a bit of privacy now
and then may be better prepared to handle anyone he meets later
on who wants to invade that privacy.

So
that's my position on trying to raise some freedom-loving children:
I don't think freedom-loving children, or adults, should have their
urine checked just to see what's in it, whether by the government
or by a corporation. But looking more deeply, the absurdity of this
whole drug-testing thing is so clear. I'm guessing that the government
schools are doing such a fabulous job of dumbing us down and of
making us think that extracurricular activities are more important
than freedom that most people don't even bother to question such
an intrusion.

Thinking
this one through, however, I see that the arguments that I thought
were bogus in college are still bogus. I'm shocked that more people
don't see through them. For one thing, just because you test negative
today doesn't mean that you will tomorrow. One day after having
a completely negative test, you can use as many drugs as possible.
So much for the drug-free workplace in that scenario. Another thing
is that the more dangerous illegal drugs are the ones that stay
in one's system for the least amount of time. Marijuana, for example,
can stay in there for a couple of months; cocaine, for a couple
of days. And so, the test allows those who use more dangerous drugs
to more easily defraud the test.

And
of course, there's the big obvious point: Shouldn't workers be judged
on what they can do instead of what's in their body? If someone
has a drug problem, it will show up in their work and that person
can be fired.

And
what about the false positive? Companies use the most inexpensive
tests possible and false positives happen; let's say they're 99%
accurate, an estimate that I read. That sounds very good, but I
think about it this way: That's the same failure rate as the pill
supposedly has and yet I know at least two people who've gotten
pregnant while on the pill, which brings me to another point: human
failure. An acquaintance I met while in college worked at one of
those major drug testing facilities — and she smoked marijuana!

Supposedly,
a false positive can lead to another, more accurate test, but how's
that going to figure into a mom's life? If you don't know that a
Leviathan-sponsored child protection agency can receive an anonymous
call about you, and your child can be taken away pretty quickly
thereafter, you're living in the last century, and in the early
part of it. That 1% chance of false positive can turn into a phone
call to Leviathan from a drug tester, and a visit from a social
worker. Easily. If you think I'm being paranoid, read
this page.

I
could go on and on, but I think I've given you enough to ponder
here. Only when good and hard-working people stop succumbing to
the silly and useless drug tests of the government and corporate
world will employers stop asking us to submit to these tests. They
have every right to ask us to acquiesce to their bodily fluid check;
we have every right to refuse.

At
this point, I don't know what the employer's going to decide. Two
different recruiters had called me about this position and this
company needs someone with my excellent technical writing and editing
skills, and soon. We certainly need the money that this job would
bring in, but even more, we need to teach our children about true
freedom. It may be that this company loses out on someone who could
help them have wonderfully-written technical documents, merely because
they want my urine. If they want to do business with me, they need
to accept the fact that when it comes to a drug test, I'll just
say no.

October
18, 2005

North
Carolina State University graduate Tricia Shore [send
her mail] is happy with her momly life. Discuss this article
at http://www.livejournal.com/users/comic_mom/.

Stabiner
does not think too much of us, those who change our mind and our
life after childbirth. She especially seems to eschew those of us
who have an education and choose supposedly to waste our intelligence
on something as trivial as raising a child. Why not hire that responsibility
out, as I would for taking care of my lawn or my pool?

She
just doesn't understand how I and now, Yale undergraduate women,
think that raising our children ourselves is so important: "The
young women think they're doing the right thing for their . . .
children having watched too many of their moms' generation try to
juggle career and family." You think? Sixty percent of 138
Yale women say that they would work part-time or leave their career
to raise their family and Stabiner is freaking out. I'm thinking:
At least the girls know before they give birth! One can easily
see, of course, how this emphasis on raising their own child by
potential moms can mess up even the best-laid plans of the feminists.

Stabiner's
got a pretty pessimistic view of those of us who want to be around
our children: "To plot this kind of future, a woman has to
have access to a pool of wealthy potential husbands, she has to
stay married at a time when half of marriages end in divorce, and
she has to ignore the history of the women's movement." Talking
about the Yale undergrads, she adds that if they "still believe
they can beat the odds, they must've slept through statistics. Or
worse, they think they're above the fray."

This
statement reminds me of a time in graduate school when I met an
economics professor mom who was not only smart enough to work
out a plan with her economics professor husband so that one of them
could be with the children and they would never have to use daycare
or a nanny, but she was also smart enough to tell me that she "didn't
want to get a divorce."  How dare she defy the odds! How
dare she be above the fray!

In
the midst of my own divorce at the time, from a marriage in which
there were no children, I began to think that maybe, hearing her
resolve for marriage and distaste for divorce, that she had made
some choices, including that of a mate, that would allow her to
make her statement true. Could it be, I wondered for the first time,
that we have control over our lives, including our marital happiness?
Having been raised in a government-school world, in which we wait
for a teacher to tell us what to do and have no control over anything,
especially our lives, I found this insight to be especially illuminating.

For
Stabiner, those of us who try to take control of our own lives by
not farming out our children to others seem to confuse "personal
comfort with social progress," she accuses educated moms who
raise our own children as being "in it for me."

Stabiner
had to know that she was opening a proverbial can of worms with
this essay. The trouble is that I think she really began to believe
herself. Call me selfish, and evidently she would, but I think that
bearing and raising children has little to do with personal comfort
and a lot to do with helping society to be the best that it can
be. I don't care that much about social progress per se; let's see
– this supposed progress has led us to the Columbine shootings
and serial killers and gangs in almost every government school.
All the better if my children miss out on that kind of social progress.

The
social progress argument that Stabiner uses reminds me so much of
that socialization question that we homeschoolers are so often asked.
And the answer is pretty much the same – interesting to note here
that they both have to do with the word "social" – I don't
care if my children are ever socialized and I don't care if they,
or I, participate in social progress as she deems it.

I’ll
train my sons to be wealthy, though. Evidently, according to Stabiner,
that's the only kind of guy that a potential mom who wants to raise
her own children can marry. Those of us who are raising our own
children know that's not always the case; most of the moms I know
who are raising their own children have not married a wealthy man,
but let's pretend: Producing more wealthy sons, of course, is an
argument for less governmental interference in business so that
my sons can achieve wealth freely, without having to navigate governmental
waters; I wonder how Stabiner would feel about that. Wealthy sons
can also be assisted by lower taxes, so that their wealth will not
be eaten by Lochness Leviathan.

Personally,
I'd be more than happy to lower my taxes by not subsidizing the
forced governmental education of children. And I'd be happy to have
a truly free market economy. Then, maybe more moms could afford
to raise their own children.

At
least I can teach my sons what Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and many
other wealthy fellows learned – that you don't need a college
degree to make millions. Now mind you, I can only do this kind of
teaching if I homeschool them, which I'm guessing Ms. Stabiner,
although she mentions nothing of this kind of thing in her article,
would be appalled to know that a well-educated woman such as myself
does. My educated self should make me want to throw my children
to the well-meaning government school wolves and the quicker the
better. Funny, though, I passed the school where my son would have
been attending kindergarten as we walked this morning, looked at
the chain link fence surrounding it; I’m glad that my son has true
freedom to learn all day at home.

I've
talked to a lot of moms who stopped breastfeeding because they had
to return to work. I've yet to meet one mom who was that excited
about returning. Among the proletariat, having the luxury of staying
home with your child is something to aspire to. But we certainly
didn't learn that in government high schools.

In my own high school, if you had no penis and dared to take advanced
math and score an A or B average, you were highly encouraged to
go into engineering, whether you cared to be an engineer or not.
Or, I might add, whether or not you had any idea what an engineer
does. Women are still being encouraged to go into the sciences and
I’m wondering, if it’s such a wonderful career area, why women can’t
figure it out on our own. Why must we have the dangling carrot and
stick?

Oh,
and what happened to being a mother when I was being trained in
the government high school? Home Economics was being phased out;
only the girls who would – gasp! – want to be mothers
and wives were foolish enough to take that course. The rest of us
took the supposedly more erudite college preparatory courses, whether
we liked them or not; we were counseled that we should. For those
of us who might have thought that we would like to have our own
child one day, we learned that being a mother is just a tiny little
part of our life, something that can be tossed in between our illustrious
career and volunteer work.

When
I was teaching first-year college English classes in 1999, I remember
the sweet young student who told me, "I just want to be a mom!"
She wondered if it would be okay to write about that kind of ambition
in the journal she kept for our class. I said, "Sure!"
Even before I gave birth myself, it seemed a bit strange to me that
she would feel so much pressure to have a money-making career outside
the home.

I
can't help but think that those Ivy League women are on to something,
though, especially if they're marrying rich. For the most part,
my friends and I made more money than the guys we married. If there's
one thing that Cosmo and other propaganda machines taught
us, it was that this love and career and sex thing is all just a
game; oh yes, and that we must win. So we did!

And
then we gave birth. Suddenly, it wasn't the game it had been. We
who had thought we would easily return to work, and who'd made choices
to prove ourselves right, would have given anything to be able to
afford staying with the baby we'd held inside our body for nine
or so months, without worrying about money. But for many of us,
it was too late: we'd bought consumerism and feminism and all the
other isms that we'd been taught. We made more money than our husband!
Besides, we were way too far in debt not to work.

Some
bought Working Mother and read all the articles in mainstream
media that told us how good it was to leave our children all day,
for them and for us. Some women believed that if our little darlings
socialized with other children all day it would be much better than
if they stayed with their own flesh and blood.

Some
began to believe that moms are unqualified to teach our children
the alphabet. Slowly, but surely, we are being taught that a teacher
benefits our children more than we ever can. It becomes much easier
to buy something for our offspring than to teach them something,
much easier to think that seeing our desk at work is more inspirational
to their creativity than sitting down and talking with them for
a few minutes.

Yet
some of us are willing to waste all our publicly and privately schooled
knowledge, to chuck the magazine articles, and to handle the ups
and downs of raising our own children; we work at home or work part-time
or negotiate flexible hours or somehow figure out a way to do the
money thing. We're not doing all this just to inspire the Yale undergraduates.
We're doing it because we like it; and because we realize that being
the biggest and best cog in a corporate or government wheel pales
in comparison to being there when our child has a boo-boo. Despite
what Stabiner thinks of our intelligence, our kids think we're pretty
darn smart.

Stabiner,
Karen. "What Yale Women Want." Los Angeles Times.
Friday, September 23, 2005.

October
10, 2005

North
Carolina State University graduate Tricia Shore [send
her mail] is happy with her momly life. She is the Comic
Mom.

Some
people envision Leviathan as a big hairy slightly benevolent monster,
the kind that you feared was hiding under your bed when you were
four, scary but a monster that your parents would have been able
to handle. It's the kind of monster that you'd notice if he were
standing outside your front door. If we go back a bit further than
Hobbes and look at what Job in the Old Testament says about this
monster, we'd see that it has "mighty strength” and that "round
about his teeth is terror. His back is made of rows of shields."
Things certainly calmed down a bit for Leviathan's image after the
Old Testament. In the illustration of a currently published Hobbes
paperback, Leviathan is merely a slightly-befuddled-looking giant,
protecting the masses that are contained inside the monster’s body.
 It is this version of Leviathan that we want to believe, the
slightly helpful, slightly befuddled monster of government that
is here to help us. Leviathan must love this more flattering image;
its existence depends on it.

How
else do we explain Leviathan's latest coup, a $400,000 federal government
grant, followed closely by another $300,000 federal grant, followed
by a generous donation by Motorola of $1,000,000 in equipment. What
modern government miracle does all this money grant us? Why, placing
security cameras in the Jordan Downs housing project in the Watts
area of Los Angeles, of course! What a splendid idea for the police
force there, ah, well, or what used to be the police force. Councilwoman
Janice Hahn actually said, after claiming that she was "cautious
about endorsing the cameras," and while apparently bearing
a straight face, that a loss of funding for the "housing police
department" prompted the Los Angeles Police Department's claim
that "they don't have the officers to patrol properly."

I
don't claim to be an economist – ask my husband, he'll definitely
agree. But it does seem as though $1,700,000, adding together the
corporate and government generosity mentioned in the previous paragraph,
would hire quite a few officers–possibly enough for a housing project's
security. Maybe Councilwoman Hahn doesn't know about the grants
– doubtful – or maybe she just doesn't put two and two,
or in this case, one million and seven hundred thousand, together.
I can relate – a lot of us were trained in government school
mathematics, the unstated purpose of which is to produce people
such as Councilwoman Hahn, people who merely want to be "cautious"
about Big Brother's moves and who don't connect enough numbers and
dots to say: Hey, if you're going to spend that much money, why
don't you just hire more police officers?!?

And
I don't mean only to place the blame on Ms. Hahn. She's probably
got enough going on in her life, trying to rationalize irrational
behavior such as spying on citizens with cameras. Anyway, she's
not the only one to be merely "cautious" about this camera
thing. In fact, she pales in comparison to such governmental luminaries
as Assistant Chief George Gascon, head of daily LAPD operations,
"Cameras are as much a part of policing now as handcuffs."

I
can't help but think of my husband here who, as young boy, opened
his Santa Claus presents before his parents woke up one Christmas,
and, finding a pair of toy handcuffs from Santa under the tree,
accidentally handcuffed his own hands behind his back, forcing his
parents out of bed way too early to fetch the key and unlock him.
I'm proud to say that my husband has learned a few things since
that time, things that apparently Chief Gascon has not. My husband
no longer plays with handcuffs.

As
with my husband, some people in the housing project have actually
grown up. A few residents have much better sense than those whom
Leviathan has chosen to protect them. While LAPD Cmdr. Charlie Beck
is telling us that "It's the criminals, not residents, we're
targeting," and admonishing that the "residents will grow
to understand this is there to protect them," the residents,
whom Leviathan has so generously helped with their housing needs,
have defiantly taken to thinking for themselves: "How do you
think they'd feel if I put a camera outside their homes?" asks
Robert Lopez. Robert obviously did not have enough public schooling.
He sees Leviathan for its sneaky monster self and is actually standing
up to this devious beast.  Never fear, Leviathan is working
behind the scenes to make sure that people like Robert "grow
to understand."

Sneaky
is as sneaky does; and this time, I must admire the craftiness with
which Leviathan has bundled this little security package. You see,
some of the grant money will actually be used to conduct computer
classes because, along with a little extra added governmental security
via surveillance, the residents will receive "free wireless
Internet access." Hooray! Now it's all okay, isn't it?
Our friend Robert, way too smart for Leviathan, has this one figured
out too. He knows of "few residents who have computers to take
advantage of the Internet access."

Police
Commission Vice President Alan Skobin, however, has people like
Robert all figured out: "This isn't about Big Brother,"
says Skobin, apparently without a hint of irony, "It is about
protecting and serving the public." So there, Robert! And let
Skobin's quote also be noted to everyone else who hasn't been so
desensitized by the reality show Big Brother that they have
forgotten the 1984
allusion. Oh, and then there's James Foreman, another thinking resident,
who ponders: "Do you think people around here are going to
trust the LAPD to use their Internet connect?" With so many
thinking people around, it's easy to see why the government wants
to monitor things.  "Maybe it will catch someone,"
another resident ponders. Maybe indeed. If Leviathan and its corporate
pal are doling out almost two million dollars, you can bet there'll
be some catching going on.

And
is Motorola merely being a good corporate citizen here? Or is it
hoping that this little camera snooping thing will catch on, so
that its investment in this housing community will yield more contracts
across the country?  All in the name of security and protection,
of course.

Nothing
much surprises me about this Leviathan move, or about its sneakiness
on the "underprivileged," as Bush's loving mother calls
those who are evidently not privileged. I'm assuming here that she
would apply the same word to the people in this housing project
as she did to the people who were unlucky enough to be caught in
Katrina's subsequent Superdome fiasco. Lest we be as smug as Mama
Bush – compared to the Bush family, most of us are indeed underprivileged.

The
supposedly underprivileged, though, have been guinea pigs for Leviathan's
creeping paws for quite a while. While Rob Reiner and his posse
are telling Californians that we should allow Leviathan to take
away our children and educate them by age 3–using the term educate
ever so loosely here – the coalition for universal preschool
in California is citing studies that show how taking away students
from their parents all day helps to improve their academic performance,
at least until they're in second grade or so. Diane
Flynn Keith has information on this ploy.

Never
mind that the studies were mostly done using that wonderful Leviathan
helper, Head Start, a program of the mid-1960s that resulted
in some of the very people that Mama Bush now calls underprivileged.
Leviathan was so successful with these guinea pigs that its ideas
spread to the more privileged. One theory of marketing shows that
it is much easier to take a product initially designed for higher-income
folks and market it to those of us nearer the bottom of the income
chain. Think Guess jeans in the 80s here.

But
in Leviathan's topsy-turvy world, things initially marketed to the
lower-income folks eventually become the desire of the middle and
upper classes. How else does one explain the recent campaign telling
those of us whose children watch PBS that we better make sure our
children attend the right preschool as early as possible, or else
they won't be attending the right college. Reiner and his ilk have
taken Head Start statistics, which show that children benefit from
early education programs, and applied them to all children.
The ploy is working and mothers everywhere now believe they are
not smart enough to teach their own children the alphabet and such. As
with many people born in the mid-1960s or later, I assumed
that preschool had been around for most of our country's existence.
Ah, the sneakiness of Leviathan, educating us masses to believe
that things have always been some particular way!

Ms.
Keith informed me that preschool is a relatively new invention.
I was indeed surprised to learn that prior to Head Start, most moms
stayed home with their children until the compulsory school age
of six or seven – that children learned at home and
became "school-ready," whatever that vague phrase means.
Tell that to the moms I know, most of whom are scrambling to place
their child into a preschool of some sort – all the better
if there can be some kind of developmental disorder with which to
diagnose Junior so that he can go to a special preschool program
on Leviathan's dime.

But
I digress. Or do I? Is it implausible that Leviathan is playing
another sneaky trick, this time with the Watts housing residents?
While we comfortably sleep, currently unwatched, in our middle-class
suburbs, supposedly free from the gang activity that Leviathan is
blaming for its candid camera experiment, we are tempted to believe
that Leviathan has a point this time. Maybe Leviathan is helping
the poor people to stay safe!

It
must have been easy for people in my Los Angeles neighborhood to
watch Head Start in the 1960s and say, Isn't that nice that they're
doing something good for the poor children? And here we are,
40 years later, with my being an anomaly because I keep my children
at home with me instead of having them diagnosed with some supposed
disability and sending them to a government preschool. Never fear
– through such programs as the sneaky camera project, Leviathan
is trying hard to condition my own children that cameras are there
for our protection. If you doubt me, go to your local intersection
with a camera that snaps your picture and license plate if you do
something it doesn't like.

There’s
no use in believing that Leviathan is the boogeyman or that its
biblical description is at all relevant to us today. Leviathan is
merely that nice police officer who's protecting you. And now it's
becoming the police officer's benevolent tool: the camera –
just watching. And patiently waiting.

Quotes
are from "LAPD to Train Cameras on High-Crime Area in Watts,"
Los Angeles Times. Friday, September 23, 2005.

September
26, 2005

Tricia
Shore [send her mail]
is the Comic Mom.

We
were in line in the late August heat to go to a two-year-old's birthday
party. I'll give this to the land of the mouse: Even when it's crowded,
they're great about getting people to the warrantless baggage search
quickly. And they are nice as they look inside your bags.

I
don't know why we moms so quickly and easily acquiesce to this search.
Disney has every right to do it, of course. Disney is a private
company and the land is private property, whatever that means these
days. We ticketholders have every right to refuse. But I've yet
to see someone turn and walk away from a Disneyland search. Perhaps
it's because we have one or two or three children to keep us distracted.
Or maybe it's because most SoCal moms have to submit to much more
humiliation when we visit our children's grandparents: No one was
actually born and raised in Los Angeles. We all have to herd our
children through metal detectors, taking off shoes and folding strollers
and taking off baby slings, all to show that, pregnant or nursing, we
are not terrorists but merely moms trying to get some children to
Grandpa's house.

Our
family had, in fact, just returned from my mother-in-law's
funeral. She had died unexpectedly and my husband, trying to coordinate
flights for us all, had gotten himself a one-way ticket to Miami.
Of course, having his mother die earlier that day and trying to
rush to help and comfort his father branded him as more likely to
be a terrorist. The loving father of my children was taken aside,
wanded, and asked to do some strange thing with the top of his pants.
Nice treatment, really, for a bereaved son.

The
rest of us got off more lightly; we went a couple of days later
and had a round-trip ticket, branding us only slightly guilty. Still,
we worried. When you're in the "social security" line,
as my four-year-old calls it, with a four-year-old who likes to
be funny, his two younger brothers, a tired mom who is a stand-up
comic, and a sign that says "No Jokes," well, let's just
say that we feel lucky when we're not singled out to be groped by
a wand or by a stranger's hand. A mom alone with three children
under five feels fortunate when she is able to go to the gate
unscathed in the same strange way that we treat those piddly plane
pretzels we receive after boarding as if they were a small slice
of filet mignon. The land of the mouse seems benign and peaceful
in comparison, even with its employees' search, for whatever.

Having
traveled back across the country the day before the birthday party,
I was grateful for the quick search into my belongings, for
the ability to remain fully shod. I unzipped my purse and hoped
the guy peering into it wouldn't think it was too messy.  My
purse must have passed muster because then he asked me to unzip
my diaper bag; he hardly peeked inside. And it was all over: We
were approved to spend money at Disneyland!  What would have
happened if I'd said no? No one with three impatient children wants
to find out. We are easy targets indeed.

A
curious note though — the "cast member," as the mouse
kingdom euphemistically calls its employees, seemed satisfied when
he saw a diaper at the top of my diaper bag, not digging more deeply.
While I am grateful for the half-trust of his cursory search, part
of me wonders if he thought I would make a dumb terrorist, one who
would not think to place any destructive device under a diaper.
Did he think I wasn't smart enough to place a diaper over
whatever contraband he was looking for?

And
what was it he was looking for anyway? I've gone to Legoland, a
couple of hours south of Anaheim, and am treated as though I am
not at all a criminal. No one snoops through anything at Legoland
and I’ve yet to hear of one terrorist act there.

If
I want to search the pocketbook of everyone who comes into my private
home, I certainly can, but how many friends would I have then? 
And would I want to be a friend to someone who searched my bag before
I entered his or her home?

We
Americans are a trustworthy bunch, though. If Disneyland's doing
it, it must be for our own good. Besides, we've got so much other
stuff to think about. It was easy to let myself go through the cursory
glance into my belongings. What's a little freedom traded for a
birthday party? Besides, we were so tired after lugging everyone
to the tram, off the tram, to the baggage check line, and then through
the actual entry gate, that we had no time to think about Disney's
motives after our arrival. Like a Beta-Minus from Brave New World,
we assumed it was for our own good and found it easier to acquiesce
than to question or refuse or turn around. After all, we had a Buzz
Lightyear ride to catch.

After
the parade was over that evening and I had desperately searched
for our car, having completely forgotten which Disney character
level I parked on, I drove home with three sleeping children in
the backseat. It's times like these, when the cell phone is off,
that give a suburban mom time to ponder such things as constitutional
rights and freedom.

And
ponder I did, as I thought about the ease with which I had acquiesced
to the opening of my purse and diaper bag. What if I hadn't allowed
the unzipping? Would we have been denied entry to the land
of the mouse? Would any mom risk driving children to Anaheim and
having her children not go to Disneyland?

It
can't be too terribly different for the New York subway commuters,
many of whom seem more than happy to be unzipped, groped, or otherwise
searched, all at the mayor's whim. They're in a hurry; they have
to go to work; they have to go home. Sure, you can say no, but why
would you — especially when doing so might mess up your evening?
And I couldn't help but think that maybe, just maybe, when my children
watch their mom unzipping her purse for a stranger for some vague
reason that is unknown to my children and to me, that my children
become desensitized to the whole search thing. 

I
also remembered what another cast member had said during my
unzipping; I heard her tell another potential royal subject that
the area past the royal checkpoint is called the "safe zone."
Those are her exact Orwellian words. If we sacrifice willingly a
bit of freedom, then we gain safety. And a birthday party. Perhaps
that's the lesson of the Brave New America, the post-9/11 society
in which we live. We said it was okay to sacrifice freedom when
our elected congressmen approved the Patriot Act. And then again,
we said for them to take away a few more freedoms when they renewed
the Patriot Act, right after the London bombings. After all, we
gain safety, right?

In
our new search-filled country, the "unreasonable searches and
seizures" that our Constitution says we are "secure"
against, seem much more reasonable. Indeed, we all become so desensitized
to the search process itself that we willingly acquiesce, whether
the search is constitutional or not. We have nothing to hide, after
all, so why not allow that warrantless policeman, or social worker,
or whatever, into our home? After all, a search is merely a prelude
to the Happiest Place on Earth!

September
19, 2005

Tricia
Shore [send her mail]
is the Comic Mom.