Aim High (no pun intended)

"Let's make it a little bit harder for our kids to get gunned down."  

~Barack Obama

We have a president who wants to "make it a little bit harder" for mass murderers to gun down children. Remind me, again, why I did not vote for such Ivy-League, Constitutional-law-professor, highest-IQ-of-any- president-ever, Nobel-prize-winning genius.

Someday, children in schools will read in textbooks that George Washington was our first president; Abraham Lincoln led our nation through a horrific civil war and brought freedom to slaves; John F. Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"; Ronald Reagan returned economic prosperity after years of decline and restored the world's respect for America; and Barack Obama made it a little bit harder for a crazed murderer to walk into their building and gun them down.

So if President Obama's goal is to make it a little bit harder for murderers to gun down school children, does that mean that instead of killing twenty children and six adults, the next gunman might only be able to kill fifteen children and four adults--because it's a little bit harder? Maybe we should make gunmen wear blindfolds to make it even more challenging yet. Tie one hand behind their backs too? Make them spin in a circle for thirty seconds before they start shooting? Yes, yes, indeed, let's make it a little bit harder for our kids to get gunned down. That's a worthy goal. That's what hope and change looks like.

And if anyone out there is wondering, yes, this is sarcasm.

Drugs for Being Human

As both a former teacher and mom of boy(s), I have often feared that we are drugging our boys for the illness of being . . . boys. Rather than shaping our schools to meet boys' needs, we shape the boys with chemicals to make them  meet the school's needs. I often wonder what we'll be learning about those medicated boys' health conditions twenty or thirty years from now when they are raising boys of their own. Chemicals have consequences.

As one who has grieved deeply the loss of a young sister and a young husband, I have also known those who think the answer to grief is a pill. And you can take pills, and I have, but the person you grieve remains dead. There is no pill for that.

In a recent conversation among the three of us who live together in this house that sprang from an observation that those who have become known as hoarders are mentally ill, we observed the absurdity that seemingly everything has become a mental illness, and if everyone who ever does anything from stupid to  seriously damaging is only mentally ill, then he or she isn't responsible. He or she should just take a pill.

This editorial in the New York Times speaks eloquently of the illness of being human.