“But your task is not to teach the child how to be a child—the child already knows how to be a child. You are not teaching your children to be children. You are teaching your children to grow into adults.”
The Challenge of Unethical Vaccines
Introduction: There are two basic discussions that swirl around the question of vaccination. One has to do with vaccines generally, and when it comes to this question I confess that I am not ...
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The Counterculture Has No Bouncers
“While countercultural rebellion probably attracts no more kooks than any other movement, it is peculiarly ill equipped to deal with them once they arrive.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 137
The Real Lesson
“Imagine a basic showdown scenario: suppose a toddler is standing at the coffee table right across from you and repeatedly wants to mess with the vase. Suppose further that the toddler has just gotten mobile and you have not childproofed the house yet, and they keep wanting to touch the vase. Too often, parents think that the lesson is entitled ‘How not to mess with vases,’ when the actual lesson is called “How not to get exasperated with other people.’
Learning Art Appreciation
As That Would Be Bad
“Extreme sports are just sports for people who don’t want to be mistaken for jocks”
Nation of Rebels, p. 132
Manners That Matter
“The child has bad manners, sure enough, and his father told him not to have those bad manners. But why does he have bad manners at the table? Because his father does. Snapping at your children at the dinner table is much worse than playing with your potatoes with a knife.”
How Our Markets Are Full of What No One Can See
“Ever since the 1960s, hip has been the nature tongue of advertising, ‘antiestablishment’ the vocabulary by which we are taught to cast off our old possessions and buy whatever they have decided to offer this year. And over the years the rebel has naturally become the central image of this culture of consumption, symbolizing endless directionless change, and eternal restlessness with ‘the establishment’—or, more correctly, with the stuff ‘the establishment’ convinced him to buy last year”
Nation of Rebels, p. 130
Honest Imitation and the Other Kind
“When we try to preserve our originality by being as unique and cool as possible, what is actually going on is that we are copying other people with sidelong glances and we are unable to admit to ourselves that that is what we are doing”
The Slaves of Jonathan Edwards, Part 2
Introduction: For those late to the party, I wrote last week (9/18/19) about the slaves of Jonathan Edwards. This excited comment, and so I followed it up with a piece on white supremacy (9/23/19). ...
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