Annie Lussenburg writes: A lot of parenting is about common sense. Deep down as parents, we realize that if a child gets showered with gifts, they become unappreciative. If they receive things because they stamp their feet and scream, that behavior will continue because it has been rewarded.

In the last few decades however, common sense seems to be on the decline and its commonality is certainly fading. Let me give you an example. When I was growing up, my parents would have a birthday party for me with perhaps five or six friends at maximum. There would be sandwiches, cake, balloons and a big back yard in which to play. There might be a treasure hunt or a simple game if my mother was feeling energetic. For the large part though, I was instructed to entertain my friends on my own, hardly an onerous task. The end result was an enjoyable afternoon and a few small gifts for me to play with, once everyone else had gone home.

Fast forward a few decades and you see something very different. The birthday party has been organized by an outside company bought in to make the birthday wishes of the ‘Fairy Queen,’ a reality. The house is decorated in an inspired fairyland design and the mothers arrive at the house with their very own princess darlings who clutch enormous presents. You watch the numbers, two, four, six and it just keeps going. “How many are coming?” you ask mom innocently. “The whole class,” she answers, removing her fairy wings before deftly maneuvering a pile of brownies through the door. The party lasts for an insane three hours ofÖfun, punctuated by the occasional melt down amongst the clearly overwhelmed kids. At last the party goers waddle out the door, stuffed with cake and brownies and clutching a goody bag equal in value to the GDP of Montenegro. The fairy queen instead of extolling the party’s virtues, lies in a heap exhausted, ripping off her wings and yelling “How come I didn’t get the pirate party!”

If this sounds like something only those with big fat purses would think of doing for a child’s birthday, I would urge you to think again. In my experience as a parent educator, this scenario or ones like it are played out all over North America on a daily basis. It’s not that people don’t know good sense, it’s that they can’t seem to put it in to practice.

It’s an abundance of energy that makes possible the kinds of excess that many parents practice with their children. It is also energy that elevates and continuously upgrades our expectations, which then in turn become the new societal norm. Our common sense tells us these expectations as to what is normal, have little basis in reality and in many ways are harmful to our children. So why then do parents that know all the reasons that they shouldn’t do something, do it anyway? Whatever force it is that encourages moms and dad to throw away the parental rulebook must be effective indeed and the only way that rulebook can be ignored, is if a definitive effort has been made to render it obsolete. (07/30/08)
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James Howard Kunstler writes: Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don’t mean that we are a better people than any other society — these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts — but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle “time out” from a frantic era of hypertrophic growth, compared to the storm we’re sailing into now.

We were fortunate to inhabit a New World filled with productive land, lots of minerals, and plenty of coal, oil, and gas; and the land itself was insulated physically from the great theaters of 20th century conflict, though we fought in wars “over there.” That experience itself, especially our victory over manifest evil in the Second World War, left us with a dangerous mentality of triumphal exceptionalism. Even now, we think we are immune to the epochal hazards of history. The notion that nothing really bad can happen to us is reflected in the blind cluelessness of our current news media and their simple failure to report what is now happening.

I drove up along an obscure stretch of the upper Hudson river on Sunday, starting in the old factory town of Cohoes, north of Albany, where the Mohawk River runs into the Hudson. There is a powerful waterfall there, and along the high bank the massive old red-brick Harmony Mill still stands with its Victorian towers and mansard roofs, like a vision from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Behind them are streets of red-brick, three-story worker row-housing from the same period. Today they are inhabited by a different kind of poor people, not necessarily working, and probably suffering from a sheer lack of structure in their lives as well as plain poverty of means. These are people who probably don’t follow the Bloomberg financial bulletins, and their experience of a cratering economy may only be the rising cost of cigarettes and beer. … (07/30/08)
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