Regardless of Whether That's a Gun In Your Pocket or You're Happy to See Me...Is the Safety On?

In 2009 I wrote a piece about kids, guns, and sex education.  No, really.  Given that the political season is heating up (for better or worse), I thought I'd repost it here.  It is edited from the original.

I have learned many things from Sir Francis Bacon. Okay, I have learned ONE thing from Sir Francis Bacon: his quote, "Knowledge is power." And this quote was never better embodied than on one of my all-time fave TV shows: MacGyver.

The show, while kitschy now, was wonderfully original when it debuted in 1985, and it became such a part of our pop culture fabric, we pulled a Google before Google even existed and verbified the proper noun. "The home improvement store was closed, so I had to MacGyver the heater until morning."

Oh sure, I doubt I'll ever have a practical need to know that a chocolate bar can stop an acid leak, or that cactus juice can power a transistor radio, or that the mullet seemed like such a good idea at the time. (NOTE: For those you still rockin' the mullet, know that when you sleep, the business in the front points and laughs at the party in the back.) No, what MacGyver gave me, more than clever household chemistry lessons or an appreciation for Swiss Army knives, was not just the notion that knowledge is power, but, at a higher level, that smarter is better.

When you think about it, it's a lesson that is subtly taught to us throughout our lives. Smarter kids go to better schools. Smarter candidates get better jobs. Smarter workers earn better pay. Smarter athletes play better games. Smarter game show contestants win better prizes. Smarter writers get better...well, better alcohol, I suppose.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, by the way, MacGyver was about an adventurer (of sorts) who found himself in tough situations and used intellect, not violence, to save the day. But while the title character was staunchly opposed to the use of guns, surely even Mac would agree...yes, I can call him Mac...that smarter gun owners make better gun owners. This is another lesson that should be taught to our children, and not so subtly.

In fact, the National Rifle Association agrees. At their website, the NRA has a page that offers an overview of their printed literature, entitled "Parents' Guide to Gun Safety." The page highlights numerous areas of gun safety for parents and children, but the line that really popped when I read the material was the following:

"Talking openly and honestly about gun safety with your child is usually more effective than just ordering him or her to 'Stay out of the gun closet,' and leaving it at that. Such statements may just stimulate a child's natural curiosity to investigate further."

Hmmm.

May I rewrite that?

"Talking openly and honestly with your child about safe sex is usually more effective than just ordering him or her to 'not have sex,' and leaving it at that. Such statements may just stimulate a child's natural curiosity to investigate further."

I find it troubling that any portion of our society would send its children into the world with guns and hormones, and provide a safety manual for the former but issue only a "Don't do it!" edict for the latter. What people fail to realize is how similar guns and sex are, all double entendres, puns, and innuendos aside.

Both carry great responsibility, both can come with dire consequences if handled recklessly, and both can bring much enjoyment. They even serve basic functional purposes - guns are used to hunt for food and sex is used to procreate. So why is it that people don't educate both issues with the same thoroughness? Better yet, why don't they even take similar stands on both issues? (Can you imagine the uproar if there was a campaign pushing to teach children to ignore gun safety and simply avoid guns completely?)

But it isn't just guns vs. sex. It's cars vs. sex, because we send our kids to Driver's Ed class instead of telling them not to drive. It's sports vs. sex, because we equip our kids with helmets and pads instead of telling them not to play. It's technology vs. sex, because we teach our kids about faux Nigerian princes instead of telling them not to surf the Internet.

And what's most puzzling about these and other aspects of life is that we teach all of this preventive posturing to protect our kids from things we can ultimately physically separate them from. In a worst-case scenario, we can lock up the guns, we can take the keys, we can trash the cleats, and we can block the Internet. But the one thing we can't take away from our kids are their bodies. Why would anyone not want to teach their children about protecting the one thing that is inseparable from them, the one thing that will be with them forever?

Smarter is better. Parents need to make their kids better by making them smarter...before the kids do something stupid.

Out With the New, In With the Old (Redux)

July, 2011


Recently, on Twitter (@ScribeHard), I've taken some unexpected cruises down Memory Lane (even though my mental GPS has told me to do otherwise).  These trips got me thinking about a piece I wrote in 2010 (under a different handle), and I thought I'd share it here.  It's unedited, and although it references the "new" year of 2010, I think its message is timeless, and while I might have been unsuccessful with the proposed resolution, I hope to attempt it again it immediately, mid-year be damned.  I hope you like it.  Thanks for stopping by.




Oh, the horror that is the New Year's resolution.

You know it. You make it. You love it.

Well, you love it for, what? A month, tops? Then you hate it. I've been right there with you. But with the winding-down of 2009 - a year I was ready to put behind me for reasons I have ... and have not ... shared here - I felt the urge to make 2010 different.

As I spent the last week of the year enjoying family, friends, and food (including the glory known as Baby's Homemade Christmas Eve Pierogies ... yes, you should be jealous), I pondered my goals for 2010. They seemed trivial (read more), comical (drink less), typical (lose weight), or impossible (be less judgmental of those whose spelling success lives or dies not on genuine spelling acumen, but on the absence of squiggly red lines). These resolutions, while perfectly functional, were duds. I wanted a resolution that MEANT something. I wanted to work towards a goal that, at the end of 2010, I could look back upon and feel a great sense of accomplishment about. I wanted the Cadillac of resolutions.

Well, that smooth-riding luxury sedan of an idea didn't pull into my consciousness and toss its keys to my mental valet until only a few hundred ticks before midnight on New Year's Eve.

To ring in the new year without risking our lives on Amateur Night Highway, Baby and I had decided to whip up a batch of cocktails and partake in Turner Classic Movies' Thin Man movie marathon - an airing of all six William Powell/Myrna Loy screwball-mysteries, in order, uncut and uninterrupted, all night long. Of course, by "all night long," we meant that the TV would be on all night long; we predicted tipsy slumber would carry us away sometime during the third film.

As an aside, I love the Thin Man films. I've seen them all countless times, I've quoted them in social situations, and I own (or have owned) copies of them in various forms, including LaserDisc. (For those of you unfamiliar with the LaserDisc, it was the "cutting-edge" format available between the VHS and DVD periods; imagine a DVD the size of a record album. For those of you unfamiliar with record albums, isn't it a school night for you?)

So there we were, Baby and me, with only a few minutes to go before the big midnight toast. As I had done in so many other must-see situations, I wielded my remote control like a Jedi using lessons learned from Obi-Wan TiVobi. Somewhere in the 58th minute of the 11th hour of the 365th day, I paused the Thin Man movie and switched tuners to catch Father Time (Dick Clark) and Baby New Year (Ryan Seacrest) ring in 2010. And it was at that moment of ultimate convergence - old year and new year, old host and new host, old movies and new technology - that it hit me: life has gotten easier, but in the process, life has lost its simplicity.

It's right about now when you might think that I will turn treacly and begin to yearn for the pleasures of my youth, all the while condemning the ills of technology. I won't, because today's technology enables me to revisit the pleasures of my youth, and for that, I love the technology.

Thanks to DVDs and downloads, and e-places like Amazon and Netflix, I can watch almost any movie at almost any time. And if I'm feeling frugal, or if a certain film is out of print, I can program my TiVo to record it on TCM and use my DVD burner to capture it forever.

As another aside, I love TiVo. I also love Turner Classic Movies. Oh, and I simply adore I-Tunes, because I-Tunes lets me spend $.99 on a song today that I spent $8.00 for in 1986 because I had to buy the whole cassette to get the one song I really wanted.

Yes, technology has made it possible for us to have whatever we want whenever we want it, all with little effort. And therein lies the core of my 2010 resolution. My lament about life's ease versus life's simplicity is about how our ability to have many of the things we want - often literally with the touch of a button - has dulled not those things, but the simple joy those things used to bring.

I don't love the Thin Man movies just because of the movies themselves; I love them because I remember stumbling across them on the Million Dollar Movie at two in the morning when I was a kid. That was special. So was finding obscure Italian horror films on the Saturday afternoon Creature Double Feature on a local UHF channel. (For those of you unfamiliar with UHF, Google it.) Now? That joy of discovery is gone. Why? Because I can just ... go get the movies whenever I want them.

So, too, is gone the joy of anticipation. If you were a kid at Christmas in the '70s and '80s, the broadcast schedule for the old Rankin/Bass productions of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Year Without a Santa Claus, and others like them, was burned on your brain, and if you missed an airing because you forgot or because your parents took you clothes shopping that night or because you were grounded, well, see ya next year, kid. Now? My daughters watch them on DVD, and they like them well enough, but there's no sparkle there, because watching them is not about being parked in front of a TV at 8:00 on a Thursday night in December; watching them is about pulling the discs off the shelf in the middle of June if they want to.

Also missing is the joy of hope. That kind of joy used to come with opening pack after pack of baseball cards - stale gum and all - hoping to get that Richie Hebner card to complete your Phillies team, or even going to a hobby shop to flip through countless binders to look for that one last card you needed to complete the whole set. Now? Just go to a website and have it shipped. Even I-Tunes sucks the joy out of hunting through bins of records or tapes or CDs in an effort to find that ONE tune that was the choice cut from the soundtrack of your youth.

And what about the joy of sharing that used to come when your sister visited you to look at photographs from that crazy party you both went to a few weeks prior? Sure, now you can look at pictures on Facebook as soon as the party is over, but it's hard to reminisce about an event that is only hours old, and it's not as much fun to point and laugh at a screen alone, and in ten years you won't visit your attic and happen across a shoebox full of Facebook and think back to the good old days.

My 2010 resolution is not about unplugging the internet, or hooking up the rabbit-ears (again, if you have to ask ...), or canceling the I-Tunes account. My resolution is about shifting the balance between Simple Joy and Get It Now. It's about doing a little more digging through the bins and a little less clicking of the mouse. It's about sometimes checking the television schedule instead of sometimes checking the shipping schedule. It's about risking the unknown instead of guaranteeing delivery. It's about sharing memories, not sharing URLs.

My 2010 resolution is about making sure that the things in my life are IN demand, not ON demand.