Month: April 2014

Yesterday here we got into a sort of discussion about what is owed children – specifically, what is owed the children of people who have them solely to extort a living from the well meaning and caring in society (or those who wish to be thought so.)

One of the first forms of assistance any human society gave or tried to give was for “widows and orphans.” As far back as it’s mentioned (in the Bible as a form of charity, for instance) there really wasn’t anything widows could do to support themselves and children. (Sometimes they could support themselves, barely. But throw in children and they were up a creek.) The differential of manual/brute force work that males and females in our species are capable of – and the fact that most of the work at the time was physically demanded left the woman with children with a lot of unpalatable options, the most palatable of which might have been “find a protector.”

So charity to widows and orphans was exhorted and, as soon as it could be done, something was done by “widows and orphans” – even by kings and queens and feudal lords, at least ones that tried to appear benevolent.

I’m not disputing – no one is – that looking after helpless children is a function society should fulfill. I am disputing how we do it, but that’s a topic for another day. It seems to me that was with a lot of otherwise useful institutions, writers and filmmakers concentrating on the worst examples of the kind (and not always with the aim to bring about social reform. Sometimes simply with the aim to build on those who critiqued these institutions and found fame through it) orphanages and madhouses have been willfully destroyed without anything better replacing them. (And before you say that orphanages were uniformly bad – I’m sure a lot of them WERE. BUT all of them? I don’t know anyone raised in an orphanage, but my mom did. Yes, he had some issues, including a feeling of belonging to no one. More than children raised in a merry go round of foster homes, though? Do tell.)

Part of the problem with where we are is that we have to trust adults who MANIFESTLY aren’t able to look after themselves or be responsible about their own lives, to be responsible with the money we give for assistance to the children in their care.

The flaws of this are illustrated every time those who are receiving assistance for their children show us pitiful pictures of ill-dressed, ill-fed children. I know that there is a faction that denies that parents receiving assistance for their children blow the food money on non-nutritious and often non-edible things, or things that in no way benefit the children. I know the same faction is fond of saying every time we see a case of a kid raised on assistance, that what we need is to give them more money. I remember a lively discussion in a forum, where someone said they watched a mother pay with an assistance card for an order consisting of a massive cake, balloons and soda. The tenor of the answers was “well, poor children need birthday parties too. Why shouldn’t they have nice things.”

Of course no one is saying they shouldn’t have nice things, but I sometimes wonder if the “more assistance needed” flavor of do gooders who tend to be comfortable upper middle class have ANY idea how those of us just a little below them fare and how we look after our kids through the tight times.

All of us have known tight times, in my generation. ALL OF US. Particularly those of us who are middle class by dint of a technical job. We came of age in the eighties when temporary jobs were all most of us could get, and we’ve navigated through jobs that very often unexpectedly disappear and – 2001-03 – sometimes stay disappeared for months or forever in some regions. I have friends who haven’t worked for more than six months at a time since the tech bust. We’ve learned to cope. Most of us continue to live middle class lives, in the sort of houses you’d expect, but… but we cope.

What I mean is that whether our children got to “have nice things or not” in the abstract, in the practical, we made compromises. A “birthday party” around here is often a trip to the zoo. (Yes, still. We like animals.) If we’re doing well financially, it might be an overnight trip to Denver and include museums, but that’s because the kids are older. If we’re not doing well, there might not even be a trip to the zoo. As with many other things, it becomes “mom cooks a nice meal and we have some friends over.”

My kids have had a bakery made cake, I think, four times in their entire life. (And only because there was this mom and pop bakery which was good and quite reasonable. Gone now.) The rest of the time they made do with my baking skills. (Those actually aren’t bad. My cake decorating skills however needed work, and I had to learn.) This is how I ended up making the multi-tier robot-cake for Marshall’s robotics group at their graduation.

And now you’re going to say that if the mothers of most kids on assistance were the kind who could/would put themselves out to make a cake/learn to bake/decorate they probably would have escaped assistance quickly, even if they’d fallen into it by sheer bad luck.

That is not necessarily true. As we’ve talked about before, the entire welfare bureaucracy seems to keep people there, once they fall in. This also I suspect leads even competent parents to the sort of state of despondent despair where they can’t make rational decisions.

But that is precisely the point. To render assistance to the children, we got through the parents. And if the parents weren’t broken to begin with, the system breaks them.

Part of the problem is that none of us on the – ah – side of liberty is particularly sanguine about terminating parents’ rights. Given how, say, the IRS is used we can easily see kids being taken from parents for having the wrong opinions/teaching children to pray in a way that’s considered bad/someone else wants the kids.

Mind you, the state already capriciously removes children from homes because they think the parent looked at them crosseyed while at the same time ignoring life-threatening abuses from much worse people. Sometimes it seems to be designed solely to make it as bad as possible.

No, I don’t have a solution. As with mental health and involuntary commitment, the closest I can come to a solution is “make these things happen on as micro a scale as you can; make the decisions in the smallest community possible.” Will there still be injustices? Well, of course there will. There have been for centuries. Besides, any human institution malfunctions and has injustices and horrors, even the best ones. BUT we might avoid the sort of “error by default” that we see in children services these days.

Take mental health, because I have an example. When I was little, the village decided to commit a young man, a local farm hand for hire. He was built on a massive scale, and a nice, quiet man. He did the work of ten men and lived with his widowed mother.

Then one day something happened. He would yell and moan at night. And during the day, he would run through the village street, stark naked, claiming that “This isn’t ours.” I.e. he was absolutely convinced that his body, from the neck down, wasn’t his.

The village elders (well, informal, you know. The grocer, two of the largest farmers, the pharmacist, that kind of people) got together and decided to commit him. You see, his mother couldn’t stop him doing this (she came up to his chest, barely) and it took several men to restrain him. He was running around naked and heedless of (rare but unpredictable) traffic.

So they got him in one of his good times, and took him by taxi (none of these men owned a car) to the mental hospital where they swore he posed a risk to himself and others. He was committed and I heard recently he died in the hospital (of old age. By “Young” man I suspect my elders meant late thirties.)

Imagine my distress when I found out years later, while doing research, that his symptoms were not of mental illness, but of a stroke.

Was it an injustice? Well, yes. BUT the men were doing the best they could with the knowledge then available. They really couldn’t wait for future knowledge of the human body to be granted them, so they could deal with the poor man’s problem adequately. (I don’t even know if we can “Fix” the issue now. It would involve brain surgery I suspect, and I don’t know how sophisticated we are on that micro a scale.)

What they did was by no means perfect, but it relieved his widowed mother of the necessity to try to wrestle with a man three times her weight. It relieved the village men from having to down tools and leave work in a rush to go restrain him in the middle of the day. It stopped village kids from being exposed to a naked adult male but, more importantly, it stopped them from being trampled. (No, seriously, imagine a man who is more than 300 lbs running, uncontrolled, in a panic. It wasn’t pretty.)

Local solutions aren’t perfect, but they at least will try to achieve concrete goals. (“We need to stop him endangering self and others.”) And they’re usually reluctantly done when they involve drastic measures. No one wants undue harshness brought to bear on them by their neighbors and communities remember how you decided for others.

Yes, this might be impossible in our fragmented, mobile communities. BUT having the decision made by faceless bureaucrats who cannot and do not know how it affects the local community isn’t an improvement. In the situation above, I can well imagine today’s institutions ordering us to let him keep doing what he was doing, or to appoint two slight females at full time pay to help his mother or something equally ridiculous.

Which is what we’re stuck with for assistance to children.

This is made worse the farther way/more different culture the children are. There is this photo essay going around Facebook about “Children in their bedrooms” but, as people who link invariably tell us, “this is about so much more.”

Well, it opens with a photo of an Arab kid from the West bank. Knowing the culture that gave us the term Paliwood for the staged photos of “Israeli atrocities” I immediately felt skeptical at the picture of the kid posed in what appears to be a chicken coup, with a lamb on his shoulders, in typical iconographic fashion.

It soon became obvious that was, in fact, going to be the theme of the essay. Oh, there were a few red herrings thrown in: a child in China, with a massive poster of Mao over his bed. A sofa outdoors in what looked like one of Rio’s Favelas… and such. But then we returned to the theme of the West bank with the photo of an Israeli child (and look, I often see photos of children from Israel – long story – and I’m going to tell you they had to search hard and long not just to find a massively fat one, but one who had a sullen, unpleasant expression with it) in a perfectly decorated bedroom. (He’s not really a child, either. While the other children in the “photo essay” run about six, he’s about 14. Because that will elicit less sympathy.)

At this point, I closed the “photo essay.” I have no clue what all those well intentioned people think the “so much more” this essay says is, but I’m going to tell you what it really says: it says that countries that have issues also have issues caring for their children. No matter how much money you pour into them, none of them will go to the children. It will go instead to pay for rockets with which to attack their neighbors; for “presidential palaces” to impress the fools or, in the case of China, for massive, impressive empty buildings which no one can even live in or to finance US debt – and I leave to you to figure out which use is worse.

Oh, I know what the point of the photos was supposed to be. It was to point out that children were in want and need, while others weren’t. But what THAT is supposed to do, unless it’s assumed that economics is a finite pie and that to give to a child is to take from the other, I don’t know. And no one really believes that. No, not even our ever so bleeding heart liberals. If they did, they’d take the money they use taking their kids on trips abroad and buying them designer outfits, and give it to needy children.

Instead, they look at these photos and feel guilty (because they have the economic sense of my cat, and I might be overestimating) and then want the government to “do something” – which on the international level is even more stupid and dangerous than on the national level.

Those photos were designed to elicit the “make this go away so I don’t have to feel bad” reaction.

And they are designed, planned, and paid for by the governments that won’t look after their children and by their enablers abroad, which are the equivalent of those irresponsible and abusive welfare parents, but armed with rockets which they buy with their international aid WIC cards..

I don’t remember who said that there could be peace in the Middle East when Palestinians loved their children more than they hated Jews, but they were right.

There can also be less suffering to children in Brazil and China when people with power to allocate money think that providing meals, education and care for desperately poor children is more important than another big, showy building.

Dictators and irresponsible poseurs use children to get what they want out of idiots.

That applies on both the national and the international scale.

The only thing we can do is not be idiots.

Looking after children and providing for children is perhaps the deepest instinctive drive of individuals and societies.  But sometimes obeying it will only make things worse.

As with the problem of abusive parents I have no solution.

All I can say is that giving money to dictators who hide behind women and children always ends with more dead and abused women and children.

Be aware of how you’re being manipulated and refuse to do anything — from material aid to echoing a facebook photo essay — just to “make the bad feelings go away.”

Sometimes a photo essay is the electronic version of hostages chained to military installations and bomb depots, so that every military strike can be called a war crime.

 

So, on the way to this pinnacle of understanding and wisdom (ah!) on which I stand, poised at the turn of the half century, I’ve made a few mistakes. They started – probably, or at least, it’s as far back as I can remember – with letting the neighbor kid play with my expensive doll while I went indoor to get something or other. When I came back, she’d broken the doll and taken off.

I think I was three. If I knew then what I know now…

Since then there has been a long accumulation of errors. Had there been none of that, I’d be as wealthy as Bill Gates. Okay, maybe not, but good enough for my simple purposes.

Let me see, only the more clear, obvious errors, just as relates to my career: I spent three years learning to write and submitting short stories, because I thought I should do it to become a published writer; I never attempted to get to the Baen Bar before I sold to Baen. (And I should have, but I was afraid of online forums.) I spent years first writing things that there was no market for, then trying to write to the market. I believed what they told me when they said there was no market for the type of science fiction I wanted to write. More stuff? Four agents. Enough said.

I’m not going to detail them, but rest assured there were the same sort of errors in the realm of investment, choosing where to live, choosing where to shop and what to buy (particularly cars – though this one is doing pretty well and, knock on wood, will continue to do so, because it’s 17 years old and we do not have the money to replace it.) Improvements done to houses we then had to sell so we could move. Buying this house. Not that there is anything wrong with this house – now. After we fixed everything – but you know we’ve known for 12 years that it wasn’t right for us. Okay, 11 years. After one year, it became clear that we were moving furniture around ever six months because the house did not fit the way we live. But we didn’t want to move again, and I’d become so busy that we didn’t have the time to unpack boxes, much less to move… which has led to us living for 11 years in a place that just didn’t fit… Never mind, we’re doing something about it.

But what I mean is that we’ve made mistakes. All of us who are adults have. Not some of us. All of us. We’ve dropped the ball, been duped, got fooled by a clever con artist, had a bizarre concatenation of circumstances clean us out of savings (what is investing the company whose CEO then died on 9/11?) but more importantly all of us have done things that can only be explained by a sudden and total death of the brain. Usually temporary, but you know what I mean as well as I do. This is how I came to go driving without my glasses one morning, which given my level of astigmatism resulted in my neatly bisecting the car with a telephone pole.

And sometimes you do stupid things – the most appalling mistakes as any sane person would consider them – and they turn out all right, by a miracle. You turn a blind corner without looking. You run across the street, and it’s only when you hear the car behind you that you realize you were fortunate. You jump, land on your feet, and then realize the jump was much higher than you thought, and you could have hurt yourself badly. You buy bum stock and it turns out to make a recover. You buy an old piece of furniture, and, when you strip the 15 layers of paint (two metallic) you realize you’re in possession of a colonial-era bookcase. … you marry in haste and are very lucky that not only don’t you have to repent at leisure, but that you found the one you were meant to be with.

But those things, the good and the bad, adults take with a shrug. It happens. Oh, I’m not saying that, like the rest of you, I haven’t wasted a whole day – or two – in heartburnings. Usually of the kind of “What on Earth made me do that?” and “How could I be so incredibly stupid?”

That I know at least none of my mistakes have cost someone his/her life, yet. Though a couple of the near misses could have. Like the time Dan and I handed the baby off to each other, late at night in front of the house, and the other didn’t have the hold, as it were, and… let’s say I grabbed the kid by his ankle, stopping his head a cartoonish half inch from the sidewalk. (No, he didn’t wake. #2 son takes after me, and I once slept through an earthquake that sent the entire village to the middle of the street. And me too, in my brother’s arms. I woke up, eventually, out on the street, because I was cold. Go figure.)

I imagine that’s the hardest of all. I’ve made mistakes that resulted in the irretrievable breaking of a cherished possession and I imagine the process is the same, writ smaller. You sit there and replay what you did. If you’d just moved your hand a little faster. If—

But here’s the thing: adults, normal, well-adjusted adults, or as well adjusted as most adults are, get over it. I don’t know if you’d get over causing someone’s death, but anything short of that, right? You get over it. You shrug it off, with greater or lesser difficulty. You pick yourself up. You dust yourself off. You remember people who were more broke than you are now at greater ages than yours and who ended up millionaires. You sigh and call yourself five kinds of dumb ass and you vow not to make THAT mistake again, at the very least.

Because you are human, in the world of humans, and because none of you are perfect and because even brilliant people (I live with three of them. TRUST me) make dumb mistakes, you know that stupid stuff that shouldn’t happen will in fact happen, and the best you can do is learn to recover and roll with the punches. No one has it perfect, and to demand perfection would be stupid.

It gets harder to recover as you get older. And it might be impossible to fully recover if your health fails.

BUT we try. We move on. We say “okay, that was spectacularly stupid, but—“

I know, at this point you’re all wondering why I’m saying this stuff. It’s obvious, right?

Oh, sure. It’s obvious to us. We were raised on stories of people who failed and failed and failed, and finally succeeded. We were raised to pick ourselves up and move on.

But this is not true of a lot of people. More and more, even if people are raised this way, the popular culture brings home the idea that if you fail, or you’re discriminated again, or, G-d forbid, if something truly awful happens to you, this makes you a victim. And as a victim, you’re owed something “by society.” (Note that it’s never explained to these people that they too are part of society and therefore expected to make it up to everyone worse off than themselves in real or imaginary ways.)

Some of what you’re owed is being walked around on tenterhooks, even if your terrible injury is that you were once frightened by a spider, or failed to get the pony you really wanted for Christmas.

If it’s anything more serious, people should go out of their way to tell you how brave you are or to make good your financial losses, or make up for the fact that you slept around and got an std or an illegitimate child. And not only are you never supposed to blame yourself for anything, other people can’t point out to you that you made a mistake which led to this situation. That’s victim-blaming and slut-shaming and … who knows? What next thing won’t we be allowed to do? Stupid-shaming?

This both fosters the notion that mistakes are never, ever your fault – and therefore allows you to make them over and over again – and that somehow, if you made a mistake, you’re now sanctified by victimhood, so there’s no need to try again.

And thereby these people do end up victims. They’re victims of a failed culture.

We owe it to them – and to ourselves – to explain that victimhood isn’t sacred; that failing doesn’t make you special.

Failing and doing stupid things makes you human. Picking yourself up, learning from your mistakes and going on to try again and in different ways? That makes you special. A member of the rare fraternity of human beings who have achieved unapologetic adulthood.

 

I’ve been listening to Patricia Wentworth while I clean and twice in an audio book I’ve come across a character remembering her days of religious instruction, and a particular bit of instruction that I know I never got, and perhaps it was an Anglican thing, and an Anglican thing in the early twentieth century.

Apparently the beginning of the answer to “What is my duty to my neighbor” is to “To learn and labor truly to get my living.”

The idea – and the idea in the books that everyone had been taught this, that it was a fundamental, underlying, basic idea everyone that – that this was the duty of every human being TO THE OTHER HUMANS AROUND HIM/HER. “To learn and labor truly to get my living.”

Imagine that you thought that was your basic, underlying duty to humanity, and so did most people around you? Your religious duty. Something you did as you hoped for heaven?

The idea is almost mind-breaking in our current day, when people demonstrate because they can’t find a job despite their degrees in Women’s Studies or Puppetry. (Or at least can’t get a job that pays enough for them to live in the way they hope to become accustomed to.)

Because it is not the duty of society to provide you with a job in something you enjoy and find fun to learn/do. It is your duty to “learn and labor truly to earn your living.”

Another thing that wouldn’t happen would be politicos announcing that they just freed you from the tyranny of work, by either rendering your job very sincerely dead, or by making it possible for you to get all your ills taken care of. Because you’re not supposed to depend on other people unless you truly aren’t able to “learn and labor”.

No wonder people possessed of that idea built and extended a civilization that spawned the world and made daily life far more pleasant, healthier and longer for the average person.

One of the things in those books is that – though the class structure makes me insane – I’ve noticed that every good worker is considered important. So, if you have someone who is making up your fire, but they’re good at it, the girl (usually. Young) receives a sort of respect from those who hired her. She’s doing a good job, and so she is fulfilling what she’s supposed to do.

I think that’s part of what we lost when we lost the idea that learning/adapting/working is our duty. We lost the respect for our fellow men, no matter how menial their labor, who are doing it well enough to support themselves; well enough to remain employed. We lost the boundary between honest labor – and how many feel obliged to snicker at that? – and faking it. We’ve learned to respect people who do a shoddy job, but get to the top through tricks, seduction or misbehavior.

All because we lost the idea that it’s each person’s job to support himself – not society’s, not his friends’, not his parents, not his neighbor’s, but the individual’s himself.

Understand me. I’m not speaking out against charity. I’m not speaking out against giving someone a hand when they need it. And I’m certainly not speaking out against parents helping their children. One of the seeming motivations of being a parent is to try to make our children’s lives better than our own. (Not necessarily easier, but better.) We want them to be able to reach their dreams and get where they want to go.

But it is the children’s duty for each to learn and labor to get their own living. And it is our duty to be compassionate and look after those who can’t. We’ve come a long way since grandma in the ice floe. I’m not advocating going back there. The infirm and the old deserve our care just as we’d hope to get cared for in their situation. Trust me, I know (and if I didn’t I’d have learned it last year) that regardless of how much will power you have, there are physical and mental states in which you can’t perform even that which you’ve learned satisfactorily well enough to get your own living.

But the charity recipient should aim to return to making his own living as soon as possible. The idea of taking charity forever should rankle.

In the same way, if someone labors his entire life, doing very well at a humble job, never getting promoted or going anywhere in particular, but making enough to support himself, he’s performing his basic “duty to his neighbors.” But if he’s out there flipping houses with shoddy repairs, or making money in crooked deals, no matter how big, how important, how rich, he’s not worthy of our respect because he didn’t “labor truly.”

In that one precept is the cure for the lack of “meaning” in modern life. You don’t need to be striving for the pinnacle, and you don’t need to create anything astounding. The only thing you owe your “neighbors” is to do the best you can and not be a burden.

And in that precept is the cure for the illusions of our would-be aristos who think that to whom they were born, their contacts, the colleges they entered by virtue of influence and contacts, make them special. Since it’s less likely they’re learning and laboring TRULY, they’re worthy of less respect than those who attend humbler schools or work manual jobs but give it their all.

In this is the cure for the continuously extended hand and the whine of the would be artist. “I am making good art. People just don’t pay me.” Well, fine, then learn and labor to get your own living and do your art on the side. In this is the cure to the entire inversion where people expect society to provide for them, instead of trying to do their duty.

In this simple precept is pride and dignity. My grandmother used to talk about “the pride of honest work.” I think that’s what she meant. Once you get to night time, and you know you did the best you could, worked hard, and you got enough to keep you another day, you can sleep in peace.

You labored truly.

And you won’t be swayed by the siren call of those who tell you that someone else having more is somehow a crime against you; and you won’t even laugh – because it’s too weird for laughter – when a presidential spokesman says the loss of jobs due to an awful law will “free people to be poets.” I have nothing against poets. Poets who learn and labor and earn their own living can be admirable people. (Even if some are really bad poets.) But no one is entitled to be a poet, or an artist, or a cruise director, or a wedding planner, or for that matter a barista.

You need to earn your living – you need to do it, because otherwise you will be failing your duty to society – and it is on you to learn and labor to do it.

Now I know our job market has got twisted by all sorts of influences, and sometimes you can’t get a job at any price or in any way. If I stop making my living from writing, I’ll be up a creek as the last twenty years have nuked my resume. BUT if you find yourself in that situation, it is your duty to figure out a way to learn something that will allow you to at least try to support yourself. If nothing else, as Jerry Pournelle put it at the beginning of this mess, if you can’t find a job, and you can’t do anything else, make your surroundings really clean. It will give you a purpose, and who knows, maybe you’ll end up with something you can do.

Look – I’m not preaching. I’m the last person to. I’m talking to me as much as to the rest of you, because I’m prone to despondency and to seeing no way out of my predicament.

And sometimes there isn’t a solution. But if in our minds we think it is our duty to find a way; to keep trying to find a way, at the very least we’ll keep at bay the awful despondency that can rob us (me) of months or years when we could have been doing something.

Besides, one thing I’ve learned which is not quite “G-d helps those who help themselves” is that the more irons you have in the fire, the more likely one will get hot. Or as Kevin J. Anderson puts it – in his “popcorn theory of success” – if you put a lot of kernels in oil and turn up the heat under them, some are going to pop – and perhaps a lot will pop.

And if nothing does, at least we did our duty. We tried to fulfil our duty to our neighbor.

To learn and labor truly to get our living.

Okay, guys, you’re going to have to forgive me for keeping things dark, but having been bitten by presses-other-than-Baen before, I let this one go all the way through page proofs and cover before I fully believed it.

But it is indeed coming out, and they’ve done a superb job of promotion and all, so now I can announce it.

Yes, it is a Elise Hyatt mystery.  No, it’s not (yet) orphan kittens.

I’m fairly sure you’ll see, once you see the cover, why this book and why it was important to announce it today of all days.

It is a craft mystery, set in the cutthroat world of artisanal sauces.

Anthon Dextra and his girlfriend Kitty are about ready to take that world by storm, until they find a dead man in their barrel of shark dip.

Will their highly trained palates allow them to distinguish the flavors of murder, greed and thievery, before their dreams fall into the sauce?

Don’t miss this year’s big mystery release of…

Shark Dip Thieves.

It starts with the dip, but it ends in foul play!