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I'm dreading the impending media rehashing of the school shooting in Minnesota. Schools have finally almost recovered from their freaked-out paranoia over the round of school shootings over five years ago. Kids can wear black to school and look gloomy again without being immediately sent for 'guidance'. We're not faced with a barrage of 'experts' condemning video games, music, and the popular culture... for a change. [Er, unless you count those freaks and the 'SpongeBob is GAAAAAAAY!' campaign. Duh, of course he is.] So, yeah, I dread another round of media outcry against the world of kids. I dread the interviews with verklempt parents and teachers trying to excuse themselves. But you know the thing I dread most? That almost no one will ever take a look at kids shooting up their schools and actually think about the two words that make up school shooting. I dread the gun lobby continuing to make gun control laws an absolute joke. And I really, really dread the complete silence on the other thing all school shootings have in common: school. By which I mean not only schools per se but the entire system we use to 'school' kids, and the utter disrespect we show them. Awhile ago there was a brief piece on NPR about a stupid kid who freaked out in the middle of a jewelry store robbery maybe 10 years ago and shot a man who happened to be a teacher. He was, because he lived in Texas, tried as an adult (he was 16 or 17) and sentenced to death. But Texas (unlike Virginia) has actually changed its mind on sentencing minors to death, so the guy's in jail. NPR went to the school where the teacher had worked and interviewed other teachers. The vitriol! People who work day-in-day-out with 16 and 17 year old kids basically calling them wicked little monsters. We think they can handle their own decisions when it's convenient (if they kill, but $DEITY knows not if they want to vote), but we also think they're stupid enough not to see our thinly veiled resentment. And we demand they deal with it for 12 years. I'm not saying schools are designed to breed massacres (obviously the vast majority of students manage never to start shooting at their classmates), but that school as it stands remains designed to keep kids off the street and out of the way - and it's not particularly up to even that task. It infuriates me that we never look at the school environments when these things happen to kids (except inasmuch as we look at, say, kids bullying other kids): we blame the culture, we blame their parents, we blame them, but we never even look at the institutions that hold them for the majority of their waking hours. Really. How stupid are we?

Last week, the web went nuts over the proposed Virginia state bill HB 1677, which was theoretically intended to bump up existing penalties for dumping newborn babies but could easily be read as requiring police reports for any miscarriage or abortion. Assuming that the intent was only to do the former, it was a pretty spurious bill to begin with. Callously put, one incident in a year or two is a very small situation to prompt a new law. But given the language, with it's shaky implications for reproductive freedom, I'm glad to see this one got jumped on so quickly. The end result? The bill got pulled. See Democracy for Virginia's coverage for further news on the story. The weird thing, though, is that the delegate (Cosgrove, of Chesapeake) responsible for introducing this bill essentially got huffy with the internet for calling him out on his badly-worded bill. His back-tracking ranged from "oh, it was the police's fault" to "no one called/emailed/asked ME" (I know I did, with no response) to "I never meant THAT", without ever accepting responsibility for it. Is this the best we can expect from our legislators? Well Timed Period reflects on just how sad that is. Or is this the best we demand? Are our standards that low? Cosgrove ran unopposed last time he was elected; it sounds like Chesapeake's just fine with sloppy law-writing, and he's clearly not all that chastised. I'm just thrilled to hear Cosgrove's also sponsoring a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, too. Maybe it will be written badly enough to effectively cancel out the Affirmation of Marriage Act from last year (although fortunately a repeal is already in the works).

I think I may actually want to have a kid. At some point. Not now, but at a vague hypothetical "later" time. This is a major shift in perspective for me, but it's not like I've come about this all of a sudden. I've been meaning to get back to this conversation with myself for awhile (well, since the livejournal post that introduced it, or since the dinner conversation that sparked the post in the first place). You can obviously just go read that post, but it started from a conversation with some friends about their intention to raise their imaginary children with rules much more restrictive than those I grew up with. Like, "no earrings till you're 15" and such. And the Santa thing. That comes up a lot at this time of year. I don't understand why so many parents perpetuate the Santa thing as a fiction they tell the kids. It's not just about Santa - there are many aspects of our dealings with children that involve belief in magic and imagination, but where the magic and imagination are proscribed. The Santa thing is one of these - why tell your children something you don't believe yourself? Talking about the spirit of giving or the magic of the holidays or something like that would be so much more fun - because it could be a shared belief, not a construct built around hiding stuff from kids. Surprises are fun and all, but I can't imagine feeling a burning need to pass off your surprise as coming from some fictional, if much beloved, character. But so much of common parenting ideas seem to be about hiding stuff from kids "for their own good". About lying to them. About controlling them and fitting them into an idea. It establishes an adversarial relationship between child and guardian, where we beat kids into well-behaved adults like they're made of clay. Like a good adult is one who conforms and behaves well. The comments after the LJ post helped solidify for me why the idea of parenting is so scary - it's not about kids' unpredictability; it's about parents' belief that you can control that. It's about educational philosophies that want the child to do all the bending, rather than allowing the philosophy bend to the child. Some of my friends are very insightful parents, and the essence of their (mostly successful) strategy seems to be to have very little strategy to begin with. Not to prepare answers or construct fiction, but to engage with their kids and be guided by them. Which is a pretty good philosophy for dealing with people in general, and one I could live with. At some long-distant future time, when the idea of bending around a smaller person seems more appealing. Why do we think about kids this way? It seems so 19th century - about making good little cog-makers, not thinking citizens.

This is for Paul, who asked me to re-post the list of not-mall places where you could shop for holiday gifts. Cause I think DIY and carefully crafted hand-made gifts are swell, but sometimes you just don't have enough time, but you have a little more money. So it's cool to buy the time and products of someone else's small crafty business. Need ideas? Here's last year's list, with some additions: Superfantastico (paper, gifts) WackyJac (undies, tees) DaddyO's and My Baby Jo (retro clothes) High Class Cho (clothes made by Margaret Cho) Fat Chance Belly Dance (belly dance videos, music, costumes) Dyke Tees (t-shirts) Good Vibrations (sex toys) Book Sense (independent booksellers) Bust (magazine, other stuff) Bitch (magazine, other stuff) Hula Source (dance stuff) Super Hero Designs (jewelry) Lush (cosmetics, bath stuff) Flying Skirts (bellydance or generally hippie-esque clothes) Mode Merr (hipster clothes for women) Austin Craft Mafia (network of Texas crafters who make practically anything you may want, including kits so you can do your own stuff) Novica (fairly traded world craftsngifts) Poise (purses - you know "poises"?) Stella Marrs (angry and cheeky stationery) 10000 Villages (if you have one locally, it's a good source for funky toys and holiday gear, and about as expensive as Target) Point being. This year and every year, there are loads of pretty awesome people making stuff outside the Holiday Shopping Machine (you know, the buy-everything, go-to-the-mall-now mentality), so if you take issue with that kind of shopping, you don't have to do it. I kinda like the mall, but no one ever died by avoiding it. And hey, if nothing on this list strikes you or gift-giving in general bugs ya, why not just give money to a cause in your giftee's name (but, you know, make it something you share - don't give to the DNC on behalf of your Republican uncle). You know, there's one gap in this list - stuff for kids (a lot of the links have stuff for older kids, but not little ones). Hey, lefty moms and dads, do y'all have suggestions I should include?

I wrote a piece last year around this time about the significance of feasting, mostly to counter all the Adbusters' Buy Nothing Day emails and blog posts I'd been reading. Really, there are only so many times you can see "don't buy anything today; Americans are baaad" [sure, that's massively reductive, but play along with me] before it starts sounding a lot like beginning of year weightloss product adverts. This year, I'm seeing a more interesting trend in my blog bubble. A trend towards recognizing that celebrating the whole "First Thanksgiving" thing with the whole Pilgrim/Indian/kid in turkey outfit concept is basically like a big middle finger to native folk. And really, do we need to shoot another middle finger? One of my LJ friends (who shall remain nameless) doctored a cutesy Pilgrim-Indian decoration with smallpox references, which I think was a fun, snarky way to encourage others to pause and think about the insultingness of our happy little icons. Because these things seem relatively silly to us grownups, but I think they root into our heads as little kids and give us slightly twisted ideas about this country. I hate Pilgrims, quite frankly. I don't hate pilgrims, mind you, but the whole Mayflower thing. It creates this idea that the colonies were all founded by religious emigrants, which is patently untrue. Hello, Virginia? Jamestown? First - well, arguably second or third - colony, totally mercenary. And this fiction that we're a nation founded by Puritans gets twisted into thinking that we share - or at least should share - a single morality. Which we clearly don't now. I think that's a good thing. I'm not saying we need to do away with the whole day-of-thanks concept. Rather, could we just stop with the fiction around the founding of the country? Maybe make the thanks more about family in our discussion of it - as it is in our practice of it?

The continuing news coverage of the election gradually went from exciting and a little funny to downright sickening last night. It's not so much the Kerry loss as what seems to have happened to Congress - centrist Democrats losing against semi-evangelical right wingers. And the thing the newsfolk kept coming back to around was "moral values". The BBC has a good article on the subject: [see link]. This election was exciting, if frustrating, from the "you've been served" primary days when Dean et al called Bush out and challenged each other surprisingly little. But the voting last night - or rather, the spin on the voting last night - fundamentally challenged my view of how this country is divided. See, my own experience leads me to believe that most Republicans actually share my views on most everything. They just disagree on what's important and how to solve the problems we all see. I think we can't let go of social issues, the stuff the press is calling "moral values" and still be a decent people; they think we can't address social issues without individuals and business feeling safer. But I always thought most non-extremists could agree that it was wrong to deny someone a basic civil right - marriage, for instance, based on any difference between ourselves and others. I always thought that most people were iffy about the ethical question of abortion, for instance, but understood a need to keep it legal as long as we weren't effectively protecting a woman's jurisdiction over her own body by preventing unwanted pregnancies. I figured the things we really disagreed on were logistical - like, how to fund adequate healthcare, or what the best form of education reform must be. But it seems that "moral values" - the things that amount to believing that one life is of greater value than another (a murderer should die, someone who isn't born yet shouldn't, a hetero couple is deserving of civil rights a gay couple isn't, etc.) - are the issues that most effectively got people out to vote on the right. My centrist pro-choice Southern EMILY's listers lost. Most (if not all) states with referenda on gay marriage and civil unions went the path of discrimination. At least it was close in a lot of places. At least the vote was gotten out. But that makes the results that much more unsettling. People weren't voting on the other side based on economic and defense issues. They were voting, to put it meanly and bitterly, for hate. Which means this country is surprisingly divided over social issues - things that I wish we wouldn't even legislate - not conflicting priorities. I miss the real Republicans, the ones who were embarrassed to court Southern racism in 1960 (not that I ever knew that party, but it sure sounds nice). Damn. It's going to be a long four years.