Two random things to pass onto you
I plowed through my inbox today, which is always an overwhelming task. Over the course of a week, I ended up with a 500 email backlog. Amongst those 500 emails, however, were a couple of treasures.
The first was information about a grassroots organization aimed at creating a coherent opposition to Obama’s wackier proposed projects. Check it out and see what you think about it.
The second, from a friend of mine who works in a public school district, is an open-letter to Obama asking him to prevent corporal punishment in America. The first thing that struck me about the letter was the weirdly homoerotic tone the letter took when describing corporal punishment. Instead of reading like an advocacy piece, it sounded like something the Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, a noted masochist, would have written. Here’s the advocacy letter:
Typically, the child is required to assume a rump-presentation posture so as to facilitate being battered on his or her buttocks with a wooden board. In fact, this offers the punisher an unpatrolled avenue for sexual exploitation.
The letter also points out that teachers aren’t trained to administer corporal punishment, so that there are a lot of untrained corporal punishers out there. Don’t know why, but that made me laugh.
As for me, I think there is a gaping chasm between a spanking and a beating. I got a fair amount of spankings from my parents when I was growing up. I didn’t stop loving my parents, I didn’t fear my parents, and I didn’t turn into someone with bizarre S&M urges. What did happen, though, was that I very, very quickly learned the big no-nos in our house and didn’t do them any more. The result was a very peaceful home, especially because my parents weren’t simmering in a stew of frustrated, impotent anger.
By the way, I don’t spank my children, not because I don’t feel that, at least when they were younger, it wouldn’t have been useful, but because I don’t have any desire to be hauled off by Child Protective Services.
