At dinner one night, I made two fatal social errors in rapid succession. First, during casual conversation with two good friends, I began talking about American culture. Not just culture, but how culture is linked to power and the broader social structure. If your eyes are glazing over at this point, you are beginning to understand how my dinner guests felt. Now imagine you are only half-way through dinner and I am seated between you and the door. My second social gaffe was that I invoked the name of the infamous social critic, Karl Marx. And I had the audacity to state my opinion that part of what he observed about culture is correct. The conversation went a little like this: Me: You know, I was thinking lately about Marx’s observation that modern society is divided between the … [Read more...]
Stop Blaming Parents for Our Society’s Failures
Yet another parenting article popped up in my Facebook feed this week. Not a How-To parenting article, which is annoying enough, but a You’re-Doing-Everything-Wrong parenting article. Generation X’s Parenting Problem, published in 2015 but making the rounds again now, is a diatribe about how today’s parents are doing everything wrong. Life was so great when we were kids. Parents today are stressed-out maniacs who need to relax. We turned out fine. Kids these days have it too easy. If only parents today followed their parents’ and grandparents’ choices, everything would be great. The problem is, we don’t live in our parents’ or grandparents’ world. Just like the insipid and ubiquitous memes about how "My childhood was awesome: I was beaten with a belt and I learned respect", these … [Read more...]
