Imminent Sleight of Hand

I wrote earlier that ads are running against Meg Whitman for not voting for nearly three decades. I saw the ad again this morning and caught that it was paid for by California Working Families for Jerry Brown. The link above doesn't really have much to it, which is good because it will automatically redirect to the official Jerry Brown for Governor site.

The working families site only makes a brief attack on Whitman for trying to spend her way into office. I think that the Brown campaign is going to try to pull a fast one. From the looks of things it would seem that Brown is going to use fake grassroots groups to do much of the actual spending during the campaign. Then Brown can use his personally low spending numbers and Whitman's spending of her own money as a rhetorical point throughout the election. Meanwhile, those who would have been donors are giving Brown all the benefits of their money without tainting his hands with their filthy lucre.

Apprenticeships in Life

Debates about Abby Sunderland's attempt to sail around the world has started debates all around that same planet. Heck, it is starting one even here in my house.

There's no argument about who should be paying for the rescue, or at the very least should be looking for a second mortgage to pay the costs. The source of contention is whether the parents were negligent in allowing Abby, and by extension her brother, take on these voyages. The wife and mom-in-law are of the mind that the Sunderlands are crazy.

My position comes from ideas I've had that our culture does not challenge adolescents to learn to take on the world as adults. That attitude is all over the coverage in how news readers insist on referring to Abby as a girl, or worse yet as a child. Please, at the least, refer to her as a young woman.

In order to teach adolescents to take on the adulthood there have to be adults taking responsibility to teach them and to someday say that they are ready to take on the challenges. Something like a solo trip around the world is one whopper of an example, but a similar decision has to be made for anything a teenager might want to do. A number of years is only a single criterion. Some of the others are:

• The adult has to accurately gauge the skills of the adolescent.
• The teenager has to accurately know the extent of their own skills. This, with the first point above, leaves no room for empty self-esteem.
• The adult has to keep setting challenges so that the adolescent's skills keep improving.
• The teenager has to learn how to motivate herself to keep expanding her skills.
• The adult has to know just what the magnitude of the risks in the challenge are. I asked my wife, who grew up with horses, whether she would allow our daughters to take up show jumping. She has no problem with that, but I bet that someone whose only knowledge of the sport is pictures of Steve Reeves in an wheelchair would think that would be negligent.
• The teenager has to learn how to gauge risks with clear eyes.
  

It surprises me the number of conservative minded people who are jumping up to make blanket statements about teenagers' capabilities. That, in my mind, is too close to saying that people outside the teacher/student (typically parent/child) relationship are competent to judge better than the teacher.

The real problem is more that too few adults are willing to really do the hard work of training their adolescents. Look around at the twenty- and thirty-somethings who are flat out refusing to grow up and take on mature responsibilities. I'd bet my keyboard that you will find parents who thought that all they had to do was look after Junior's self-esteem and that he'd figure the rest out on his own.

Teenagers are not adults. Neither are they children. Teenagers need to be taught how to be adults and to handle responsibility. Not full adults, but an intermediate step, Apprentice Adult.

No Rest for the Voter

Just when we thought is was over, commercials are coming on TV for the November gubernatorial election. The one I have seen the most so far has been the one that replays Meg Whitman's wholly non-responsive response to a question about her not voting over the past 28 years. While she was nominally taking responsibility for her record, not giving the reason is going to keep this an issue.

My advice on this matter is to again take responsibility but to also embrace an emerging demographic. I would suggest an answer like this.

"It is true that I had not voted for many years. The reason I did not vote is that I was complacent. Government was not an important issue in my life at the time. At least, I did not think it was important. During those years, the Legislature, Governor's office, and regulatory agencies in Sacramento were expanding their budgets and granting themselves ever more influence in our lives. While they were doing that, I abetted it by being complacent. And over those same years, the rates of voter turnout have dropped while Sacramento careened out of control.

"The commercials imply that it is hypocritical for me to be running for Governor when I have not performed the minimum asked for of citizens in the past. I answer that it is not hypocrisy but an awakening. My neglect, and the neglect practiced by millions of other voters, have ultimately created the crisis we now face, and now we have to wake up and see the problem fixed. That awakening is happening, and the citizens of California need to either lose their complacency and engage the process or to re-engage by overcoming the despair that their vote cannot create a difference."

Those who haven't voted in the past but are now pissed off enough to get out on the streets.

Reflections on a Bumper Sticker

I passed a car with a bumper sticker calling for the repeal of Prop. 13. First time I had ever seen one like that, probably because almost everyone likes the control on property taxes. It makes it quite easy to be able to count on politicians being bound from jacking up taxes at a moment's notice.

Sounds kind of like rent control. I wonder what bumper sticker owner thinks about keeping landlords from raising rents whenever they feel like it.

This Would Truly be Ironic... I Think

It is really hard to know what exactly is ironic, but this situation would be if it happens.

Imagine: a Category 5 hurricane is barreling down on New Orleans. The damage is expected to be devastating, to say nothing of the oil slick that the storm surge will bring ashore.

Then, as the storm hits the site of the Deepwater Explorer fire. The oil slick, coating the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, prevents water vapor from rising up and feeding its heat into the storm. Starved for heat, the Hurricane dies out and hits the coast as little more than a tropical storm.