The Populista

I haven’t watched a single minute of mainstream news broadcasting in what must be over 10 years.

This isn’t really out of any conscious partisan motive; I will proudly and unabashedly own the fact that I’m a garden variety neo-lefty liberal, clean and sober after a few years’ flirtation with libertarianism. I’ve always been quick to poke fun at Fox News in particular just on the strength of their headlines, all nothing but incendiary rhetoric dressed as “hard questions”. Still, it wasn’t like I was patronizing their competition, either.

Truth is, be it ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ media, it’s all just a bone tossed our way so that we can fight over it amongst ourselves, while the real troublemakers tiptoe in the back door.

Right now, as we plink away on keyboards and answer phones, there’s a demonstration happening on New York’s Wall Street. Thousands of America’s most promising, the newly graduated yet unemployed, the people who were sold an education, a path, a dream that is unlikely to come true due to the failings of an economy ruined by the sociopathically greedy, have flocked to the financial mecca where most of the last few years’ catastrophes were born, nursed on political backscratching, vote-buying and strategic deregulation. They’re pissed off — and what’s more, many of us are pissed off with them. Many of us have sensed the fact that, no matter who we vote for (not even the pitifully trumpeted third-party options who are desperately propped up by a sling fashioned from the remaining threads of optimism a few voters have left), it won’t make much of a difference. Many of us have sensed that the rules have changed, mostly because it’s not even the people for whom we vote who are making the rules anymore.

America’s been sold to the highest bidder; now we’re meeting the new management.

I know about these protests because of the internet (which itself, despite a few roguish plutocratic efforts, is still mostly free — for now) and the few independent sources taking advantage of it, as well as those in the thick of it who are observing and reporting. That’s the only place anyone can get it, because practically no corporately-owned, mainstream news outlet is covering it. At the time of this writing, CNN’s website boasts headlines about a manure spill and a rather cynical attempt at recognizing the “faces of poverty”. On Fox, there are front-page blurbs giggling over a tintype of Nic Cage’s doppelgänger for sale on eBay and Elin Woods’ remarriage. On MSNBC, the vicious epidemic of small-town web gossip takes center stage.

On the front page of not one of these major outlets is there a word being said about the New York demonstrations. There’s barely any acknowledgement from them at ALL, really, save for a page here or there that seems to have sort of slipped into the search results without any commentary or updates.

Meanwhile, things like this are happening:

This is happening to our young people, who have convened in a place to demonstrate before those they feel have wronged them and the entire country, and barely a word is being said about it by any source with a corporate interest. Curious.

Am I saying there’s a conspiracy, an evil scheme, some insidious media blackout? Not necessarily. If nothing else, all of this shows me what I’ve suspected for a long time and what many others have themselves realized (although not nearly enough yet): they don’t care what we want. Whether they’ve actively gone to the trouble of keeping the story off the airwaves or have all just disdainfully waved a dismissive hand, genuinely unconcerned about the protests, they don’t care. Not the protest-ees, and not the media who refuses to shine a spotlight on them, because they’re both the same entity. Not a single one of them care.

After all, who are we? All we do is work for them, if we become so lucky, most of us our entire lives. We buy their products and services. We endure their relentless advertising, squirm under their constant poking and prodding at our psyches to stoke lust for their wares. We’re one solid half of a giant transaction between buyer and seller.

But we’re constantly told that the seller is all that matters. Their half is the important one; how could we possibly ask them to pay more taxes? How could we possibly ask them to continue our benefits, or not to cancel our medical coverage? How could we ask them to spend more money on production materials that aren’t hazardous or unethically procured? How could we ask them not to lay us off, not to ship our jobs overseas for someone who will joyfully work for $3 an hour? How could we ask for anything more, we ungrateful, impetuous consumers?

As long as we have money in our wallets, we’re more or less willing to truck with the devil to carve out whatever modest existence feels best to us. Our margins, our little spaces of wiggle-room, might contract just a little bit, year upon year, but hey. We work, we consume, we live our lives and try to enjoy our time here.

But what happens when we HAVE no money in our wallets? What happens when we don’t even have the jobs necessary to bring in the money to continue happily consuming? What happens when they’ve taken everything else away, when they’ve whittled down every possible incentive for our complicity in their bid for unfathomable wealth, and now they can’t even deliver the one thing we absolutely need to continue business as usual? What happens when education itself is a business, and most newly come-of-age Americans start their lives in the red, with years to go before their money is actually theirs? And when we go to those with our supposed best interests in mind, that fatherly collective whom we’ve asked to keep our rainy-day piggy banks safe, what happens when we find out it was they who unlocked the doors to our homes and businesses so as to allow the thieves to silently slip in and take off with everything, knowing they were in for a cut of the loot?

This is what happens. That video above is what happens. And where we might have climbed mountains and shouted the news from their summits, we find there’s a big Comcast logo spraypainted on its face. The soapbox has been mortgaged. Our voice was pledged as collateral.

And no democratic process will really fix that; we didn’t elect them, so we can’t impeach them. They’re not “officially” in power, so we can’t overthrow them. We’re still playing by rules that barely even apply to the game anymore.

Ultimately, it’s going to be left up to us to find out just how rigged it is. People are going to have to get sick and tired of being (literally) sick and tired. They’re going to have to get fed up with working harder and longer for less and less. They’re going to have to eventually learn that most of us are “down here”, a handful of them are “up there”, and the enormous disconnect that that implies is calamitously real. We aren’t people to them — we’re numbers on a market analyst’s report. We’re laborers, we’re consumers, and in either role, we’re the people standing between them and their next big pile of money. We’re the obstacle, and I’m of the mind that it’s high time we make it a lot more difficult for them to run through us.

The 5,000 gathered in New York are hopefully just the tip of that iceberg.

Every year, on the anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the American public is taken aside almost like children, each of us alternately playing the kindly, world-weary father and the youngster awaiting counsel, and reminded to “never forget”. It’s become a sort of tradition among those of us who were old enough to understand the gravity of the event to recall our whereabouts and, more poignantly, our reactions when we learned the towers had been felled.

I was turned away from my Western Civ class by an instructor who told me to go home, turn on the news and watch, for history was being made that day. He was right.

People cried. They called loved ones. They stared motionless at televisions, their eyes doubtless a bit sore from having been, in a sense, deflowered; none were accustomed to seeing such destruction, the product of such uncivilized and uncontrolled rage, in a place where most everyone spoke the same language as they.

I didn’t realize it then, but that day marked the first in a gradual shift of my perception of my country. In the weeks and months and years that followed, after all those endearing images of great courage and sacrifice had us all swelled with pride and drunk from that thimbleful of unity, we displayed to the world what might be our most enduring legacy: of fear and cowardice.

The attack was more about us than it ever was about government, foreign or domestic. Far more than it was about Islam or radicalism, if it ever was. I think it was well-known what effect it would have in classrooms, around water coolers, on internet forums, in the mere imaginations of Americans desperate to keep it from ever happening again, desperate to feel incorruptibly safe again, even though they never were. If anything would destroy us, it would be us; if anyone would deny us liberty or bitterly grow to “hate” it because of the associated risks, it would be ourselves.

And we have, as expected.

Ten years ago today was the last day that I had a country. What I have now is a loose affiliation of people standing on the same landmass. And it might shock people to know that this is a conscious choice I’ve made in feeling this way; it was by no means involuntary. I became a citizen of the world, and I did so because I would never allow myself to irascibly point at a vague grouping of other world citizens and say, “Look what ‘they’ did to ‘us’.” Such is always the ominous bell toll before we as a species do something irreversibly flagitious.

The inherent danger of opening one’s arms to another man is that it allows him ample opportunity to stick in a knife. America has almost totally closed its arms and, what’s worse, is still swinging its fists in impotent fury until that delicate glass dome of security is painstakingly pieced back together around us, somehow flawless and undefiled. Safety, however, is and always has been completely illusory. I don’t mean this in the sense that more attacks are imminent, but in a greater, far more banal sense. When we get into cars, when we board planes, when we eat junk, when we simply venture from our front doors every day, not one of us is truly “safe”. If your only immediate fear of death comes from the threat of a hijacked aircraft, friends, then you truly haven’t considered much about your existence.

The September 11^th attacks happened ten years ago today, and the only thing I fear is America. I’m not afraid of attack, or really of death, no more so than any other person who realizes her own mortality. I’m more afraid of living if I’m to do so in a country where everyone else is afraid, where the voters and the voted are afraid, where that fear is used to shut us in and everyone else out. I’m afraid of succumbing to dehumanization and how easily others have succumbed to the temptation of committing it against others.

While I would like to be able to simply remember the dead and commend the valiant, I can’t help but realize that every anniversary, the admonishment of “never forget” has far more sinister overtones than most are willing to admit. To me, it doesn’t beseech us never to forget the victims or those who bravely rushed in to try and save them; it demands that we never forget the anger and helplessness. It rings hollow in my ears as a heartfelt tribute, but sounds more like an entreaty to keep a record of wrongs, until the score is somehow — and by any means — settled.

Instead, I believe we should be exhaustively specific, and so my requests to America are thus: never forget your humanity. Never forget that everywhere, every human being has a real need to eat, drink, sleep, heal, and feel secure in his environment. Never forget that others feel as strongly about the inherent worth of their beliefs as you do about yours. Never forget that our borders are simply drawn on maps, and that they don’t imply any true differences between one people and another. Never forget that a vote can kill just as swiftly and surely as a bullet.

Never forget that there are fates worse than death, and that fear makes those possible.

I watch the coverage of these riots — both the official televised AND first-hand accounts shared by citizens over the social network — and I find myself so ambivalent. On one hand, I’ve read a few very poignant, interesting reactions about the social conditions leading to this sudden destructive, violent outburst; how even in the UK, there is an ever-widening gap between classes that live mere minutes away from one another, and there are people exposed early and often to a way of life and a conspicuity of consumption they’ll never have. How they’re not privy to the quality of education others are afforded in posher areas, or through private schooling. How they’re born and bred within a coccoon of exceedingly low expectations.

Then again, I see lads extending a treacherous hand up to an injured person just long enough to rob him in the midst of all the chaos. I see a whole country of frustrated people, both in the UK and in America, whose problems with wealth disparity are just as blithely ignored (and even encouraged by some), yet they still talk, and debate, and contact their representatives, and vote, and do everything they can in a calm, constructive manner. Perhaps I don’t understand the nature of rioting, but even if I was driven by a violent rage enough to destroy anything, I couldn’t imagine not destroying the target of my frustration — if your boiling point was unpunished police brutality, why not destroy police stations or cars exclusively? If you feel education has failed you and is failing others, why not destroy (empty) schools or administrative buildings? Why the sheer madness, burning homes, burning businesses, harming other people who may be just as frustrated with a distant and unresponsive government as you are? Certainly everyone involved in the destruction isn’t a simple, disenfranchised citizen expressing his rage at institutional oppression; some ARE just opportunists using the decoy of civil unrest to cause pain and self serve. I mean, surely we can’t pretend that people have never stolen from or hurt others for their own sadistic pleasure, for their own personal profit.

They can’t all be written off as maliciously mischievous, of course, and I understand why a few have entreated onlookers to not be hasty in doing just that. But I think there’s all the more reason to condemn the opportunists — there’s very little difference in the eyes of those watching between someone smashing up a car out of righteous fury born of years of marginalization and having an unattainable dream waved in his face, and someone smashing up a car because other people are doing it, and when’s he ever going to get another opportunity like this?

I know I could be wrong, and this is only my incredibly saddened and confused opinion. I’m sensitive to all sides involved, and the brunt of my contempt still rests squarely on the shoulders of the elected and the elite, who at all times seem to be at the very core of these matters. Britain and America are very much brothers –Britain, the elder and more experienced; America, the junior, somewhat zealous in its youthful naiveté. There are things I envy about Britain as an American, and as these riots rage, my opinion of their tiny island is not altered; in fact, in a small, secret way, I’m amazed to see such a vivid public reaction. Even if violence is not to be condoned, it CAN be understood — when pressure mounts, there’s eventually nowhere for it to go but outward. Somehow, I can’t see this happening in my country, for as complacent as we seem to have become. We can rip each other’s faces off on blogs, in social media, on television . . . but mass demonstrations are seldom seen. We can’t even muster the vivacity necessary to riot, and the short-term costs would be far too great; someone might drop an iPhone, Starbucks might be set ablaze. Forget a peaceful demonstration where results aren’t instant and in-your-face.

The fact that Britons are even doing something, ANYTHING (even if the wrong thing), makes me think they take their discontent more seriously somehow.  It makes me think they believe something can change, that they believe they will be heard, one way or another.

I hope, once the thousands of incredibly generous, proud, and civic-minded people have swept up the last of the glass and cinders, once this is all over, they once again take up their signs and continue to protest. While fresh in the minds of the dozy officials who couldn’t be farther removed from the lowest rungs of society, their message still needs to be heard. They’ve all seen what enraged people can do. Now it’s time to clean up, and get back to the peaceful demonstrating, just to allow them to decide which one they prefer.

Anyone who lives in my neck of the woods has seen local TV ads for Sunday school attendance at least once; you know the one with the pastor standing out on a grassy knoll with a group of happy, smiling citizens, beseeching the religiously apathetic to get their kids to a church almost as a matter of emergency, because they “need and deserve it.”

For those who are from other parts of the country . . . that’s a thing. Contain your mirth, please.

It’s actually kind of funny to see these advertisements because, of ALL the regions of the country whose citizens would need some cajoling to boost their religious participation, one would think that the Great Makeshift Notch of the Bible Belt would be among the last. Then again, one could argue that despots have never exactly been above propaganda, no matter how total their rule. But one would have to appear quite cynical in order to evoke such imagery, so it’s a good thing one is not, in fact, cynical.

Still, it’s hard not to take a swipe at such tactics when so many individuals are more than happy to let others know just how much they disapprove of how they raise their children, particularly where the subject of religion arises. I’ve undergone a fair amount of badgering, pestering, and coaxing; I’ve taken criticism directly on the chin, been accused of close-mindedness, of indoctrination, of unfairness. It bears mentioning that those ads are probably the single gentlest and kindest suggestion I’ve received thus far regarding my child’s religious habits or lack thereof, even from my own family.

It’s funny how well your opponents come to know you, how adept they become at pushing your buttons. They begin to realize the high value placed on open-mindedness, on fairness and reservation of judgment, and with no shame at all, they begin to use that as a way to back you straight through the doors of their churches. It’s truly one of the most twisting and elaborate performances you’ll ever see, watching the religious dominionist preach to you about the virtue of tolerance while the very presence of a non-believer is like the shriek of a smoke alarm that forces him, on a deeply physical level, to seek it out and silence it immediately.

“Oh, church won’t hurt him. Why not let him make up his own mind?” This is said entirely without irony by those who have never once posed the question back to themselves with regard to their own children. It’s even more galling when self-identified ‘freethinkers’ or the happy-clappy mislabeled agnostic begin to adopt the same notions about religious ritual in a vain attempt at appeasement. Expose your child, if only to “educate” him and let him make his own decision! The best I can say about this is that I can at least assume they would be supportive of a sort of ecclesiastical world tour, with a visit to a Protestant church one week and a Catholic mass the next, to a synagogue the next week and a mosque the week after. Most conventional champions of church attendance support conscription but with the tacit understanding that theirs is the only side of the war worth joining.

But whether pressured towards just one belief or all of them, I still reject this thinking on various grounds. I’d like to run through these, both for people with similar child-rearing woes and those who inflict them.

1. Raising a child without religious training does not equal imposing atheism on him. It’s been suggested to me that, by not broaching the topic of religion at all and not making it a part of our daily lives, I’m ‘forcing atheism on my son’. The ages-old argument of whether or not atheism is, despite its nomenclature, a sort of religion in itself springs to mind. There is a difference, although some mistakenly think it so subtle as to be non-existent, between strong atheism that makes definite claims of knowledge (“there is no god”) and agnostic atheism (“I don’t believe there is a god”). Despite what some might call my ‘militant’ stance on social and political matters involving religious belief, my actual theological position is encompassed by the latter, not the former. I don’t claim knowledge that there is no god (which is the ‘agnostic’ part); I do, however, lack belief that there IS one based on lack of evidence. Certain particular gods, by textual definition, are self-refuting (their actions/qualities contradict one another) and can thus be supposed not to exist with a degree of certainty, but that’s a completely different discussion.

In order to “impose” atheism on my son, I would first have to propose a god (out of a rather long, diverse list of gods that have been thought to exist over the span of thousands of years — all but one of which modern monotheists reject out of hand, I should mention), and then I would have to steadily reinforce to him that said god does not exist. Doing this would squander more of my time and his than the average person wastes in church twice a week. I have never taught my son that a single god within any pantheon doesn’t exist, because I don’t teach him about any gods in any pantheons — yet. As an 8 year-old, he’s just not interested in it. Judging by the squirming, annoyed, uncomfortably-dressed kids I used to eyeball in church in the past, not too many of the children who actually DO attend church are very interested, either, unless there’s crayons and coloring books involved.

The subject simply never comes up. My son likes to talk about games, so much of the time, we talk about games. My son likes to argue silly, irrational things like whether or not he should put eggs down his pants or I’m planning to send him to the moon in a rocket, so we do that. He likes building things with Legos, watching Adventure Time, and playing his DS. Add his scholastic obligations to that, and we have enough occupying our time on any given week. Religion, of any kind, simply isn’t a factor.

2. Belief in religion is not the same as knowledge of religion. I believe some feel as if I’m actually planning for my son to never know the meaning of the words ‘Christianity’ or ‘Islam’ or ‘Buddhism’, or that religion will be an utterly foreign concept to him by the time he graduates high school, leaving him open to all sorts of terrible consequences born of ignorance, much in the same way that children who are never educated about sex are the most susceptible to its oppressive outcomes (and I will freely admit how amusing it was to write that sentence).

Religion being what it is in the world, I would be remiss to ever pretend it doesn’t exist. While I would love nothing more than to treat every prevailing modern religion with the same detached interest as I would treat the stories in the Epic of Gilgamesh or the old Mesoamerican legends, the fact is that time has not yet petrified them into inanimate mythology. They still have an active and observable effect on the world; thus, I don’t think declawed, saccharine comic-book versions of Abrahamic religions are going to be helpful to my son, even though we can talk about ancient Greek religion like it was never anything more to its early devotees than a series of quaint tall-tales.

"Behold Todd, the God of Headaches!"

Here again is where the problem of interest presents itself; while I have every intention of giving him an education in comparative religion, he’s simply not interested in it at this phase in his life. Rest assured, he will not grow to adulthood with no knowledge of what religion is and what effect it has had on the world.

3. Education is not a typical church’s first priority. This isn’t to say that an attendee can’t learn something about the faith through attending church; but anyone who intends to convince me that any teaching done is not for the express purpose of reinforcing belief has his work cut out for him. Church serves a dual role in teaching the faith and bringing a congregation together to worship. In even the most speak-frankly congregations, the general tone and purpose of church attendance is to glorify the deity of choice, to encourage faith in its inerrancy, benevolence, omnipotence, providence and so on. Indeed, to expect to attend a church and receive a fair appraisal of the veracity of its teachings is to ask a barber if you need a haircut. Moreover, if I didn’t have the collective confirmation bias to worry about, then I’d certainly have to remind myself that I represent a fresh, new wallet full of tax-free donations to any church that doesn’t currently have my business. For anyone who isn’t already a dyed-in-the-wool believer, standard sectarian churches are the very definition of “conflict of interest”.

People who obtusely pretend that churches are humble, unassuming houses of learning that intend to let the undecided make up their minds don’t do much to help their cases. I think that to learn the most about any subject, dispassionate inquiry is essential. Church attendance, per my understanding and experience, is meant to be anything but dispassionate.

In my attempts to bear out the agendas of those who would pressure me to send my child to church, I can’t overlook the truth of my own motives or remain entirely unswayed by my own opinions. Reason tells me that if there is not enough concrete evidence of a thing, it is perfectly acceptable to remain unconvinced of its existence (note once more that I did not say “It definitely does not exist”, only that being unconvinced is a perfectly acceptable state until more evidence is available). In my eyes, this is a reasonable, logically consistent point of view that makes no assumptions, tells no lies, and has little effect on my judgment, morality or ability to live day to day. In fact, I think it is superior to points of view that reward assumption, that laud as virtuous the acceptance of ideas without evidence, and that prohibit innocuous human impulses. As such, I hope my son’s eventual decision, should he ever come to make one, will match that which makes the most empirical sense to me. This is because I’m human, and relationships tend to be easier when the opinions and ideas of two people are in accordance. I would find it harder to relate to my son if he were religious — not necessarily due to the religion itself, but because of how the mind has to work in order for religion to fit comfortably within it.

However, this is where I’m prepared to accept the more difficult aspects of parenting — nay, where I welcome them. I have an incredible power at this point in his life, because I could very easily mold him into something that is most pleasing to me. I could make him deny the existence of god(s) as a matter of rote recitation. I could even make him believe he believes that exact thing for himself, ready to jealously defend the idea against all comers who would tell him otherwise. I could pass him around my likeminded friends, allowing them to reinforce through sheer numbers that which I have already impressed on him. I could turn his brain into a mirror image of mine, so that the only thing I’ll ever hear is an echo of my own thoughts in his sweet, matter-of-fact little voice.

The world, however, already has me. I realize that my ethics and principles were all eventually chosen by myself with respect to values that I refined for myself, from the raw materials my parents gave me to work with. I think my obligation to him is to nurture curiosity, to be as honest with him as I can possibly be, and to help him develop a mind capable of ascertaining what is useful and valuable. The most successful I can hope to be as a parent is to have a son who knows how to ask good questions. Religion is but one of those things I wouldn’t dare take the fun out of by deciding for him. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have an opinion about religion, one most people find hostile and disagreeable; however, when I lend out my books to people, I don’t insist “You think this book is poorly-written and full of holes” before they even get a chance to read them. He’ll get his chance to see what I’ve seen and more through his own eyes, especially in this age where we seem to record everything in exhaustive detail. How he interprets the data is his own privilege. Any variances between our opinions, if any, will make for interesting conversations later in his life.

People who value faith are within their rights to do so. People who raise their children with religion based on that value are likewise within their rights to do so. I could (and, in another forum, probably would) argue the merits of those values, but they’re still ours to decide and will often inform our actions. The trouble with making normative statements such as “You should take your child to church” is that they don’t necessarily take the values of that person into account. Expecting someone to act in accordance with your personal values is what some might consider self-centered, arrogant, or rude. Such matters are better off not introduced as slogans on a bumper sticker or a TV advert; instead, consider why someone might not value faith. Ask why they don’t attend church in the first place. These get more to the root of the issue, and have the happy side-effect of teaching you more about the person you’re questioning. I find that the more you know about someone, the more human they are to you, and the less likely you are of becoming hostile when they don’t think like you.

My husband and I had a pretty sobering thought on the way home from a recent night out: we now live in our own, personal culture vacuum. This was kind of an exaggeration because, of course, there are still new things that catch our attention, they’re just fewer and far between. Still, a lot of today’s most popular music, film, and television simply flies over our heads. The last pop icons I ever went crazy for were Nirvana (and I feel they were actually icons then, as opposed to now, when little has time to really anchor itself into the culture before the next identical thing appears in a magical puff of airbrushing and Auto-Tune). The last group of singing kids that ever made it onto my radar were Hanson, and that was back when kids actually had to play instruments to impress adults. Evidently, if pop culture is wet spaghetti, then I’ve turned into a greased wall.

Some of it can’t be escaped, unfortunately. With the same resigned sighing and rolling of eyes with which my parents acknowledged the existence of New Kids on the Block, so have I done with Justin Bieber. I have a pretty strict cultural spam filter, but his marketing is absolutely relentless and somehow still slid through. Apparently, the boy is a singer and pre-teen girls soil themselves at his mention. And if that was the extent of his use, I could throw on Led Zeppelin IV and leave them all to it.

"I call this next one 'If It Weren't for Rape (I'd Be Missing You Now)'."

The problem arises with this habit celebrities have of using the pulpit won from their artistic endeavors for religious and political purposes, a particular example of which is a Rolling Stone interview conducted with the child star a few days ago. In the highly-discussed piece, Bieber states, “I really don’t believe in abortion. It’s like killing a baby.” When pressed on exceptions for rape, he replied, “Um. Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don’t know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t be able to judge that.”

Let me start by reminiscing about a time when pop stars were refreshingly mute about such things, and when publications like Rolling Stone actually asked questions about music and touring and artistic influences. When I look at music now – or, at least, music as represented by Justin Bieber – it resembles an offshoot of reality TV, where we’re expected to be impressed by the idiosyncrasies of the people lounging around a surveilled house or jumping around on a stage, rather than by any actual SKILLS they possess. Yes, we had people like John Lennon who were anything but silent about their political views, but he still used the music to try and accomplish those ends and was more or less nonsensical and vague in interviews. I’m not sure if it’s just myself, but it feels like music is simply a cover for Bieber’s T-shirt and poster merchandising business, with the pleasant bonus of allowing him ample opportunity to engage in most people’s favorite hobby: talking about themselves.

Of more concern, though, is what actually makes it into print for all the shrieking prepubescent girls of America to see. My issue really isn’t with the rape comment, as if I believe he actually said “rape happens for a reason”, although it it’s incredibly easy to extract that meaning from it. No, my beef specifically deals with the concept of pregnancy as a consequence of rape and its elevation to some fatalistic link in a chain by a 16 year-old whose scale of personal vicissitudes likely only extends upwards to being grounded on a Saturday or picking his Toy Story undies out of the crack of his ass after an atomic wedgie.

Yes, I know — he’s 16. He lacks a frame of reference. That’s easy enough to understand, and if I’m going to rip the stuffing out of the poppet, it won’t be for that.

It will be for the disgustingly familiar “everything happens for a reason” platitude that I believe even a 16 year-old should know better than to hide behind. Anyone who has taken even the most cursory glance at their surroundings should be able to determine that there are multitudes of things that happen for no reason at all. It is a statistical certainty that, somewhere in the world, a guy is losing his job right now — a guy with a home and a family, who already has a strong work ethic and earned everything he has, who will probably languish unemployed for some extended period of time, perhaps lose his house, be forced to move into an apartment, while he and his family watch their dreams just sort of break apart like a wet cake. He will gain nothing from it, no deeper personal insight, just loads of worry and debt and pain. If he’s lucky, he WON’T wonder what he did to deserve it or whether or not someone or something is punishing him. But, if he’s anything like Justin Bieber, he WILL wonder and he WILL feel like the world, or some god, or fate are out to get him. And it’s exactly because people peddle this idea that “things happen for a reason” — usually as an easy way to defend an indefensible point of view.

When I look at the current atrocities in Africa, the widespread rape and AIDS infestation; when I hear about similar bands of roving rapists in Haiti who take advantage of the absolutely dissolved infrastructure in the wake of an earthquake that happened well over a year ago; and when I think about how many children will be born because of and into those situations, I can’t help but want to rudely chortle in the face of anyone who means to convince a rational person that every occurrence, no matter how benign or cataclysmic, does so as a matter of intended consequence. It simply is not true.

And even if it were true, could a person like Bieber vouch for whether or not those “reasons” are bad or even villainous in intent? I infer from his statement that he imagines that every woman who was ever raped and consequently impregnated will eventually find some cheesy, teen-drama happiness at the end of her ordeal, proving that from enormity can (and will) eventually come joy and fulfillment. What if those reasons aren’t nearly so magnanimous? It doesn’t take a doctorate in social work to figure out that domestic situations involving unplanned or unwanted children don’t always have happy endings. How does he intend to explain or prove that the puppetmaster in these scenarios isn’t spiteful and cruel, and simply wishes to kick over a few anthills from time to time?

Or . . . what if the “reason” was to have the woman have an abortion? What if the rape happened solely with the intention of providing her with the experience of an abortion in her lifetime? What if she’s ardently pro-life and decides that she just can’t live with bearing the child of her rapist, thereby spurring her to change her mind on the subject? When you basically have to make up the hidden intentions of a hidden entity, you could truly make ANYTHING up.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to acknowledge that things, good or bad, simply happen and sometimes require us to make choices, good or bad?

And better yet, if you’re going to stand up and talk in front of droves of people — many of whom are impressionable teens who would love nothing more than to impress you on the distant off-chance that you should meet — shouldn’t the things you say require just a little more thought? This is the same interview where, when asked who he’d vote for were he old enough to have the privilege, Bieber offered, “I’m not sure about the parties. But whatever they have in Korea, that’s bad.”

Yeah.

If the acceptance of gay rights is viewed by some as a disturbing trend amongst we more “sinful” youths, imagine their shock when a video starring an 80 year-old grandmother in a passionate entreaty for tolerance surfaced on YouTube.

The young lady briefly acknowledges her traditional Irish Catholic upbringing and initial shock after her son came out as a homosexual many years ago. From there forward can be summed up in four words: she got over it.

The message is simple, yet tragically uncommon to hear from a person of her years — “please, love your children”. There’s no doubting what was likely programmed into her mind throughout childhood until the moment her son revealed his secret. Yet, when the moment came, she simply did what a mother does. She realized that her child was going to grow up and walk his own path, and rather than disown or deride him for how he was born, she supported him. No matter what the internal dialog between she and her religious beliefs, her humanity obviously spoke more loudly.

This issue, as you will come to learn if you aren’t already aware, is close to me because I am very close to it. Besides identifying as bisexual, myself, several friends and family members of mine are homosexual. Never once has it caused me an ounce of chagrin or discomfort. Even in my brief flirtations as a young girl with Southern Protestantism (and all that that implies), it simply never occurred to me to fear or avoid anyone whose sexuality didn’t appear to match my own. Why should I? Even if it was a sin, so was taking the Lord’s name in vain. So was working on the Sabbath, or dishonoring my father and mother. If I was a sinner just by accident of birth, and if no one but Jesus was sinless, why quibble over one specific sin versus another, if the person had no intention to harm me in its commission?

Unfortunately, there are many parents who don’t see the situation in such an elegantly simple and humble way. In their minds, homosexuality is everything from an automatic sentence to the very furnaces of Hell to an oppressive social humiliation.

My own uncle is gay. Several years ago, his longtime partner, a kindly older gentleman named Rogers, died after a protracted battle with cancer. His own mother was among the many who couldn’t see past the stigma of having a homosexual son, so preoccupied was she with the opinions of her church friends. She was nothing like my grandmother who, even though the truth of my uncle’s sexuality shocked her and caused her some degree of worry, did not allow this to dull her instincts as a mother, one who loved her son from the day he was born and always would. And not only did she love him, she loved Rogers. At fifty some-odd years of age, Rogers managed to find himself a surrogate mother in my grandmother – a lady with genuine warmth of affection for the man my uncle loved.

Tragically, Rogers’s final days were spent in a room with barely any air circulation during the hottest months of an Alabama summer, as his was one of the only rooms in which his mother would allow him to stay, well out of sight of anyone who might see her gay, ailing child. To this day, it hurts my grandmother dreadfully to think about how much she wanted to open her doors to Rogers, to actually make him feel comfortable and loved during his last days alive. Why couldn’t she?

Because he wouldn’t let her.

You see, Rogers loved his mother, perhaps to a fault in light of her cold and distant regard for him in return. Our children love us innately as we love them. And if someone with even the most orthodox and conventional values can not only embrace her son to the fullest extent of his true self, but tell the entire world about it in an age where one video can reach millions within the span of a day, then there is no excuse for anyone not to.