House of Eratosthenes

I see conservatives are grabbing this one and running with it. There’s sure to be a dust-up coming soon, since you don’t snark at Michelle O and get away with it. The libs will say they’re taking it out of context, and when they do, I’ll be able to see the point…

Michelle Obama told high school students taking part in a mentoring program at Georgetown University on Tuesday that being married to the president can be scary at times, because he makes the family get out of its comfort zone.

The first lady urged students not to let fear guide them after a student asked about being worried about going away to college.

“I mean this is scary,” she said. “Shoot, being married to Barack Obama? He’s got big plans. He’s always pushing us beyond our comfort zones, and I’m dragged along going, `What’s he doing now? No, not this.'”

Sounds like me when I talk to kids. Lazy kids. I think she’s doing the right thing, because nowadays kids have all kinds of incentive to be fat stupid and lazy, and adults don’t correct that behavior now like they used to. She’s still peddling her let’s-move-eat-healthy propaganda campaigns, so this fits in well with that. Chalk it up as penance for those 1500-calorie hamburger meals.

But — only a child, at this point, is going to buy the idea that marriage to Barry figures prominently into the pantheon of scare moments. Get real, Michelle. He opines, opines, and opines some more, then He goes out to the links and plays golf. And let’s face it, it is weird. How many wives-and-mothers would agree that kids need to get used to bigger, scary things? Nearly all of them, probably. How many would offer their own marriages as an example? Uh…just the really bored ones, the ones that have no examples to offer lately and are flailing about, grasping for one. Hmmm…

Unlike most of the other critics, though, I had my attention drawn to something else:

She said she wondered whether she’d be able to compete with classmates who were wealthier and had gone to some of the best schools in the world. But she said she was willing to work hard and found her strengths.

“One of my strengths was that I had a big mouth, and I liked to talk a lot,” she said, adding that she tells her own daughters not to be afraid to speak up.

This part is not so unusual, and I wish it was. I’ve been noticing this about kids lately. Boys, whose voices are naturally annoying, need to learn the “library voice” routine like they always did. At least, after about age five or six…girls, though, are always adorable, always precious and it’s always their turn to talk.

I think this needs scrutiny. We seem to have a lot of bumpkin parents running around, laboring under this misconception that society is suffering from an acute shortage of noisy females, and desperately needs more. Bring ’em on, double-quick, we’re running low.

But that is not reality. Reality is what immediately follows, and it is not “PC”, but here it is: At any age, a female making a whole lot of noise is about as precious as sand in the Sahara. And for the same reason.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t know where this idea came from, that kids of either sex or at any age, need to be told by their parents that they shouldn’t be afraid to speak up. They get that as they pop out of the womb. It’s in their “hardware programming.” Lately it has become awfully fashionable to teach your young girls that they need to be ready, willing and able to speak up about things, and forcefully, especially if they find something disagreeable that’s none of their business. And then talk loudly and forcefully about these efforts you’ve been making to teach your daughters to talk loudly and forcefully about things.

News flash from The Blog That Nobody Reads: This doesn’t empower women. As a general rule, a lady’s behavior does not have an empowering effect on her sex, if it makes the gentlemen want to scram. If it fills the hubby’s head with visions of fishing in a mountain lake, way up high above sea level, with her not around, whatever she’s doing is not striking a blow for women. The Speak-Up-Forcefully schtick falls into this. And I don’t know how this got started. I don’t know who started it and I don’t know what exactly their train of thought was. From all I’ve been able to learn, it seems they, like FLOTUS, are lazily conflating the act of bravely confronting changes and challenges, with the act of talking loudly while female. Well, those two are not the same. They’re different.

There are a lot of parents losing this distinction, and I don’t think future generations will look back favorably on them.

Yeah, I heard some people who I’m generally allied with making a big deal out of this. I hate it when their side does it. I hate it even more when our side does it.
- philmon | 11/10/2011 @ 12:58

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Scary MarriageThursday, November 10th, 2011

Scary Marriage
Thursday, November 10th, 2011