How Things Are
Ellen, a Norwegian friend of my parents, came over for dinner tonight, and somehow conversation morphed from the erosion of the American school system (from the good old days of rote learning) to the erosion of the Norwegian school system, to the impact of illegal immigrants on Norway's economy and social fabric. Didn't know Ellen was such a social conservative, and though I hate to disagree with dinner guests--especially in somebody else's house--my kids were sitting there listening to her broad-sweep rants about Muslims and lazy Africans and the cushy reality of life on welfare, then back to those Mexicans, sneaking over the border to steal our jobs. It shocked me; I've known her for years, but this was new. Maybe I just hadn't been paying attention before. She threw in some bin Laden talk because she could tell I wasn't on board, and she, like so many, assumes bin Laden is a good leaping-off point: one we'll all agree on.
I couldn't let it go, and didn't, and the kids sat there quietly and seriously, listening and watching. When Ellen slammed her hand on the table, they jumped. Soon after I gathered them up and headed home. They've heard my power/privilege spiel so often I see it coming back to me in Maisie's school essays, and Liam has a sense of human justice that's so pure it could make you weep. It makes him weep. It's simple and clear to them--easily defended, easily worn. What they don't often see--because I don't often hang out with people like Ellen--is that the other side is not absurd: it can look like your friend, or your grandpa, and it can have enough kernels of perspective that are familiar to you that you might feel confused by it, and unsure. I want Maisie, especially, to start to see the complexity. Not that Ellen is complex. But neither is she a monster.
"I thought her head was going to spin around," Maisie said when we got home.
Well, it's a start.
posted by I n g e r @ Saturday, April 22, 2006
14 Comments:
I think it is great that you can have these conversations with your kids at such a young age. Most people think they are raising children, but really don't we want to raise adults. It is never too early to start teaching people tolerance and the fact that there are opposing views out there.
I'm always shocked when I discover that the views of my friends are so different from mine. And your right, it does show that "the other side" isn't total evil. Either that or I'm a bad judge of character. J/K Have a great weekend.
oh how i've missed your words =)
great post...and i love how you're raising your babies...
i got totally blind-sided in the 2004 election by people i'd known for years, mostly the damn soccer moms of my kids' schoolmates whom i thought were on my side...what an awakening that was...
goes to show, you don't ever know...
peace...
Inger...
I had this happen recently...just substitute gay for "illegals."
What is NOT amazing is how lucky your children are. They have a shining example right in front of their eyes!
Have a great week. Stay safe on the roads.
STB
YOU....are an awesome mother!
Your kids are lucky to have you, and we are lucky to be able to read about it firsthand. Thank you, Inger, for integrity. Seems to be such a commodity these days.
the divergent complusions of being a good guest and a good person. impossible, aren't they? do the kids talk back? i know they know the drill, but at the table, among grown ups? do they talk back? are you training them to do that, too? i don't think i would know anything at all if it weren't for participating in arguments at table. does maisie shudder at the handslamming? (i doubt it very much; i don't rightly know her, but at eight she seems a very cool customer to me, cooler than you even, and, monster comment included, i'm quite positive that four short years from now, she'll be high priestess of the slightly haughty, befuddled and bored sideways glance that can wither any audience into self-doubt in four seconds). i worry about liam, though. apparent, everywhere, that he is the sort of boy who so easily takes goodness for granted, that it hurts his heart to see that it isn't always so with the rest of the world. he'll have to be steeled against handslamming. but he'll learn. he'll have to. he'll learn to love his heart more than the trouble it will give him. you can tell in his face.
on tolerance: a most overrated virtue. we ceaselessly sing its praises, leasing sealed lips to bullies, sops, barbarians, and then wonder why the world's gone mad. the only thing one should tolerate is a cold. there are too many tolerant people. we need more fighters, not fewer.
practice rattling hands, dishes, egos.
i don't know why i'm carrying on so, or here. i had to. i missed you. i'm glad you're back.
inger-i love that you have imparted the sense of social justice to your kids.
it is FRIGHTENING, how many people are raising elitist, racist, selfish humans. blech.
i see the struggles that my 3 kids deal with, as they encounter the racism around them. but, like your 2 kids, they have an innate sense of acceptance, and respect for their fellow man. that said it's not an easy path to walk, these days.
xoxoxox
Although the rhetoric of nativism can be grating and ugly, and I don't criticize your reaction, Ellen managed to lurch into some important issues.
The Norse have been where they are for centuries. If they managed to reproduce themselves, they would have no need to import many people so different from them, and why should they? They are as entitled to preserve their culture (although it has evolved and will do so more) as the Inuit, the Bedouin, or the Tamils. If I were Norwegian I wouldn't want a flood of Africans, or Arabs, or Albanians, just to start with the "A's," moving in, either.
We Americans are a many-stranded people, although the roots are mostly English and Protestant, as David Hackett Fisher has shown. Why can't we have some control of who comes here, the extent to which they are expected to absorb the dominant language, values, and customs, and whether they drive down wages and deplete the public coffers, or add value and pay their fair share?
As a sovereign nation with traditions worth preserving (and allowing to evolve, too), we have immigration problems and should deal with them.
No doubt Ellen was annoyingly snarky, and as the mother of a multiracial family you reacted to the snark. All I'm saying is that doesn't exhaust the policy issue.
Mil abrazos para Vd. e la família.
--El Gruñón
(Hugs to you and your family -- Grumpy).
What an awkward situation. You can't just sit there without viocing your opposing view - the kids learn from watching too. They are lucky children to have such an example in their lives!
I make a similar effort with my girls - and I see emerging social conscience in both of them. In some ways it is more satisfying to see them growing into tolerent humans than any other achievement they make!
It's great to see how the evolution of your children's perceptions emerge from the seedlings we as parents offer to them. Kinda wordy, but you know what I mean!
~Deb
I think it is important that our children know where we stand on the important issues of the day.
You are wonderful at making sure that they know what is going on in the world.
Mary
Is it too soon to nominate them for President and Vice-President when they are the right age?
alan
When I was little, I'd see my paternal relatives saying hateful things about people of other colors (we're white, and some of them were Klan) all the time.
Their faces would contort, their voices would get loud and shrill, they'd turn red.
It scared me and my cousin witless.
When I was nine and he was ten, we hid in his room to play Monopoly and get away from the crazy grown-ups, and we decided to pinky-swear that we would never "be that way about black people."
I'm just saying, maybe it will ultimately be good for them, to see what hatred looks like, and that it can live in otherwise lovable people. I'm sorry they had to see it and you had to hear it, anyway.
I feel like that when I listen to my co-workers defend Pres. Shrub.
How are you my friend? new home, new job?
Norway belong to Sweden Kingdom for a long. The poorest place in earth. Then, petrol search and find -obviously from euro-american companyes- let them achieve a bit of the european style of life -well someone may think there's an american way of life. That's false. No doubt. USA it's an euro expansion. Let's go to Lybraries.
Norway it's an edge, in any sense. From the point of view of the European people.
Nice post. Nice country, Norway, sometimes, norwegian mistakes too. Don't your gruppies?
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