Dear Mrs. Obama:
A friend was kind enough to send me a copy of a letter you wrote to America’s parents, written, it appears, when you were busy hosting visitors from China as your husband celebrated “China’s rise,” and in the aftermath of the terrible shootings in Tucson. Your letter, as you may recall, was written to instruct us parents to be tolerant and to teach tolerance to our children, suggesting that if we had done this, we might have prevented the Tucson shooting.
I know the past few months have been very busy for you, what with entertaining foreign dignitaries, hosting the White House Super Bowl party, taking vacations, traveling across the country for the Tucson memorial/Obama-campaign-launch event, teaching parents to prevent mass murders with tolerance, and gaining access as part of a large group of politicians to the ICU to visit Tucson-shooting victim Congresswoman Giffords. I’m still wondering how a large group of non-family-member politicians gained that access; most hospitals are pretty stringent about ICU patient visitations. I also don’t remember you and your husband being quite so passionate and involved when more than 40 people were shot, 13 murdered, at Fort Hood by a radical religiously-motivated shooter back in November, 2009. But I do remember talk of tolerance; guess we parents didn’t do our job to prevent the tragedy in Tucson.
You, however, do not rest. In your tireless efforts to make us, as your husband described, “better,” you have now taken it upon yourself to help influence and control the portion sizes served by America’s restaurants. I believe I speak for many other American parents, who, like me, eat quite frequently in America’s restaurants and love nothing more than receiving enormous portions of food and bringing enormous boxes of leftovers home afterwards to satisfy the enormous appetites of growing active kids. With all due respect, you need not suggest that we offer them something more in keeping with your list of preferred foods, because what and how we feed our kids is our decision, not yours.
Also our decision, and one of the most personal as a parent, is the decision to breastfeed – another issue you have taken upon yourself to promote. I know it has been years since you were faced with that decision, and I don’t care to know what you decided, but I would imagine you know of women, who, for whatever reason, either could not or would not engage in this activity. What is never addressed in regard to this topic is that it can be far more difficult and far greater a commitment than many women realize. In answer to your related claim that breastfeeding prevents obesity, while plenty of scientific evidence confirms the benefs of breastfeeding on brain development, I have seen nothing linking it to long-term obesity prevention (and I have a feeling you haven’t either).
So with all due respect, Mrs. Obama, as one of the millions of American parents you are addressing en masse with your letters, your speeches and your alleged scientific conclusions, I have done just fine on my own feeding my kids; monitoring their portions of restaurant food; and, as is my right as an American (an American who has always been proud of my country), teaching them the core values of my choice. Indeed I know I speak for myself and millions of other American parents, when I say that we were doing just fine in this mission, long before we ever even heard of you and your husband.
I thus think your time might be better spent, not lecturing American parents on what we must do to ensure our progeny and their beliefs meet your and your husband’s particular expectations, but to concentrate instead on your own daughters. I know nothing about your children (apart from the private information you shared about their BMI scores), and that is how it should be. Your children and their BMI scores are, and should be, no concern of mine, and you, a self-appointed representative of the government, need not bother yourself with concerns about my children, either.
Japan’s Tragedy and Preparing for the Worst
March 26, 2011 | Comments (0)As a veteran of several large earthquakes during my formative years, I have watched with great sorrow the tragedies that have stricken Japan over the past couple of weeks. While my own thoughts mirror those we have heard from all corners in the aftermath of the trauma, the events and the dignity we have witnessed of the victims dealing with those events have gotten me thinking, as they should, about what we can do when and if we find ourselves in the sites of such unexpected danger.
Believer that I am in preparedness, when I lived in earthquake country I was one of the most prepared individuals ever to populate the San Andreas Fault. Outfitted with water, food (for dogs, too), light sources, camping gear, first-aid supplies, radios, tools and enough batteries to power an L.A. high rise for a week — from car to office to home — no earthquake was going to leave me and mine helpless. When I then moved from earthquake country to blizzard country some years back, I simply transferred that mindset to accommodate the new type of threat Mother Nature may decide to send my way.
My long-suffering husband has through the years humored me in my compulsion, and like any decent mother bear, I have schooled my kids in the fine art of preparing for disaster, which has become second nature to them, as well. And indeed my clan has witnessed firsthand the value of my efforts, particularly when we have found ourselves in sub-zero temperatures without heat or light or running water.
I realize that such preparations may be useless in the face of tsunami or nuclear meltdown, and my heart goes out to the thousands of people dealing with such unspeakable tragedy today. But the hard fact of this life is that some catastrophes simply defy preparation or human intervention. Or blame. Preparing for the worst, however, gives us power, and I have found that that with that power comes peace of mind. When you acknowledge that disaster can strike, and you gather the supplies and learn what to do if it does, you become less a victim in both mind and body. So wherever you are, wherever you live, be ready ahead of time for whatever special brand of disaster might occur — earthquakes, hurricanes, brush fires, blizzards, tornadoes, the list goes on. By preparing for disaster, we make our own luck, and perhaps even our own survival, as well.