Something in the water?
Interesting article over at The New Republic. Heres an exerpt:
A typical take on race has no room for stories such as this one. In 1987, a rich philanthropist in Philadelphia “adopted” 112 inner-city sixth-graders, most of them from broken homes. He guaranteed them a fully-funded education through college if the kids would refrain from drugs, unwed parenthood, and crime. He even provided tutors, workshops, after-school programs, summer programs, and counselors when trouble arose. Forty-five of the kids never made it through high school. Thirteen years later, of the sixty-seven boys, nineteen were felons; the forty-five girls had sixty-three total children, and more than half had their babies before the age of eighteen. Crucially, this was not surprising: The reason was culture. These children had been nurtured in communities with different norms than those that reign in Scarsdale.
Read the rest if you want here:http://www.tnr.com/book/review/what-hope
OK OK,This isnt really relevent to dirtbag swimming coaches but I aint gots me no website.Rich, you want to post, go ahead and post. Easier if you write it up first, then email me or Peiper and we’ll glue it in. but this kind of heads up is Ok too.
Funny, I know Scarsdale. Guess the “damage” was done by the time the kids were 12, huh?
I get it,,Copy,Past and Glue. Very funny Drewmeister.Like the good old days of 2nd grade art class.
2nd grade art class or the professional newsroom. Copy and paste are standard terms even for the PC. Even this blog engine has the ability to make any given post “sticky”; that’s the name of an actual attribute each post has. I think these are all old newspaper terms, when the pages were designed using mucilage and scissors.
I always suspected a few things… Years ago I did some freelance design work for a certain national swimming association based here in Florida and the two guys who ran it refused to hire anyone except well-stacked blondes. Looking around the office was actually kinda creepy in a harem sort of way....
Posted by TimO
08/13/2010 at 07:19 AM
I, who am slowly no longer trusting many people anymore, find it highly suspicious that, as pointed out, nothing is said/sued until after the competitive years are gone. I suspect either a person who cannot accept the failure/nothingness of every day life or a sick therapist who believes ‘someone is always to blame’ for our personal failures, combined with lawyers who have turned life into a Legal Lottery for which they are handsomely rewarded.
My sister has had a charmed life - 3 years through U of MN (fully paid for) with a double major (English Literature and Russian Literature) and a minor in History, played the harp with 3 city symphonies (that I know of) and Harvard paid (they did not admit women then) for her Masters (Library Science) which she did at the Smithsonian. . .And she has spent her adult life scamming welfare (so I am told) blaming my Mom for something that happened in the late 40s/early 50s. So now dealing with other family members, I’m getting all the pieces for the story - incident wasn’t life changing (not rape - if it even happened at all) and what my parents did at the time - was more than most parents would do today. But still for decades, she blamed my Mom. But one day, a cousin took her out to lunch, listened to the same old story and looked at her and said - Where was Uncle Bill, where were your brother and sister, your grandparents - met with dead silence - for the first time in her life, someone actually pointed out that the entire family lived within a very few miles of each other and most of them saw each other daily - so how does she make this whole incident about her and Mom? I’ve not heard a single word about her ‘craziness’ since then and she doesn’t come after any of us anymore - she knows we are on to her ‘pity me’ scheme.
I think that those people who actually get to adulthood without a major personal/family trauma are rare and the most blessed - for the rest, it is just life (made worse and more common today with the lack of God in so many people) and you face it, deal with it, and truck on. I can’t imagine what a few zillion would do to ease the pain of something done decades ago - heck I did not even file charges - as I did not want another single human being to know what was done to me. But back in the day, I’d just put him in jail for life - there was no Legal Lottery like there is today. Oh and guess what, I managed very well to have a life ever since.
But that was one of the things that bothered me while working in the Mental Hospital - why some people get stuck in one moment of their life and why others don’t. And the hopeless therein is what drove me away from that line of work.
Wardmama, you wrote us a 2 or 3 part life story a few years ago that was cathartic for you and very involving for us. If you feel the need to type out another chapter, that’s fine. I’ll even put it up as it’s own post if you’d like.
Yes, all of us are wounded by life, all of seek different ways to heal those wounds. And nobody can push your buttons better than the people that installed them: family.
