EUnuchs

It’s sad to watch a big person tormented by a small one who knows intuitively the big guy hasn’t the will to defend himself. The little fiend pours on abuse - verbal insults that escalate into humiliating condemnations. Then he’ll throw things at the big weakling who turns away, unable to make eye contact. Then come painful punches and kicks. Onlookers feel his humiliation and plead with him to defend himself, to use his strength to dispatch his tormenter. They want to do it for him but know they cannot. Something vitally important is lacking in his big body - a pride, a belief in himself that would enable him to fight. They know only he can find it - and if he doesn’t, he won’t survive.

That’s how it feels now watching Iran torment Britain. Fifteen British sailors were seized by Iran and they’re forced to make humiliating televised “confessions.” Iran insists that Blair agree his sailors strayed into Iranian waters - even though they didn’t. Blair has asked the UN Security Council for help. That’s how we know he hasn’t got the guts to stand up to the mullahs.

The UN? Is he kidding? He thinks Iran respects the UN? The sailors were captured because they obeyed UN rules of engagement. They couldn’t shoot unless they were shot at. Ask black Christians in Darfur about UN “help.” Ask the Tutsis in Rwanda. This is the UN whose Human Rights Commission last Friday passed a resolution which “expresses deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations.” Nobody should be hanging by the neck waiting for the UN to rescue him.

Blair is articulate. He might work something out if he weren’t dealing with a government of nut jobs who deny the Holocaust, pledge to wipe Israel off the map, and are waiting for the Twelfth Imam to come out of the Iranian well he’s been living in for thirteen hundred years. They believe that if they create chaos here in earth by making nukes and blowing up Israel with them, the imam will come out of the well and establish 1000 years of peace and justice.

I’m not making this up.

Blair thinks he can negotiate with these people? What’s happened to the Prime Minister who fought alongside the United States after September 11th? If he’d just issue an ultimatum like: “Release the hostages in 48 hours or else,” we could help. But no, he’s putting his tail between his legs and whimpering to the UN. Pathetic.

Whatever Britons there are left who haven’t succumbed to the multiculti emasculators of the European Union (EU) are pining now for the days of Margaret Thatcher - the “Iron Lady.” Thatcher would know what to do with Iran’s theocratic dictators. When Argentinean dictators took over the Falkland Islands, she dispatched a naval task force to the area. When no diplomatic progress was made as the fleet was sailing, there was little doubt what it would do upon arrival.

A generation has passed since Thatcher was in office. Today’s Britons are are so enamored with the EU, they’ve become EUnuchs who, like the UN, are worried about offending Radical Islam much less standing up to it.

For example, London's Daily Mirror reported Monday that:

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government-backed study has revealed. It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades - where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem - because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.

Iran smuggles weapons and terrorists into Iraq to kill British and American soldiers. They’ve set up a proxy army (Hezbollah) to bring down the Lebanese government and attack Israel. Now they’ve kidnapped British sailors and publicly humiliate them every day. The price of oil is going up in anticipation of Britain doing something about it. Iran has threatened to shut down the Strait of Hormuz (entrance to the Persian Gulf) if it’s attacked and the big western countries are afraid to call its bluff. So, the torment continues. For how long? Don’t hold your breath waiting for a respite.

Americans remember when Iran took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The United States was humiliated for a year and a half while President Carter tried to use his big smile to negotiate with the Iranian theocrats - who only released them on the day his successor, Ronald Reagan, was inaugurated. Historians say that was the beginning of our War with Radical Islam.

Something’s lacking in the big western countries like Britain and the United States who represent western civilization itself. Iran and Al Qaeda know it and their torments will only escalate. If we can’t find the will to defend ourselves, if we all become EUnuchs, we won’t survive either.

The Fixer

When something breaks, people expect me to fix it. I’m a father, a husband, a grandfather. I also take care of vacation properties to supplement my teacher salary. To fulfill these roles, I need a workbench with a vise and tools within reach. So, when I built my garage, I put a work area in one corner. If I pull a vehicle in and open the hood, my workbench is right there with lights, a power source and tools. Much of this had been in my basement and there is still a bench down there, but I don’t use it much. It’s hard to lug stuff up and down the stairs and there isn’t as much room to work on large objects as there is in the garage.

There’s one problem though. My garage workbench is right next to the door leading into the house, so when someone comes home with armloads of things, the natural tendency is to set one or more of the loads down on my bench before opening the door. Sometimes they’ll come back and put it where it belongs and sometimes they won’t. Stuff accumulates, covering every square foot of space in a matter of weeks - sometimes only days. So, when I need to work on something, I must first clean off all that stuff before I can set down whatever I’m supposed to fix and examine it.

That’s frustrating. It’s seldom possible to call everyone who put the stuff there and ask them to take it away, so I have to deal with it myself. By the time I’m done, my mood has sometimes soured and I don’t feel like fixing whatever broke.

Some items are things people don’t really want very much, but can’t make the decision to throw away either. So when I ask them to put the things away, they don’t actually have a place. The items haven’t been adopted into the household. They’re kind of a temporary foster things and decisions on their final status have been postponed or forgotten. It falls to me to have to force a resolution. Usually I say something like: “Well put them somewhere, or I’m going to put them in the trash. They don’t belong on my workbench.” In response, I hear a sigh and an “Oh all right,” and some foot stomping while they do it. Those are not the kinds of interactions that engender good will. Though I’d originally set out to do something helpful and nice - to fix something for somebody - it can get unpleasant.

A friend has been remodeling a kitchen and he gave me some old oak wall cabinets. I hung them in the garage and organized a lot of my tools and other stuff and I feel good now. I cleaned off my entire workbench and it looks great. I know where my tools are and there’s a cleared work area on top where I can actually set something down, turn it over and around, disassemble it, and work on it. I don’t know how long it will stay that way, but for the time being, my workbench can be what it was meant to be. I feel powerful - ready to fix whatever should break next. I’m even looking forward to it.

It had been so long since I’d thoroughly cleaned it off, things appeared which I couldn’t identify. They were metal, plastic or polymer and more like pieces of things, but I’ve forgotten what things. I don’t know if they were important things or unimportant things. My wife might have put them there or I might have, but neither of us can remember. Those weighty decisions now fall to me: throw them away only to find out later that they were dreadfully important doodads? I can’t form a committee to decide because I’m all alone, so I put them in an large coffee can labeled UPIPs, or “Unidentified, but Possibly Important Pieces.” I have to save them for five years before I can dispose of them.

Then I realize there are UPIPs on top of my dresser, in the kitchen catchall drawer, on the dashboard of my pickup truck, on the desk in my office at home and on my desk at school. Should I consolidate them all in this one container or leave them where they are? Decisions, decisions. It’s too much to consider all in one weekend. I’ll leave them there for now and figure it out later.

Bong Hits 4 Jesus

When high school student Joseph Frederick unfurled his 14-foot banner declaring: “Bong Hits 4 Jesus,” at a school-sanctioned event in Juneau, Alaska, was he exercising his First Amendment right to free speech? Principal Deborah Morse suspended him. With the help of the ACLU (of course), he sued her in federal district court and lost, but they appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and won. Now the US Supreme Court will make the final decision.

For those who may not know, “bong hits” are inhalations of marijuana smoke from a large pipe called a “bong.” The principal suspended him because of the pro-drug message on his banner, not the insult to Christians. Frederick, now twenty-three years old, claimed in an interview with the Associated Press published last Sunday:

What the banner said was, ‘Look here, I have the right to free speech, and I’m asserting it.’ I wasn’t trying to say anything religious, anything about drugs.

Uh-huh. Did you take any bong hits before your AP interview, Mr. Frederick?

The First Amendment record of the Ninth Circuit (called “The Ninth Circus” by some) is sketchy. Just two weeks ago, it ruled against two Oakland employees in another free speech case. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported it:

The city of Oakland did not violate two employees’ freedom of speech when it removed a flyer they posted promoting the ‘natural family’ after other workers had founded a Gay and Lesbian Employees Association, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The flyer was taken down by supervisors after complaints by lesbian employees. It read:

Good News Employee Association is a forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With respect for the Natural Family, Marriage and Family values. If you would like to be a part of preserving integrity in the Workplace call Regina Rederford @xxx-xxxx or Robin Christy @xxx-xxxx

The two women thought they should have the same free speech rights as gays and lesbians, but US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker dismissed their lawsuit in 2005 and the Ninth Circuit upheld his ruling. Evidently the “Good News Employee’s Association” isn’t protected by the First Amendment because the “Gay and Lesbian Employee’s Association” has special rights under the city’s “anti-discrimination and harassment” statute. When homosexual activists in Maine passed a similar statute last year, they insisted they wanted only equal rights, not special rights. Uh-huh. Tell that to Robin Christy and Regina Rutherford.

One consolation the women might take is that the Ninth Circuit is the most-overruled appeals court in the country. That’s easy to understand when they rule that “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” is protected speech, but “Natural Family” is “hate speech”. I wonder what their ruling would have been if Frederick’s banner read “Bong Hits 4 Muhammad”?

In another student free speech case last April, the Ninth Circuit ruled a student’s rights were not violated when his school gave him an in-school suspension for refusing to take off a T-shirt proclaiming “Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned” and “Homosexuality is Shameful.” He wore it on a day when gay and lesbian students wore T-shirts supporting homosexuality during a school-sanctioned “Day of Silence.” The student asked for a preliminary injunction that would allow him to wear his T-shirt. The Supreme Court heard his case too but dodged a decision, claiming on March 5th that the case was moot since the student had graduated.

In still another student free speech case, the Associated Press reported this month that:

When a few classmates razzed Rebekah Rice about her Mormon upbringing with questions such as, "Do you have 10 moms?" she shot back: "That’s so gay."
Those three words landed the high school freshman in the principal’s office . . . [where she] got a warning and a notation in her file . . . [H]er parents sued, claiming officials at Santa Rosa’s Maria Carillo High violated their daughter’s First Amendment rights when they disciplined her for uttering a phrase that "enjoys widespread currency in youth culture." . . . Testifying last week about the 2002 incident, Rice, now 18, said that when she uttered those words, she was not referring to anyone’s sexual orientation. She said the phrase meant "that’s so stupid, that’s so silly, that’s so dumb."

Her parents contend the school didn’t protect Rebecca from harassment because of her religion, but instead disciplined her for using a word in a way they didn’t like when she defended herself. She could use “gay” to mean “happy” or “homosexual,” but not “stupid, silly, or dumb.” The word is protected, but not Rebecca. Should the “Ninth Circus” ever get this one - and they may since it’s a California case - want to guess how they’ll rule?

The Cult of Gaia

They practice their rituals fervently and insist that everyone believe as they do. They see themselves as morally superior to the rest of us and they pressure government to enact laws that would punish unbelievers. They preach that unless we all do exactly as they say, billions will die and the world will come to an end. In some sects, animals are more sacred than humans. They worship a god they call Gaia (pronounced gi-yuh) and they won’t rest until they impose their beliefs on everyone.

Recycling is their most sacred rite. Bicycling and composting are also paths to holiness. They evangelize the world claiming that if everyone recycles and makes compost piles, Gaia will be pleased. Anyone who mentions studies showing that recycling uses more energy than it saves commits blasphemy. Such sacrilege so outrages the Cult of Gaia, members binge on organic vegetables and Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch until their inner turmoil diminishes. Lately, their fire-and-brimstone preaching about the “End Times” of global warming is gaining disciples across the globe. According to my local paper, The Conway Daily Sun Saturday, two-thirds of New Hampshire towns have articles on their warrants for spring town meeting demanding that state and national governments do something about global warming.

Even the conservative DRUDGE REPORT carried the blaring headline: “REPORT WARNS OF COMING CHAOS” last Sunday. Clicking on it took me to an Associated Press report declaring:

The harmful effects of global warming on daily life are already showing up, and within a couple of decades hundreds of millions of people won’t have enough water . . . At the same time, tens of millions of others will be flooded out of their homes each year as the Earth reels from rising temperatures and sea levels . . .

Also forecast were malaria epidemics and killer hurricanes. Right above that story were Google-sponsored links claiming:

Truth of Global Warming - How to Avoid The Extinction of Man - A Survival Wake Up Call! savethehumansnow.org

The Coming World War - Find out what Nostradamus says about the years 2007 - 2012. NostradamusOnline.com.

Droughts and floods aren’t bad enough? We have to endure malaria epidemics, killer hurricanes and a world war at the same time? This is serious. Gaia must be really pissed.

A headline in Saturday’s London Times declared:

Europe goes nuclear in battle to save the planet.” Europeans have converted to the Gaia Mother Earth Cult too and they’re among its most fervent disciples. According to another weekend story from UPI, Czech President Vaclav Klaus declared that “Environmentalism is a religion" that seeks to reorganize the world order as well as social behavior and value systems worldwide.

Klaus’s observation fits with what I’m seeing where I live in New England and around the United States. Oregon’s governor threatened to fire the state climatologist for the blasphemy of doubting human behavior is the cause of global warming. Delaware’s climatologist faces Inquisition for a similar offense. Virginia’s former climatologist published a book about “expensive [global warming] policies that are likely to have little or no detectable effect on the planet's temperature.” Notice he’s now the former state climatologist.

The Sunday Telegraph reported that other blasphemous climatologists are threatened with death:

Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community. They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions. Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change . . . [Ball]claimed the theory of man-made global warming had become a "religion" forcing alternative explanations to be ignored.

Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on doors telling people to prepare for the “End Times.” They believe in their religion as much as Gaians do, but they don’t impose their views on us. They treat people who don’t believe as they do with respect. Periodically, they go up on a mountaintop somewhere when they think the world will end, and when it doesn’t they go back down and check over their theological calculations. They don’t insist on restrictive government measures that would shut down our economy as the Cult of Gaia does.

The historical record indicates wild climate swings here in what is now New England, and nearly everywhere else on earth as well. On Vermont mountain tops you can find fossil shells from tropical seas alongside bedrock scrapes from glaciers more than a mile thick. There’s coal from tropical rain forests in Antarctica. The whole planet saw extreme climate swings countless times before humans ever existed. None of that matters to the Cult of Gaia though. They still insist that strictly-enforced practice of their religious rites will stabilize our climate in its present state forever.

Perhaps they also believe we increase sunlight by setting our clocks ahead.

The Right Choice

More than six years after their oh-so-close election fight, Bush and Gore are still in the news. Gore got an Academy Award and was the darling of Hollywood. Bush got his usual hammering. You know the drill: He’s a moron, warmonger, liar. As dozens scramble to replace him, our president’s foibles are out there. I don’t see him as a moron, a liar, or a warmonger, but many of his policies are way off. Twice I voted for him, however, and would again given the same choices.

Mr. President? Here’s where you’ve messed up so far:

You’re wrong on government spending first and foremost. There’s very little government can do for people that they wouldn’t be better off doing for themselves.

You’re wrong on the prescription drug benefit. We simply cannot afford it.

You’re wrong on aid to agribusiness and small farmers. Let farmers sink or swim on their own like everyone else.

You’re wrong on aid to education. The federal government should not be in the education business except for perhaps one function: Design a test to measure what every student should know and be able to do in each grade, K-12. Don’t require that every student take it; just put it out there so everyone knows about it. If states or local districts really want to see how their students measure up, they’ll use it. If they don’t, they won’t. Government can’t make schools improve. Only the communities in which those schools exist can do that.

You’re wrong on illegal immigration. What part of the word “illegal” don’t you understand? Look at the map. Borders define our country. If we don’t control them, we won’t be a country. Legal immigrants are fine and they’re the only ones who should be here. Deport the rest. All of them.

You’re wrong on the war: You’re not aggressive enough. Reread your speeches from the fall of 2001. The “Bush Doctrine” was right on the money. “If you support terrorism, we’re coming after you,” you said. Iran and Syria are supporting terrorism and you’re not going after them.

Other than those things, I’m with you, and I know you’re not as dumb as you look sometimes. Meanwhile, you can take some consolation knowing your opponents in 2000 and 2004 are making asses of themselves. Next to them, you still look good. Kerry dropped out the 2008 race because people got to know him and they don’t like him. Even though he called you dumb, your GPA at Yale was higher than his. He still thinks he’s a genius though and that irritates people. Those remarks about our soldiers being “stuck in Iraq” because they didn’t do well in school? Dumb. Very dumb.

Then we have Al “Save the World” Gore. He’s telling us all to ride bikes and cut down on electricity while just one of his mansions uses more than twenty times what an average American home does, and he has three of them. Meanwhile, your ranch in Crawford is an ecological wonder compared to Gore’s Nashville home. According to a 2001 article in the Chicago Tribune:

[Bush’s] 4,000-square-foot house is a model of environmental rectitude. Geothermal heat pumps located in a central closet circulate water through pipes buried 300 feet deep in the ground where the temperature is a constant 67 degrees; the water heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. Systems such as the one in this ‘eco-friendly’ dwelling use about 25% of the electricity that traditional heating and cooling systems utilize. A 25,000-gallon underground cistern collects rainwater gathered from roof runs; wastewater from sinks, toilets and showers goes into underground purifying tanks and is also funneled into the cistern. The water from the cistern is used to irrigate the landscaping surrounding the four-bedroom home. Plants and flowers native to the high prairie area blend the structure into the surrounding ecosystem.

In a free society, hypocrites like Gore get smoked out eventually.

When Bush won the 2000 election, I was at a directors’ meeting of an education-reform group called “The Southern Maine Partnership” at a fancy restaurant in Portland. I was the only person there who voted for him. The others were depressed as they speculated, ominously, that Bush would advocate vouchers in public education - checks to parents for about half the amount it would cost to educate students for a year in public school. Parents could use vouchers for private school tuition.

“I think vouchers are a good idea,” I said. There was silence as everyone looked at me incredulously. “Gore sent his kids to private schools but he’s against vouchers that would enable others to do the same thing. Meanwhile, Bush sent his kids to public schools but he supports vouchers that would allow many more parents to make the same choice Gore did. Bush is pro-choice on education and so am I.” My term on the board ran out shortly after that and I wasn’t invited back.

My votes in 2000 and 2004 don’t keep me up nights. President Gore? President Kerry? Now those are scary thoughts.

Power of History

History has power, whether it’s factual or in a distorted form. It can be a positive force or a negative one. Those who distort history seek power as shown in two recent examples: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims the Holocaust never happened. The late Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat claimed there never was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem built by Solomon or by Herod. Many Muslims are taught this kind of history across the Middle East and believe it. Consequently, they see Israelis as evil invaders with no right to exist. For them, such distortions justify “wiping Israel off the map” as Ahmadinejad and Arab leaders threaten. Palestinians have already done so literally - the maps used by Palestinian schoolchildren do not depict the state of Israel - only Palestine. In these two cases, rewriting history would seem preliminary to perpetrating a second Holocaust.

Israel exists today because one of the first acts of the newly-created United Nations was to recognize Israel as a country in 1948. The western world felt pity for Jews because of what Nazis did to them. An ancient people, Jews had lived in what is now Israel for more than a thousand years before being dispersed around the world in the Great Diaspora after rebelling against the Roman Empire. It was Rome that destroyed the second Temple built by King Herod. Although a small number of Jews remained in the Holy Land after the Diaspora, most endured as residents of other countries - where they suffered countless persecutions for two more millennia. Some Jews became Zionists around the beginning of the 20th century and returned to their ancestral homeland in relatively small numbers. After World War II this trickle became a flood and the new Israel became a reality.

Dore Gold was Israel’s UN Ambassador from 1997-99. In an interview about his recent book, “The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City” he said, “I felt it was necessary to respond to the charges that Yassir Arafat made at the end of the Camp David summit in July 2000 that denied the core of our Judeo-Christian heritage. As you might remember he tried to assert that there never had been a Temple in Jerusalem. But what he essentially did was to throw a stone of historical lies into a lake and its ripples spread all over the Middle East.”

If Palestinian Arabs can be convinced that the Nation of Israel was foisted upon them out the blue by western countries acting through the United Nations, they can be convinced that their suicide-bomber sons who kill Israelis are heroes who will enjoy their virgins in Paradise. If other Arab Muslims can be convinced that their socioeconomic backwardness is a result of historical western oppression, recruitment of suicide-bombers and other terrorists to kill Jews and Americans will be much easier. That’s power gained through both selective history and distorted interpretations of history.

Soviet schoolchildren were taught that Russians invented the light bulb, the radio, the television, and many other things actually invented in the west. Soviet citizens grew up believing communism wonderful, capitalism evil, and that communism would eventually spread over the whole world. Thus they were willing to make whatever sacrifices were necessary to accomplish it. That’s power gained in the same way - distorting history.

Other people selectively interpret history to justify their inertia in the present. Some of my Irish ancestors were accustomed to blaming British oppression for whatever miserable circumstances in which they found themselves. The British certainly did oppress the Irish for centuries, but even though Britain’s domination had been over for generations, many Irish held on to it as an excuse for their largely self-induced misery.

Once I wrote a column urging Mainers to vote “No” on a referendum question that would have allowed Indians to open casinos in this state as they have in so many others. I questioned the status of Indians as citizens with different rights other Americans and whether that was justified. In that context I acknowledged that many Indian tribes suffered savage oppression at the hands of some European countries. However, I also pointed out that many Indian tribes had perpetrated similarly savage oppression against one another before the Spanish, French, English or Portuguese ever arrived in the Americas. Europeans had treated each other savagely at various times also and nobody has a monopoly on suffering. History shows us that very few escape.
Citing such politically incorrect aspects of history stirred up a hornet’s nest as Indians from around the country flooded my principal, my superintendent, my school board, and my state teacher certification office with angry letters, phone calls and emails declaring me unfit to teach. Clearly, a lot of Indians cherished their victim status even more than the Irish did, and they weren’t going to tolerate alternative viewpoints from this columnist. I even got a telephoned death threat.

History has power however it’s used, and pointing out its misuse as I did can be a very unpopular - even risky - undertaking. Still, it must be done. Now, about those "Bones of Jesus," . . .

The Middle School Shuffle

They shuffle along, their heels dragging with each step, making a statement. It says to those who watch and listen that they don’t care much where they’re going and they’re not in a hurry to get there either. They re-laced their sneakers, not in the typical crisscross pattern you see out of the box, but in a horizontal, parallel pattern. After putting the sneakers on, they don’t pull the laces tight. The result is loose-fitting footwear, the heel of which thumps the floor as they walk - the middle school shuffle. Those who consider themselves coolest do it, but if patterns of past fads hold, soon nearly all will.

It’s another way for an adolescent to attract attention that can be seen and heard. It’s a display of purposeful slovenliness or studied carelessness, and it’s arriving just as the low-riding pants with exposed boxers craze is fading away. It is similar, however. Practitioners of either fad take great pains to appear as if they don’t care how they look - as though they can’t be bothered to pull up their pants or tie their sneakers - as if such mundane considerations are beneath them. Thankfully though, the shufflers who try very hard to appear lazy are not all lazy students. Some are, but the fad crosses the entire spectrum from lazy to diligent - so far at least.

Over my three decades in public education, I’ve seen a lot of fads come and go, way too many to list. Once it was friendship bracelets - a kind of miniature macramé of colored strands or strung beads tied around wrists or ankles. They were harmless and kind of nice actually, in that the bracelets were meant to proclaim a camaraderie or one kind or another. Then there were stickers - shiny and colorful and depicting almost anything. More recently, there were - I don’t know what to call them - key chain-like things hanging from numerous zippers on the backpack every student lugs around. As they walked down halls on the way to homerooms in the morning or to their busses at afternoon dismissal, there was a cacophony of key chain doodads banging into each other as they swung back and forth. It was like the shuffle in that it called attention through sight and sound.

Hairstyle changes over the decades are too numerous to chronicle here. I can’t think of anything that can be done to hair that hasn’t been on display. Piercings, too, appeared in many variations, however not so many as in the wider world, thank goodness. As a boy reading National Geographic, I was appalled by the ways people in primitive societies mutilated their bodies according to local fashions. There were pictures of people who forced wooden disks into slits cut in their lips to stretch them out so they could put in bigger and bigger disks. They attached weights to their ear lobes to stretch them down so much that eventually they flopped onto their shoulders. They stuck things through their nostrils and carved patterns into the skin of their faces, backs, abdomens, and God knows where else. All of it was bizarre to my young eyes, but practitioners stared boldly into the camera lens as if proud of how they looked. I asked my parents why anyone could choose to look that way. They laughed of course, and told me that different people had different ideas of what was attractive. I believed they were answering me truthfully but it was hard to accept. It still is.

Primitive piercings started years ago in middle school when girls made numerous holes along the edges of their ears and filled them with metal. Then some boys wore earrings. Then metal began appearing on nostrils, lips and eyebrows. Most often, a student would come in on Monday morning with something stuck in his or her face, the surrounding flesh looking puffy and red. When I had occasion to speak with the student and make eye contact, a troubled self-consciousness was obvious. I’d avoid looking directly at the wound, but there was an unspoken awareness in both of us that it was there. Not one ever asked, “How do you like my new nose ring?” and I never asked, “What they heck did you do that for?” Mutual courtesy, I guess.

Outside of school I’m seeing more bizarre body mutilations on people here in the rural western Maine mountains as our civilization regresses toward the primitive. I see the ear stretcher things and the lip stretcher things I thought were so bizarre forty years ago in National Geographic. Hopefully I’ll be retired before they start showing up on the fourteen-year-old bodies of my students. Meanwhile, I’ll tolerate the middle school shuffle as long as it lasts.