There is a wise and peaceful person I want to be, but sometimes I do feel violence rising in my blood. My blood sometimes does reach that boiling point where I can feel like I could punch someone. When I see a big person picking on someone too small to fight back, like a child, whether verbally or physically, I am occasionally guilty of wanting a good fight with them. I am a small woman, but still bigger than the child who is being dumped on.

The other day I was sitting at a fast food place having unhealthy-but-fun-to-eat-burgers with my son, when I heard a father arguing with a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, and wasn’t even a third of the man’s height. I love a good verbal argument, especially when it utilizes and promotes the practicing and development of one’s mental faculties and everyone involved comes out of it a bit more intelligent or with a more complex views on things. A good debate is a fantastic opportunity to have your paradigms shifted in a positive direction. This argument was not a positive argument.

They were arguing about the existence of dollar burgers at another location that apparently did not exist at the location where we were eating. It appeared that the father was resentful at having to spend 15 cents more since at this particular restaurant the cheapest burger was $1.15. The boy kept saying that he didn’t see a dollar menu at the other place, and that’s why he came here. The word “argument” might be too generous a word to apply to this verbal interaction, since the man had most and loudest input, and when the man was done, he concluded this mostly one sided argument with one piece of verbal vomit.

“You are a dumb shit.”

What got to me more was what ended up happening to the boy as a result of my reaction. I was so shocked that I turned my head and looked at the boy. My reaction got the boy to look over at me, which would have been fine if I hadn’t seen him fill up with shame. He was embarrassed because he knew that I heard his dad.
I could tell how he felt and I wished to god that I could say, “no, no, it isn’t you, you should not be feeling embarrassed. You are not a dumb shit and your dad is the jerk; he is the dumb shit for calling his son that. No father or no mother should say such a thing. In fact, no adult should ever say such things to children ever!”

But I couldn’t and I didn’t.
I hated that man for that.

I believe education is the greatest equalizer; I believe education can take a child of poverty and elevate him or her to a financial standing that is far superior to his or her parents, where he or she came from, etc… but before any of that can happen, the child has to be able to have the self-confidence and self-value to study or to feel that his own self is worthwhile enough to invest his or her time in…

If it takes that, what can we expect from a child who has been put down and told that he is a dumb shit? A child like the boy that I saw at the restaurant has most likely been exposed to and been living under such derailment of his self-esteem and his right to self efficacy through out his entire life… what chance does that boy have to do well in school, to do well in life, or to feel sense of self, when he only knows about a world in which the people who are supposed to love and cherish him tell him that he is a “dumb shit”?
There really ought to be some sort of counseling program that parents-to-be are all required to go through before becoming parents, where the parents-to-be get an opportunity to work through their issues and gain helpful parenting skills that do more than warn them of all the pot holes of being parents, but empower them with real knowledge about children, how to parent in positive settings, etc… Parents seem to need to be told that children are naturally good.

When children behave badly, it is the adults around them helping to produce bad behaviors… Parents-to-be ought to be taught that it is never too late to bring about positive attributes from children, and to help them to become the loving and happy adults that we are all meant to become in the first place.

When I was in fourth grade, my classmates and I were the world’s best students and the world’s worst students, and we changed from one to the other almost instantly as one set of feet left our classroom and one entered in. Just like that. Just that quick.

The last time we saw Mrs. Chong, she was busy telling us how much she would miss us over winter break; we all knew that we would miss her quite badly, and looked forward to the spring semester when we could all sit by her feet again and listen to her many tales of the ancient pasts, stories, and histories woven perfectly for our ears and our hearts.

I had a fresh egg that I snuck from my family chicken coup, holding it as carefully as I could in my hands cupped over my lap while anticipating her arrival. I hoped to hand it to my dear teacher before the girl sitting at the other end of the room gave her hers. Our eggs seemed to smooth out her fragile voice that often cracked, interrupting her stories that took us to all kinds of fascinating places. The door opened and a set of feet, carrying with them an alien, a squared faced fat cheeked man who appeared to know how to look at us while not looking at us, charged in to our room.

We were perplexed, to say the least, by our beloved teacher’s sudden disappearance from our lives, but that was not the most perplexing part. The most perplexing part about that terrible and sad event was that we turned into the most trouble making students, it appeared, almost over night, for we were, it seemed almost daily, lined up to be punished for our bad behaviors and our mistakes.

Mrs. Chong was the most beautiful angel that I had ever met. I can honestly say that I have not met her match to this day. She spoke gently at all times, sometimes losing her voice due to her old age; those of us with chicken coups in our homes took turns bringing her fresh eggs that she could drink so that her voice would work. She was one of the oldest teachers in our school. Amongst her many wonderful stories, one that stood out most in my mind was the one that she told us in response to one of us asking her why she walked with a limp and a cane.

She told us a story unlike her usual stories that lifted our hearts and spirits, she told us of a day when she was only a little girl. She remembered on this particular day everyone in her family gathered in her house as if they were hiding from something scary. Her mom then took my teacher outside, helped her climb up in a tree with the instruction to climb higher and made her promise to stay up there no matter what was happening in the house or in the yard. She obeyed her mom and stayed hidden in the tree. She saw occupying soldiers arrive, take everyone out to the yard, and shoot them. Everyone. She saw the soldiers eventually leave but wasn’t sure when she should come back down so she stayed up in the tree. She later fell asleep and fell out of the tree. She told us students that during that time her family was considered one of the most educated and influential families, so the solders were ordered to kill everyone in her family. She was the only one left. When she grew up she dedicated her life to education of the her people and became a teacher.

I remember how much I loved her many stories, but I cannot remember any of them as vividly as I remember the terrible story about how she broke her leg and watched her entire family killed in front of a firing squad.

I don’t remember the shape or any of the details of her face, though I wish I could. I do remember clearly what I felt about her in my heart. I looked forward to seeing her every morning with excitement, and even today I know that every one of my classmates also shared the same thoughts and feelings about her.

It would be no surprise to anyone that my classmates and I were crushed, broken hearted, and disheartened to lose someone like her with no explanation as to why she stopped being our teacher. We were then further disheartened to see a man with large squared fat cheeks walk in and take over Mrs. Chong’s desk. She herself never seemed to sit at her desk but often sat down on a little table close to us, as if wanting to be as close to us as she possibly could.

The man, whose name I don’t remember, sat down and spent the next what-seemed-to-be-forever going through the drawer, getting everything out, emptying them, then pulling things out of his stiff leather brief case and carefully organizing the drawer.

He finally opened his mouth and spoke.

Before he spoke, he pulled out a wooden ruller in a deliberately slow gesture and placed it in front of him. His words were stone heavy, though they seemed to reverberate through out the room and into our ears. We were told rule after rule, and when he was finally done, he lifted the ruller and demonstrated to us how he would snap it on our cheeks if we broke any one of his many rules. I was so scared, as I was sure I had forgotten everyone one of the new rules already; I looked around the room and found, on my classmates faces, the fear that was in my heart.

The perplexing part of all of this was that we, each one of us fourth graders in my class, went from being the best kids there ever could have been to the worst kids there ever were. My whole class slowly learned, as we were being lined up to get our faces slapped with his ruler, that we were all bad children.

That first semester with Mrs. Chong escaped us very quickly for all that we could see was that we were dumb, in addition to bad, because we could not catch up with all of the new fat-square-faced teacher’s rules. We just kept breaking them and getting punished. It was a hell that we couldn’t figure our way around or through. We dreaded every day of the rest of that year. Memories of our teacher who loved us slipped from us, we were busy attempting to survive and failing desperately at being good to remember them. We just couldn’t figure out how.

Looking back now as an adult, I have a better understanding of what happened. We children hadn’t changed. Our first teacher, Mrs. Chong, brought the best out of us, and our second teacher brought out the worst.

Now that my childhood is long behind me, and the dust of the squared-faced man’s ruller has settled, Mrs. Chong is the teacher that I hold dear in my heart, what she was, what she represented, and how she made me feel are impossible for me to forget. She has remained the role model of what and who a teacher is supposed to be for me. Though I lost her from my life too quickly, she was able to impart part of who she was as a teacher with me. I believe I am very lucky to have had her in my life even if our time together was just too short. She allowed the horrible event of her life inspire her to become a passionate educator and she has inspired me to do something very similar with the terrible events of my life.

A good teacher once said that students cannot know the true joy of learning until they have worked as hard as they can. I’d like to explore now why this may be true…

Let’s first define for ourselves what “working hard” in school might mean.
Working hard in school means…

• Working in a regular and consistent manner – the advantage of this would be that more in depth and long term learning would occur. Exams would be easier to take and cramming would be unnecessary(cramming most often does not result in helping a student do well on their exams anyway, and of course, cramming does not result in quality learning).

• Consciously learning to focus one’s attention as fully as one can and mindfully learning, the almost meditative practice of learning to focus one’s mind on the topic at hand.

• Fulfilling one’s responsibility of doing all of his or her assigned work and more to create a greater learning experience, as well as learning what it means to be “responsible” for one’s duties/agreement/commitments.

The positive consequence of working hard then is not only getting good grades, but also gaining the hard working habits it would take to help students prepare themselves for a life that is easily productive and easily successful. Working mindfully and regularly to attain sets of knowledge should also help students get ahead in life, though financial success is not the only benefit of working hard. Knowing how to work hard and knowing how to exert oneself in life can bring a sense of self-fulfillment that cannot be experienced otherwise. The value of our children learning how to work hard in school and gaining that habit for their education and their future lives is invaluable, to say the least.

Motherhood and fatherhood come with weighty responsibility.

For now, I am going to focus on the mother, one half of the important force in a child’s life.  Furthermore I want to talk about the mother who gets to be capable and has been allowed to become a good mother.

Well… who is this good mother?  What kind of a person is she?  What human quality does she possess?   How strong is she so that she can help her children become self-confident and emotionally intelligent people?…

Would you say that… this woman should have a good sense of herself, strong capacity to love, and a deep level of intellectual curiosity, etc.?

While no one is perfect, those characteristics that are mentioned above, a good sense of herself, strong capacity to love, and deep level of intellectual curiosity will definitely be helpful attributes to have if she is to become a good parent.

So… how do we bring up women with those above qualities?  To answer that question better, we need to go a little backwards and discuss what kind of an environment this future good mother must have had.

To allow a female to grow up to be that emotionally strong and intellectually developed woman, we must provide a supportive environment for her.  We must reveal to her or allow her to discover that she is intelligent, strong, and infinitely capable of just about anything that she puts her mind to.  She must be allowed to grow to her full strength as a human being!  Make sense, right?  If you agree, take a mind walk with me just a little bit further.  I have something that I would like to discuss with you as we walk…

Let me now flash backwards in my life a week or so to reveal to you why I am writing this piece in the first place.

At the top of the ninth inning of a Giants home opener game, a portly porkish man with a square-ish head, standing, experiencing too much thought in his unhappy little square-ish head with the umpire’s call, began a string of verbal attacks at a Braves hitter, which went something like, “get up, pick up the bat, don’t be a wuss, it didn’t hurt,” and as if that wasn’t enough he pushed out of his mouth a louder, “don’t be a little girl!”

The guy was almost indescribably obnoxious in his mannerism and voice while he said the words, “don’t be a little girl”   But those words are not always said by indescribably obnoxious drunken idiot of a man like him; those words are said by many normal men and even by some women, and this is what concerns me much more than some indescribably obnoxious people.

Since this particular moment with this man, the indescribably obnoxious man who had said “don’t be a little girl,” I have been hearing men who are not so obnoxious as that drunken man repeat his words.  I have been witnessing normal average Joes saying it.

Just the other day, I heard John Oliver, a comedian that I like very much, who is definitely not a redneck ignoramus, say it.  Right after revealing that the British now have a more sophisticated technology that aides commentary discussing the British elections, to a very impressed looking Jon Stewart (representing the USA), John Oliver said, “yeah, little girl,” (speaking for Britain.)

No matter how different all these people may be from each other, there is one belief system that they all have; when they say, “don’t be a little girl” they are saying, don’t be weak.

Let’s explore possible ways that this can be unhealthy for the females of our lives, and in turn, the lives of all people involved.

When a little girl hears those words, “don’t be a little girl,” she hears that being a little girl represents something that one doesn’t want to be.  Being a little girl means being shamefully weak and perhaps even cowardly.

When this is said so often and so easily, with such certainly of its truth that being a little girl means that one is weak, there have to be consequences on the deep unconscious of the female hearing it.

Could this type of treatment of females identity why so many intelligent females put up with bad and unhealthy relationships with men?  Could it be that many females at some deep subconscious level believe they are inherently weak, and that they need a man to complete them, no matter at what cost?  If females are the ultimate symbol of weakness, how can they expect to be anything of real substance?

I can hear arguments against this going as follows: “but many females manage to be successful and strong and all of those things…” yes, that is true… could it be that it isn’t that these treatments do not affect females, but despite those effects, some of them still rise and the rest have hard time rising from under such weight of emotional put downs and never fully grow?  Consider smoking; smoking doesn’t cause cancer in all people but we know that smoking does cause cancer in most.

If continuing the habit of using the phrase “don’t be a little girl” meaning, “don’t be weak” may hurt most females of our generation, we should examine how this also may  affect the males of today and of the future.   As Mary Wollstonecraft argued once: better education and better treatment of females is needed if we want to protect the potential of the human race.  She was saying to everyone that these females whose emotional and intellectual well-being are being put in harms way will grow up to be poor mothers to all, to men and women.

It is just too easy to find examples of the emotionally, intellectually and spiritually stunted women in our generation.   I am proposing that we at least give it some thought as to what we are saying to and around our little girls.  I am proposing that we give our girls a full and fair chance to grow up to be as strong as any human being has potential to become.  I am proposing that we do not use the word “little girls” to symbolize the state that is the weakest of the weakest.  I propose that being a little girl is not something to be ashamed of.  I am asking that we allow our little girls to grow up to realize their full selves, what ever that may be.  I would like to suggest that that world, a world that had honored a full growth of the females, would be a very nice place to be for us all.

I love Robert Wright’s “None Zero Sum Game” concept.  Being an English major, I love words and terms… I like the sound of the phrase itself.  Still…I cannot avoid seeing the logic behind the ideal that it is for self preservation that we should/must work to gain deeper understanding of cultures that hate us, for when we do, we can figure out how to get them to not hate us.

I am thinking that this concept can also apply to personal relationships.

Here is what I mean…

It is all so easy and habitually natural at the least, to hold to resentment, to regurgitate the experiences of victimization and sometimes to expand the negative experience in our minds to further the need for anger and hate.

It is also just as easy to find flaw in others and replay those aspects both externally and internally to feed some sense of insecurity in our own selves.  Doing such a thing can make us feel good if only temporarily.  But lets be fair and discuss what this “good” feeling is.  It is not a true “good” emotion.  What I mean to say by this is that true good should last, when it comes to our emotional state, but the good feelings, the temporary feeling of superiority over others, does not give us long term good feelings.  Equivalent to doing drugs, we have to do it again to gain that good feeling.  And like drugs, possesing ill feelings toward others tears away the good nutrients from our hearts, souls and I propose, even from our physical bodies.

Why am I talking about this you may be asking?
I am talking about this because I have been in a long term discussion, more like an argument with my extremely articulate and highly intelligent twenty year old son.

I have been on a crusade.

My crusade has been to convince him of just that concept.. to attempt to understand some of those difficult people around him.  The reason why I use the term “crusade” is because I am really good at preaching when I feel that someone is being wrong, especially when it is my own son who I expect to be as good as God(I am agnostic by the way so I am not sure of the consequence of this word that I am using with little remorse).

But here is what I realized… just recently… and have been thinking about it…
I too do exactly the same thing that my son has been doing, what I have been trying to talk him out of…

I too often am unwilling to forgive or even just to move on.  In my heart, I designate, those who are good people vs. those who are bad.  Of course I would never admit that I do such a simplistic a thing, but really in the end, that is what my thinking or my judgment ends up amounting to.
Of course I could not guide him to think differently about these people.  I have showed him for the first twenty years of his life, how to hold a grudge, to judge, to shun those who hurt me, insult me, etc… much more often than attempting a deeper understanding, having compassion, love, etc…

It is not easy being  a parent, if one wants to be truly effective.  Sometimes, teaching or guiding is not about talking it but living it.  It takes a long time.

So here I am… from today forward, I will have to try my hat at deeper forgiveness, compassion, better understanding of those who hurt me or are difficult, or are prejudiced, etc.  As I write it, I am uncertain how easy it will be for me.  And that gives me the clue as to how hard it must be for my son.

I agree whole heartedly with Wright, that it is for self preservation that we must understand others and grow our morals.  If I want my son to honestly be happy, then I must teach him how to be truly compassionate and truly empathetic.  And to do so, I must be truly compassionate and truly empathetic.  I have hard work ahead… but a great writer once said, “We can do hard.”  I say, we must.

I enjoyed watching this with my son.