Trying to get an understanding of things while avoiding overblown and complex prose. Throw in a rant now and then. Throw in some fun stuff too. Click on the Archives on the right side to see it all. Click on pix to enlarge.
I also have a picture blog at http://bill454.tumblr.com/ which is pix found on the web I liked.
Story in our local paper inflames lefties. Excerpt:
"Officials from the national chapter of Kappa Delta sorority are investigating a report that the Bloomington chapter of the sorority house participated in a themed event that demeaned the homeless this week.
Heidi Roy, director of communications for Kappa Delta sorority’s national headquarters in Memphis, Tenn., issued a response on Friday to the “cultural insensitivity” of members of its Sigma Upsilon chapter at Indiana University.
“National and local leaders of Kappa Delta sorority were recently made aware of an inappropriate event theme that perpetuated insensitivity toward the homeless community. Kappa Delta does not condone these actions or any language that demeans an individual or group. We continue to investigate and will respond accordingly,” Roy stated in a news release."
Here is my sampling of comments by readers on this story today:
I never did care for sororities or fraternities, so I'm really
not surprised at anything they do. These girls are ignorant, self-absorbed
infants.
the Greek system loves to collect for national charities, but
wouldn't raise a hand to help local homeless folks. Guess adults who are down
and out aren't as glamorous as kids with cancer at Riley
It's easy mocking and deriding other human beings while tucked
away in ivory towers, but none of these little fascists would dare go down to
shalom center with that crap, nor would any punk-a$$ white boy go to the hood
and act like a jackass...if they did, they'd get a large dose of reality that
conflicted with what they've been programmed to believe.
wonder if the girls see the irony; they are poking fun at the
unemployed who use cardboard signs to solicit handouts from strangers.
Unemployed sorority members use their cell phones to solicit handouts from
Mommy & Daddy.
Typical that conservatives would show up in support of spoiled
white chicks to laugh at the expense of a marginalized disenfranchised group.
My own comment on the story:
The prejudice, racism and class warfare shown by the lefties is here for all to see. Without knowledge of the facts or knowing the girls involved the sorority is criticized for: 1. being white, 2, being in a sorority, 3. being fascists (a favorite lefty slur), 4. being spoiled (by parents who care about their kids??), 5. giving to national charities ( how evil!). One commenter indirectly threatens violence .
Message from a Recon Marine in Afghanistan:
This young man is articulate and has a flare for colorful language, and descriptive prose... Scorpions, Chiggers & Sand Fleas/great letter, must read!
From the Sand Pit...
It's freezing here. I'm sitting on hard cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains, along the Dar'yoi Pomir River, watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave. Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.
I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I've actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but the scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission fluid, but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.
The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that's where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy. I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld, shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware. We bash some heads for a while, then I track and record the new movement.
It's all about intelligence. We haven't even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they're in for. We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin. But you know me, I'm a romantic. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows, man. It's not even a country. There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes. There are no jobs here, like we know jobs.
Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family: join the opium trade, or join the army. That's it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu, if that's your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those 'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.
I've been living with these Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen. and even a couple of Pushtuns, for over a month-and-a-half now, and this much I can say for sure: These guys, all of 'em, are Huns... actual, living Huns... They LIVE to fight. It's what they do. It's ALL they do. They have no respect for anything, not for their families, nor for each other, nor for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each other's barbarism. Cavemen with AK-47's. Then again, maybe I'm just cranky.
I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice, and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours. Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right? Do me a favor, Bizarre. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban 'smart.' They are not smart. I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is 'cunning.' The Taliban are cunning, like jackals, and hyenas, and wolverines. They are sneaky and ruthless and, when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites, who create nothing, and destroy everything else. Smart. Pfft. Yeah, they're real smart.
They've spent their entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go), and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil. They're still figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen; eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it. OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon, so I have to get back to my hole. Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice, but I'm good at it.
Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives. The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit, and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen through the commercials. We've got this one under control. The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here, because you have no idea what we're doing, and really, you don't want to know. We are your military, and we are doing what you sent us here to do.
Saucy Jack
Recon Marine in Afghanistan
Semper Fi
"Freedom is not free... but the U.S. Marine Corps will pay most of your share".
My comment: The power of Islam rests on
murder or the threat of murder. Like the Mafia, Muslim fanatics have power
way beyond their numbers. Below, a normally vulgar comedian explains why he
rips Christians but will not say anything about Muslims. Next, a European explains
what Muslims are doing in Europe. bill
In this excerpt from a Las
Vegas Weekly interview, Penn Jillette
explains why he won't cover Islam or Scientology on his TV show, Bullshit!
Let’s talk about your TV
show Bullshit! Will you ever run out of theories to debunk and people to
expose? If you build a kingdom on bullshit, you're not in danger of
running out of it. Our producer says that Teller and I can take any subject in
the news and do a credible show on it. Sure, we like to have a villain,
something to call "bullshit" on, but if we don't, we can depart from
that model.
Are there any groups you
won't go after? We haven't tackled Scientology because Showtime doesn't want us
to. Maybe they have deals with individual Scientologists —- I'm not sure. And
we haven't tackled Islam because we have families.
Meaning, you won’t attack
Islam because you’re afraid it’ll attack back ... Right, and I
think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that
you’re afraid to talk about it—I can’t think of anything more horrific. [...]
You do go after Christians,
though ... Teller and I have been brutal to Christians, and their
response shows that they’re good fucking Americans who believe in freedom of
speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, “We
appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ.” Christians come to our
show at the Rio and give us Bibles all the time. They’re incredibly kind to us.
Sure, there are a couple of them who live in garages, give themselves titles
and send out death threats to me and Bill Maher and Trey Parker. But the vast
majority are polite, open-minded people, and I respect them for that.
EUROPE
TODAY Geert Wilders is a Dutch
Member of Parliament. Dear friends,
Thank you very much for inviting me.
I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the old world. There is a
tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might
be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear
and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America
and the sheer survival of the West. The United States as the last bastion of
Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe.
First I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe . Then, I will say
a few things about Islam. To close I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem
.
The Europe you know is changing.
You have probably seen the landmarks. But in all of these cities, sometimes a
few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world. It is
the world of the parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration.
All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighborhoods
where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they
might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It's the world of head
scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a
group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three
steps ahead. With mosques on many street corners. The shops have signs you and
I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These
are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim
neighborhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe . These are
the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of
Europe , street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.
There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe . With larger
congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are
plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region.
Clearly, the signal is: we rule.
Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam ,
Marseille and Malmo in Sweden . In many cities the majority of the under-18
population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim
neighborhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities.
In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned,
because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to
Muslims.
Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils.
In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims.
Non-Muslim women routinely hear 'whore, whore'. Satellite dishes are not
pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin.
In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to
Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of
Darwin . The history of the Holocaust can no longer be taught because of Muslim
sensitivity.
In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system.
Many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves.
Last week a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels ,
because he was drinking during the Ramadan.
Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of
anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets
of Tel Aviv and Netanya , Israel . I could go on forever with stories like
this. Stories about Islamization.
A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe . San Diego University
recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe
will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim
majority by the end of this century.
Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the
Muslim-immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of
that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their
loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France . One-third of French
Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social
Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favor of a
worldwide caliphate. Muslims demand what they call 'respect'. And this is how
we give them respect. We have Muslim official state holidays.
The Christian-Democratic attorney general is willing to accept sharia in the
Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with
passports from Morocco and Turkey .
Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behavior, ranging from petty crimes
and random violence, for example against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to
small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the
banlieus. I call the perpetrators 'settlers'. Because that is what they are.
They do not come to integrate into our societies; they come to integrate our
society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.
Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against
non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighborhoods, their
cities, their countries. Moreover, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be
ignored.
The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet.
His behavior is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if
Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa
wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass
murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages - at the same time. Islamic tradition
tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had
prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of
Banu Qurayza. If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it
is bad.
Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a
here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence Islam is a political ideology.
It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every
person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means 'submission'.
Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for
is sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or
national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.
Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam 'the most retrograde force in
the world', and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran. Many in
Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances
of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would
not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would
all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary,
the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam.
They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is
weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with
Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for
world domination. If they can get Israel , they can get everything. So-called
journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a
'right-wing extremists' or 'racists'. In my country, the Netherlands , 60
percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the
number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam
as the biggest threat. Yet there is a greater danger than terrorist attacks,
the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in
Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without
freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a
loss of military might for America - as its allies will turn into enemies,
enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America
alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem .
Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to
fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who
fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe, American cemeteries
remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we
cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians.
We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe 's children in the same
state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and
imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our
liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.
We have to take the necessary action now to stop this Islamic stupidity from
destroying the free world that we know.
The continent of Africa is much larger than I realized! There is much activity now by foreign companies investing in Africa's natural resources. The Chinese are especially active in mining and acquiring farmland. Nigeria has the largest population and has a lot of oil but is so corrupt the weatlth does not reach the masses. South Africa is the only government still functioning well south of the Shahara but it's future is cloudy due to mismangement and corruption by the new black ruling class.
Time has been called the fourth dimension. Your car is
sitting somewhere. It has a location relative to a reference point at x, y
and z coordinates. Your GPS can show it’s x-y (latitude and longitude) as well
as z (elevation for aircraft GPS). But at 7am tomorrow your car will disappear
from that location when you go to work. It will return to about that same
location at 5pm. So we have to add a time to the xyz to insure the car is
really there when we observe the location.
A
Physicist said “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” I
suppose that was a tongue in cheek answer but it does make sense.We cannot all occupy the same space at the
same time. As the Bible says, there is a
time to sow and a time to reap, you
cannot do both at the same time.Can
time be tinkered with? Einstein’s equations predict that if the velocity of a
spaceship approaches that of light, time slows down for those on-board relative
to a stationary observer. There are other effects such as an increase in mass and
decrease in length of the spaceship.Weird stuff! The word spacetime was created to describe the interaction.
I have tried to think of a Time as a river as have others ("The river of time") but I cannot make it work. If we are floating down the river, does the shore represent history after we pass? Time is hard to think about in isolation.
There is a time for
everything,
and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather
them,
We older guys have heard some common jokes and sayings that should be passed on to the younger generation.
"Big hat, no cattle." Back in the day in some parts of Texas a certain amount of status and pride went with being a big cattle rancher. For these folks wearing a stetson cowboy hat went with the status. So the comment in quotes is a put-down on someone who tries to look the part but is not the real deal.
"It depends on who's bull is getting gored." Before modern times is was common to bring livestock, including cattle, to the local community market on market day. Bulls are known for their aggressiveness and will attack and attempt to gore other bulls when they are brought together. This of course could be a financial loss to the owner of the losing bull. So the saying implies that the agitated owner will run to the scene and attempt to rescue his bull while other farmers may just be spectators enjoying the show.
"We ain't got no dog in this hunt" Refers to the sport of coon hunting using dogs to track and tree the quarry. Owners knew the voice of their dog and could follow the sound and knew which dogs were on the scent. The saying expresses a lack of personal stake in the matter at hand.
Friends are the family you choose.
If you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.
But is she as pretty inside? I hope she is a good person. I notice she has the caucasion 'peaches and cream' complection I find so attractive.
Florence Colgate:
Girl who has 'Britain's most beautiful face' | Mail Online
Saturday,
April 21, 2012
A woman's
face is said to be most attractive when the space between her pupils is just
under half the width of her face from ear to ear. Florence scores a 44 per cent
ratio. Experts also believe the relative distance between eyes and mouth should
be just over a third of the measurement from hairline to chin. Florence's ratio
is 32.8 per cent.
Mark Steyn has a gift with words and is the most interesting conservative commentator around.
"Europe" has
a basic identity crisis: As the Germans have begun to figure out, just because
the Greeks live in the same general neighborhood is no reason to open a joint
checking account. And yet a decade ago, when it counted, everyone who mattered
on the Continent assumed a common currency for nations with nothing in common
was so obviously brilliant an idea it was barely worth explaining to the
masses. In the absence of ethnic or cultural compatibility, the European Union
offered Big Government as a substitute: The project was propped up by two
pillars — social welfare and defense welfare. The former regulated Europe into
economic sloth even as India, China, and Brazil began figuring out how this
capitalism thing worked. The latter meant that the U.S. defense umbrella
ensured once-lavish budgets for hussars and lancers could be reallocated to
government health care and other lollipops — and it still wasn't enough.
Whatever the individual merits of ever-more-leisurely education, 30-hour work
weeks, six weeks' vacation, retirement at 50, the cumulative impact is that not
enough people do not enough work for not enough of their lives. And once large
numbers of people acquire the habits of a leisured class, there are not many
easy ways back to reality.
I believe every high school girl should read this article from the NY Times.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Jessica
Schairer has so much in common with her boss, Chris Faulkner, that a visitor to
the day care center they run might get them confused.
They are both friendly
white women from modest Midwestern backgrounds who left for college with
conventional hopes of marriage, motherhood and career. They both have children
in elementary school. They pass their days in similar ways: juggling toddlers,
coaching teachers and swapping small secrets that mark them as friends. They
even got tattoos together. Though Ms. Faulkner, as the boss, earns more money,
the difference is a gap, not a chasm.
But a friendship that
evokes parity by day becomes a study of inequality at night and a testament to
the way family structure deepens class divides. Ms. Faulkner is married and
living on two paychecks, while Ms. Schairer is raising her children by herself.
That gives the Faulkner family a profound advantage in income and nurturing
time, and makes their children statistically more likely to finish college,
find good jobs and form stable marriages.
Ms. Faulkner goes home to a
trim subdivision and weekends crowded with children’s events. Ms. Schairer’s
rent consumes more than half her income, and she scrapes by on food stamps.
“I see Chris’s kids —
they’re in swimming and karate and baseball and Boy Scouts, and it seems like
it’s always her or her husband who’s able to make it there,” Ms. Schairer said.
“That’s something I wish I could do for my kids. But number one, that stuff
costs a lot of money and, two, I just don’t have the time.”
The economic storms of
recent years have raised concerns about growing inequality and questions about
a core national faith, that even Americans of humble backgrounds have a good
chance of getting ahead. Most of the discussion has focused on labor market
forces like falling blue-collar wages and lavish Wall Street pay.
But striking changes in
family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to
upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly
likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay.
Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her
degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched
paychecks that come in ones, not twos.
Estimates vary widely, but
scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in
individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in
certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United
States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with
marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.
“It is the privileged
Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a
sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.
About 41 percent of births
in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three
decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an
analysis by Child Trends, a
Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to
college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school
degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.
Long concentrated among
minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it
does by race. It is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle
class — among women like Ms. Schairer who have some postsecondary schooling but
no four-year degree.
While many children of
single mothers flourish (two of the last three presidents had mothers who were
single during part of their childhood), a large body of research shows that they
are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience
childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of
school.
Married couples are having
children later than they used to, divorcing less and investing heavily in
parenting time. By contrast, a growing share of single mothers have never
married, and many have children with more than one man.
“The people with more
education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved
fathers,” Ms. McLanahan said. “The people with less education are more likely
to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.”
She said, “I think this
process is creating greater gaps in these children’s life chances.”
Ms. Schairer’s life offers
a vivid example of how rapidly norms have changed. She grew up in a small town
outside Ann Arbor, where her life revolved around church and school and
everyone she knew was married.
“I thought, ‘I’ll meet
someone, and we’ll marry and have kids and the house and the white picket
fence,’ ” she said. “That’s what I wanted. That’s what I still want.”
She got pregnant during her
first year of college, left school and stayed in a troubled relationship that
left her with three children when it finally collapsed six years ago. She has
had little contact with the children’s father and receives no child support.
With an annual income of just under $25,000, Ms. Schairer barely lifts her
children out of poverty, but she is not one to complain. “I’m in this position
because of decisions I made,” she said.
She buys generic cereal at
about half the brand-name price, takes the children to church every week and
posts their happy moments on her Facebook page. Inequality is a word she rarely
uses, though her family life is a showcase of its broadening reach.
“Two incomes would
certainly help with the bills,” she said. “But it’s parenting, too. I wish I
could say, ‘Call your dad.’ ”
Path to Single Motherhood
The van with the cracked
windshield arrived on a recent day at 7:30 a.m., and three people emerged, the
smallest stifling yawns. Several days a week, Ms. Schairer opens the child care
center 45 minutes before she can send her two youngest children to school.
Bored children in work spaces make mornings tense.
Savannah, 7, crossed the
play area on stilts. Steavon, 10, threw a ball. As parents with infants and
toddlers hurried past, Ms. Schairer chided the two to stay out of the way.
“They’re really not supposed to be here,” she said.
Steavon has Asperger
syndrome, a mild form of autism that can lead to sharp mood swings. He slumped
on her desk, wanting $2 to buy a bagel at school. Ms. Schairer does not carry
cash — one way not to spend it — and handed him pretzels from home. “I don’t
like those!” he said, shoving them away.
Ms. Schairer is known for a
spotless desk. Steavon found a leaky pen.
“I’m ready for you to go,”
she said.
Time away is money lost —
Ms. Schairer punched a clock by the door — so she hurried the children to
school and returned with a look of relief. A stop in Ms. Faulkner’s office
brought a bit of rejuvenating gossip: two teachers were having a tiff. Adult
diversions are absent at home.
“I talk to myself a lot,”
Ms. Schairer said.
Although she grew up in the
1990s, Ms. Schairer’s small-town childhood had a 1950s feel. Her father drove a
beer truck, her mother served as church trustee and her grandparents lived next
door. She knew no one rich, no one poor and no one raising children outside of
marriage. “It was just the way it was,” she said.
William Penn University,
eight hours away in Iowa, offered a taste of independence and a spot on the
basketball team. Her first thought when she got pregnant was “My mother’s going
to kill me.” Abortion crossed her mind, but her boyfriend, an African-American
student from Arkansas, said they should start a family. They agreed that
marriage should wait until they could afford a big reception and a long gown.
Their odds were not
particularly good: nearly half the unmarried parents living together at a
child’s birth split up within five years, according to Child Trends.
Ms. Schairer has trouble
explaining, even to herself, why she stayed so long with a man who she said
earned little, berated her often and did no parenting. They lived with family
(his and hers) and worked off and on while she hoped things would change. “I
wanted him to love me,” she said. She was 25 when the breakup made it official:
she was raising three children on her own.
She had just answered an ad
from a child care center that needed a teacher’s assistant. Ms. Faulkner hired
her and promoted her twice, most recently to assistant director.
“She was always stepping
out of the classroom and helping,” Ms. Faulkner said. “She just had that drive,
that leader in her. I trust her completely.”
Ms. Schairer took night
classes and earned a degree from Washtenaw Community College. A supervisor from
the corporate office wrote, “We are so lucky to have you.” Still, after nearly
six years, she remains an hourly employee making $12.35 an hour, simultaneously
in management and on food stamps.
After Ms. Schairer had an
operation for cervical cancer last summer, the surgeon told her to take six
weeks off. She went back to work five weeks early, with a rare flash of class
anger. “It’s easy when you make $500 an hour to stand there and tell me to take
six weeks off,” she said. “I can’t have six weeks with no pay.”
A Broadening Gap
Despite the egalitarian
trappings of her youth, Ms. Schairer was born (in 1981) as a tidal surge of
inequality was remaking American life. Incomes at the top soared, progress in
the middle stalled and the paychecks of the poor fell sharply.
Four decades ago,
households with children at the 90th percentile of incomes received five times
as much as those at the 10th percentile, according to Bruce Western and
Tracey Shollenberger of the Harvard sociology department. Now they have 10
times as much. The gaps have widened even more higher up the income scale.
The reasons are manifold:
the growing premium a college education commands, technological change that
favors mind over muscle, the growth of the financial sector, the loss of
manufacturing jobs to automation and foreign competitors, and the decline of
labor unions.
But marriage also shapes
the story in complex ways. Economic woes speed marital decline, as women see
fewer “marriageable men.” The opposite also holds true: marital decline
compounds economic woes, since it leaves the needy to struggle alone.
“The people who need to
stick together for economic reasons don’t,” said Christopher Jencks, a Harvard sociologist. “And the people who least need to
stick together do.”
Changes in family structure
do not explain the gains of the very rich — the much-discussed “1 percent” and
the richest among them. That story largely spills from Wall Street trading
floors and corporate boardrooms.
But for inequality more
broadly, Mr. Western found that the growth in single parenthood in recent
decades accounted for 15 percent to 25 percent of the widening income gaps.
(Estimates depend on the time period, the income tiers and the definition of
inequality.) Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution found it to account for
21 percent. Robert Lerman of the
Urban Institute, comparing lower-middle- and upper-middle-income families,
found that single parenthood explained about 40 percent of inequality’s growth.
“That’s not peanuts,” he said.
Across Middle America,
single motherhood has moved from an anomaly to a norm with head-turning speed.
(That change received a burst of attention this year with the publication of
Charles Murray’s new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” which attributed
the decline of marriage to the erosion of values, rather than the decline of
economic opportunity.)
As recently as 1990, just
10 percent of the births to women like Ms. Schairer (white women with some
postsecondary schooling but not a full college degree) occurred outside
marriage, according to Child Trends. Now it has tripled to 30 percent, compared
with just 8 percent for women of all races with college degrees.
Less-educated women are
also more likely to have children with more than one man. Analyzing nearly
2,000 mothers in their mid- to late 20s, Child Trends found that a third of
those with high school degrees or less already had children with multiple men.
So did 12 percent of mothers with some post-high-school training. But none of the
women in the study who had finished college before giving birth had children
with multiple men.
“That’s a dramatic
difference, and it varies by education more than by race,” said Mindy Scott, a
Child Trends demographer. “It tells you these families are on different
trajectories. Having men in the house for a short time with ambiguous parenting
roles can be really disruptive for children.”
Ms. Schairer did not have a
child with another man, but she did find a new boyfriend, who she thought would
help with the children and the bills. They dated for a year before he moved in.
Kirsten, 11, and Savannah liked him fine, but Steavon adored him.
“I’m not the only boy
anymore; we’re going to do boy stuff!” Ms. Schairer recounts him saying.
“What’s boy stuff?” she
asked.
“We’re going to play video
games and shoot Nerf guns and play Legos,” he said.
“We do that now,” she said.
“Yeah, but you’re not a
boy,” he said.
The details of what
followed are less important than the disappointment the boyfriend left behind.
No Legos got built during his six-month stay, and it took a call to the police
to get him to go. The children asked about him a few days later but have not
mentioned him since.
Whether measured by Legos
or marriage rates, the pattern is similar: the middle is shifting toward the
bottom.
Forty years ago, the top
and middle income thirds had virtually identical family patterns: more than 95
percent of households with children in either tier had two parents in the home.
Since then the groups have diverged, according to Mr. Western and Ms.
Shollenberger: 88 percent at the top have two parents, but just 71 percent do
in the middle.
“Things remained extremely
stable in the top third,” Mr. Western said. “The middle is increasingly
suffering some of the same disadvantages as the bottom.”
That is the essence of the
story of Ms. Faulkner and Ms. Schairer. What most separates them is not the
impact of globalization on their wages but a 6-foot-8-inch man named Kevin.
School Trips and Scouting
Kevin Faulkner works the
sunrise shift twice a week, leaving home at 5:30 a.m. for a computer
programming job so he can leave work in time to take his sons to afternoon swim
practice. Jeremy, 12, is serious and quiet. Justin, 10, is less driven but more
openly affectionate. They arrived home recently to a note from Ms. Faulkner
about the next day’s Boy Scout trip.
Thursday night:
Pack
Kevin — Pay Home Depot
Chris — Sort clothes
The couple’s life together
has unfolded in to-do-list style. They did not inherit wealth or connections or
rise on rare talent. They just did standard things in standard order: high
school, college, job, marriage and children. “I don’t think I could have done
it any more by the books,” Ms. Faulkner said.
The result is a
three-bedroom house, two busy boys and an annual Disney cruise.
The secret to their success
resides in part in old-fashioned math: strength in numbers. Together, the
Faulkners earn nearly three times as much as what Ms. Faulkner earns alone.
Their high five-figure income ranks them near the 75th percentile — hardly
rich, but better off than nearly three of four families with children.
For Ms. Schairer, the logic
works in reverse. Her individual income of $24,500 puts her at the 49th
percentile among parents: smack in the middle. But with only one paycheck, her
family income falls to the 19th percentile, lagging more than four out of five.
The Faulkners built a house
in Livingston County because of the good schools. Ms. Schairer cares about
education, too. But with Ann Arbor rents wreaking havoc on her budget, she is
considering a move to a neighboring town where the school system lags. She
shops at discount grocery stores and tells Savannah to keep away a friend who
raids the cabinets.
“I feel bad, like maybe
she’s not getting enough to eat,” Ms. Schairer said. “But sometimes I don’t
know what I’m going to feed my own kids, never mind another.”
Jeremy Faulkner plays
tennis and takes karate. Justin plays soccer and baseball. They both swim and
participate in Boy Scouts, including a weeklong summer camp that brings the
annual activities bill to about $3,500.
Boy Scouts has been
especially important, offering the boys leadership opportunities and time with
their father, who helps manage the troop and rarely misses a weekly meeting or
monthly camping trip. Jeremy started as a shy boy terrified of public speaking.
Now he leads the singalong and is racing to make Eagle Scout.
“He’s just blossomed
through Boy Scouts,” Ms. Faulkner said. “I could do the scouting with them,
because we have single moms who play that role. But they have different
experiences with their dad. Kevin makes good money, but he’s an awesome dad.”
Ms. Schairer tells an
opposite story: constraints in time and money limit her children to one sports
season a year. That compounds Steavon’s isolation, she said, and reduces her
chances to network on his behalf. When she invited his classmates to a park on
his birthday a few months ago, no one came.
“He cried and cried and
cried,” she said. “I tried the parents I had numbers for, but they didn’t
respond.”
Researchers have found that
extracurricular activities can enhance academic performance, and scholars cite
a growing activities gap to help explain why affluent children tend to do so
much better than others in school.
Four decades ago, families
in the top income fifth spent about four times as much as those at the bottom
fifth on things like sports, music and private schools, according to research
by Greg J. Duncan of the University of California, Irvine, and Richard J. Murnane of Harvard. Now affluent families spend seven times as
much.
Two parents also bring two
parenting perspectives. Ms. Faulkner does bedtime talks. Mr. Faulkner does
math. When Ms. Faulkner’s coaxing failed to persuade Jeremy to try hamburgers,
Mr. Faulkner offered to jump in a pool fully clothed if he took a bite — an
offer Jeremy found too tempting to refuse.
While many studies have
found that children of single parents are more likely to grow up poor, less is
known about their chances of advancement as adults. But there are suggestions
that the absence of a father in the house makes it harder for children to climb
the economic ladder.
Scott
Winship of the Brookings Institution examined the class trajectories of
2,400 Americans now in their mid-20s. Among those raised in the poorest third
as teenagers, 58 percent living with two parents moved up to a higher level as
adults, compared with just 44 percent of those with an absent parent.
A parallel story played out
at the top: just 15 percent of teenagers living with two parents fell to the
bottom third, compared with 27 percent of teenagers without both parents.
“You’re more likely to rise
out of the bottom if you live with two parents, and you’re less likely to fall
out of the top,” Mr. Winship said.
Mr. Winship interprets his
own results cautiously, warning that other differences (like race, education or
parenting styles) may also separate the two groups. And even if marriage helped
the people who got married, he warns, it might hurt other families if it tied
them to troubled men.
“You get back to the
question of how many marriageable men there are,” he said.
At the same time, scholars
have found that marriage itself can have a motivating effect, pushing men to
earn more than unmarried peers. Marriage, that is, can help make men
marriageable.
As Mr. Faulkner tells it,
something like that happened to him — he returned to college after an aimless
hiatus because he wanted to marry Ms. Faulkner. “I knew I had to get serious
about my life,” he said.
His experiences as a father
so far suggest just how much there is to be said for simply showing up.
“Thank you for coming,
Dad,” Justin wrote after a school trip. “I like it when you’re with me at every
event and watching me do every activity.”
He added 16 exclamation
points.
End of the Day
Left to do the showing up
alone, Ms. Schairer makes big efforts. She rarely misses a weekend of church
with the children, and she sacrificed a day’s pay this spring to chaperon field
day at Steavon and Savannah’s school. “They were both saying, ‘This is my mom,
my mom is here!’ ” she said.
In February, she received
$7,000 of refundable tax credits, the low-wage worker’s annual bonus. She
prepaid her rent for six months and bought plane tickets to Orlando, Fla. After
years of seeing pictures of Ms. Faulkner’s vacations, she wanted to give her
children one of their own.
“Do you think we’ll see
Jesus?” Savannah asked on the flight. “I hope the plane doesn’t run him over.”
They stayed with Ms.
Schairer’s brother, visited SeaWorld and Gatorland, and brought back happy
memories. But the trip soon began to seem long ago, more a break from their
life than an embodiment of it.
Ms. Schairer sank into the
couch on a recent Friday night, looking weary, and half-watched a rerun of “Friends.”
Steavon retreated to his room to watch “Superman” alone, and Savannah went out
to play with the girl who always seems hungry. Kirsten was in her pajamas at 7
o’clock. They had few weekend plans.
Thirty miles away, Troop
395 was pitching tents beside a rural airstrip, where the next day the boys
would take glider rides and earn aviation badges. The fields and barns looked
as tidy as cartoons, and an extravagant sunset painted them pomegranate.
The clipboard in Justin
Faulkner’s hands called for an early reveille. “I’m the patrol leader,” he
said, beaming.
Thirty minutes later, a
rope appeared. Boys started to boast. Mr. Faulkner snapped on his tug of war
gloves, only to discover that Justin had disappeared. He found him sitting in
the grass nearby, fighting back tears. “I want to go home,” Justin said.
Mr. Faulkner did not say
much. Jeremy used to get homesick, too. Now he is halfway to Eagle Scout. After
a while Mr. Faulkner asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to do a tug of war
against me?”
Justin watched the other
boys tumble. “When?” he said.
“We can do it right now,”
Mr. Faulkner said.
It was not much of a
contest for a man who outweighs his two sons combined by more than 100 pounds.
Justin fell face first and bumped through the cool grass — a laughing
tenderfoot pulled along by his dad
