Stop Talking about Newt Gingrich

If you’re in your 20′s, you are not qualified to discuss Newt Gingrich or Bill Clinton.

You didn’t elect either of them and you were too busy fapping to Britney Spears or N*Sync to give a shit about politics – and even if you did in theory give a shit, whatever that means to a teenager – you were too stupid to understand anything anyway, so anything you think you know about what was going on in politics in the 1990s is consumed as chewed-up digested backwash from either your parents or as in the form of a history lesson told by your politico-religious priests sometime long after it was current.

I am just about 29.  I was 9 years old in 1992 when Bill Clinton was elected.  I am not even sure which year Newt Gingrich became Speaker – I would have to look that up, so that knowledge is from Wikipedia, not from memory.  1994?

Please – and you know very well who you are – stop talking about Newt Gingrich like you have even the faintest idea what he did or did not accomplish during the 1990′s.  You had to be there, and you weren’t.

How Parenting Changes You: Fear

I’ve now officially been a parent for a full year.  What they say is true – it really does change you.

This time, I’m going to talk about something that I wouldn’t have predicted.

I’m a very confident, fearless person.  Not in all aspects, of course.  I think I would be too afraid to sky dive or bungee jump.  I’m not reckless, particularly when it comes to the possibility of personal injury.  But I’m not afraid of things like going bankrupt or getting fired or failing at major life things.  I tend to worry pointlessly about things from time to time, but never too seriously.  If you asked me a year ago, “what are you afraid of?”  I probably would have said “nothing.”

Before my son was born, I like most people sometimes thought to myself, “wouldn’t it be awful to have a child with some kind of disability” but didn’t think much of it.  Now, a year after my son was born, that passive thought takes on a new weight entirely that only other parents can appreciate.

On Cable channels like Discovery Health and sometimes TLC they have stories about children with rare conditions and how their families cope.  Those have transformed from mildly amusing shows to horror stories.  Those shows scare the living shit out of me now, far more than any actual horror film.

I never really thought of myself as an empathetic person and in general, I’m not.  After having a child, I find that I empathize with the parents of these children sometimes to the point that it almost brings me to tears.  For example, Batten’s Disease.

The thought of something like Batten’s Disease suddenly besieging your child and being faced with the fact that he is going to slowly degenerate until he dies before his 12th birthday is the stuff of nightmares.  Nightmares.  When your baby is born healthy, you breathe a sigh of relief.  But then you learn about things like autism, how it suddenly develops at some random point in your child’s development.  And you think what if that happens and it’s horrifying.

What I’ve found is that these possibilties have instilled in me a new type of humility.  I’ve always found it easy to not be afraid of possible bad things that can happen to me personally because I’ve never thought for a moment that I wouldn’t be able to weather those storms and come out better than I came in.  But I find that is nearly impossible to not be afraid of possible bad things that can happen to my son (like Batten’s Disease, God forbid) which are entirely out of my control (or worse, essentially my fault since Batten’s is a recessive genetic condition).

The musing of how bad it would be to have a child with a terminal disease takes on an entirely new gravity once you actually have a child.