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North Andover School Policy Trumps Common Sense

Friendships between teens is a tricky thing.

Sometimes your friends are up to no good and the right decision is to stay away. Helping friends steal hubcaps off cars or start fires are examples that come to mind. But when a friend drinks too much at a party and has the good sense to call you for a ride instead of choosing to drive drunk, you should help them out, even if the party might be raided by police when you show up.

That’s my opinion, and by that rubric Erin Cox was being a good friend — a courageous one, even — when she drove to a party to pick up a friend and get her home safely.

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When a friend has been drinking and you can keep them from getting behind the wheel and putting other lives in danger, it’s a no-brainer. It’s simple, common sense.

Unfortunately, as we’ve often seen in recent years, school administrators are perfectly comfortable casting aside common sense when there’s a rule to be upheld. That appears to be what happened when North Andover High School punished Cox for violating their strict policy against alcohol and drug abuse. According to the article Sara Brown wrote for The Eagle-Tribune,  the school demoted the senior and honors student from being captain of the volleyball team and suspended her from playing for five games for violating the policy.

“Two weeks ago, Cox received a call from a friend at a party who was too drink to drive,” Brown wrote. “When she got there to pick up her friend, North Andover police had also arrived. Police arrested several students for underage possession of alcohol, however, Cox was cleared by police for not drinking or in the possession of alcohol.”

Tim McCarthy, a reporter with The North Andvover Citizen, quotes a prepared statement from School Superintendent Kevin Hutchinson that says, “The rules for student-athletes strongly discourage students from engaging in conduct that is unlawful or fails to promote the health and safety of the youth in our community. Each incident is fully investigated and decided upon based on the individual facts and circumstances.” As a policy, he said the district doesn’t comment on student discipline matters.

Was information revealed in the hearing that we don’t know about — something that justified punishment? We’ll probably never know. Based on public reports from police and witnesses at the scene, however, nothing in Cox’s behavior justifies getting punished.

If she was indeed helping a friend in need and, in the process, keeping other people out of harm’s way, then she deserved better.

Rules are important. They help our children distinguish right from wrong. But when rules are followed with no regard for unique circumstances, kids learn something else — that those enforcing the rules are misguided and deserve to be defied.

Good luck with that one, North Andover.

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Objects in the Media Are Often Smaller Than They Appear

After yesterday’s post on the Washington Navy Yard massacre fueling the stigma around mental illness, I got the usual assortment of feedback after that post published.

If you’re for gun control, you told me I was minimizing the reality of gun violence by suggesting more gun control laws will accomplish nothing. Those of you who don’t see this as a gun control issue took me to task for picking on NRA Chief Wayne LaPierre for suggesting the mentally ill be committed.

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One good friend commented, “What he REALLY said was ‘that the nation needs to do more to lock up mentally ill people who are dangerous.’ He did not make a sweeping generalization about the mentally ill, just the subset that are dangerous.”

Truth be told, I agree with a lot of things LaPierre said on Meet the Press. The mental healthcare system is broken, especially in the schools. I also agree that it takes good guys with guns to stop bad guys with guns and that security personnel at military facilities need to be better armed.

My main criticism here is with the media, which sliced and diced his words to make more dramatic headlines suggesting people are homicidal maniacs if they are mentally ill.

Wife and OCD Diaries editor Erin Brenner said of the phenomena, “Shocking things, like mass murders and mentally unstable people committing murder, get over-reported so that we think there’s an epidemic.” I agree.

I’ve been a journalist for most of my career and will believe in freedom of the press until my dying breath. But we also have the freedom to ignore the press. In my case, I try to find the more objective news sources and avoid the loud, obnoxious networks that are guilty of over-hyping the causes and effects of national and global tragedies.

Perversely, the hyperbolic drama of the mainstream media is contributing to the mental illness of many. When I was at my worst, I watched the news nonstop. If there was a shooting in London or LA, it may as well have been right outside my bedroom window, because in my sickness, that’s how it felt. The music and graphics TV news used magnified the feeling exponentially.

Is there a mental illness epidemic? Yes, but there always has been. Depression and mental disorders have been woven deep into the fabric of humanity since the beginning. But people are much more open about it than they were 20-plus years ago.

You could say that’s good, because a society more open about mental illness is more capable of devising remedies. Or, through the filter of mainstream media, you could say it’s bad; that recent shootings were the handiwork of mentally sick people. Therefore, there’s a mental illness epidemic, and if a depressed soul acquires a firearm, watch out. The truth is probably more of the former than the latter.

Just remember: Objects in the media are often smaller than they appear.

Breaking news alert

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Dumb, Racist Reactions to Miss America 2014

I typically try to avoid passing judgement on people in this blog. I simply react to events from my own experiences and move on. I also always try to assume that the best of humanity will win out over the worst. I still believe that.

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Sometimes, though, people do things that are so stupid and embarrassing for the rest of humanity that they simply must be called out on it.

So it is with some of the reaction to Nina Davuluri being named the first Indian-American Miss America for 2014.

Immediately after she was chosen, the racist comments started.

Here are some, according to The Guardian:

If you’re #Miss America you should have to be American,” said one on Twitter.

“WHEN WILL A WHITE WOMAN WIN #MISSAMERICA? Ever??!!” asked another.

One of my favorite sites, Public Shaming, captured these gems from Twitter:

Luke Brasili Tweet
Wendy Fraser Tweet
Shannon McCann Tweet
@em_adkins Tweet

Davulur handled all the racist talk with class, telling The Guardian, “I’m so happy this organization has embraced diversity. I’m thankful there are children watching at home who can finally relate to a new Miss America.”

Bravo to her.

For the rest of you: Go back to school and take some Social Studies classes. Clearly, you need a refresher course on what America is all about.

Miss America Nina Davuluri

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The Problem With That ‘Crazy Wife’ Video

A man decided to record his wife freaking out. Now it’s a YouTube sensation and the subject of a post on Gawker, a site seemingly dedicated to shit like this. People are gleefully talking about how bat-shit crazy this woman is.

I’m here to rain on their parade.

http://youtu.be/1JZZWA_sjJw

This video seems to be real, but it’s getting harder to trust what you see on the Internet these days. Under the premise that this video is genuine, I have some observations:

  • Sure, she’s acting worse than a three year old. But other than this video, those outside her immediate world of family, friends and colleagues know nothing about her. Labeling her as crazy is harmful and ignorant.
  • If I had to put up with someone like this on a daily basis, I’d probably be planning my escape. But I would not record our fights for the world to see. Why? Because nothing good comes of such things.
  • It’s one video showing one perspective. I doubt it tells the entire story of this marriage.

Every marriage has its bumps, and sometimes you have to throw in the towel and call it a day. But it’s a private matter. Just because your marriage sucks and your wife is nuts doesn’t mean you have to make us watch.

Now that I’ve watched it — I didn’t have to but I did anyway — I see more going on than just some poor guy proving that he’s a victim.

I see a woman who probably suffers from some form of mental illness. Even if she’s too volatile to stay married to, she needs help.

I see a husband fanning the flames of his wife’s insanity. He goads her. He ridicules her. He makes damn sure to set her off. That’s an asshole thing to do, especially if the wife has a mental illness.

Nothing good ever comes from pressing a troubled person’s crazy button.

I hope this woman gets some help. As for the husband, I can’t help but wonder if he helped make her that way.

crazy wife

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“Rolling Stone” Outrage and the Bandwagon Mentality

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence; nor is the law less stable than the fact. —John Adams, Summation, Rex v Wemms (1770)

I wasn’t planning a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the Rolling Stone cover story on Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev. Then I saw all the outrage and realized there was more to this than the magazine’s editorial motive.

This is a case study in how caught up people get in the bandwagon mentality.

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Consider this: People are outraged over the magazine cover because they feel it portrays Tsarnaev as a teen heartthrob. But the picture has been floating around for months and The New York Times used in back in May. No one said boo at the time. The picture shows an innocent-looking kid who is anything but innocent, but it’s real.

Nevertheless, after a few people expressed anger over the Rolling Stone cover, people started tripping over each other to rage in a delirious rush to find a seat on the bandwagon. Some stores announced they wouldn’t carry this issue of the magazine because they were taking a stand against such sensationalistic madness. In my opinion, they’re just trying to capitalize on the anger and get some good brand PR.

New York Times Tsarnaev Front Page

Consider this: A few weeks back, amid a tidal wave of public joy over the Supreme Court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), The New Yorker displayed an issue cover that depicts Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie snuggling together in from of a TV displaying the justices. Most of the response was positive. People gushed about how this demonstrates how far we’ve come in accepting people for who they were, regardless of sexual orientation, race and so on.

But the cover takes liberties with the truth. Sesame Street has said that those characters are not gay. In fact, its puppets are without sexual orientation, period.

Go ahead and tell me you can’t possibly compare the two covers, that Sesame Street is a children’s show. The characters on Sesame Street are very real to children, and The New Yorker made two of the characters out to be something they’re not.

New York Bert and Ernie Cover

Personally, I wasn’t bothered by The New Yorker cover. To me, it was an artist merely expressing his emotions over the death of DOMA. I wasn’t bothered by the Rolling Stone cover, either. I thought the image with the headline and summary set the reader up for an important case study in how a seemingly good kid goes astray, espouses evil and becomes a monster.

Someone noted yesterday that terrorists crave the limelight and want to be on the cover of magazines. Perhaps that’s true. But we need to see their faces, too, so we know who our enemies are. That’s why evil people make the cover of news magazines all the time.

When there’s a bandwagon to jump on, however, the truth gets trampled underfoot. People latch on to memes on Facebook every day that have absolutely no basis in truth. The image and text capture the outrage they feel, so the facts become unimportant.

The outrage over the Rolling Stone cover is, to me, another example of that. With emotions still raw (mine included) over the Boston bombings, people want ways to vent their spleen. Seemingly offensive photos and magazine covers will do the trick every time. Maybe that’s not a bad thing; having outlets to express our pain is healthy and helps us move on.

Yet when we spend too much time on a bandwagon fueled by rage, we’re bound to choke on the exhaust.

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The Little Boy, the LEGO Gun and a World Gone Mad

I understand the anxiety educators feel over guns, especially after the horrific events in Newtown, Conn. What I don’t get is how absolutely stupid and unreasonable grownups have become over every little thing.

Case in point: a 6-year-old boy getting in trouble for carrying a LEGO gun barely the size of a quarter.

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I already sensed we had gone off the deep end when a high-school girl got the book thrown at her for a science experiment gone wrong. But this is so much worse. From WCVB Channel 5:

A Massachusetts kindergartener has been given detention and could be suspended from the bus after bringing a Lego-sized gun to school last week.

The incident happened on an Old Mill Pond Elementary School bus in Palmer last week. 

A 6-year-old had the toy gun, which is slightly larger than a quarter, on the bus and it was seen by another student, who alerted the bus driver.

The boy’s mother, Mieke Crane, said her son had to write a letter of apology to the driver, was given detention and could be temporarily suspended from the bus.

One must wonder if the driver had smoked a big fat one with school administrators before that bus ride. A bad reaction to weed is the only reason I can think of for why they’d treat a tiny LEGO gun sighting as if it were Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum.

My kids are LEGO freaks and there are tons of these tiny guns all over the house. It hurts like hell when you step on one with your bare foot. But that’s about all the damage these things are capable of.

“[The driver] said he caused quite a disturbance on the bus and that the children were traumatized,” Crane told the local news.

Really? Traumatized because they thought the boy would shoot them, or because they all wanted one just like it? Kids can be pretty unreasonable when it comes to toy envy.

Or maybe they were traumatized because all the grownups around them have gone bat-shit crazy, overreacting in the name of school safety and political correctness.

In their overreaction, they are teaching children that violence lurks around every corner and that they should fear everything and everyone, even classmates with toys that are cooler than theirs.

They’re helping to create a paralyzed, paranoid police state.

In this world gone mad, not even the children are safe.

LEGO gun

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Narcissism on Facebook? No Kidding!

Last year, The Guardian wrote about a report which concluded that Facebook is rampant with socially aggressive narcissism.

No offense to the author or publication, but studies like this are laughable for the obviousness of their conclusions.

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From the report:

Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a “socially disruptive” narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media sceptics.

People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.

The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.

The latest study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also found that narcissists responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site’s public walls and changed their profile pictures more often.

Duh.

A couple years ago, this article would have offended me. At last count, I had 2,470 friends on Facebook. Meanwhile, this blog’s Facebook page had 578 likes and 37 people were subscribed to my updates. I change my profile and cover pics often, and between my personal blog posts and work-related writings, I’m a pretty prolific poster. You could say the description in that article fits me like a glove.

The report misses some finer detail, though. For example, a lot of my friend count is because my network is made up of friends and business associates. I’m also connected to a lot of Facebook pages for guitar makers and sellers because I have a passion for guitars. I’m also connected to a lot of writers who are not personal friends, but I admire their work and connecting to them is how I keep tabs on their creative output.

I won’t lie, though: I’d rather have a big network than a small one. I’m a social animal who likes to know what people are up to. And it warms the heart knowing there are more than a few people interested in keeping tabs on what I’m doing as well.

That’s a mark of narcissism right there. But I’m not making a fresh revelation here. I’ve written at least three posts in which I own this part of me.

Read about my struggles with narcissim:

“Narcissism Is A Fatal Illness“

“Narcissism Inc.“

“I’m a Narcissist (and So Are You)”

One of my friends posts all day long about his security work, his weight-lifting progress and what he’s listening to. You could call that narcissistic. But I wouldn’t miss his posts for the world. Another friend loves taking her self-portrait from the seat of her car and posts them multiple times a week. That’s the mark of a narcissist. But she never, ever speaks ill of anyone on Facebook, nor does she complain about how hard life is. That is not the mark of a narcissist.

We all have a self-absorbed side to our personalities. Anyone who denies it is full of shit. We all worry about our art, professions, friendships and how others perceive us. Facebook gives us at least some ability to present the self image we aspire to. That’s more than a lot of us used to have. Why not use it?

If you’re the type of person who drops everything to help someone in need, who tirelessly works to advance causes that make humanity better, who loves unconditionally, understand this:

You’re gold in my book. Even if you post a shitload of pictures of yourself and accept every friend request that comes your way.

Facebook is one reflection of the human condition in the 21st century, but it’s not the whole story. Not even close.

Social Media Venn Diagram

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‘Dude, You Are Pathetic’

I don’t always respond to readers who call me names in the comments section, but sometimes it’s necessary.

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When I wrote a post the other day about being released from mental therapy, a guy named Jerry had this to say:

Dude you are pathetic. Be a man, work out your issues outside, or in the gym. Talk to your friends and family. You don’t NEED anything, you just tell yourself you do.

Now, I don’t care that he called me pathetic. After 20 years as a journalist, I have pretty thick skin. I also don’t feel the need to repeatedly justify why I write about these things.

But I see his comment as an insult to anyone who struggles to overcome the demons that hold them back.

So I’ll just say this to you, Jerry:

I agree that people need to talk over their challenges with friends and family. If not for that outlet, I wouldn’t be here. I also agree on the value of the outdoors and the gym as both a physical and mental strengthener.

But mental disorders often require the intervention of a medical professional. In this case, a therapist. If a person’s brain chemistry is off and signals don’t move back and forth properly, venting to a friend or demolishing a punching bag in the gym will help. But it won’t fix the brain chemistry problem, and the person will continue to suffer.

Pathetic? Hardly. It takes courage for someone to admit they need help and then go get it.

If that concept is hard for you to accept, leave this blog behind. I’m sure there are plenty of more manly blogs out there for you to enjoy.

weight-lifting-brain

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When People Don’t Like A Discussion, They Call It Drama

Since I write a lot about how we talk to each other in this blog and my professional one, I hear the word drama a lot. It’s almost always used to describe something people don’t want to discuss. It’s a one-word arsenal meant to shoot down anyone you disagree with. I get shot at a lot. And I’m perfectly fine with it.

Yesterday I publicly took a local newsman to task for relishing his coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings a little too much. He was on Facebook, telling us about how he had the best information and the best inside sources at the hospitals and in law enforcement. He ripped politicians who didn’t come right out and call this a terrorist attack. He kept track of the death count like a scorekeeper at a ballgame, going on about how the media was reporting three deaths but his tally was four.

He boasted that his info was the best, better than Fox, better than the Eagle-Tribune, a local newspaper he competes with fiercely. He carried on exactly as he has in the past, and that’s why I wrote this post a few weeks ago. When all you can do is toot your horn during your reporting, you become part of the problem in media today.

The reaction to my criticism was swift. Some agreed with me, while others defended him. The defenders accused me of creating drama, as if covering a national tragedy like a ballgame wasn’t drama itself. One person said I was engaging in a “form of adult bullying.” Another told me I needed to “get laid.”

As my 9 year old likes to say: “Whatever.”

Facebook is a place where everyone loves to express their outrage and pride with memes and sayings that are not fact-checked. That’s drama, too.

If I smell something that stinks, I’m going to say something about it. As a writer, that’s what I do. If it offends you, unfriend me or unsubscribe from my posts.

Better yet, do something about the drama you create.

kirk yelling at kahn

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Boston Marathon Explosion: Observations and Helpful Links

I wasn’t in Boston for the marathon today, but I’m in that specific area all the time and am stunned. Far as I can tell, everyone in my family is safe and accounted for.

I’ve started this post to use for communications. If anyone has information regarding the rail lines, alternate routes out of the city or wants to find out about friends and loved ones, I’m hoping the comments thread or the Facebook and Twitter threads from this post will help people get the information they need.

Otherwise, some random thoughts:

–I’m grateful for all the messages I’ve gotten from around the world asking if me and mine are OK. It goes to show that even in the face of evil, good people always come through. You’ll hear a lot more about that in the coming days — stories of stranger helping stranger. As Mister Rogers’ mom once told him, always watch for the helpers. They always arrive.

–There’s already a lot of speculation on motive, including suggestions that this was timed to coincide with anniversaries of the Columbine massacre, the Oklahoma City bombing and the violent end of the Waco standoff. At this point, all that matters to me is that those who are hurt are getting medical assistance. Also, it’s far too early to draw conclusions. Do yourself a favor. Stay away from the big news networks for now. They jump to conclusions and spread misinformation every time.

I’m sticking to local news outlets, two of which are below.

–If you were in Boston today and you’re reading this, I’m thankful you’re OK.

I’ll update this post as needed.

Helpful links for information:

Those trying to locate loved ones can call 617-635-4500; people with tips can call 1-800-494-TIPS

WCVB’s live video feed.

Boston.com’s live tweet feed.

Be safe, folks.

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