Jetta was bullied

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Recently, a story was reported on Fox News that a young lady named Jetta was bullied in school after she had donated her lovely long hair for use for kids with cancer.

The photos that are supplied of young Jetta show a really pretty child of about seven or eight, with beautiful long hair, a photograph of the same young lady having her hair cut, and the after photos, showing her looking very reproachful.

The story is that her classmates (or schoolmates) taunted her for having a boy's haircut.  It all depends, of course, on what the words were that were actually used, but, on the face of it, this sort of bullying (and I agree that it certainly is bullying) is hardly terribly painful.  The biggest crime here seems to be that Fox News chose to make a fuss about the whole thing.

OK, we are in a time where bullying is deplored generally, and publicly.  But it seems more that Fox News is trying to get some attention by featuring this very sweet young lady than that it is trying to focus on bullying in schools.

Is all bullying equally bad?  I don't think all bullying is equally bad, just as I don't think all crimes are equally bad.  Kids are often mean to each other, because they envy whatever the other kid has, and try to be hurtful in retaliation.  Are we ever going to eradicate bullying?  Is the situation going to be helped by parental intervention?

The principal of the school concerned remarked that nobody was ever hurt by a few harsh words, and I believe this is the sanest response he or she could have made.  My goodness; vilifying a bunch of kids for taunting a girl about a short haircut probably falls close to zero in the scale of all bullying.  If anyone wants to pursue a zero tolerance policy for schoolyard bullying, they're going to be seriously disappointed.

Physical bullying must absolutely stop.  But bullying of the sort such as "your haircut is stupid" is stupid, but it is even more stupid to be prosecuting it.  On the other hand, bullying a child because its parents have an alternate lifestyle, or because it is from a minority race, or because it has some birth defect is deplorable, and needs to be looked into.

In the present case, I think an enormous part of the problem is that the utter charm of the young lady concerned is almost impossible to resist!  She is not only pretty, but has a lovely smile, so she makes a wonderfully tempting poster child for bullying generally.  But I think she would be better served by being counseled to turn the other cheek, as the saying goes, than to make any bigger a fuss over the incident than has already been made.

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This and That

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Whoa!

The wife and I were just fooling around, trying to stuff up the gaps around the windows in our bedroom, and I came down to check on my blog, and One Hundred and Three people had been viewing the blog!!!  I am totally not accustomed to all this attention.

Only 5 people had read the most recent post; obviously some of them have been reading older posts, and there's no way to tell who read what, when.  (I mean, if I kept track of the count of viewers of all the posts daily, I could deduce this information, but I don't have that degree of interest in the data!)

By the way, do please take a look at our companion blog about Archie's Archives, the radio show.  There is an enormous amount of information, aimed at people just getting started in listening to classical music.  (Please don't listen to the podcasts; I hate the sound of my own voice, and I assume you will, too.)

The latest post was on sets of variations, and Passacaglias.  And there are pictures.

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Does the financial resources of a family impinge on the safety of their pets?

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When I looked on FaceBook recently, someone had posted a picture of a sweet little doggie that had been found (read: caught) in a certain neighborhood.  “Please share,” the post pleaded; “This little lady is very scared here, and is probably missing her home very much!”

I don’t doubt it.  The cute little dog looked distinctly anxious.  Some pet owners are sufficiently affluent to be able to afford a dog tag with the name and number of the owners.  The range of resources that could be brought to bear on keeping a pet safe is enormous.

As most of my readers will know, it is possible to insert a passive RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification tag, which is a tiny microchip that responds to a sensor with a code.  It does not need any extra power; the power of the reader, or sensor, is all it needs to broadcast back its ID.  To use this technology —which currently costs around $10 or less— a citizen must (1) be able to afford the gadget, (2) have access to a veterinary surgeon (or Vet) who is willing to insert the device safely, and to be able to afford his or her services, (3) be aware of the very existence of this sort of thing, by reading this Blog, or from similar educational sources, and lastly (4) care enough about their pet to do it.

It is difficult to tell why a pet ends up on the street.  It is usually any one of: the home is not secure; the owner is too busy and distracted to keep track of the pet; the pet is such a nuisance that it is often banished to an area from which it is easy to escape; the pet has been thrown out of the family car, having become too much of a burden on the responsibilities of the family.  Of course, the pet could wriggle out of its collar and make a run for it; pets often (or invariably) do not know what is good for them.

The RFID, if a pet has it, is only good if the pet is picked up by the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), also known as the Animal Shelter, or some similar institution which has the means of actually reading whether an RFID is present, in which case of course they can locate the owner of record.  The pet could have met with any number of horrible fates instead of this most fortunate one.

Obviously, I don’t believe that poverty is a culpable crime; it is the crime of society itself that poverty exists.  Bear in mind that poverty in America is extreme only in comparison to other developed countries.  There is extreme poverty in Third World countries that is fueled by the needs of American Capital, compared to which the homeless in the US live like kings.  But, the fact remains: even the poor should be allowed the satisfaction of owning a pet, provided the safety of the pet is supported by things that are easy to do.

In many localities, implanting an RFID, or obtaining a collar with an ordinary printed name-tag, is either free or subsidized.  (This doesn’t help owners who don’t know about them; that’s an educational problem.)  This is something which should be easy and inexpensive to remedy, but certain types of fiscal conservatives do not look upon this sort of initiative with favor.  To pass a Federal Law that enables every locality to offer free or subsidized RFID on demand, it has to pass the test whether the government can afford to give every single pet in the US, numbering in the millions, obviously, one of those devices.  Then, can it afford the bureaucracy that will be needed to get the plan working (which, Fiscal Conservatives suspect, involves putting countless undeserving imbeciles on the Federal payroll, and enabling a large number of unemployed to enter the ranks of the employed, and running the risk of countless numbers of Democrat votes that did not exist before)?

Helping keep pets safe is obviously a business fraught with unintended political consequences, and probably left alone, at least by a Republican Congress.  But seriously, the number of conservatives whose reasoning follows this cynical path are probably very few.  But they are in charge of the GOP machine.

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Politix Today

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You know, I have been thinking.  I don't think it's easy to divide Americans into liberals and conservative anymore.  This is because the list of articles of faith of the Tea Party is so (1) extensive, and (2) so extreme, that many conservatives probably have trouble subscribing to them.  On the other hand, that List is inducing increasingly more Articles of Faith on the liberal side, some of which are (2) almost as extreme as those on the other side, especially pertaining to how evil all conservatives are.

In the short term, I suppose, we have to deal with one thing at a time, as it becomes necessary to foil various ploys that the sinister strategists among the conservatives dream up.  Conservatives are not, however, all of the same stripe.  There are several kinds of conservatives, and we need to be aware of this.

Conservative politicians are some of those who arouse the most suspicion in me.  They often spout lies and disinformation which must be countered strongly with accurate information and analysis, and if absolutely necessary, counter-propaganda, though that seems a rather extreme thing to do.  But other conservative politicians are probably very unhappy with how things are developing; it has been my theory for a long time that there is a sector within the ranks of the conservatives that is deeply embarrassed by the lies of some of the conservative politicians.  If conservatives plan to be in control for any length of time, they must see that they have to put forward more substantial ideas than simply manufactured lies, and pandering to business interests.

Conservative businessmen are of two kinds.  Some of them can only see that their resources are being eroded by high taxes.  (But we know that most of the taxes go towards unbelievably high salaries for congressmen, and towards the Pentagon and its dreams of glory.)  Others only see that the Government is mishandling its financial resources (which, of course, came from taxes, in the first place).  Businessmen of all kinds are deeply offended by others mishandling money.

A very important sector among conservatives, especially reasonable ones who are strongly religious, is that they feel that liberals seem to be getting Government to do the charity on their behalf, whereas these conservatives would rather have control over their own charitable endeavors.  This is a completely reasonable attitude, except that it seems to us liberals that the government —when it functions as it ought— has the potential to be far more organized and effective than private organizations.  Let's not forget that private organizations have been on record as squandering a far larger percentage of their resources on remuneration of high-level officers than we have been accustomed to expecting.  But of course, conservative businessmen are perfectly ok with big salaries for the high-ups in any organization (except a liberal President, of course).

So that is quite a major division of opinion between liberals and conservatives: conservatives want to do their own "charity" (which of course we liberals consider rights of the poor), whereas we liberals would like it to be organized in such a way that people of small means can get the assistance in a systematic way.  Of course there is corruption, which we liberals think is inevitable, whereas conservatives cannot tolerate it.

Lots of individual conservatives are idealists, and innocent, and tend to regard clever-dick liberals as sly cynics.  A lot of liberals are clever people.  But generally speaking, very few liberals are as willing to manipulate the truth as the conservative media.  Conservative media and conservative money together have taken the responsibility to be the arm of the Conservative movement that spreads deceit and out-and-out lies, all in —to them— a good cause.

Conservatives have been, some of them, thinking very long term, over the past several decades.  How can they get in power, and stay in power, so that they make taxes lower, the military stronger, take away government services, erode the strength of Music and the Arts, NPR, PBS, and all things that really represented the high aspirations of those classy conservatives of a bygone era, to which the conservative billionaires of today can never aspire?  Culture, for this latest crop of moneybags, is a hot dog in the reserved seats of a ball park.  I suppose someone has to support baseball.  But I just have no respect for the uneducated rich, who are willing to sacrifice public support for the arts and public education in order to lower taxes, and further stretch out the difference between the standard of living of the very affluent and the very poor.  All this gerrymandering, all this maneuvering to get conservatives into the Supreme Court, all this frantic legislation to give political power to corporations; for what?  To systemically ensure that liberals are kept out of government.

Liberals, too, are guilty of some things.  Some of this rhetoric about enslaving animals for food must be reserved for small, special-interest groups.

[To be continued]