Dads in the Mix: Don’t Hate, Meditate (or Zip it. Lock it. Put it in your pocket.)

I was very upset recently about the news that an interracial couple was denied a marriage license in Louisiana.  I won’t go into details, since I am sure you all have read about this ad infinitum.   How such a blatant bigot, a man who unapologetically enables hatred and breaks the law himself could be sitting in judgment over others in a public courtroom or anywhere for that matter is very troubling.

Stewing about this incident brought to mind another upsetting issue.  Even though the government cannot tell people who they can and cannot marry, some states, including my own state of California, make an exception for gays, who have been denied that right. 

In turn, pondering this issue made me think about the many discussions I have had with my brother about the right of homosexuals to marry.  We used to think alike about most social and politically issues but, in the past few years, his views on many things have changed.  We love each other dearly but our “talks” can be quite frustrating.

From news stories, family, friends, colleagues, and seemingly everywhere else I turn – on the radio, television and even in my beloved dad blog community, I am confronted with things that upset me more often than not.  Sometimes it’s sensationalized news, spun facts and opinion passing as truth.  Sometimes it’s the genuine real life problems of this world or just people looking at different sides of the coin.

Subsequently and inevitably, I involve myself in confrontations filled with misinformation (on both sides), disagreement and eventually, touches of vitriol and a few exclamation points that leave me frustrated and depressed.  Even when it’s a respectful conversation between people of different viewpoints which there are plenty of, I am left a little despondent when I can’t seem to convince people of certain things that I know are true (I have been wrong on occasion 😉  I know there are others who feel the same.

Maybe in the current political and social climate, with media having evolved into  a major lobbying force for one side or the other, people’s views are much more polarized then they have ever been in my lifetime.  Maybe it’s because I am more aware of the world around me, not just as a consequence of maturity, but because I am a parent and much more concerned about the future for my kids’ sakes.

Whatever the reason, I find my “panties in a wad” much of the time nowadays.  I don’t know how much this affects the way I interact with my children, but I know it does.  Further, I know they see my behavior with others and sense my moods, which I know affects them as well.

Why am I writing the obvious?  Because, as a parent, I need to be clear about what I teach my children about confrontation, frustration and how to always be respectful.  I must give them tools to take care of their own mental and emotional health and to keep anger in check.  This is often harder than it seems, since much of what they learn is not from what they are told but what they witness.  I can preach to them all day about right and wrong but, if I don’t set the proper example, they are possibly learning the wrong lesson. 

Further, my children are bi-racial and, the reality is that they have been born into a country and a world that may, at times, be more hostile to them than it is to me, being white.  They will especially need to have the tools to deal with hate, anger and frustration, and to be able to talk about what they believe with others who disagree and to remain happy through it all.  And, that is what my point is (finally) or my question, rather.  How do we, amongst the furor, remain happy and calm?

I have come up with a few suggestions I would like to share, if you’ll indulge me.

The first advice was indirectly from one of my daughters.  She loves to repeat her teacher’s dictum when kids speak out of turn, “Zip it.  Lock it.  Put it in your pocket.”  I’ll leave you to imagine the hand choreography that goes along with this.  I was recently participating in numerous blog comment streams with random people with whom I disagreed and an email exchange with my brother that was approaching 100 printed pages!  Then, I would rant to my wife and friends on Facebook, Twitter, at home at work and wherever else I could find sympathetic ears.  I was doing so much research, writing and talking, you would have thought I was running for office.  But, what I was really doing was neglecting things that actually matter, not the least of which was my own sanity and happiness.

I decided to stop it all – Zip it, lock it, put it in my pocket – at least for a while, in order to re-group.  For the time being, I’m not going to have the last word, put someone in their place or show them how wrong their argument is.  I made a commitment to look at all things from a positive angle, and talk about nice things.  This is tough.  Even just in this post, I had paragraphs filled with angry words about the aforementioned judge and the anti-gay forces.  At first, I couldn’t delete the paragraphs, I just hid them.  But, I finally forced myself to actually delete them and I really felt calmer.

Secondly, I changed the focus of my research and looked into happiness.  I found the “happiest man in the world”, Matthieu Ricard to see how he does it.  He was a French molecular geneticist at the Institut Pasteur who moved to Tibet and became a Buddhist monk.  A side note – this may not be the most solid science but he actually received his title by volunteering for a University of Wisconsin–Madison study, which tested levels of happiness, where scores ranged between +0.3 indicating depression and -0.3 denoting great happiness.  He scored -0.45 which was off the scale compared to hundreds of other volunteers.

I read his book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill.  Basically, his “secret” to happiness is meditation or mindfulness, as it is called in Buddhist practice.   I won’t go into specifics but you can hear all about it from him here or go to TED.com and find Matthieu Ricard.

So, I am putting a temporary moratorium on political conversation, turning off the talk radio and tuning out the news for a while.  That, in conjunction with my beginning the practice of meditation has made me so much happier.

Don’t worry bloggers; I’m will be back.  You won’t lose this liberal-progressive voice.  And, I’m not cutting myself off from the news of the world permanently either.  But, hopefully, stepping back for a moment will allow me to step back in as an even more open-minded, rational and calm voice.  More importantly, I think it will help me teach my children how to effectively and respectfully participate in an argument and even how to remain happy in the face of hate and hate-enabling from the likes of soon-to-be former Judge Keith Bardwell of Louisiana.  Or maybe we’ll all just meditate the hate away before they have to deal with it.

What do you do, if anything, to find happiness?

Dads in the Mix: Teaching Tolerance

I used to do stand up comedy as a hobby.  (I know you couldn’t guess that by the seriousness of my posts but it’s true).  In one of my bits, I proposed that my wife and I (she is black and I am white) walk into a restaurant in a particularly racist pocket of America; she dressed in traditional African clothing and I in a Klan robe.  We would sit in a booth and just start making out heavily – just to get a reaction.

Racism exists all over this country and the world.  The seemingly unanswerable question is “how do we fight it?”

In my previous post (Unintentional Prejudice) I pointed out a relatively innocuous example of a questionable situation at my daughter’s school where there may or may not have been racism involved.  In that post I expressed frustration with a lack of recourse or action that might shed light on it without having adverse consequences for my daughter.  Since then I have been thinking quite a bit about the subject.  Certainly, in some ways racism has been quite diluted today compared to the levels it once was and this should be celebrated as we move to eradicate it further.  However, in other ways is has become even more concentrated and harmful.  One example of this is something I came across recently that illustrated how prejudice and hatred of all kinds (racism, homophobia, sexism, etc.) has evolved into the insidious and extremely dangerous bigotry that masquerades as honest scientific inquiry.  This convinced me that I really must do something.

I was going to write about a particular study and how it was totally twisted by a white supremacist group to try and show, scientifically, that mixed-race people are biologically inferior.  I had dissected their argument and provided proof and statistics to show how idiotic their bastardization of the study was.  But, the community to whom this post is directed is one of intelligent individuals who don’t need the case made for equality and mutual respect.  Plus, to argue with nonsense would be to give it validity it does not deserve.  So, I decided I wanted to focus on the question I asked above; what can be done?

One reason hatred continues to exist is because it is instilled in us as youth and humans have trouble extricating ourselves from what we are taught when we are young, nonsense or not.  It is the same reason that if you are brought up in a certain religion, you will most likely follow that religion as an adult, logical or not.  This is why it is SO important that kids be taught tolerance for all.  We need to not necessarily always write letters to teachers or argue with hate groups.  We need to personally inculcate our youth with ideals that teach love and acceptance so that future generations will not experience prejudice and, supremacists of any color or ilk, hate as they may, will be rendered impotent.

I finally realized what I should be doing is what I am already doing, talking to my kids rather than just writing to their teachers.  But, I also concluded that I must take a step further and communicate with my daughter’s teachers about what I expect to be taught in school and even go into the classroom and participate in discussions.  To that end, I would like to provide a great resource to parents who are interested in helping their kids’ schools build tolerance curriculum.  There is an amazing group called the Southern Poverty Law Center that fights all forms of discrimination.  They have a teaching arm called Teaching Tolerance which provides award winning resources to educators, including a magazine, DVDs, curriculum, books and much more.  I recently contacted the principal of Sosie’s school about introducing their yearly Mix It Up at Lunch program that helps develop inclusive school communities.

I am not going to complain about Berg Girl 1 being moved to a different class in what may or may not have been a decision motivated even unintentionally by racism.  I am going to talk to my kids even more about what I believe and make sure their school has the resources and is using them to teach kids acceptance of and respect for all.