Wikipedia, for most, resides on the Web like a neighbor we see and interact with often, so we may be surprised to learn that this seemingly friendly presence has caused all kinds of trouble with schools. Some teachers and even a few institutions have considered banning their students’ from having a relationship with Wikipedia at all.

Banning is pretty serious. Is Wikipedia that dangerous for students?

As some of you may know, I am a teacher and writing researcher at Drexel University. I have been involved with several research projects over the past few years that try to see, basically, how well students write. Two large studies of Drexel undergrads showed us some interesting things. Let me ask you this: What writing area do you think seems to cause the biggest struggle for the thousands of students we studied? Grammar? Creating a good main idea/thesis? Organization?

Nope, nope, and nope.

We found that the most difficult challenge the students we studied came up against in their writing projects was using evidence and research. These bright students write clearly for the most part and have good ideas, but they have real trouble supporting their thoughts with evidence. This is not (just) about correct citation — “Where does that comma go again?” — but about thinking how to support claims and ideas.

This might surprise you until you really think about it, because making a good evidence-based argument is very difficult, and where are good models in our culture for students? Advertising? (“Wear these shoes and you’ll jump higher and people will like you!”) Political campaigns? (I don’t need to say much here, do I?) Marriages? (Perhaps the true hotbed of non-evidence-based argumentation in human history: To quote the dad in A Christmas Story, “You used up all the glue…on purpose!”)

When students Google just about anything, Wikipedia pops up first. It’s just so easy to use to fill in that little research requirement part of a paper. So teachers can ban students from citing it, but in doing so, have they taught them a darn thing about why and how it works?

They need to see that it’s a wiki, which means people can edit and change information on it. Yet all information has some kind of gatekeeper, and they also need to understand that Wikipedia has some remarkable editorial controls built in. As a teacher, I wondered how I could have students think hard about Wikipedia so it just wasn’t forbidden fruit. Working with fellow teachers Andrew McCann and Dan Driscoll, we developed some assignments to try to help students do just that.

First, we asked students to search Wikipedia and find something worth knowing about that is not on the site. This turns out to be incredibly difficult, because Wikipedia has marvelous scope. Try it some time. If they can’t find something, and most don’t, then their task is to look at a Wikipedia entry about something they know a lot about and evaluate how accurate and comprehensive it is. Is there anything they would add or change?

However, if they did find some gap, something not on the site, they could write up, just for our class, a “stub” of a Wikipedia entry. This was a good experience. But here’s what’s cool: If they desired, they could create a Wikipedia account and, for real, try to add their entry. For instance, this Wikipedia entry, about the specific building that served as the U.S. “Capital for a Day” during the War of 1812, was created by a student in my class who happened to live near Brookeville: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookeville_Academy. This student added a little piece to the knowledge of the world as represented by Wikipedia.

Students learned a lot from this experience, but perhaps the most remarkable thing was an awareness of how Wikipedia’s gatekeeping function operates. Above all Wikipedia entries is a little “View History” link. You probably never clicked on it, but that “History” provides a record of the commentary about that article by Wikipedia’s editors and contributors. I knew Wikipedia had a massive, vigilant network of editors, (check out this great article by writer Marshall Poe, which describes his efforts to create his own entry on Wikipedia), but even I was shocked at how quickly editors began checking in on, for instance, the Brookeville Academy entry. Within hours, there was a conversation about the validity of this entry and what it needed to be officially published.

So it comes down to not being afraid of Wikipedia or frustrated with it, but, instead, taking a critical look at how it works and maybe even getting involved ourselves.

As I teacher, I don’t ban Wikipedia. Despite its vast controls, it is still an open wiki, so I don’t want to see direct references to Wikipedia in student papers. But where else can you easily go for the remarkable neutrality that Wikipedia represents on so many topics? Why can’t students read a Wikipedia page and use it to move into further research, perhaps encouraged by Wikipedia’s normally pretty expansive list of references for many entries? In fact, after we’ve talked it over, I encourage them to use it as one of many places they could get or build on a good idea.

Because I think Wikipedia can be a great place to get started, but you just don’t want to end there. If we understand that, the digital natives and their teachers will get along just fine.

Mitt Romney has suffered serial pantsing through the primaries, some of it self-inflicted. Count the Iowa caucuses as an own-goal. If he hadn’t made his puny “win” by eight votes (against Rick Santorum for cripes!) into some sort of historical landslide then his puny loss by thirty-odd votes and the quick-change dealing involved would not have landed with such a thump. The lash bit especially deep as he also played his genuine and unsurprising win in New Hampshire as the second in a streak! And don’t you know that NOBODY has ever won both Iowa and New Hampshire and NOT won the Republican primaries! This factoid suffers explosive decompression when it is likewise understood that none of those gents ever won the general. But Triumphalism is largely the coin of the primary realm. With momentum any uptrend is rideable all the way to the White House, so Mitt was certainly counseled, that is IF he had to be convinced to take his victory lap and did not, as seemed to happen, leave all salaried employees in the dust. We can forgive Willard his enthusiasm perhaps as he was doing it for Dear Old Dad.

Not much is heard about George Romney though he was as prominent a politician back in the Nixon era as, say Chris Christie is today. He made his own mad dash at the White House, then running as the forward-looking Governor of Michigan and riding the Motor City Model of prosperity into the dawn of a new age! Like our current Romney, he was a liberal Republican to say the least, wildly expanding Michigan’s state government and imposing her first income tax, something previous Governors had attempted and failed. Are these the accomplishments to take to a Republican primary? Then as now, “accomplishment” had a cache’ independent of ideological, practical or ethical considerations. Then as now, George’s record of getting Democrats to vote for his plans was counted as virtuous bipartisanship; as if it took hot tongs to get the Johnson crowd to replicate the New Deal at the State House. Regardless of that good foundation for his campaign, it faltered. The most remembered event was an unforced flub by George. In explaining an about-face on Vietnam that took him from a proud proponent of the fight against communism there to a fiery opponent of it as near-treason, he explained that he had been expertly “brain-washed” on a fact-finding junket he and other mucky-mucks had attended. If it weren’t for the bad history, Mitt might employ this gambit to explain his equally abrupt and equally unsourced about-turn on healthcare but the history persists and it is one area of history Mitt knows with a bitter familiarity. The young man was out on that familiar ritual of the Mormons, the biking tour, when he received a Panglossed note, Don’t worry about your mother and I. ‘tsall for the best…. But George and the family harbored grudges and just like in kung fu movies, in politics it falls to the youngest boy.

Is that what drives Willard Mitt Romney? It is impossible to tell but more than fair to so assert. He demonstrates no great principle he feels called to promote. “Pragmatism” is his claim and like his father he forwards his business acumen, proved by his balances, as his foremost asset. His labors on projects that should be anathema to conservatives or Constitutionalists are promoted as examples of his genius and energy. In other words he follows his father’s path just as closely as one could imagine yet he hopes, we presume, for a far different ending. His one notable deviation is encapsulated in his campaign book, one you may indeed judge by its cover. “No Apology”, it is titled and given the singular I think it is safe to say that he has ONE issue in mind and it is healthcare. He will make no diversion. He will accept no blame. Indeed in his view there is nothing to be blamed FOR! In Massachusetts his program, that he stipulates is clearly Unconstitutional at the federal level, has performed to specs. Heck-fire, it has OVER performed! So he states boldly, repeatedly and without fear of contradiction, not least because he had his book edited to muddy the question. If only Rick Perry had called Mitt’s bluff! But even high-level PR gymnastics cannot alter the basic facts; the most stubborn of which is that Mitt’s former satrapy is trapped in a medical quagmire largely of his devising and YES, Masscare is indeed the philosophical germ from which Obamacare has sprung. Is it this contradiction that has brought Romney down to a wan second in the crucial Sunshine State? Yes, and many others. It is too bad Mitt has taken the vindication of his father’s failure so close to the heart. Claiming he was “brainwashed” by medicine-oriented self-dealers would have been more prudent and plausible than what he has done and is doing, which is to simply declare facts to be falsehoods and arrange political chits in defense of  his most aching weak point. Still this is just the summit of his true problem; vacillation, the one his father took to such an absurdity that the early computer industry developed the soft-key, a shorthand to enter the phrase, “Romney later explained…. ” (shft/ctrl R)

If Romney is plagued by the debts of his father, and we thereby plagued with him, this doesn’t reflect any notable, relative defect. It seems like nearly everyone clambering for high office has some sort of Daddy Issues. Anyone with the temerity to wear a Bush t-shirt from, say, 1998 to the present has heard the patented denunciation; well, he just ran to please his father. And probably he did, in some measure. Certainly he did not run to DISplease his father and let us hope that win, lose or draw, Bush the Elder would not have been displeased at least with W. So it can be admitted that at least in part, the highest fliers compete in search of their fathers’ approval. We can say this equally of Newt and Bill Clinton, both of whom had absent biological fathers but dedicated surrogates. Is it too much to think that they run and speak and strive on the high wires to vindicate fathers they never knew as well as father-figures that they did? John Sidney McCain’s family is a naval institution which is most of why he was also. It seems for little more than his father’s good opinion McCain lay in captivity for years when he could have been released. This may have redounded to the good of the country; it is unclear, but absent paternal loyalties it seems McCain would have been in an American hospital long before he actually was. Reagan’s drunk of a father drove Ronnie to industry, to California and to acting. Did he also drive him to high office? It is Al Gore who is the realbleader in the pack of daddy’s boys. His father had the young Al plow up hilly fields with a mule team at a time when a mule had scarcely been seen outside a Founders’ Parade for decades. And why? So that when he ran for President, ostensibly from Tennessee, he could claim that he knew what it was like to do so; a claim more pertinent in the ’60s when the senior Gore might have run. Failing to win the Presidency by failing to win his base of Tennessee, Gore now inhabits a fantasy world where he is nothing so pedestrian as Chief Magistrate. No, he is Savior of the Earth! How do you like that, dad?

It is quite dismaying but no less true that our “leaders” generally are expiating their personal demons, vendettas, insults, accounts and traumas at least as much as they are serving any recognizable national interest. Not all these accusations are created equal however. The common rap on W even to this day is that he “started” the war in Iraq because of Saddam’s attempt to murder Bush Sr in revenge for Desert Storm. This event of course took place on Clinton’s watch. Did he launch an air assault on Baghdad since he doesn’t know who his daddy is? As for Saddam, his entire career of mayhem could quite well be explained, if not excused, by brutalization at the hands (and other extremeties) of his male relations. And we can go back through our history and ancient history finding again and again that the sins or other faults of the fathers are charged to the sons, mostly with the sons’ collusion. For the most part they never are paid, thankfully, but if the Daddy Issue is relevant it is incumbent on the Incumbent as much as any of the challengers.

What are the glaring Daddy Issues of one Barack Hussein Obama? Since the gentleman has offered not one but TWO autobiographies the field is well-sown. Just on the vital statistics we see some points of interest. For one, the ill-documented marriage of his parents took place long after his quasi-documented birth. There is scant evidence that the toddling Barack ever lived with his mother and father as a family. Obama the Senior was a minor apparatchik in his native Kenya whose benefactor was succeded by assassination, eliminating his civil service seniority. According to the most public of facts, Barack Sr. was a bigamist, a socialist, a drunk, a lecher, an abuser of both wives and children and above all, a highly self-destructive man who killed himself with drunken car crashes one leg at a time. And these facts were never secrets from the public or from the maturing Barack Junior, or Barry as he was known when adopted by Lolo Soetero who enrolled him in a school in Indonesia with a muslim curricullum. Mr Soetero’s history seems unblemished except perhaps that he was susceptible to the charms of Stanley Ann Dunham. Can Lolo or Barack Sr be seen in any of the statements, actions or habits of our Barack? It is considered rude to wonder; racist even but we continue. The youthful Barack had nearly a stable of fathers. His mother’s father Stanley Dunham did most of the paternal rearing. He was a communist and had seen that Stanley Ann Dunham had a red elementary school education. Is that of any relevance? Grandfather had a friend who also pitched in on Barack’s reering. This is the “Frank” described in “Dreams from my Father” as a black paternal stand-in. This is the same fellow who wrote an anonymous autobiography called “Sex Rebel: Black” (which was also salciously subtitled). He describes himself as bi-sexual and we could safely call him try-sexual, in that he would try anything; gender roles notwithstanding. Marshall was “down low” before it was cool but just when he was mentoring a pre-teen Barack Jr. In another startling coincidence Marshall recounts what was plainly a statutory rape of a thirteen year old white girl named Ann at about the time and about under the circumstances that would allow Barack’s mother to fill the role. Shall we include recalcitrant Mommy Issues as we do Daddy Issues? We could, to be fair and thorough but even in the ghettos they hesitate, usually, to bring your mother into it.

Early in 2011, New Jersey instituted rigid school anti-bullying laws that require schools to follow strict guidelines about HIB: harassment, intimidation, and bullying. While the intention is good, HIB’s over-zealousness creates a stifling bureaucracy for educators, and these blanket regulations, in their effort to eliminate the child bully, are perhaps empowering other types of bullies.

Before I proceed, I want to make a few things clear. I don’t want three kids beating up one kid after school. I don’t want 100-pound second graders tilting other kids upside down until lunch money pours on the floor. I don’t want a kid or groups of kids using digital venom to poison another child’s reputation. More than anything, I don’t want children to do something drastic to themselves or others because of unchecked malice. No one wants these things.

However, I do want us to allow educators to educate children. HIB has created a new level of bureaucracy—right in your school, folks!—requiring high-paid, well-trained, smart administrators to spend their days sifting through piles—piles—of HIB paperwork, splitting hairs about issues such as if poopyheads are a protected class of children whose rights are violated when other kids call them “poopyheads.” If the answer is “maybe,” then if Suzy called Jimmy a “poopyhead,” Jimmy and Suzy and Suzy’s parents and Jimmy’s parents could be summoned before the “court” of your school board to sort it all out. Note, that a hearing about this poopyheadedness must happen within a 10-day time frame, which may require special assemblies of the board of education and your administrators.

HIB is regulation run amok. Over-extended, draconian bullying rules create confusion and fear in schools. As a parent and school board member, I am struck by how successful already in-place anti-bullying campaigns have been. Kids I know say the word “bully” with total disdain, almost like “murderer.”

Schools are gatherings of large groups of human beings, a remarkably cussed species, so, yes, we will have bullies. How bad is the problem? A recent Pew study, “Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites,” found 69% of teens said their peers are mostly nice to each other online, yet 88% have witnessed peer-to-peer meanness or cruelty and 15% have been the target themselves. However, 90% ignored this behavior, 80% defended a victim, and 79% told someone to stop it. The study reports an interesting mix of behaviors. On the one hand, kids are mean to each other — surprise! — and can now be mean using social media. However, without being pummeled by regulation, the vast majority of kids are willing to stand up for what’s right.

Children need to learn to deal with all kinds of problem behaviors. Now, when a kid is insulted, we mobilize an educational bureaucracy to his or rescue. I wonder if we are further short-circuiting children’s ability to deal with adversity.

And HIB laws, in an attempt to ferret out all incidences of one kind of bully, will no doubt embolden another kind, the parent bully. Parents will use HIB to get at others and to, well, bully their schools. You know these people. They already been mucking up the process of running a school, haunting your district’s administrative offices and clogging up meetings with their grievances. The world has been out to get them, and now it’s out to get their children. They are quarrelsome, troublesome, overbearing people, and they will use the mania of HIB to bully school staff out of one of the most precious things they have (and that we all pay for): Their time.

I am not making light of childhood bullying. I wish I could have in some superhero way personally prevented every drastic bullying incident, but I don’t believe HIB regulations will successfully don the hero cape. HIB creates a labyrinthine set of ambiguous or poorly supported rules,  including the requirement that cash-strapped schools appoint an HIB administrator to sort through what will largely be nonsense. At a recent school board training I attended, the New Jersey School Board Association lawyers conducting the training said the state had set up a fund to help schools pay for the required HIB administrators, but no money was actually appropriated to that fund. Check out your school: I bet your HIB point-person is someone who already has five other job responsibilities. (By the way, schools are starting to fight back against HIB mandates on this fiscal point.)

As I close, I want to say how I am struck by the way legislative bodies seem hellbent on micromanaging schools and school personnel. I know public schools must be accountable: They are run with public money. But from astonishingly inflexible budget rules to No Child Left Behind to HIB laws, politicians have used threat and coercion to destroy opportunities for common sense-driven decision-making by school personnel. We hire people in schools to teach children. Let them do their jobs.

(I guess it’s just what people care about. While we’re nattering about HIB, some urban schools remain cauldrons of violence, as was well documented in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s recent “Assault on Learning” series. I guess it’s easier, and maybe more politically advantageous, to go after those “poopyhead” haters.)

Overregulation distracts schools from their core mission: Educating children. U.S. schools are certainly not the better for these layers of regulation. In fact, the way that legislators lean on schools makes me think of one thing: Bullying.

With the arrival of spring, love is in the air, they say, but there is (at least) one overlooked, terrible consequence of the excessive nuzzling of those early days of bloom: Children with holiday birthdays. These poor forgotten youngsters, whose most important day has always been an afterthought, a shred of wrapping paper discarded in the dusty, dark corner of a warm, fire-lit, festive holiday chamber.

(While I will focus on the sorrowful effects of this phenomenon in the context of my particular sphere, Christmas, my appeal is intended on behalf of all children who emerged into the world during the time of their own December festivals, observations, and celebrations.)

We need to come together to do something extra for these children, and this year would be a fine time to start. After all, they have withstood years of ignominy: The Christmas card with a “bonus” birthday candy cane from Uncle Sebastian; that Great Aunt Leonora must be reminded annually at Christmas dinner that little Chris’s birthday was last week; the agony of December children watching their siblings’ July pool parties and thinking back to their own hastily arranged post-December 25th gathering of “whoever was available” featuring leftover pie strewn with the wrong number of candles; the awkward January text from a supposed best friend ending with “Srry I forgt ur b-day, holidays are sooo busy! LOL!” LOL indeed.

We must compensate these forgotten children. What I propose is that we make this the Year of the Very Large Gift, one that encompasses both Christmas and the ill-timed birthday, with plenty of gifting interest to account for the neglect of years past. Following are some mild suggestions.

While other children will open a brand-new Monopoly, Blokus, or video game this Christmas, the holiday child should receive, say, a pool table that converts into air hockey. Many children will excitedly find a football or soccer ball under the tree. But the child whose birthday was spent two days before Santa’s visit shopping for others could receive instead two tickets to a Philadelphia Eagles game [even this season], with complimentary parking, of course. A doll house is a classic gift, but imagine your calmed conscience on Christmas night after having given the normal victim of your insouciance a beach-front shore house for two weeks.

You could amplify the traditional holiday outing. While other children make the annual pilgrimage to see Santa at the mall or to the downtown Christmas village, the child of Yule could get a trip to Munich to see the Christkindl Market (and perhaps a few nearby beer halls), maybe with a friend or two (in this effort to salve the pain of Christmases forgotten, a few friends might serve as better traveling companions than family on such a trip).

Once you realize the goodness of the Very Large Gift, ideas will certainly flow freely. You will see the gift of a bicycle in a new light, providing your usually forgotten child with a liquid-cooled 745cc Honda Shadow RS. That new movie you were going to tuck into a stocking could transform into the complete box set of The Wire. Even the humble Christmas cookie, sugary and distributed in apparent fairness, could be re-thought. Let his siblings munch their tasty wafers while your December child enjoys an evening out at Buddakan or perhaps even Le Bec-Fin.

These are but suggestions, and you will develop your own approaches. Regardless, the Year of the Very Large Gift would be a meaningful step in undoing eons of second fiddledom. These Very Large Gifts, collectively, would make the world better for that 8% of the population who have long suffered for their parents’ amorousness during nascent springtime. This petition is not driven by greed — no! — but is put forth as a reasonable way to do that rare thing, to make up for the woes of the past, one souped-up holiday present at a time.

Note: Some may find it suspicious that the author’s birthday is December 21. I can assure you that this column’s subject matter and that birth date are merely coincidental. Further, the above gift suggestions were arrived at using a random gift distribution methodology.

My six-year-old daughter and I walked the cold, bare lines of February evening concrete in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. We were seeking a favorite restaurant after spending the afternoon at the Franklin Institute’s BodyWorlds exhibit, trying to see in those brilliantly split cadavers what makes us work.

We passed a promising restaurant, and I peered through the glass at the menu. Most were indoors that night, but down the street I heard yelling, some muted profanity. I didn’t even look up at these night cries of the winter city, and the menu wasn’t familiar, so we walked on.

From the direction of the profanity, a man made for us, cutting across the street diagonally. He was disheveled, stocky, short; he had a thick beard and wore a dark Eagles jacket. He was no one I knew, yet he glared at me and flicked a cigarette across my path. As the cigarette bounced in front me and he bulled by, I looked back at him, catching this man’s eye, seeking someone perhaps, but instead seeing only mean intent.

Such meetings are odd. My daughter and I walked a bit more and saw our restaurant. We walked into reddish light, and a waitress approached, and I asked for a table. A few other tables were filled. I saw another little girl.

I had a sense of warning. I turned to see someone rip through the door and come at me. I pushed my daughter behind me. A face big with rage. Arms cocked, twitching with menace. The face spewed curses, threats. I rocked back, bewildered. This face couldn’t know me. I said to it: You have the wrong guy.

I saw the Eagles emblem on the jacket, and I realized it was the bearded man. His eyes, which were white, piercingly clear,  unnaturally focused, were hateful. My mind was mired. Was he insane? Was he high, wasted?

He threatened to kill me. I pointed behind me to my daughter. “My daughter’s here. You have the wrong guy.” I thought he mistook me for some ancient rival. He was between us and the door. I glanced around, but the the people in the restaurant were stunned and unmoving. “Someone call 911!” I cried. “I’ve never seen him before!” They all stared, including the little girl. Perhaps they thought I had ruined dinner by bringing a street confrontation into their restaurant.

One of the waitresses, no more than five-feet tall, stepped between me and the man. He ignored her, flexing his arms, jerking his torso at me: “C’mon, bitch!” In clipped English, she urged him out. He spewed profanity and threats. Then he jerked his body again and said to no one, “If he gives me 75 cent I’ll leave.”

I watched him avoid the waitress, this small woman, and I realized my thought you have the wrong guy was flawed. He followed me from the street. Why? Because of my daughter? My daughter. My mind began to churn. She was being subjected to something awful. Yet this small waitress was unafraid, as if she knew him, a local lunatic who had come after me in a crude shakedown. I was vulnerable because I had a child with me. Fuel started running through me. The confusion, fear turned into something else.

I have tried so hard to escape the past, to be a responsible adult, teacher, coach, friend, neighbor, father. But fuel was running unchecked through me, and a primal real emerged. Something that had lain hidden for years was being fed, the deep coding of fight.

I only have credit cards, I said. He said, “I”ll take them then.”

The fuel was streaming, and I realized for the first time how a threat to my family opens that valve completely. You get nothing, I said, challenging now. I watched the waitress point him out the door, and I stopped thinking about escape. I looked at the big restaurant window and thought that was the way he was leaving. He was stocky, wild-eyed, nothing to lose, and although anything could be secreted in his heavy jacket, but the fuel created a plan that said my chances were good.

Now all he had to do was touch that waitress.

I got ready. Took a deep breath, leaned back, prepared for a war.

But I glanced at my daughter, and the fuel valve was shut. I saw in her stunned eyes that she was not even processing the confrontation, the language. I saw this man was not going to touch the waitress. He was no physical threat to me. And I knew something then: My daughter could not see her dad in a fight — no matter the outcome, I would be no hero. The memory would never leave her. That would be the awful thing.

Without the fuel diluting it, a bizarre thought came into focus, strange as it was at that moment: “What would Atticus Finch do?” That’s what I thought. Atticus took that spittle in the face from Bob Ewell.

Another expletive-laced tirade, this time accompanied by racial, even sexual threats. Finger thrust at me. A promise to kill me. But the waitress shooed him out. The spittle dripped down my face.

A woman came out of the rest room. Having only heard the exchange, she could take action. She handed me a cell phone. I clutched my daughter, caught the eye of the other little girl in the restaurant, and tried to call 911, but my fingers were quivering with the unspent fuel. The woman took the phone and dialed it for me. I started talking, and the waitress took my daughter aside, so I followed the man outside.

In one of those great moments of fortune, a bike policeman appeared.

I babbled out the story to this Officer Ho, and a second waitress came out and added details. We saw the heavy dark jacket a half-block away. Officer Ho pointed his bike at the jacket and pumped the pedals. He shouted “Stop!” several times, but the jacket moved on. The officer leaped off his bike and threw the jacket to the ground behind several parked cars. There was little struggle, and a squad car responding to the 911 call arrived moments later.

My daughter, with a handful of hard candy and a fortune cookie, came outside with the first waitress. Drawn by the flashing lights, a small crowd formed, and we all stood together in the cold, trying to see the group obscured behind the cars. The jacket was shoved into the squad car. It was over quickly, and Officer Ho came back, placid despite the melee, and took down my story in a notebook. When I mentioned the 75 cents, he raised his eyebrows: “This is attempted robbery.” Could I come downtown to give a statement?, he asked. But seeing my daughter,  he said I could give a statement another time.

I thanked the waitresses and compulsively told my tale to a stranger in the crowd. The police left. My daughter chewed her cookie, and I realized the whole incident had only taken seconds. She hadn’t processed it, and maybe never would.  She wanted to know why the man was yelling at me, her daddy, but it seemed she hadn’t heard the actual words, the threats.

We couldn’t flee, back to the suburbs, hide that night from the press of humanity, all of it. I had to do what Atticus Finch from tired Maycomb would do were he in Philly’s Chinatown that night with Scout. Still so full of unspent fuel that I couldn’t hold chopsticks, I went into the restaurant, and my daughter and I ordered a nice Chinese dinner. The waitresses treated her like a queen.

As we withstand the informational deluge from Penn State, we are faced with the possibility of another case of institutional child abuse, in which a whole group of people, a whole structure, contributed to the horrific abuse of children. It is clear that we are just not getting it.

We need a new lens to view the sexual abuse of children. We collectively profess to know it’s wrong to rape a child. But not only is child abuse common, people in powerful positions protect abusers. Maybe some day we’ll crack the psychiatric pathology of the pervert/pedophile, but understanding those who would protect them? They must only be able to do so because we have come far short of articulating and understanding the gravity and effect of these crimes. Perhaps if the effects were clearer, more broadly conceived, then we can unleash the full wrath of our terrible societal engines against all such transgressors.

We haven’t done this already because, sadly enough, we apparently need more than emotion to govern our laws and policies about sexual abuse of children. Let’s stop looking at abuse just through dewy-eyed sentimentality about children. Instead, look at abuse in terms of the hard, cold logic of practical societal survival: Children we don’t protect grow up. Those ice-cold stares from prisoners were once the hopeful glimpses of little kids. Those kids often never had a chance, yet their experiences affect our world in immeasurable ways.

I would like some researchers to conduct a massive meta-study of all the screwed-up people. All the dictators and molesters and thieves and murderers and wife-beaters. How many of these people were abused as children and never shook that trauma, and in that peculiar, agonizing human tendency, rather than see their experience as the last thing they would ever do, instead perpetuate the same kind of horrors on another? We know intuitively this is long-standing human behavior, but we seem to need more proof.

Victims can and do overcome when they have the supportive structures in place. But when they don’t or can’t move past the terrible theft of their childhood, they create a cascade of expensive woe and destruction. As Philadelphia Inquirer public health blogger Jonathan Purtle writes, people who suffer abuse are prone to many overall health problems, problems that affect nearly every aspect of our culture.

That anyone would mull over the consequences (trying to save their own pathetic skins?) of reporting a molesting priest or rapist coach shows, as Purtle says, how “few people really understand the devastating consequences of sexual abuse.” Your silence is a crime against humanity, only worsened by your effort to hide such abuse and protect any pervert.

If we thought about it like that, maybe people would get out the torches and pitchforks. However much I enjoy Scott Stein’s occasional column about people who should be killed on this site, I have trouble ideologically supporting the death penalty because of the obvious bureaucratic problems with state-administered executions. But if we viewed the scope and effect of abuse more broadly and accurately, we could certainly create better, more severe laws punishing abusers and anyone who sustains them.

We need better laws driven by a clearer mindset about the perpetuation of destruction child abuse breeds, laws that put in action the full force of the U.S. judicial machine and that help inculcate stronger collective values about abuse. I could get behind a political platform about this, framed around the simple idea that sexually abused children grow up. Then what? In Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Coriolanus, the brutal title character’s son, Young Martius, is raised in the same bloodthirsty way as his father. The child ponders a threat, saying, “A shall not tread on me./I’ll run away till I am bigger, but then I’ll fight.” Children will some day have an effect on the world. Do we want that effect to be revenge?

We share feelings of vengeance about the candy-toting scumbag trolling for child victims. But we need legal clarity about a person in a position of authority and trust with children who uses that position to find victims; that person deserves a codified level of societal wrath akin to nothing else. And if you protect those people, from walking away from a child rape to helping a molester move to a new position, you are an accomplice in creating a potential cascade of societal damage that may resonate for generations. You will be punished.

The monsters who molest children will always be the focus of our disgust. But if we see this as a crime against humanity that has unique resonant effects, maybe then anyone who protects them will receive the same level of disgust — and thus no one will ever hide this awful crime, regardless of the consequences of disclosure.

I’ve been away, dear reader, for quite some time. I’ve been busy driving a child to and from preschool, making Target runs, finding my spiritual center on Oprah’s Lifeclass (the first lesson taught us about the false power of ego), watching The Bachelor and Bachelor Pad (it takes three hours to watch that show every Monday night — that keeps a girl busy!), and wondering how I can avoid cooking the Thanksgiving Day turkey.

I’ve also been busy getting a job, and then quitting that job two weeks later. I write that sentence with relative ease, but I’m mortified about the entire experience. It’s so embarrassing that I can hardly admit it to my closest friends. Therefore, I think the best course of action is for me to blog about it, so that complete strangers can read it, know my deepest, innermost, and personal thoughts, and absolve me of my guilt and shame. Then we can all go our merry ways and pretend the entire thing never happened.

I’ve been a Stay-at-Home-Mom for a few years now. And, despite the somewhat negative public perception of this career choice, I’ve been happy. I’ve had time to read, write, have coffee, lunch with other ladies, work out (which of course I never did), and keep in touch with friends. Oh, and be available to my child twenty-four hours a day.

Then, when the little man started a few hours a week at preschool, I feared that the never-ending coffee break would become boring, and I decided to get a job. The thought was that I would meet new people, maybe do a little work while having a lot of fun. And get paid. So I found a job in retail.

Allow me to mention that I have never before had a job in retail. I had plenty of other jobs kissing ass, mind you, but never had the pleasure of kissing ass as a sales associate. But I was optimistic and excited for the all the fun I would have.

The first week at orientation was easy enough — a lot of sitting, talking about the brand, the customer, and the amazing sales associates. There is nothing I enjoy more than hanging out (while seated) with other women talking about how amazing we are. My friends asked me how the job was going, and I said “Great!”

The second week was not as easy. Although I was learning about the retail business, I also spent a lot of time opening boxes and using that gun-thingy to attach the plastic-tag-thingy to the garments. I hung clothes, sorted, re-hung, resorted, folded, and sorted some more. Not only was I on my feet for hours at a stretch, but I was lifting, pulling, and bending, all with four seconds to take a bathroom break. (I had fifteen minutes for the break, but it took me 14 minutes and 56 seconds to figure out how to open my locker.) And I had to appear happy doing all this physical labor, lest the manager think I wasn’t as amazing as I appeared at orientation.

Managing the job and my son’s schedule was complicated. In the past, I only had to wake up, make my son’s breakfast and lunch, drive him to school, and drive him home. Now, I had to wake up, take a shower, make my son’s breakfast and lunch, eat my own breakfast, drive him to school, stop at the store to get milk, drive home to park the car, straighten my hair and put on makeup, get on the bus to take me to work, work for a few hours, take the bus home, get back in the car to pick my son up from school, drive home again, and tend to all the other things that mothers do. I didn’t even have the time, or the energy, to work out. Oh wait, I never do that anyway.

Midway through the second week, it was all getting mighty stressful. I said to my husband, “I’m not sure how I’m going to do this”. My husband assured me that I wasn’t used to working outside the home, and would soon get into a rhythm.

A few days later, I got to interact with customers. Finally, I would meet all these new people and have lots and lots of fun. Only the store was packed. I’ve never seen so many people needing so much attention. And, in my effort to be a great sales associate, I pushed myself. I talked to everyone. I asked the customers questions. I got different sizes from the sales floor, did personal shopping, measured hems, found dressing rooms, asked how the pants fit, ran to see if we had items in back stock. The frenzy never stopped. I got 15 minutes to step outside to eat half a banana and some grapes and take a four-second pee break. (And yes, I came back inside for the pee part of the break.)

I started to get a familiar feeling -– the one I had when my son was a week old,  which was, “I had such a great life. What have I done?!?” (Note to new parents: you’ll stop asking yourself this question after three years.) The herculean effort it took to get out the door in the mornings, the commute, and the fast-paced job quickly became too much. I decided that the entire thing had become a lot of work and no fun at all.

And finally, at the end of the second week, I got a cold sore. Nothing says “I’m under extreme stress” like herpes simplex virus on your lip. It was time to quit.

If you’re reading this thinking I am a wuss, a high-maintenance brat, or a lazy prima donna, you would be right on all accounts. I’ve taught my child a number of lessons here, such as: when the going gets tough, it’s best to quit. Or: it’s better to luxuriate in your pajamas and a cup of coffee in the mornings than to shower and race out the door. And: retail jobs are hard. It’s much more difficult to work in retail than to sit in a cubicle appearing to be busy while surreptitiously looking on the Internet. (Unless of course your Internet usage is being monitored, and the log says you’ve been spending time on a gambling site. But that’s a conversation for another time.)

I reasoned that the amount I got paid wasn’t worth the stress, that it cost me more in child care than I made per hour at the job. But the reality is that I couldn’t cut it. Many parents successfully work while raising children. But for me, after a full two weeks on the job, I resigned. And I am beyond embarrassed. I warned everyone that I was going to be very busy with my new job. How am I going to tell them that I’m back to being very un-busy? I could barely tell my husband the truth. When he asked, “Aren’t you going to work today?”, I just murmured, “Oh, I don’t think I’m going to go today. I don’t know. I like that shirt. Where did you get it?” Thank goodness he is easily distracted and enjoys compliments or else I really would have been held accountable.

So now all of my friends (and my husband) can read of my not-so-long and not-so-illustrious career as a sales associate. My family can once again shake their heads at my failed attempt at employment, and my friends will be reminded of how pathetic I really am. But the one glimmer of hope here is that I now can spend most of my day watching reruns of Oprah’s Lifeclass. Which is good, considering I might need some help with my bruised ego. And I’ll have unlimited hours to watch The Bachelor, which began filming its latest season just a few weeks ago, and should be airing soon. I quit just in time.

In the overall scope of human history, we are a prosperous people, us Americans living right now. Yes, the rich are getting richer, the economy is looking bleak, and there are sit-ins and protests around the country — the world could always stand a few straightenings — but if you take a moment you realize we have more, and more access to, things than anybody else ever has. With apologies to the diehard pessimists and the political gain they hope their pessimism brings about, Americans have it pretty good.

In fact, American children growing up today — no matter whose health care plan we end up with — will have opportunity, health, and safety at levels unimaginable to children born at any other time.

Yet somehow, vast numbers of these children won’t be happy. They aren’t even happy now. No, I’m sugar coating it: Many of them are going to end up depressed, malaise-ridden, suicidal.

It’s disturbing. I look at the vaccinated, vitamin-rich, bully-shielded children around me and wonder why so many will end up this way.

I once wrote a dissertation. If you are like every person in the world save maybe four, you haven’t read it. In that epic work, I looked at what I described as “subtle technology”: My way of thinking about digital tools and devices. It was over-complicated in that classic dissertation style, but I tried to work out our psychology in response to the fact that commonplace digital technologies and the structures and bureaucracies they enable operate at the micro level: We can’t directly interact or fix them.

Perhaps this example will help: While you may not want to change your oil or even change a tire on your car, you could if that was the difference between getting away or being eaten by rampaging zombies. When something digital goes wrong, it breaks at a subsensory level that is hard to get at with screwdrivers and elbow grease. You often need the interface of the computer to fix the computer itself.

I am no technophobe, especially in my professional sphere, where I am a big advocate of teaching technologies. But like those thinking about “digital depression,” I wonder if our continuing slide into the digital can leave us with a sense of being out-of-control, a daily, simmering frustration about all the things we can’t easily and tangibly handle.

I thought this during a recent unlucky run I had with the digital bureaucracies my life orbits. This may sound familiar to you:

• Like most, I manage my benefits and insurance on the Web. With a keystroke, my dental insurance changed. I never realized that my current dentist was now off my provider list. In fact, I never knew this until after a routine visit, I was sent a bill.
• I paid for parking in Philadelphia with a credit card. The machine spit out a receipt prematurely — but the receipt was measured in end time, not amount paid. I bought another block of time, and I placed both receipts side by side so the parking officer could see I bought two of them. No surprise here, I guess, to those familiar with Philadelphia parking: Ticket. However, bless the PPA’s  heart, I did get the ticket dismissed, but only after writing a careful letter and sending it with copies of the receipts. And waiting — pensively.
• My health care insurer had my primary care physician’s office address wrong so I got hit with an out-of-network fee after a well visit. I called the insurer and spoke with a helpful person who got to the bottom of my problem. But two weeks later, I got another bill.
• At work, I get paid via Direct Deposit. However, in an accounting glitch, I was paid by a real, live check. This paper check sat in a bursar’s office, unknown to me. I wrote a personal check against money that wasn’t in my bank account and of course got hit with a bounced check fee. After one of those menu-heavy phone calls, my bank graciously removed the fee. My next bank statement, though, included a mystery service charge.
• Then I had to call the people I wrote the check to, trying to assure them I wasn’t a scofflaw. I slogged through their voice menu; the real person I ended up talking to (said she) believed me.
• My relatively new computer suddenly decided it needs broadband authentication when I power up. Then it decides I’m okay after all. I don’t know why.

Again, I enjoy many aspects of the digital part of my life (I mean, I’m writing a blog), but this list of troubles in the land of digital bureaucracy took me hours to resolve, and even in my moments of triumph, I felt that creeping helplessness. You know the feeling: You want to yell. But at who? The voice-activated menu? “I’m sorry, but ‘Arghhh’” is not an option.”

Where is the problem? In the little blips of life that are my accounts, my records, my life?

I wonder if our digital natives are running themselves headlong into a world cloaked in the guise of digital user-friendliness, which makes it even more shocking when they discover their lack of control. And I wonder if that looming, intangible pressure sets them up to be collectively more frustrated, withdrawn, and perhaps even depressed.

Millenia ago, when a sabre-toothed tiger came bounding after you, there was no time for self-loathing or poetic neuroses. The brilliant machine in our skulls said, “It’s time to move.” Now, our antagonists float, subtle, ephemeral bytes that can often jump the digital boundary, destabilizing our atoms, that real stuff we’re made of.

Lately I’ve been chasing my father all over Hell – figuratively speaking. I don’t expect to catch him; he died seven years ago, taking with him some secrets I wish I could have asked him about, and others that I know I couldn’t have. He left behind some intriguing clues about himself, but remained something of a mystery to the end.

As a posthumous attempt at understanding, I’m writing an essay about his formative experience in World War II, when he was sent to the Pacific as a cryptanalyst for the US Army Signal Corps. He served aboard the USS Blue Ridge, a command and communication ship that took him to New Guinea and the Philippines. The Blue Ridge was the flagship for Rear Admiral Daniel E. Barbey, leading the VII Amphibious Force, during the invasion of Leyte Gulf, when American forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur returned to the Philippines. My father liked Admiral Barbey, an expert on amphibious warfare who planned and executed some 56 landings in New Guinea and the Philippines. When I was very small, one of his nicknames for me was ‘Admiral.’

     A few months ago, while exploring how my father’s war experience shaped his later life – and how his generation came out of World War II to produce mine – I came across an interesting book titled “Lost in Shangri-La” (2011) by Mitchell Zukoff. It describes an odd occurrence in New Guinea in May 1945, seven months after my father left. An American DC-3 carrying some two dozen soldiers and WACs crashed while on a sightseeing flight over the interior of the island. They were looking at a vast network of native villages, a primitive culture that had only been discovered by outsiders a decade or so earlier, and which had not invented the wheel.

The three survivors of the crash were ultimately rescued, but getting them out required a massive month-long effort. They had taken off from a base at Lake Sentani, Gen. MacArthur’s headquarters, where my father had stayed for a while in 1944. I can’t help wondering whether he knew any of the survivors or rescuers.

My father was lucky: he didn’t have to carry a rifle through hell. But he saw action between New Guinea and Leyte, and may have witnessed the first successful kamikaze attack, which struck the bridge of the HMAS Australia during the battle of Leyte Gulf.

He and I differed, but didn’t argue, about the atomic bomb. He thought it had been necessary to avoid an invasion of Japan, and that such an invasion might well have cost him his life. Based on what he knew in 1945, his reasoning wasn’t unsound.

But while researching my essay I learned something interesting about that subject as well. Operation Olympic, the planned US invasion of the Japanese home islands, had been secretly abandoned in the summer of 1945. Japanese radio intercepts at the time (not made public until the 1970s) showed a massive build-up of enemy forces on Kyushu, and the projected invasion became unthinkably costly. So, unbeknownst to the rest of the world, President Truman and his war planners scrapped it. The actual alternative to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was further bombardment and blockade, not invasion.

It goes to show.

I grew up in a very different and more divided America than my father. That’s the luck of the draw. He remained an enigma to the last, but a loving one. He taught me to laugh, and we practiced a lot together.

Digging into the past has a way of turning things up that don’t fit the puzzle, or hitting rock; it’s worth the effort, but only if you know when to stop. I’ve stopped trying to figure out my father. There will be no more digging. The essay is nearly finished – a son’s small gesture. and a last long salute.

When I was in second grade, I was enrolled in CCD at our church. The point of this venture was to instill me with a more fundamental knowledge of my/my parent’s faith — to help me realize more fully what it meant to believe in God, and what it meant to be Catholic. There was a textbook, with pastel paintings of Jesus and his disciples, portraying his efforts to help the sick and feed the poor. There were tests — memorizing the Commandments and reciting the Our Father. I needed to learn these things to make my first Holy Communion, to advance in my faith. The weight of the spiritual world was essentially resting on my shoulders, being this was the first rite of Christian passage that I actively was participating in.

But none of that mattered. The fear and anxiety of the tests and the practicing and the ultimatums (“If you don’t learn this, you won’t be able to get Communion,” which loosely translated into “You won’t be able to wear a pretty white dress and have your own special party”) completely paled in comparison to my true source of anxiety every Sunday: the open staircase that led to our classroom.

Since I can remember, I have been afraid of heights. Terrified, in fact. I only recently started to be able to use down escalators, and still usually have to latch on to whoever I’m with for stability and moral support; I still have to grab the railing on any staircase I walk down.

The stairs that led to the church basement were made of solid, gritty concrete blocks. And although there was a double-bar railing, there was plenty between the bars for me to easily see the imminent death that awaited me if I accidentally lost my balance and slipped. I can’t explain where this fear originated or why it was so debilitating, but I would literally become paralyzed once we would reach the curve where you could see the flight of steps below.

Even then I knew this wasn’t normal, or particularly cool behavior to exhibit in front of my peers, but I couldn’t help myself. No matter how much I pep-talked myself or tried to properly prep for the challenge, the fear drained the blood from my little limbs until I felt weak and tingly. Against my best judgment, I would cling desperately to my Sunday School teacher for comfort and assistance, attaching myself to her as we walked down the stairs.

My teacher did nothing to hide her annoyance about my  quirk, and would often — and quite openly — dismiss my fear, only finally helping me when it was clear I would not move on my own. This routine got old to her pretty quick, and it was soon clear that I was the thorn in her proverbial side as much as she — and that damn staircase — were in mine.

One day, she finally lost it.

“It’s not my job to help you down the stairs and I’m not doing it anymore. If the rest of the kids can do this, then you can too — I’m not going to give you special treatment or coddle you about this any longer,” she declared matter-of-factly, in front of my fellow classmates.

Although I’ve managed to perfect my poker face  in the 20 years that have passed since then, it was clear I did a pretty poor job of masking my total and utter humiliation when my mom came to pick me after class that day. And although I can’t exactly remember what she said when I told her what happened, I do remember what happened after.

The next week, my mother came inside when she dropped me off and told my teacher that if she couldn’t be bothered to make sure I felt comfortable on the stairs, then she would do it herself.

“And as long as we’re establishing what will be done and what won’t,” she continued, “I want want to make it clear that you never speak to my child that way again, ever.”

And so my mother helped me with the stairs until I felt comfortable doing it on my own. She never complained, she never made me feel silly or stupid about it. She simply offered me her quiet love and patience before she’d finally go home, only to have to come back and do it again less than an hour later.

I thought about this the other night as I was helping her up our basement stairs. I had brought her down so she could see our rabbits and pet them for awhile (she has always been an avid animal lover and being around them still brings her very obvious delight). It wasn’t until it was time to go back upstairs I realized the dilemma: between the Alzheimer’s and her already poor vision, it’s difficult for her to maneuver stairs, especially ones with open slats.

“It’s OK,” I assured her, “We’ll just take our time.”

I held her hand as I guided her up each step, helping her move her foot to the next landing. If she got confused, we waited. If she got nervous, I made sure she was comfortable before we tried again. It took some time, but we made it, and by the time we got to the top, she was smiling again.

“Thank you for taking the time with me,” she said, slightly embarrassed. “I really appreciate it.”

I gave her a hug and told her she didn’t have to thank me at all.

“Consider it payback,” I said.