I am not ready for the Wild Rumpus

Can I screen my child’s potential friends for the rest of his life? No? Well, I don’t care for that. I think I usually strike a pretty good balance between my intellectual desire for letting Max interact and experience with the world (good and bad) and my emotional need to hover and protect. I know he needs to make mistakes and bad choices to learn how to properly recover from them, but I still like to moderate the challenges to take some of the risk away. I meddle, it’s what I do.

Earlier in the week during a walkabout with the wife, the little dude spied a pack of neighborhood boys. The pack ranged in age, most of them much older than Max, but when they started to run, he wanted to join in. This pack of lads was unsupervised, and they were full of energy and rambunctious childhood rashness, so they wouldn’t be considered the best companions for a 3-year-old. He did join their pack for a bit (with my wife keeping a watchful eye from a few feet behind), albeit without official invitation. And, since he didn’t have a weapon (they were playing guns, naturally), the game moved on without him and he came in for a quick snack break.

While he was inside, he kept talking about going back outside with ‘the boys’ and playing with them. Aside from my trepidation at his running around with the older crowd, he was also weathering a hearty cold, and the walk outside had turned his nose into a snot faucet. So, I gently suggested he stay inside and warm up while having a rest, and the sadness burst forth from within. He was so forlorn at not joining up with the boys that I felt terrible. I want to give him all of the social play opportunities he asks for, but the cold was already inviting a cough to the party and I had to be the bad guy.

I guess it’s another part of parenthood that you have to make your peace with: your child will have friends that you don’t approve of. You can’t supervise every relationship they participate in, and sometimes they’re going to hang out with the smelly kid with the shifty eyes. But hopefully we can keep him out of the wilder rumpus’ for a little while longer.

 

Nothing is set in stone yet

(Politics again, at least to start things off. You have been warned)

I made a mistake and spent the last 10 minutes of my evening on Wednesday watching the political analysts on CBC discussing the upcoming election. They are all certain that the Conservatives are going to walk into a majority on May 2, and that sent me into a teeth-grinding fit of frustration as I was trying to get to sleep.

But finally, after tossing back and forth for almost an hour, I realized something about the nature of polling and the alchemy of elections. No matter what a particular poll might say, the election isn’t final until the votes have been counted. What a tiny sample group may have said to a phone pollster is a poor indicator of the actual mood of the country’s millions of voters.

But creating this illusion of certainty and inevitability works in the Conservative’s favour. It is the laziest way to court the undecided voter. I suspect that a lot of these voters are the people who want to go with the flow and they will vote the way that the country expects them to vote. The party puts forth the assumption ‘we are going to win a majority’ and the media starts to repeat it, strengthening the claim. A few selectively chosen poll results are tossed into the mix, and voila! The people of the fence vote blue, and democracy gets a kick in the throat. And, by giving in to the despair myself, I was adding strength to this version of the political reality.

So what does that mean for anyone who is passionate about getting rid of Harper? It means we have to stop accepting the failure narrative. It ain’t over ’til it’s over. We have to make our voices heard as we spread the message to the undecided in the middle: There is hope. Everything is not yet lost. WE CAN WIN.

I mean, c’mon, we’re up against a pudgy white bread of a man who’s afraid of reporters and one-on-one debates. He’s hoping that most of us stay quiet and stop asking the questions that make him look bad. Because when we ask questions, the decent people in his party start to ask too, and the answers might just make those sensible Conservatives stay home.