Month: October 2017

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Rules, What Rules?

I lost a sizable chunk of my faith in humanity today. The drop-off line at elementary school can do that to me. It’s not the utter monotony of the queuing up in an endless parade of minivans and SUVs that bothers me. That part is often comical, verging on absurd. What troubles me is that a simple, civilized procedure has been hijacked by a few individuals who take the sense of entitlement to new heights.

They are a fascinating breed, the entitled folks. I’m not talking socioeconomic entitlement. I mean it more in an emotional and sometimes physical sense—they believe and act as if they deserve more of every slice of pie out there, and not because they earned it. They  simply deserve more because they are better than us. It’s their world, not OURS to share. And they are wreaking havoc on the actual and the metaphorical drop-off lines that surround us.

Day after day I sit there. I have been in that line for nearly 6 years. I start off optimistic in September. I figure that after summer break and with the addition of new families to the school, it can take a few weeks for folks to get back in the rhythm of the drop-off procedure. We are seven weeks into the school year now, and I’m losing my patience for the entitlement and the resulting incompetency.

Each year the school administration communicates the drop-off procedure to parents via email and snail mail. Those communiques cogently inform us of the following:

1) If you want to participate in the drop-off line, your child must be capable of independently getting out of your vehicle (intended translation: While the word independent is confusing in the modern over-parenting era, the definition has not changed—independent means not relying on others for aid or support);

2) Under no circumstances should you park your car in the drop-off line to help your child exit the vehicle (intended translation: Although you are special because your SUV might be large, you are not permitted to create a parking space wherever you choose…doing so is backing up traffic and negatively impacting others);

3) If your child needs assistance exiting the car, no problem. You can park your car and help walk your child to their class line (intended translation: Don’t even enter the drop-off line…kindly park on the street so the line can proceed safely and without interruption);

4) If you forget the rules, we are fortunate to have a kind and brave gentleman who is responsible for directing traffic to help the process move in a safe and efficient manner. Let me say that again—he is there to keep the children and staff SAFE. Note: he is not there for you to verbally abuse day after day when you break the rules.

5) If you fail to see the gentleman dressed in safety orange because your coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, the school has placed a large sign out that says: “Pull forward to this sign.” This requires reading, which I realize some folks simply don’t have the time to do. Again, they are too important.

Let me get back to today’s grievance. A woman in front of me decided that she would ignore both the sign and the traffic director. She stopped her car about 50 yards before reaching the large “Pull forward to this sign” board and parked. She got out of her vehicle and walked around to let her child out—slowly, at that. Then, she stood and watched her child walk to the school yard. Not once did she look back at the massive line of traffic accumulating behind her car. As the traffic director ran to her to implore her to move her car, she casually strolled back to her vehicle and shouted something nasty to him, the unsavory content of which is not worth repeating. Suffice it to say that she was not interested in the rules. She had to drop her son off. The rest of us could wait.

Here’s the thing. She is not the only one. There are others. I will even humor the entitlement for a moment. YOUR KIDS ARE MORE SPECIAL THAN MINE. AND YOUR TIME IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN MINE. Because you are so special, you can park and stay far away from us silly average Joes who believe in adhering to the system. It might be shocking to learn, but some of us actually believe in rules still. We have jobs, sick children in tow and countless things that we also need to accomplish today. Our time matters too. We ALL matter.

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If we as parents can’t follow simple rules on the drive up to school, aren’t there larger implications? If that’s your mindset, where does it stop? The school parking lot, the soccer field? Does your child even have to follow the rules once they enter the school building or are they arbitrary like the drop-off rules? Have I missed the memo that rules are somehow unfashionable, or even worse, optional? I am willing to follow the slippery slope here to societal norms and laws to prove the point that even our simple choices matter.

Where Does It End?

If you get it wrong at drop-off, what are you doing the rest of your day? Do you push someone aside to get on a train? Do you speak on your cell phone loudly in a waiting room that bans phones? Do you take more time in the checkout line? Do you really think the rest of us don’t exist? Do you really think your kids aren’t watching as you flout the rules and provide a vivid example of what bad behavior looks like?

I’m not brazen enough to make the broad jump here that fixing the entitled drop-off line behavior will usher in world peace and political stability. I’m not even sure those ideals are attainable in our current geopolitical climate.  I wonder though, if we could all act like there actually is someone behind us, that there are real people all around us whose lives are just as important as ours, whose problems weigh on them just as heavily as ours do, wouldn’t that be a better world?

We have certain rules and systems in place for things like school drop-off, but the truth is we should not even need them. Human decency should dictate that in any kind of  line you don’t cut and you don’t take extra time when you get your turn. If you demonstrate kindness and consideration for the fellow human beings around you, something amazing becomes possible: the chaos dissipates, tempers cool, everyone is equal, no one person is more special than the rest. We all matter, even on the drop-off line.

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A Reluctant Break from the Traditional Mold

I have realized that as progressive and current as I would like to perceive myself, I am a steadfast traditionalist at heart. I not only enjoy writing things down on lined paper with a number 2 pencil, but I actually find it compulsory if I’m to have any chance of remembering my thoughts. Occasionally, I ditch the gray lead and opt for colored ink, but only if I’m feeling frisky.

I desperately struggle to keep pace with technology and the rapid-fire social media universe that swirls around me, but that party has long since started and I have barely crossed the metaphorical threshold to the cocktail hour. I succumbed to joining Facebook a few years ago, and while I have a Twitter account, I have only used it once with little success. Tweeting or being Tweeted at seems to suggest that I’d be engaging in some kind of illicit activity that obviously involves some form of ritual sacrifice for which I am grossly ill prepared. Not to mention the 140 character limit is nearly impossible for this woman of many words.

I’m not completely backwards, however. At least, not to the outside observer. Like many of my contemporaries, I have outsourced much of my life to Apple. I wear an Apple Watch (although I truly don’t take advantage of even half of its functionality), I carry the latest iPhone Plus and I typically travel with my iPad Pro in my purse. Siri and I are super tight and talk all the time. Typically, I say “Hey, Siri,”and as if she is falling in step with my children and husband, she tends not to answer my questions or do any of the things I have asked her to do. I soothe myself by accepting that she is simply playing hard to get.

In spite of my best efforts to embrace modernity, I just can’t seem to come up to speed on being or even feeling truly relevant. Take my new blog, for instance. My website www.momcanwrite.com may give the air that I am web savvy and have embraced new media, but I do not know this world, not even a little. I am a novice blogger, and I am mainly taking a stab because I am told by those in the know that I need to finally enter the 21st Century. So, here I am, attempting to plot an unfamiliar path as a writer, even though my traditional self yearns to see my name in either matte or glossy ink instead of intangible cyber letters.

A long time ago in a kingdom not so very far away, I was a hard news junkie who read 3-5 national newspapers by the time I finished my second cup of morning coffee. I began my career in broadcast journalism fresh out of college. I first went into the field because I had an immense appreciation for my old-school newscaster idols—Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Cokie Roberts, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel (whom I actually had the immense honor of working with on Nightline). Actually, that’s not completely true. I also went into journalism because I was trying to cure my childhood fear of “the news.” I recall being so frightened by the evening news that I would plug my ears, close my eyes and spew loud gibberish so the “bad” news would not penetrate me.

The ‘80s and ‘90s were fraught with scary, somber news stories: the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Pam AM flight 103 was brought down by a terrorist bomb, Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide killed several people in Chicago, The First Gulf War took place, Genocide and Civil War in Rwanda took the lives of more than 500,000 people, domestic mass school shootings yielded shocking death tolls in Jonesboro and Columbine, just to name a few of the major events. I naively reasoned that if I worked on the other side, the news would somehow feel less frightening as a gatherer than it did as a consumer.

Needless to say, while I loved being a journalist and working for ABC News, I by no means cured myself of my news fears. The scary stories of the ‘80s and ‘90s got even scarier after the millennium. While I was stationed in Washington, D.C. in September 2001, I happened to be in New York on 9/11 and the scary news was once again ignited into a crippling phobia. Whether is was the many Americans we lost that day or the aftermath of being swabbed to the depth of my brain for suspected anthrax poisoning or the ensuing War on Terror and the subsequent growth of ISIS, I lost the will to tell stories. It simply felt too scary and too sad.

I have realized years later, however, that I let sadness and fear dictate what I love—writing and telling stories. After a week like this one, the news is heartbreaking, tragic, downright horrific, but the stories must be told. I cannot, more aptly, I will not bury my head in the sand and refuse to engage in the great dialogue, even if I’m not sold on the new media platform. As a storyteller, I think it’s even more important that I attempt to find the stories of triumph amid the horrors, the stories or observations that might otherwise go untold.

All Aboard the New Media Train

So I’m going to try to make sense of all of these alerts and dings that now invade my life and take my seat at the blogosphere table. I don’t think I will ever master the art of writing for search engine optimization (SEO to all the cool, more tech savvy folks out there), but to heck if I’m going to let a new challenge beat me. I’m going to wing it here and hope that you readers that have made it this far will have patience for this pseudo youngISH traditionalist. It may take me a while, but I hope to earn my seat at the modern table.

Perhaps this adjustment to the blogosphere is no different from the struggle my mother had when the microwave oven came into fashion. She worried that nuking food might be the equivalent of serving up a plate of radiation for dinner (turns out she may have been right, but man does it speed up dinner preparation). I want to embrace technology, but I often find it an overwhelming time suck that takes me away from actually living.

Sydney J. Harris had me pegged when he spoke about our love-hate relationship with change: “What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.” The new media world is not remaining the same, but if I don’t participate, I can’t make it better, and I most certainly can’t complain about the players if I’m not willing to be one of them. So cheers to attempting to bring my craft to the new media world. My fingers may have to go modern, but for now, my heart will stay traditional.