Good and bad stuff this week.  I’m doing a lot of stuff with the elementary school – it’s both the obligation and the reward of being a stay-at-home-mom.  I’m working with the school newspaper, class mom for the fifth grade, and helping out with my kids’ former 1st grade teacher.  I don’t spend quite so much time with the kids as I do, say, vacuuming and washing the floors, or even doing the dozen or so loads of laundry a week, but it’s way more rewarding.  Just the fact that the kids get all excited and hug me and celebrate when they find out I’m coming in to school makes whatever I do so much more important than it might seem superficially.  Seeing those faces when I read the last two chapters of “Old Yeller” or talking about how to turn an interview into an article, or seeing the face of a child who’s read a book well for the first time getting an excited reaction from an adult – these are the things that let me know that my children are not the only ones who benefit from my not working a regular job.

On the other hand, after seeing all the great progress and happiness of the children, I find out that a sibling’s long-term spouse has made a selfish decision about his/her gender assignment that benefits no-one except this person, and maybe not even that.  My sibling has been put through a heck of a lot, much of it at the hands of this spouse, and the only good thing is that this selfish action will finally propel things towards a positive end – without the persistently errant spouse.  It just drives me nuts how people can make self-centered decisions and then criticize the people they hurt for not being “supportive.”  Screw that.  Life is about more than just you.

OK, so here in New Jersey, Governor McGreevey is trying to open up stem cell research.  This is all very well and good, and I think it has enormous potential, but it’s kind of silly, since federal legislation has already thrown a monkey wrench in the works.  It does, however, bring up all kinds of questions about the nature of hypocrisy in this country.  It amazes me that  “devout” people will oppose it because it involves destruction of a small number of cells that could, under the right circumstances, become a human being.  So, where’s the uproar about the same type of cells that are destroyed without positive result after chemical fertility treatments and in-vitro fertilization?  It seems to me that it’s even more sinful to create bunches of ova that might never be fertilized, ova that will be fertilized but never implant or spontaneously abort, or fertilized ova that will be kept frozen until they’re discarded or rot.  How can abortion, IUDs, morning after pills, and stem cell research be against God’s will, but when devout infertile couples turn to science, destroying eggs for no reason other than their own egomaniacal desire to continue their line (which, if it were really God’s will, wouldn’t need intervention) it becomes. . .well, God’s will.

OK, and since I’m on a tear here, why is abortion wrong, but capital punishment right?  Why is one religious state that forces compliance on nonbelievers any better than another religious state that forces compliance on nonbelievers?  (I’m getting impressions of Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale” here. . .)  If life begins at conception, is it really a good thing to keep human souls trapped frozen in a multicellular frozen state rather than set them free if they’re not going to be implanted in a human womb?  If it’s a good thing to donate your body parts (not just for science, either – read Mary Roach’s “Stiff” for some perhaps less appealing but equally beneficial ways your remains can benefit humanity) then why is it bad to let your frozen embryos that will never be born, or your miscarried or aborted fetuses, become materials for research that will benefit humanity?  (Current legislation prohibits all of these, not just deliberate therapeutic cloning.)

I just think that the world would be way better if people who spoke out in national public forums, people who make laws, people who make news, heck, everyone in general, thought about hypocrisy when they made blanket statements – maybe even apologized when they were called on it, rather than the more childish tack of elaborating their statements to cover their behinds (as a Mom, I can tell you that is >so< easy to see through!)   Before you’re ready to tell everyone to be like you, make sure you’re not really saying “Do as I say, not as I do.”

I read the newspaper every day, and I like to consider myself fairly well informed, but I didn’t listen to or read transcripts of the State of the Union Address.  Like most Americans, I didn’t vote for Bush.  Not that it made a difference.  So anyway, I prefer to not really listen to him, relying instead on reports in the paper, which allow me to take a break in between horrified cringes.  

Not so last night, though.  We were watching The Daily Show (probably the most fair and balanced news show on the air!!) and they played excerpts from the address.  Thank goodness for comedy, because it wasn’t until well after the show was over that it finally sunk in that one of our nation’s new priorities is eliminating steroid use.  Steroid use, people!!  Starvation, inadequate medical care, poor education, rising crime, all these things that are rampant enough in society to have a negative impact upon hundreds of thousands of lives, all take a backseat to preventing steroid use!  These are your tax dollars at work.  

I suppose it’s important that we not add tolerance of drug-enhanced athletes to the list of things for which other countries despise us.  Let’s stop the tide with warmongering and gun violence and rude tourists.  We’ve already got a bad reputation for those, so there’s no need to fix them, right?  Embarrassment doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel right now.  I want a big neon sign to wear that says “I didn’t vote for him.”