17 Months.

 

Gentle Neighbors, 

My kids last went to full time school 17 months ago this Tuesday. We've piecemealed care from friends, neighbors, babysitters, older siblings, grandparents and other relatives over Zoom, harried daycare workers risking death and disability to stay open, TV watched on school-issued computers, letting them climb on us and destroy the house while we work, bringing them to work, etc. At one point I briefly left the cat in charge while I visited a very depressed friend. He's an impressive cat. 

I (like many parents) have responded by feeling angry, exhausted, proud, guilty, ill, hopeless, grateful, depressed, manic, faint, endlessly stressed, and just about every other feeling. 17 months of pandemic parenting seems a lifetime, and my rapidly graying beard shows it. Many parents and caregivers around here have had it far worse. I have a loving reliable co-parent, have the funds to pay for care when I need it, work in a place where I and my kids can be outdoors, have reliable vehicles, have supportive neighbors and friends, speak English, have fast internet, didn't catch COVID, and have healthy kids. I have trouble imagining how the many parents lacking any of these blessings have made it through these last 17 months. 

So what I want with all of this is to thank, and congratulate, and commiserate with, and hopefully to comfort the parents and caregivers who have made it this far. If you've made it through this in one piece, or even two or three, and have not attempted to murder anyone, you are an impressive and resilient human being. You deserve plaudits, and a raise, and less expensive housing, and a place where you can send your kids for several hours five days a week for free where dedicated professionals with advanced training and accreditation will teach them and feed them and provide them with a social life. 

Schools will be open in six days, twenty hours and (for my kids' school anyway) two minutes. You have overcome an extraordinary trial, challenge, stress. Whatever comes after this, you are stronger than it. Nice work. 

Gratefully, 

Dr. Dan Levitis

Violence is not entertaining.

 

Squirrels non-violently entertaining children at a campground

I am not entertained by violence. Not violence in TV shows or movies, not violence in games. Not in books or songs. I reject superhero violence, cartoon violence, dinosaur violence, monster violence, and spaceship violence. I will not look at vehicular, gun, sword, magic, or fist violence. Not sports that formalize or simulate violence. Not historical, sexual, or emotional violence. The threat of violence, the tools of violence, aptitude for violence, and the glorification of violence are unwelcome. My kids found superhero comic books at the library and I will not support the reading of them. Chess is the most violent thing I will entertain, and even there I would enjoy it more if there was less association with war. My feelings about this have only strengthened with age and events.

Feeling this way about violence is one reason I do not watch TV or movies, do not watch sports, and avidly avoid American Popular Culture, which makes allowance for those who are offended by sexuality but offers few refuges to those who are offended by violence. Facebook for example insists on showing me ads for horror movies, action movies, police movies, etc. That anyone can fail to be entertained by violence is not allowed for in any algorithm.  

I understand this focus on violence in popular entertainment in commercial terms, in anthropological terms, in sociological terms, in evolutionary psychology terms, but it feels alien and harmful.

Harmful in that it crowds out other ways for characters to interact with the world. Harmful in that it perpetuates toxically-masculine depictions of what a leader is, what an athlete is, what a conversation is. Just as much pornography teaches unhealthy lessons to young people about sexuality, violent entertainment teaches them unhealthy lessons about communication, empathy, politics, and conflict. I would not ban either, but see the same avenues of harm in both.

And it feels alien, not in the not-from-around-here way, but in the "I am unlike all these people" way. What most members of our culture will pay to see, I find depressing and enervating. The vast majority of fiction in our culture is about people being bad to each other, and I fundamentally do not identify with finding that interesting, relaxing, or desirable. Rejecting people-being-bad-to-each-other entertainment is a position so far outside the norm that even those who know me best tend to chuckle when I state my position. It cuts me off (by choice) from vast domains of human endeavor, foundational cultural touchstones, central shibboleths.

We are products of cultures built around violent entertainment. We print great mythical violence-makers onto diapers and metaphors. We parade children in costumes of characters named after the paramilitaries that brought the Nazis to power. We make aircraft carriers available to film-makers because it helps with recruiting actual sailors. I do not blame anyone for participating in our culture, but this aspect of it I hope will eventually change.


 

Jenner Highlands Bobcat

I took the day fully off today. No work, not even emails. No childcare, not even taxiing them around. Instead, I went for a long hike at Jenner Headlands Preserve, out on the Sonoma Coast, north and west of most places. 

I saw lots of good birds, an embarrassing amount of beautiful scenery, too many flowers and butterflies and such. Badger burrows, deer tracks, etc. But the clear highlight for me was a several minute look at a hunting bobcat.

When I first spotted it, near the top of the Raptor Ridge Trail, above Hawk Hill, beyond the Falcon's Fairway and within sight of Peregrine Point, it was standing still, a few hundred feet from me, silhouetted against the sky. I couldn't tell what it was until I had it in focus and zoomed in.

I braced myself against a fence post and staid as still and quiet as I could in the whistling wind. It stood quite still for a minute or two, then pounced, paws together on landing, like a Lynx (which is in the same genus) crushing a vole's snow tunnel. 

 

The ground clearly caved in slightly under its paws, but whatever dug the tunnel had escaped. Immediately afterward it turned and gave me such a look, as though I was to blame.

It then spent several minutes slowly sauntering off along the ridge-line toward the trees, pausing occasionally to glower at me.