Hidden in Translation: Downplaying the Seriousness of Civil Rights Threats

January 7, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

The following essay is a detailed discussion of the political implications of the meanings of cuss words. I’m not the one who made this an international civil rights issue? But the topic is crucially important, and a clean-version is not possible. Can I recommend Happy Catholic* if you’d like something beautiful and good to contemplate today instead?

The Wine-Dark Sea is lyrical and thought-provoking, if you’d like to scroll some back issues and be edified. How about Siris, if philosophy blogging is your thing? Or at the other end of the clean spectrum, Aleteia is really quite good.

No? None of that? You want the cussing?

Okay, you were warned. Read at your own risk.

***

Our topic is the interview with French president Emmanuel Macron, described here (in French) and printed here (behind a paywall). We’re going to look at his word choice in French and its implications, and then, more briefly in conclusion, the decision of English-speaking journalists to mistranslate that word.

***

Imagine for a moment that Donald Trump, or President Biden if that’s more suited to your situation, made the following statement about people like you: “I am going to piss them off.”

You would rightly infer that this person planned to use his power to make you very, very angry. That’s what pissing off means. It’s the provoking of an emotional reaction.

Now imagine instead that your opponent threatened to “Screw with you” “F*ck with you” “Screw you over” “F*ck-up your life” or something else on those same lines. Different meaning. Now they aren’t just planning to make you angry, they are planning to sabotage you. To embroil you in genuine problems.

“I am going to piss them off” might be said of, say, a new paperwork requirement that’s irritating but manageable. Or perhaps a symbolic undertaking, such as displaying an offensive flag or monument, or intentionally naming a highway in honor of someone you find morally repugnant.

“I am going to screw them,” in contrast, would be paperwork “requirements” that effectively inhibit your ability to go about your daily life. Or, in the highway example, creating a “highway improvement project” that intentionally limits your ability to get to work, run a business, etc.

Both are displays of ill-will, but whereas the first aims to hurt you emotionally, the second aims to, well, screw you over.

***

So I’m honestly not great at the finer points of French grammar because I developed fluency in the language not by years of formal study but by attending high school in France. As a result, however, cussing in French comes quite naturally to me. And let me tell you: There are fine distinctions to vulgar language in French that have important implications even among, to the non-native speaker relying on dictionary translations, apparently synonymous terms.

***

First, the word Macron didn’t use: In French if you want to level-up from ticking someone off to full-on pissing someone off, in France you don’t urinate but defecate, using the verb phrase faire chier. Which means “shit” (literally: to make someone shit) and definitely shit in this case, not poop or crap or anything like that. Expressions built around chier are expressions of being made angry or frustrated. (And no, don’t use these in an interview. In my experience, the verb chier is somewhat more vulgar than emmerder discussed next, but there are plenty of ways to politely express a desire to anger others if that’s your intended meaning.)

The apparently-synonymous noun merde of course means “shit” (or “crap” if you prefer) but it’s not quite as vulgar nor as strong in France as the English-language counterparts are in the US. The president using it in a speech doesn’t have the same shock value in terms of word-choice generally, so set that aside — it’s how he uses the word that matters more. The related verb emmerder, which the word President Macron used in his interview discussing the forthcoming pass vaccinal, lacks an English counterpart: Enshitten would be the verb, if it existed.

[Update 1/30/2022: Thanks to The Diary of Samuel Pepys I learned that shitten is an adjective, anyhow. Okay, carrying on . . .]

On the face of it, comparing emmerder and faire chier, the dictionary seems to be proposing synonyms that largely can be translated to piss off. But, dear readers, President Macron picked the term that has an additional and politically very important implication, and one which he spelled out quite clearly: The plan is to emmerder the non-vaccinated minority by denying them a “social life.”

Access to restaurants, cafes, and theaters is what gets mentioned in most reports of the interview, so you might imagine vie sociale is just the nice, fun stuff people do together in their free time, as wikitionary’s definition indicates. In French, however, vie sociale can take on a more profound meaning — your life as a member of society, period. In most interview excerpts, it’s unclear which one Macron is implying.

If you look at the text of the passe vaccinal, however, you’ll see that the new law in question also denies access to regional public transportation — which in France means you are crossing over from merely “social” activities in the American sense (you can live without restaurants and movies) to making it impossible to, say, go to work in the morning. To participate in community life whatsoever. While some parts of France are, like the US, car-dependent, an enormous portion of the nation’s population is concentrated in urban zones where public transportation is the only viable means of travel beyond your immediate neighborhood.

Correction 1/13/21: On a closer look, local neighborhood public transit isn’t affected, my error there. Inter-regional trains are the big debate, with the complication that crossing regional lines, just like crossing state lines in the US, is more or less common practice depending on how close you live to a border. Many people won’t be affected at all, but others will find short, local trips subject to restrictions. And of course many people living in Paris or other densely-populated metro areas simply don’t own cars, and therefore, yes, would face massive problems if work or family obligations required a trip across regional borders.

As of this morning, here’s a good English-language synopsis of the current status of the bill. I’m once again noting how those of us at the “extremes” of Left and Right are finding common ground in defending basic civil liberties.

–> And as long as I’m in here admitting to my errors, I’m going to remind readers that all of this law is concerning a virus that is being actively transmitted by asymptomatic vaccinated people. The idea that vaccine mandates are stopping the spread is strictly fantasy. Vaccination is doing wonders for reducing the severity of the disease. But surrounding yourself with only-vaccinated people will in no way protect you from infection.

Okay, picking back up with the original essay:

Hence the word emmerder was chosen quite accurately. It’s not a strategy to aggravate you; it’s a strategy to create emmerdements or more colloquially, des emerdes — which are real problems that truly screw up your life.

All of that the French are discussing quite freely. Now getting to my point for US readers:

What strikes me as very important from a journalistic point of view is not only Google Translate’s imprecise rendering, but that an outlet like NPR alludes to the translation error but never clarifies it. There is a significant difference between a president creating emotional hostility with a portion of the general public and a president vowing to screw you over.

“I’m gonna piss you off” is, when it comes to legislation, radically different from “I’m gonna screw you.” The latter is what Macron vowed to do. To sugarcoat his words, as NPR and others are doing, is to be complicit in hiding the reality of the stated intentions of the law in question.

[Additional update 1/30/22, since I’m here: Anonyme Citoyen is an account documenting the protests in France. Turns out that actively provoking your citizens isn’t a popular move.]

***

Related: Please read this excellent essay from a fellow pro-vaccine columnist (note the part at the beginning where she mentions her husband is triple-vaxxed) who lays out the serious civil rights implications of vaccine passports.

For your own well-being, please put serious consideration into being vaccinated if you haven’t done so already. But also for your own well-being, please don’t destroy the republic. It’s not worth it.

And also, regardless of your politics, no matter desperately you really do want to screw over the people you are so angry at, please please please join the Clean Air club. It is both one of the lowest-risk interventions available and at this point appears to be the only viable option we have for actually stopping the pandemic. Worth a shot, seems to me.

Photo: Blue Angels flying in formation against a clear blue sky © Frank Schulenburg / CC BY-SA 4.0. This is a non-metaphorical picture of one of the reasons I’m so dang insistent on this whole civil rights business, as those who know can attest.

*Full disclosure: Julie Davis and I once got into a private debate about, among other things, cussing in movies. In retrospect, I think she was more right than I gave her credit for at the time. So her irony-meter is getting a full workout with this post. Though honestly looking through it, I ended up cussing less than anticipated.

PS: The etymology on chier is absolutely hilarious. If you’re into irony, anyway.

Resolutions, Rebranding, and the Body You Have

January 4, 2022 By Jennifer Fitz

What caught the eye of your internet-mom this afternoon was a weird bit of cross-discourse about body image, fat-shaming, and weight loss. No links, I’m going straight to bullet point answers to the questions and arguments these various voices are circulating:

Why yes, our culture is obsessed with body image, and it can’t help but fuel psychological hang-ups about being thin enough (women, generally) or muscular enough (men, generally). For women, in particular, take this challenge: Keep a tally of what portion of movies and television shows feature a female lead who isn’t noticeably slender. It’s a thing. The star is always skinny, that’s how it works. It’ll mess up your brain.
Absolutely, sloth and gluttony can cause weight gain. Doesn’t work for everybody, but it works for a lot of people.
Other things cause weight gain too, and you can’t control all of those things.
Also, some people just aren’t slender even when they are perfectly fit and healthy. Other people have serious health problems usually associated with obesity even though they are slender.
Therefore: Being either ashamed or proud of your weight is an emotional time-waste for most people. Your weight may or may not be something you can control, and it may or may not be an accurate reflection of your health.
Furthermore, it may be relatively easy or more difficult for you to adopt practices associated with good health, so pride, once again, is not just a deadly sin it’s an absurd one.
What you can control is the effort you put in to taking care of your health. Not your weight, your health.
While physical health is not more important than spiritual health (so you are deluding yourself if you look fantastic on Insta but your soul is a fetid pit), making an effort to improve your physical health is a good spiritual exercise.
There’s nothing like trying to work on your physical health to help you uncover other underlying factors that need to be addressed more urgently. So even if your resolution to be a better steward of your body doesn’t work out the way you hoped, if you allow it to do so it will help you discover things about yourself that you need to know. So that’s good.

What I’m going to recommend you work on is one of two things:

(A) Make an effort to improve your blood sugar. See, for example the results of this study reported in Science Daily: “Long-term blood sugar history predicts risk of severe COVID-19 among diabetics: Two- to three-year history offers more accurate prediction than shorter time period.”

If you are not sure where to start on dealing with your blood sugar problem, here’s a list of a few resources I mentioned last time I lectured you at length on this topic.

If you aren’t sure you have a blood sugar problem, invest $20 in an inexpensive but reputable-brand glucose monitor available over the counter at Walmart or your nearest pharmacy and for goodness sakes find out. Type II diabetes doesn’t tap you on the shoulder one night in a wave of the wand from the Sugar Fairy; it’s a condition you develop slowly over time, and which you can detect before you start developing serious health problems, rather than waiting for some random doctor’s appointment to finally catch it farther down the road.

It is one of the cheapest, easiest, most potentially life-changing diagnostic tests you can run, and you can do it at home whenever want.

And reminder, y’all: Even though you’re fully-vaxxed (good) and all your friends are fully-vaxxed (good for them, too), COVID infections are spreading among people who are carefully ensconced in their vaccine-mandated bubble, and they are causing serious disease among fully-vaxxed patients with underlying health conditions. Poor blood sugar control is the one underlying condition that is both tightly associated with serious disease and death and which you can have some control over.

PS: If you’re doing everything your doctor says to do to control your diabetes and it’s not working, then resolve to find out if there is a different approach to managing the disease that might work better for you.

(B) If you don’t have a blood sugar problem yourself, resolve to be genuinely supportive of people who do. And by that I mean I quit friggin’ flooding the world with cookies. And the like.

You know what I mean. You don’t need to drop hints. You don’t need to assist other people with their meal choices. But you could just completely quit bringing food to non-meals, and start only bringing real, unprocessed, unsweetened foods to actual meals. That would be fun.

(Also: Did you really need to have this meeting? Because there are people who’d like to be out getting in a quick walk, and instead you are making them just sit there? Fewer meetings is a great way to help other people improve their health.)

***

Finally, as long as we’re talking Plague 2022, resolution for everybody: Join the Clean Air Club.

Photo of a rusty pipes with big colorful valves courtesy of Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Duisburg, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord — 2020 — 7824-6” / CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Life-Changing Magic of Acting Like a Grown-Up

December 30, 2021 By Jennifer Fitz

There are many good things in your life that you may have to walk away from. Your marriage is not one of them.

There are many taboos, and trends, and social pressures that may be chaining you down, and that you may find great freedom and fulfillment in rejecting. Staying faithful to your wedding vows is not one of them.

There are many good uses for literary prose. Glamorizing the destruction of a family is not one of them.

Don’t fall for the trap.

It’s normal in midlife to examine what you’ve accomplished this far and to ask serious questions about how you ought to proceed from here. It is normal to find that your current occupation isn’t quite what you’d hoped, and to ask whether some changes are in order. It is normal to discover some years in that your spouse is just this ordinary person with faults, and weaknesses, and attributes that are boring, or not-that-attractive, or which, if you had it to do all over again, maybe you wouldn’t choose.

You don’t have it to do all over again.

You have this marriage. You vowed faithfulness to this person. You are now the protagonist in one of those romance novels involving the boorish male lead and the impetuous bride, forced into an arranged marriage by people who perhaps meant well, but frankly they’ve stuck you with someone you’d never have picked for yourself — except alas, that you did. The person who arranged your present marriage is the much-younger you. He or she meant well. He or she had good reasons for thinking you’d be happy with this person. And your job, hero or heroine, is to embark on a torrid midlife romance in which you discover all the ways that this no-longer-chosen spouse is indeed the love of your life after all.

Meanwhile, divest yourself of the fantasy that your tiresome marriage is somehow anything, at all, special or different than the life of everyone else out there. The happily-married people? They are happily-married to ordinary, weak, fault-prone, body-odorous, flabby, wrinkly, not-that-rich, not-that-successful, not-that-anything normal spouses.

Maybe there’s a couple couples out there who’ve never had a fight in their life? I’m doubtful of those claims. It’s normal for happily married people to experience conflict and disappointment. It is normal for middle-aged persons to examine their lives and find areas where changes are in order. It is normal to have to work through these discoveries with your spouse, and find ways to support one another through sometimes-difficult changes.

Destroying your marriage and wrecking your children’s lives is not the solution.

***

Maybe, though, you are in an abusive relationship.

In that case: Get out. Definitely get out for now, and probably you’ll have to get out for the long term. Do whatever it takes to protect yourself and your children from your abusive spouse.

There is nothing romantic about being abused. There is nothing heroic about allowing your children to be abused nor to witness your being abused. Get out. GET OUT.

***

But if your marriage is just kinda boring? Your spouse is a little clueless, but never intentionally hurtful? You can honestly say that things are fine, they’re just boring?

Or maybe things aren’t fine, but you aren’t being abused (if you’re not sure about that, get yourself to safety and then consult a professional for confirmation on how to proceed) and with some serious changes things could be fine?

Then work on your marriage. Work on your life. You can increase intimacy and trust and companionship in your marriage while also exploring new interests and fulfilling unmet needs.

***

If you’re Christian of any flavor, I highly recommend the classic work Boundaries by Cloud & Townsend, which is crystal clear on the difference between abusive relationships (GET OUT) and run-of-the-mill unhappiness. The paperback is cheap enough you can get yourself and your spouse each your own copy.

(I think it could be just fine for many non-Christians, too, but I’ve read some reviews by readers who were clearly not looking for a Biblically-centered work, and that’s what this is. I think for the price you could just take a sharpie and black out the theology-parts and still have perfectly sound advice for how to build emotionally-healthy relationships, but also you could just look for a different, secular or your-faith-centered book that covers the same material.)

I recommend this book for non-married people, too. It’s about relationships generally, so it’s helpful for dealing with friends, colleagues, employers, doctors, neighbors, sales reps, roommates . . . anyone at all in your life, and also your pets. Especially your pets.

–> If your only two modes of operating right now are “this is fine” and “burn it all down” then you seriously, seriously need this book.

***

There’s nothing edgy or glamorous about destroying or abandoning a pretty-good marriage. It doesn’t matter how sexy the protagonists are nor how thrilling the script or the prose: Wrecking people’s lives and betraying your own spouse and children is not romantic. It’s bad for you. Don’t do it, and don’t fawn over the poor souls who have mistaken immaturity for bravery.

It’s a terrible way to live. All you’ll discover in the end is that if you can’t be happy with faithfulness and kindness, you really just don’t know how to be happy.

Photo: Moscow Metro Volokolamskaya, A.Savin, WikiCommons, Free Art license.

There’s nothing new about the temptation to adultery and divorce. Related columns of possible interest:

A Marriage-Affirming Romantic Comedy about Adultery – What it says on the tin. I know!
Adultery is Not the Only Option: Five Things You Can Do to Keep Your Vows Intact – Practical advice on how to resist the temptation to adultery.
Choosing to Fall In Love
Straight Talk on the Reality of Marital Chastity – Excerpts and link to the Darwins’ excellent essay on NFP in marriage.
Is Abstinence Hard on a Marriage? – Me being very, very pointed about the reality of abstinence within marriage, and what makes or breaks couples who find themselves needing to abstain.
A Mission for Old Married People – Reminder that if somehow by the grace of God you’ve managed to stay married all this time, younger people desperately need to know your story and know that it’s an achievable goal for ordinary sinners like themselves.

Epidemic of Personal Responsibility

December 20, 2021 By Jennifer Fitz

Today’s topic is me as your internet mom lecturing: You, personally, are responsible for taking care of the body God has put into your care.

(Make that bodies, plural, if others in your family, your workplace, or your community are dependent on the decisions you make on their behalf. But today I’m mostly talking about the specific body your soul is animating, and then the rest will follow by extension.)

Yesterday when I picked back up on the COVID-blogging, I did something unusual and largely resisted making any public policy prescriptions. And understand: One of my early childhood memories is me laying in bed circa 1981, thinking about the Reagan-era Cold War discussions on the news, and forming a youthfully-innocent recommendation on how to achieve world peace. (It was: Mind Your Own Business. If you want to know how my third-grade self tended to think.) So for me to go never mind all that is a big deal.

And I’m going right now, to you my readers, that where Omicron is concerned: Never mind all that. You have much more pressing things to re-think right now.

Here’s a nice summary from a physician with the NHS about more or less what I gave you links on yesterday. (Yes, he’s writing in Al Jazeera. I like them as a source for learning about the existence of Africa/South Asia stories that the US press doesn’t cover. In this case, though, it’s just a guy who is looking at the view from his practice and the current, very limited data on the latest COVID outbreak in the UK, and it looks like we’re seeing a similar view of the horizon.)

Here’s The Atlantic’s summary of the state of the science as of this morning, which includes significant discussion of the part about how you’re contagious before you know to test, and that reality includes vaccinated folk. (FYI – Coronavirus coverage at The Atlantic is not behind the paywall. So you can just go read and check behind all the links and see what you think.)

So let’s talk about public health, and why I am very much urging you to reassess and update where COVID is concerned.

***

Updated (7:30pm EST 12/21) to add this link to the White House’s press release:

On Monday morning, a mid-level staff member, who does not regularly have contact with the President, received a positive result for a COVID-19 test. Three days earlier, on Friday, that staff member had spent approximately 30 minutes in proximity to the President on Air Force One, on the way from Orangeburg, South Carolina to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This staff member is fully vaccinated and boosted, and tested negative prior to boarding Air Force One, as is required for everyone traveling with the President. This staff member did not begin to experience symptoms until Sunday, and was tested on Monday.

Fortunately so far President Biden is asymptomatic and testing negative. But guys: Fully vaxx’d, boosted, and coming down with COVID?

Vaccination status is not a sufficient protective strategy.

***

In my opinion, the US has had one single public health success in managing the pandemic, and that is in making vaccines available to the entire US population. I have many complaints about many things, including some of the details of this thing, but this one thing did happen, and I’m grateful for it.

If you were hoping widespread vaccination would do the trick, I do think a vaccine-oriented approach to ending the pandemic was a reasonable hope.

Unfortunately, what I’m seeing with the growing wave of infection and transmission within groups of vaccinated persons is that many of us need to reassess the extent to which we were relying on personal and population-level vaccination as our primary means of self-protection.

I want to be very clear here: I think there remains strong evidence that vaccination is a good strategy for most adults’ personal health.

(–> Though I qualify with “adult”, my youngest child is fifteen and fully vaccinated; I’m hesitant to make any further comments on vaccinating young people because I’ve had no call to look into the question for children-generally. Since I don’t have younger children, I’ve only assessed what applies to my specific offspring with their various personal medical histories, states in life, etc.)

Furthermore, even though it is becoming very clear that vaccinated persons are experiencing breakthrough infections and spreading the virus among themselves, I think there is still strong logical evidence in favor of using household vaccination as a way to reduce (but not eliminate) risk to vulnerable persons. In other words: Even if you didn’t think your child personally needed the protection of vaccination, it would still make sense to vaccinate your child if you or another family member is higher-risk for COVID complications. No, I am not satisfied with the data I’ve seen on household transmission as of yet, but seriously? If you are spending two-thirds or more of your day in close quarters with somebody, it’s gotta be easier to get less-sick if that person is also less-sick and for less time? I mean, just guessing? But yes?

So vaccination remains a good strategy even though it cannot be a total strategy.

***

The reason I am writing yesterday and today is because public health moves slowly and Omicron does not. Over the next week or two or three, if you are relying on vaccination-status as your means of not getting COVID, you are very likely to make decisions that will put you at significant risk of infection.

(Again: If you are a person who is indifferent to being infected, I’m unclear on why you aren’t scrolling @catworkers like I told you to yesterday. If you exhausted that feed, can I recommend @hourlyfox, @corgieveryhour, @rabbiteveryhour, and probably also a long talk with a good friend?)

I know a lot of people who have serious reasons to minimize their exposure to COVID-19. Many of you have, very rationally, taken the approach until now of using vaccination status (or immune status generally, if you also include prior-infection history) as a means of striking the balance in the trade off between the real and serious risks of isolation and the real and serious risks of infection. I am not in any way suggesting you panic. I am saying that you need to update your strategy, and that at this time you are the only person who is going do that for you.

***

Listen, I know many of you reading this are hopeful that whatever governments are local-to-you will take appropriate public health measures. There’s a reason I’m not commenting on what those measures should be, and my reason is this: They aren’t actually happening in a way that will protect you.

We have seen multiple incidences of the very leaders who imposed strict lockdown and isolation and mask-wearing rules brazenly breaking their own rules. Um, so . . . there’s a vector for you. I can likewise assure you that in institutions and jurisdictions where vaccine mandates, test-and-trace, and quarantine protocols are official policy, there are standard practices of ignoring, circumventing, or outright lying to get around the rules any time there is a perverse incentive to do so. Maybe people are behaving in front of your face? But they aren’t behaving.

Your understandable anger at this situation will not keep you from getting infected. You have to decide whether you’d rather be angry-and-sick or angry-and-not-sick.

***

In any case, your anger is rapidly growing obsolete. Omicron is not playing by the rules put in place under the regime of earlier mutations.

***

So where does that leave you? It leaves you with reexamining the ways you can take responsibility for reducing your risk of infection and reducing your risk of complications from infection. What are they?

#1 Clean Air

@CovidIsAirborne is a fairly good aggregator of info on this. Ditto @jljcolorado. I would say that for most of my readers, the big change you can make is to buy or build a good air purifier for your home (if you share air with people) if you don’t have one already, and ditto for your workplace, classroom, etc.

I haven’t seen anyone mention this, but y’all: If someone in your home is higher-risk for respiratory infections, do a serious assessment of how much you can cut down on sharing exhaled air. It’s okay to have weird sleeping arrangements so that your child with severe asthma isn’t spending a third of his life breathing whatever germs the sibling brought home, even if they need to share a room during waking hours. Your marriage will be just fine if your spouse who has comorbid risk factors uses the marriage-bed for intercourse but some other room away from your germ-exhaling self for a sleeping-bed. (Yes. I said that. Clean air is a great way to prolong your marriage and all the good things that marriage has to offer. If you’re too young to read about that, you need to get off the internet.)

#2 For-Serious Masks

Again, I am not making risk-benefit decisions for you. But if in your own estimation it is important for you and the people you breathe around not to get infected with COVID, it’s time to upgrade to N95s. Use them when you are indoors (or crowded outdoors) around people who are breathing, and also when you are indoors in places where people have been breathing, even if the people themselves have moved on.

Even (especially) if you are not concerned about your own risk, use an N95 when you’re visiting a high-risk person.

In close quarters, such as when you’re packed into an airplane, even if the air filtration overall is top notch, use an N95 to prevent exposure to the unfiltered air coming straight at you from the person who keeps taking your armrest.

#3 Your Underlying Health

Being perfectly healthy won’t prevent Long Covid, and it’s no guarantee against severe (even fatal) infection. In any case, you probably don’t have it in your power to be perfectly healthy. What you can do, though, is take small steps to be healthier than you otherwise would be. Then, no matter what happens, you’ll have that much more of an edge.

Get your blood sugar down to a consistently healthy level. Because it is so strongly associated with poor outcomes, this should be a very high priority. You can make improvements to your blood sugar numbers even when weight loss isn’t happening.

Eat healthy foods. Heavy on the fresh vegetables, and then whatever unprocessed or minimally-processed foods seem to work the best for you.

Exercise the amount that you can. Maybe that’s a lot, maybe that’s not a lot. If you’re currently dealing with Long Covid, another post-viral syndrome, or some other exercise-limiting illness or injury . . . believe me, I know. I know. It is very, very hard in difficult cases to know exactly how to balance out rest and activity levels. Do the amount that you safely can. It’s okay to err on the side of a little too much rest, you can always do a little bit more tomorrow.

But especially if you’re dealing with a serious illness or underlying condition, the amount of physical activity that you can safely accomplish is super important. Don’t fixate on the big picture here. You’ll go bonkers if you try to compare yourself to people who can follow some generic plan and push themselves and all that. Just do the amount today that you’re confident will be okay.

Get fresh air and sunlight. Go outside if you possibly can.

Cultivate friendships. Find people who support your mental and physical health and let them be the people who predominate in your life.

Discover the deeper meaning and purpose in your life right now. Chances are that if you are someone who has an above-average need to prevent COVID-19 infection, maybe your life is pretty difficult?

Maybe you are dealing with a lot of social isolation because you’ve been in this situation for a long time, even when others around you felt relatively safe. Maybe your risk profile has changed because of some serious losses that have occurred over the past year or two. Maybe your underlying health condition, or your state in life that has people so desperately depending on you, involves hardship.

Hard situations are just plain hard. They aren’t fun, and they usually involve you not getting to live life quite the way you’d hoped. Maybe you’ve been valuing the person you wish you could be, and you’re feeling like right now your life just isn’t all that. You can’t contribute, or be involved, or do the important-to-you thing that you have long considered to be who you should be.

Well, that picture of an “ideal” life might be perfect for somebody, but guess what? It’s not your vocation. If it were your calling, you’d be able to live that life. You’re not. Your calling is to live well the life you’ve been given at this very moment. Whatever that is. Richer or poorer, in sickness or in health, until death do you part: Live the life that you have.

Artwork: Albert Bierstadt – Storm Clouds (c.1880), public domain.

PS: If your reason for not-vaccinating yet is an understandable concern about running medical experiments on yourself, it may be that there is now enough safety-related data accumulated to put your mind at ease. Keep in mind that even if you don’t trust the US or XYZ other country’s data, there are studies being put out all over the world, in all kinds of different political, social, and environmental conditions, so you are much more likely today to be able to find information that answers your questions about the risks and benefits to someone in your situation. It’s worth looking into.

Intergenerational Interdependence is a Blessing Not a Curse

December 2, 2021 By Jennifer Fitz

From my reading this morning:

¹⁰Do not glorify yourself by dishonoring your father,
for your father’s dishonor is no glory to you.
¹¹For a man’s glory comes from honoring his father,
and it is a disgrace for children not to respect their mother.
¹²O son, help your father in his old age,
and do not grieve him as long as he lives;
¹³even if he is lacking in understanding, show forbearance;
in all your strength do not despise him.
¹⁴For kindness to a father will not be forgotten,
and against your sins it will be credited to you;
¹⁵in the day of your affliction it will be remembered in your favor;
as frost in fair weather, your sins will melt away.

My aunt and uncle, and my father and stepmother, have together organized their lives around making sure my now extremely-elderly grandmother receives the care she needs. My other aunt and uncle did the same for my maternal grandmother in the years prior to her death. It’s demanding work, but it’s their work, and though they avail themselves of all the help they can get in making the work happen, it would be unthinkable that they simply abandon their own mother.

As we finalize our retirement planning, my husband and I have been having conversations with our teen and young adult children about their preferences in how to care for us when the time comes — knowing that we can’t truly plan for end-of-life, it will happen when and how it happens, but we can make certain financial choices that will impact the types of resources they have at their disposal. They, too, can begin thinking now about how their life choices over then next five or ten years (professional formation, choice of spouse, place they settle down) will affect the shape of their adult relationship with us.

Neither my husband nor I come from a culture where expectations about extended-family life take a specific, prescribed form. We do come from a culture (late 20th century USA) where independence is considered the pinnacle of human life. To be dependent on nobody for anything is what makes you a superstar. To need others — not just to enjoy them, but to actually need them — is a mark of failure.

It’s a radically screwed up culture. The reality is that all humans need other people, and that all humans pass through phases of life when they are utterly dependent on others.

Because we come from this culture that idolizes the myth of independence, it is difficult to talk with our kids about plans for a time when they may have to take on all kinds of potentially unpleasant and overwhelming work in order to care for us. You’d think aging was invented last week the way Americans tend to act shocked, just shocked, that human minds and bodies are prone to frailty.

Meanwhile, statistically speaking, if we live long enough to need our children to care for us, and they live long enough to do so, we’re probably going to have to depend on them, personally, for that care, because there will be far too many other Gen-Xers competing for the assistance of fewer-per-elder working-age adults than ever. We can reasonably expect professional nursing care to become cost-prohibitive and social security to wane away, all while our retirement savings are eaten up by the inflationary pressure of the US’s current (under all administrations, this isn’t party-specific) spend-and-spend-and-spend fiscal policy.

So while we would have preferred to be able to have more children (alas they don’t grow on trees), we’ve become grateful in a new way for the ones we’ve got. Before we just loved them for the pure goodness and beauty and wonder of their existence. Now we’re beginning to appreciate some of the possible side-benefits of parenthood.

And that, friends, is what I’ve been thinking about as I watch some of the shallower rationales for abortion slinging around Twitter these days: It is much, much easier to keep a straight face and ask your kids to sacrifice for you when you have already proven you are more than willing to sacrifice for them.

Never easy caring for an aging parent, I don’t think. But hella lot easier doing it when you have no doubt in your mind that they are grateful for you, have always loved you absolutely and unconditionally, and would have done, and indeed did, whatever they possibly could to give you the best life they could manage.

My grandparents, though as imperfect as anyone, loved their kids that much and that completely. My husband’s and my parents, though as imperfect as anyone, loved us kids that much and that completely. We kids, all of us with our many imperfections, have in turn loved our children that much and that completely. I certainly don’t count myself perfect either as a parent or as an adult-child. But I can honestly to say to my parents with undying gratitude: When you sow love, you reap it.

Photo by Tim Green of Alan Wilson’s sculpture “Grandmother with Child” (1996), Railway Road, Blackburn, via Wikimedia CC 2.0.

Of Course Prenatal Learning is Real

November 30, 2021 By Jennifer Fitz

Melanie Jean Juneau has a provocative story over at Catholic Stand about her own children’s experiences of remembering life in the womb. I’m skeptical, but think it would be a fun and fruitful avenue of research if anyone can come up with reliable ways to study the question. Regardless of what infants and toddlers do and don’t remember, however, the fact that unborn children are conscious and learning is obvious. Newborns are aware and able to learn, and that’s not because of magic thinking-dust floating in the air of the maternity ward, it’s because they are already able to learn before they make their grand entrance.

Which leads to a funny story. My eldest (born three weeks early but perfectly able to think and learn, he didn’t have to wait for his 40-week gesti-versary to begin expressing strong opinions) is less than two years older than his next-younger sister. Mr. Boy has become much more diplomatic with each passing year, but let’s just say his was not a quiet infancy. Could his complaints be heard through a couple inches of insulating material? Absolutely.

So, funny story about prenatal learning . . . his little sister was born crying like a toddler. If you’ve been around newborns, you know that usually they have this distinctive newborn-type cry that’s not real nuanced. As the baby grows towards Peak Toddler, tonal subtleties flourish, and the child develops a whole repertoire of types of crying that can be very informative for the parents. Toddlers and newborns do not have the same cry — unless the newborn has received extensive prenatal voice-coaching from an older sibling.

As a result, my #2 child was born crying not like some just-off-the-cabbage-patch neophyte, but like a seasoned pro. In the middle of the night, I could not distinguish the newborn from the toddler, because they had the same cry. She’d been listening her whole life to the very loud young person who did much of his hollering just inches from her developing ears and brain, so she already knew the language.

(FTR: I can now definitely tell their voices apart, thank you puberty, these days I mistake my son for his father not his sister.)

Anyhow, that’s my personal story of prenatal learning. I don’t think there’s any huge lesson to draw from it, other than that of course your baby is going to have a connection with you, Mom, because of all the months and months of learning your movements and voice and scent, so naturally your baby is going to favor spending time in your arms. Nothing ground-breaking there. Likewise, it suggests that Dad and siblings and other close household members are going to be somewhat known by the newborn already, so that family bond is already forming before you meet face to face.

It’s good.

***

Simcha Fisher has an interview up with an adoptee who talks about the pain and grief of being asked to pretend that adoption is the fairy-tale ending that erases the trauma of losing your first family. It’s not an easy read, so if you click through please understand that you are signing up to enter into someone else’s trauma and listen, and some of what this now-adult child of adoption has to say is very raw.

I think it’s an interview that absolutely attests (regardless of whatever you might believe about the science birth trauma, etc.) to the fact that children are meant to grow up in the loving embrace of their biological mother and father who are committed and faithful to each other and to their child, and that anything that rips apart that fundamental need is going to hurt. It’s a loss, and it’s normal for that loss to be painful and the grief to be lasting. There’s no age when losing one or both parents is just no big deal, move on to the next thing.

But obviously it’s a fallen world, and while we should do everything we can to help children grow up in a peaceful, loving home cared for by their own biological mother and father, if for some reason that’s not possible, we do what we can to find a next-best option. Neither “just kill the victim” nor “just pretend nothing happened, everything’s fine” are the loving response. Loving people is the loving response.

Photo of a little girl in vividly colored striped stockings with pink Crocs by D Sharon Pruitt, via Wikimedia, CC 2.0. Not my child, but I had a few who went in for that sort of fashion statement. Possibly some still do.

Freedom of Speech Matters

November 29, 2021 By Jennifer Fitz

H/T to Salon Beige on a European freedom of speech ruling that’s being used by Algeria to justify to the UN the imprisonment of religious dissenters. English language summary of the case is here.

Very short version:

Said Djabelkhir was sentenced last spring to three years in prison for Facebook posts questioning Muslim orthodoxy (as defined by Algeria).
The UN freedom of religion and freedom of expression investigators sent a letter to Algeria saying: What the heck?
Apparently Algeria wrote back and said: We’re not doing anything other than what the European Court of Human Rights already said was AOK.

I haven’t been able to dig up a copy of Algeria’s statement yet, but the reputed contents are indeed consistent in kind, though not in degree, with the ruling on the case in Austria:

The woman in her late 40s, identified only as E.S., claimed during two public seminars in 2009 that the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage to a young girl was akin to “pedophilia.” A Vienna court convicted her in 2011 of disparaging religious doctrines, ordering her to pay a 480-euro ($547) fine, plus costs. The ruling was later upheld by an Austrian appeals court.

The ECHR said the Austrian court’s decision “served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace.”

What’s the difference between a western democracy and a theocratic despotism? Less and less with each concession to utilitarianism.

Readers: Freedom of speech is worth preserving. Yes, it means that wrong-headed ideas will circulate and gain adherents. But without freedom of speech, you lose the ability to fight back. Your ability to say what is true and good becomes dependent on how fashionable your message is and how neatly it fits with the interests of those in power.

That’s not a world you want to live in.

Image: Norman Rockwell’s painting from The Saturday Evening Post of a man speaking from the audience at a town meeting in New England, used for a propaganda poster entitled “Save Freedom of Speech Buy War Bonds” circa 1943, via Wikimedia, public domain.