Being Bold

I watched The Dark Knight on our new Blu-Ray player tonight. The player was a Christmas gift to the entire household, and it is gorgeous. I loved the visuals and the sound. I do believe that it is an excellent movie, though not for children... it is rated PG-13, but it really should have been rated PG-15.

During one part of the movie, Joker has threatened to kill people each night until Batman gives up his identity and turns himself in. At a press conference, Harvey Dent tries to convince the people of Gotham that they don't really want to insist on this. He tells them that Batman will have to answer to his vigilante behavior, but he must answer to the people of Gotham, not to a madman. He must answer in their own timeline, not under threat by a terrorist.

After the movie, I settled down to check my emails and forum posts, and found myself typing a comprehensive response to the question of whether a certain political figure was a Christian. As I explained how Christianity was more than just attending church, how a Christian over time sees humility replace pride and self-sacrifice replace selfishness, I was already catching myself cringing over my own words. "I am not fit to sit on the judgment throne, but we were given this power on Earth, judgment and excommunication, in order to prevent the insincere from making God's power seem meaningless." (Those were not my exact words, but it was the gist of what I was saying.) Even as I typed, though, I caught myself cringing. My debate opponent was definitely going to accuse me of pride, I thought, and thereby argue that I am not a real Christian if this political figure is not.

Then I remembered the movie, and from that I have this message to give to Christians at the close of the year.

Those who are working against Christianity have been steadily redefining words and changing labels. This is not only a Christian-Humanist thing, but a liberal-conservative one as well. You redefine compassion and accuse your opponent of having none, so that he supports socialist programs in order to appear to the people to have compassion. You redefine pride, so that  you can keep your opponent from speaking out boldly for fear that people think he is prideful and thus a hypocrite. If you can accuse him of hypocrisy, you have won the debate, even if the facts are on his side.

Now, I am not the kind of 'bold' Christian who says anything on my mind without softening, without thought. Some people are eager, for instance, to walk up to anyone on the street who appears to adopt a homosexual identity and declare that this person is going straight to Hell. I do not. However, others try very hard to act accepting, to hold their tongue when they should speak honestly and carefully, because they do not want to be seen as intolerant. They fear that society can no longer tell the difference between integrity and pride, between humility and hypocrisy. They fear being seen as prideful and hypocritical if they act in simple, honest, genuine boldness.

Speak and be bold. Let God alone tie your hand or still your speech. Be plain and honest in your dealings. Speak the truth, not with anger or harshness, but with love. When you do keep silent, when you do cushion your words, when you do choose your battles and decide that a certain time is not the time to fight, do it for love and concern for the other person. Do not do it out of fear for your own reputation.

Show true humility. It is pride that makes you want to appear to fit the new definition of humble. Avoid hypocrisy. Do not fear being labeled as a hypocrite. This generation is inundated by definitions and ideas which are as shallow and weak as artificial flavoring in an artificial meal. You can satisfy yourself with it unless you are exposed to the real thing. People will know, deep inside, when they see the real thing. The charges of hypocrisy, or pride, or ruthlessness, will not stick if you hold to the truth of humility, strength, and honesty. You do not need to meet their definitions out of fear.

Even someone who has heard only their side for an entire lifetime will know what's real when they see it. Christians must be bold in God, humble in God, honest in God, and compassionate in God... and properly represent the truth.

Plenty

I did laundry today. I hung sheet sets and jeans/pants on the line and did underwear and the smaller stuff in the dryer. Not as economical as hanging everything out, I know. Still, this middle-of-the-road solution works for me. As I finished putting the clothes away, I got a sense of well-being. I do enjoy having the laundry done, for the same reason why I love foodshopping. I get a deep satisfaction from seeing my house set up with plenty. Not wastefully huge, not scarce... just plenty. I know my husband would give me an odd look if I demanded that he come and see my 15-month-old daughter's dresses all hanging neatly in the closet, so I will show it to my readers instead.

Since my family is a classic single-income homeschooling family, we don't exactly have a lot of clothing money. I shake my head incredulously when I hear of women going to the store and spending $200 on clothing as if it's nothing. So how did I manage to glean such a lovely wardrobe? Well, "glean" is a good way of putting it.

Back in the Old Testament days, according to the laws of Ancient Israel, you were told to only harvest your field once. Instead of picking over it again and again to garner every grain and every fruit, you needed to leave it alone for the poor, the widows, and the orphans. This was an interesting kind of 'welfare program' unlike most common systems in that it required the recipients to work for their gain. Look in the book of Ruth to find a story of a widowed woman patiently gleaning leftover grain in order to feed herself and her mother-in-law.

My church has a giveaway room, and my aunt has kept the pretty dresses that family members sewed for her daughters. My stepmother-in-law also keeps an eye out for pretty things at yard sales. Through these sources, I have patiently assembled my daughter's wardrobe. The things you don't see hanging are the 2-3T dresses that I have folded and put in a box for next year.

Making plenty from little can be done, but it does take patience and foresight. I need to be willing to pick up items that I don't need right away. I need to have enough skill with a needle to repair discarded outfits with very little wrong with them besides a lost button or burst seam. I need to be vigilant and creative. My reward is that lovely closet full of little hanging dresses that my girl hugs in delight when I present them to be worn.

Does my post have a point? It has several, which is why this isn't really a proper Article Post of the sort that I usually write. For now, though, I just want to focus on that happy feeling I get when I see "the plenty" in the wardrobe, and how fulfilling my job as a homemaker in a frugal household can be.

Maybe you'll get a picture of my garden vegetables another time.

And when they came for me, there was nobody left

I have several things to say about the BP oil spill, but many people are saying them already. I may devote another post to the government regulation that led to the spill and exacerbated its detrimental effect, but for now I want to focus on a slightly different topic.

The important thing about this society is that we enforce the law for everyone, not just the people we like.

This is important, and fairly unusual throughout human history. Before this Reformation-based civilization, it was fairly common for the authorities to turn a blind eye to abuses that happened to unpopular figures. If you were a pauper accusing your lord of rape, you couldn't expect to see him put up on trial. If you were a gypsy, you would be lucky just to keep your head down and avoid being killed on sight.

Even in this illustrious country, we have had problems with 'unpopular' people. The first gun control laws were enacted to prevent the newly-freed blacks from arming themselves. Why did they need to arm themselves? If a black man was brutally beaten for the crime of walking down a certain street, the feeling among the racist supremacists was that he deserved it because he was getting 'uppity'. However, we have always as a society followed the laws that permitted 'inconvenient things' like voting rights and innocent-until-proven-guilty, 'even if' that meant championing the human rights of the minority races.

In fact, even present-day America is not immune from the tendency to categorize some people as 'unpopular', showing less sympathy when they are victimized. There are some men who rape lesbian women and believe that the women deserved that cruel treatment. However, as before, we follow those laws and prosecute these men as the criminals that they are. The important thing about our society is that we truly have that equality, and we do not set laws aside just because we don't like the victim much

Until now.

It started with AIG. Husbands and fathers found their homes besieged and death threats made against their children for the crime of receiving the bonuses that they had earned by lawful contract. The government should have intervened on their behalf, upholding the law for them, even though they are unpopular as blacks, Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals have been throughout history. Instead, Obama decided to give these people a very unlawful choice... either give up the compensation for their hours of hard work, or face ruin at the hands of an angry mob.

We saw it happen again when Toyota's upper management was hauled in front of the liberal Democrats and badgered about a vehicle problem that they were already hard at work trying to find and fix. There was no need for that kind of humiliation. They were already doing the right thing. Still, as an auto manufacturer who makes such horrible things as SUV's and trucks, they had to be shown that the unpopular members of society are no longer protected by the law.

Now it's happening with BP. The guy who got into trouble for calling Obama's demands of money a 'shakedown' ought to be praised to the skies for calling a spade a spade. They are learning what Toyota and AIG have already learned, a lesson that should chill us to the bone, such that we should be demonstrating against the government instead of against that evil, evil company who seeks to fill our vehicles with gas and our homes with heat.

Whether you are doing the right thing or not, whether you follow the laws or not, what now matters in this country is whether or not you are an unpopular minority.

If you are, then you may find  yourself bereft of the Constitutional protections once intended for all, even those whose right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is 'inconvenient' to those who wish to tear them down in vile hatred.

Sure, it's just oil companies, bank executives, and auto manufacturers now. However, Obama once spoke out in contempt of those small-town Americans, the 'bitter clingers' to 'guns and religion'. How long will it be before he comes for you? And if you cheer on the suspension of law for the sake of those whom you despise, what will protect you when he comes for you?

And you shall become one flesh

I have seen a trend that disturbs me. It is a similar trend to that which was seen in the 1800's, in areas of Europe and the southern United States. It always seems to follow wealthy societies. It would be nice to pretend that our wealthy society has been able to increase our worldly goods without falling into some of the traps of previous times, but humankind has not 'evolved' as many claim.

There are a few ways that we have seen wealth harm families in modern-day society, but there is one in particular that I would like to focus on today, and that is the separation of spouses from each other and parents from their children.

In the Victorian era, the very wealthy husband and wife did not find it unusual to have separate sleeping chambers. They spent their time among different friends; the wife in the parlor with the women, and the husband in the drawing room with the men. He might travel for months or years in search of more wealth, while she might go to visit a friend and not return for months or years. They were so wealthy that they could afford for each of them to live basically entirely different lives.

Most people in the U.S. share a marital bed (many of whom are not married, but that's another post), so how can I say that we're falling into the same trap? Well, have you ever seen the standard Master Bath of today? A separate shower, separate tub, two sinks set with a swatch of countertop in-between, and the toilet closed off into its own little alcove. There are, not one, but two walk-in closets in the typical New Home design that I see on the architectural websites, and the closets are nowhere near each other.

My concern goes far beyond walk-in closets, though. The huger homes of the upper-middle class and the rich allow for people to pursue their separate hobbies far beyond calling distance of each other. Even the middle class and lower-middle class often boast one vehicle for each family member above the age of 16. The largest separation in the family that I see, however, comes from the common cell phone.

The working husband and working wife, with their separate dressing areas and their separate mobile offices and their separate lives, could go for a week or longer while barely speaking a word to each other. As their children spend the working hours at daycare and school, and their evenings and weekends on a myriad of lessons meant to make them as fine and fancy as the other 'rich' kids, a family comes to the point where they strive to have a hasty sit-down dinner just in order to have the chance to see each other.

Now I hardly seem to be describing the life of a "rich" family. The upper-middle class, middle class, and even some lower-middle class families can meet this definition. Of course, so can the 'poor'... that is, those who are sufficiently poor for the Federal and State governments to provide their cars and cell phones and various activities. That is because this has become a decadently wealthy country. When we speak of the 'poor', we truly do not understand what it is to be poor. You may no longer be able to ask your mother for a description. Ask your grandmother.

Imagine for a moment a well-to-do but not 'wealthy' American farm out somewhere in the Midwest. The father and mother sleep in a bed that would be considered tiny by modern standards, in a room that would barely fit a modern nursery. The children share rooms. They need to discuss who needs the horse and buggy and who is going to accompany them. There is no daycare. The parents spend each day in the company of their children.

In the evening, there is no house big enough for each person to pursue separate hobbies in places where they cannot be heard by the others. The entire family sits down in the same room to learn writing or darn socks with no means of amusement except each other. This was not even considered poverty. It was merely the means by which the 'common folk' lived.

By now I can almost hear the objections. "But back then, the medicine was bad, and the food was harder to come by! The literacy rating was lower, and the technology was practically nil! We have all of those benefits today!" To which I answer: What does it benefit you if you gain the world and lose your soul?

Am I advocating an end to technology? Certainly not. However, I would like for us to show some ability to gain wealth while not making the mistakes that come with it. I would like to see the benefits of a modern society without the drawbacks. After all, if our lives are longer and more miserable, our education is up but our children are increasingly disturbed, our health is better but we are emotionally harming ourselves on a daily basis, have things truly improved?

How much better would we be if we took the best from each era? If technology helped to bind families together, wealth was a means to living well and aiding others instead of drifting off into fuzzy selfishness, and our longer lives were spent doing that which is worthwhile?

The Feminist Union

Lately, I have been hearing more from self-identified feminists than I have for about three or four years. This is thanks to the Ladies Against Feminism site starting a Facebook page. Though you have to go through a vetting process to post articles on their website, all you have to do to post on their Facebook page is to click the "Like" button. A surprisingly large number of feminists, often two or three at a time, click that "Like" button so that they can express how much they dislike the group. In speaking with many of them, I have come to a realization that feminism can be likened to another group that rose in this country during roughly the same timespan. Feminism is like a worker's union.

My experience with (and distaste for) unions goes further than the newspaper stories I read or the discussions in conservative media. The same goes for feminism, and my experiences with both are strikingly similar. I'd like to outline a few similarities here.

Feminism, like unions, started with a good intent. The first worker's unions were formed to address a power imbalance between the workers and their employers. The intent was to bring people together to form a stronger bargaining power, correcting the excesses of the 19th century. Feminism was formed to address a power imbalance between men and women, and operates much in the same fashion. Both groups held protests and made their case, pushing initially for the kinds of equality championed in the Bible.

Feminism, like unions, was quickly diverted from its original intent. It wasn't long before unions started demanding more. As representatives only of the workers, they push for worker's rights at the expense of employer's rights. This creates hostility between those who should be cooperating. It also leaves unions in the place that they once fought against. They are now the ones in power, and with few employers being capable by law to challenge them, they have become the oppressors. The same can be said of feminism, where once they fought to allow women to open bank accounts and now they struggle to give women equal pay for inequal work. (More on that later.)

Feminism, like unions, degrade the worker by lumping him in with a group that may not share his/her abilities or ethics. Without the union, a poor worker is quickly removed and an excellent worker is quickly rewarded. With the union, however, all workers are lumped together, and so they are all treated the same. This happened to me when feminism sought to 'equalize' the number of women in math and science, regardless of the average woman's prowess or desire to compete in those areas.

I was a computer programmer, and I was a genuinely good one. I could have become a 'crack programmer'. When I was hired on a co-op position, I was already correcting the code of my group's 'crack programmer'. I especially loved working with C and Assembler, preferring to get into the guts of the logic and work with as little as possible between me and the hardware.

Many people reading this do not know that much about how computers and the computer industry works, so let me tell you that this is an unusual gift and an unusual focus for a woman. Nevertheless, feminism continues to push women into the programming field. The problem is that, though women on average make decently good maintenance programmers, the one who can build new code from scratch is rare. Now, if the only women entering the field were those who were genuinely good at the job, the only female programmers entering the workforce would be treated much as the men. This was my experience at the beginning of college, before the feminists really 'discovered' the field. By the time I was hired, though, most companies were wary of a female programmer and automatically relegated her to the maintenance section.

Before anyone starts calling these people chauvinists on my behalf, let me assert that I have seen the work of the average female programmer and I agree with them. The typical woman who was prodded into the field by feminists anxious to prove that women could do whatever men could do is sadly inferior to her male counterpart in the area of code-writing. Unfortunately, I was lumped in with them and lost in the shuffle. My manager, recognizing my intelligence, tried to push me onto the management track. All I wanted to do was to write code, and if the market had not been saturated by less competent women in the name of feminism, I might have succeeded.

Feminism, like unions, hate when their members negotiate their own way. In my last full-time job outside of the home, I ran into trouble. I was a working mother, struggling to balance family and employment while my husband finished his degree. I tried to work out some alternate arrangements with my employer to better suit their needs and mine. Unfortunately, union rules prevented us from compromising. The same rules that prevented them from cutting me some slack also prevented me from giving them a little more in return.

It is true that feminists keep asserting that they wish to give their members a choice and allow them to be homemakers and stay-at-home mothers if they so choose. However, they keep insisting upon representing me in order to give me 'freedoms' that I do not want (mostly in the area of paid daycare so that I can work outside the home and extra benefits for singles so that I do not have to be married) while removing privileges that would make my job much easier (like the right to modify the terms of a service agreement in my husband's name). Feminists insist upon speaking for all women, even the ones that they are putting at a disadvantage.

Feminists, like union officials, don't want membership in their ranks to be a voluntary matter. Well, they aren't entirely against the membership being voluntary, as long as everybody voluntarily agrees to join. Union officials and feminist leaders both engage in attempts at intimidation and shaming in hopes of forcing the reluctant to join their ranks. If you are not a feminist, you are not a proper woman. If you are not a feminist, you are cooperating with people who want to enslave women as blacks were once enslaved by Southern plantation owners. If you do not subscribe to feminism, you don't count.

I mentioned the Ladies Against Feminism Facebook page above. To their credit, a few of the feminists have simply left peacefully when they understand that we do not wish to embrace their philosophy. The rest, however, quickly devolve into insults and anger. They keep a mask of politeness for as long as they think that they can convert us, and then turn very ugly when we politely refuse to be converted. I would like to think that this was not a hallmark of feminism, but as I encountered this in my college and my workplaces as well, there is only so much that separates "random incidences" from "systematic behavior".

Feminism, like unions, have become sufficiently blatantly political that the only logic in the people and policies they support is that they are in agreement with the leftist Democrats. We live in the odd world where those who claim to support the workers are giving political contributions and doing favors for those whose policies are keeping the workers from improving their lives. In the world of feminism, those who should be championing the efforts of women in politics are demonizing female conservative politicians and circling the wagons for male politicians who mistreat women. They are quick to protest against conservative men who treat women decently, but they have a poor track record of opposing socialist countries that oppress their women severely.

Feminism, like unions, has outlived its usefulness. The tide has turned.  It is possible for a woman to hold down a job without feminists screaming outrage. It is possible for a worker to negotiate with an employer (and, indeed, the richer ones are the ones who do their own negotiating) without a union threatening a strike. The abuses have been over-corrected, and now we need a movement in the opposite direction. Our brothers, husbands, fathers, and sons do not need to be our enemies.

Before feminism, women were able to participate in society. Though the situation in the 19th century needed to be corrected, it did not need a scorched-earth solution. Now the best thing we can do is to let wounded relations heal, and the continued acerbic mannerisms of feminism are only hurting those whom they claim to protect.

Response to Feminism

I was pointed to a link this morning on a definition of feminism. It sought to strip away the history of the feminist movement and present the concept fresh, with nothing clinging to it. I read through it, and I discovered the problem, the snag, the reason why I still cannot call myself a 'feminist' despite its attempt to stick to a single core concept that the author no doubt hoped I could support.

Here is the link: http://tomatonation.com/culture-and-criticism/yes-you-are/
I will be quoting from it and responding as a member of the group Ladies Against Feminism, who seek to live by, in the words of the main site, a "strong, intelligent, biblical view of womanhood."

It starts with a definition.

feminism n (1895) 1 : the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes 2 : organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests — feminist n or adj — feministic adj

  This is how far I got before I spotted the first problem. Can you spot it? No doubt, legal equality of the sexes is a good and proper thing. God Himself set this up in Ancient Israel, in which women had equal status with men in criminal and property law. A woman's testimony was as good as a man's. When this was perverted in exile, Jesus restored it to our attention by having His resurrection first viewed by two women instead of two men. They satisfied the legal requirement for two witnesses.

However, this definition doesn't even mention legality. It mentions politics, economics, and society. Politics is a touchy subject. At one time, the vote was held by male property owners. This wasn't for the purpose of disenfranchising women. After all, the grown sons still living in their father's household could not vote, and the wife cast the vote in her husband's absence. This was a means by which the vote was given only to taxpayers. Remember that this was before the income tax. That being said, I think I can tentatively agree with political equality of the sexes. If a male in a certain situation can vote, a female in an identical situation can vote.

Economic equality is a different matter entirely. It assumes separation where there should be cooperation. With the breadwinner/homemaker model, the man earns and his wife saves. Before the Industrial Age, the husband and wife worked together on a farm or at a business, and it did not matter if one "earned more than the other" because the money all went to the same place. Of course, now that the man might work for one employer while the women works for another, "equality in economics" ignores the simple and wonderful fact that women bear and nourish children with their own bodies. This interruption in a career will result in economic inequality of outcomes if it is approached with equal opportunity or, if you wish to have equal outcomes, requires unequal opportunity. The only way to provide equality on both ends is to neutralize the woman's ability and desire to bear children. I cannot agree with this.

Social equality has problems of its own. As mentioned above, women bear and nurse children. They have different standards of physical modesty, different allowances made in pregnancy and breastfeeding, and are properly treated differently in a respectful society simply by being female. Of course, I acknowledge that I share with the feminists a desire to prevent situations in which a woman is assumed to be less intelligent or less capable for being female. But I would not like to see her treated no differently than a man in society.

This brings me to another problem, which could merit a post of its own. One of the people responding to the link in hopes of helping us to understand feminism said the following:

Feminism is not about "being men" - it is about refuting the concept that men are "default humans".

 What, pray tell, is a "default human" and should we be striving for it? This is another problem with feminism. They appear to be making women like men and men like women because they are striving to create in one person an entity that represents the best of masculine and feminine, usually by stripping out the defining traits of both. This is the "default human". This I reject. Man is delightfully male, better than the "default human", complementary with the female, with strengths inherent in his masculinity. Woman is delightfully female, better than the "default human", complementary with the male, with strengths inherent in her femininity. The wonder of biblical womanhood is that it acknowledges not the "default human" but the "complete human", a man and a woman pair-bonded for life, bringing the fullness and richness of both sides to the table. This ties into the other part of the article that gave me trouble.

See, once the article is done with the definition, it spends most of its time defining what feminism is not. It isn't the clothes you wear, or the job you do, etc. This makes some sense, because this definition of feminism is meant to strip out what makes people male or female, and clothing is part of what distinguishes male from female. The bodies are different. Even a woman's jeans are different from a man's jeans in form, jutting out in some areas and not others. But that's beside the point. Here it is:

The definition of feminism does not judge your lifestyle. You like girls, you like boys, doesn't matter.

It has nothing to do with your sexual preference or your sense of humor or your fashion sense...

Ah, but that is the point. That which makes you female echoes through every single cell in your body, and informs everything you do in one way or another. Since I am a "Lady Against Feminism", I guard my sense of humor and do not indulge in jokes that tear down men. I seek modesty and attractiveness in my fashion. True, I can pull this off in jeans or dresses, but even when I dress in jeans and a t-shirt I am still doing so in a feminine manner. This is still off the heart of it, though, so let me say it right out.

The definition of feminism does not judge your lifestyle. You like girls, you like boys, doesn't matter.

They are not talking about the friends you make. They are talking about sexual preference. This is perhaps the largest example by which we can understand feminism and the desire to make us non-gendered beings. It doesn't matter. You 'like' girls, you 'like' boys, it doesn't matter. However, biblical femininity cannot work that way. This is not out of some 'hatred' for homosexuals. This is not even a matter of disapproving of the homosexual lifestyle. This is simply how femininity and masculinity works. When you see each person as richly male or richly female, you cannot pretend that pair-bonding two richly-female or richly-male people can result in that "complete human" which we seek. (May I add something here? When feminists scoff at us for seeking a man to make us complete, they are doing exactly what they claim to abhor, considering the male to be the "default human". We understand that our men also seek us to make them complete, and therein lies equality.)

In short, I must reject this "Yes You Are" philosophy of feminism, even shorn of its history and more radical statements. I can advocate equal rights under the law in a constitutionally-limited government. I cannot advocate that the childbearers of society be treated exactly the same as the non-bearers in matters of economics and sociology in which they are meant to be complementary. Likewise, I cannot advocate the "default human" stripped of a sexual identity. My choice is that of the richly masculine and richly feminine, pair-bonding to become the "complete human". I simply believe that it is a better solution.

A better way than this

A cartoonist posted this in his blog a few days ago:

You know what this is? It's a sculpture by Blake Fall-Conroy, the Minimum Wage Machine.
From the site:
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 5.04 seconds, for $7.15 an hour (NY state minimum wage (and Ohio state minimum wage, too--)). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money.

I generally hate 'abstract sculptures', but this one seemed to reverberate in my very soul. I spent a few years of my life at that crank (granted, not working minimum wage), trying to wring out the pennies we needed to keep the household going. Now my husband is the one who turns the crank.

Granted, not all jobs are quite this bleak. Many people are able to make their living doing something they enjoy, or, at least, something that is not consistently monotonous. My husband works as a computer programmer, a "code monkey", as he puts it. Still, most workplace jobs involve a certain level of cranking. That goes doubly for the kind of jobs in which working women often find themselves.

This is one reason why the feminist anti-homemaker viewpoint baffles me. They wish to replace a system in which the man returns home from the crank to find beauty, warmth, and stimulating conversation. They wish to end a system in which the woman spends all of her creativity, intellect, and strength in fulfilling tasks that make life for her husband so much more than 'the crank'. They want to take her from her home and children.

Their idea of utopia is the man and the women both out at their own separate cranks, grinding away while the government takes half of what trickles out and raises their children for them. The feminist dream ends each workday when whichever parent finishes at the crank first having to stop and pick up his (or her) children from daycare, then to arrive at a cold, empty house in hopes of making things a little brighter for the sake of his (or her) mate.

(Of course, this changes the house life even on weekends and holidays. I see more and more women choosing to put their children in daycare on vacation days so that they can "get a break" and have time to do the chores. I hear them complain about vacations from school, grateful when their own children return to someone else's care. You have to live with a child to know how to 'deal with' that child. You have to spend most of your hours in a child's company to get into that child's groove, so to speak, to understand which sounds of frustration denote hunger and which sounds denote sleepiness. But I am getting off the subject.)

We laugh at books and magazines written in the '50's that encourage housewives to fetch drinks for their husbands. There is even an Internet meme full of advice such as making yourself pretty when he returns home from work and not bothering him with trivialities until he has had a chance to relax. We read it and scoff about what doormats those women were back then. The next time you hear that advice, though, and the next time you are ready to laugh, I want you to go back to that picture and I want you to look at that crank.

That cartoonist's blog post continues:

Picture that. Picture standing there for four hours, six hours, eight hours a day, turning that crank to squeeze out one penny at a time till you have enough to pay the rent, put gas in the car, keep the water, electric, wash the clothes, feed the kid, pay your taxes.... Your day revolves around being there to turn that crank. Your life revolves around turning that crank. Your precious limited time on this dear sweet earth is eaten away by that crank.

Ladies, your husband has spent his entire day at that crank. If you are a full-time homemaker, or even if you are a part-time worker, he has spent his day at that crank for you and for your children. He will spend tomorrow at that crank. He will work that crank until he is elderly, and he's doing it for his family. If he is like my husband, he may complain about his work, but he never complains about the fact that he will be winding away at that or another similar crank for most of his life. That 50's meme that so many women find ridiculous, the easy chair and the glass of his favorite beverage, the effort you take to look pretty and provide him with a hot supper... that is the least we can do in return.