At The Washington Post’s On Balance blog, a father writes about Samuel, his seven-year-old son with cerebral palsy. He writes this about parenting a child with a disability:

My experience is that parents of children with disabilities face a
different balancing act. One big struggle is balancing time spent
supporting a child with a disability vs. the family’s other child(ren).
Others include marshaling the time, energy and financial resources
needed to manage a child’s medical care and therapy, and the scarce
resources left for yourself, your relationship with your spouse, and
your work.

I think about my own family and how the gravity well of my disability shaped and tempered our dynamics. I consumed a lot of of my parents’ time and energy, especially during those years when it seemed like I was getting sick every other week. And my siblings sometimes had to assume the role of caregiver or personal assistant, particularly my brother. We used to play computer games that I didn’t have the dexterity to play independently (oh, Wing Commander II, how I miss your awesomeness). And when I wanted to play and he didn’t, my petulant rages would eclipse anything that any of those whiners My Super Sweet Sixteen could muster.

I have good, close relationships with my parents and siblings, in large part because I learned that I am not, in fact, the center of the universe. Now, when I see other families coddling or kowtowing to their kids with disabilities, I wince a little bit. We may look innocent, but many of us have an almost preternatural ability to bend minds to our will.

As I was walking home from a movie last night (American Gangsters: decent but not spectacular), I noticed several red-clad Guardian Angels riding a city bus. The last time I checked, this isn’t New York City circa 1986. A couple of them wore wraparound sunglasses; they looked like extras from a direct-to-video movie. Is the Metro Transit system really that unsafe as to invite the presence of a group that I thought has been inactive since the early days of grunge? Or am I completely oblivious to the present dangers of life in the city?

I’m trying to prepare myself for the imminent loss of fresh Daily Show and Colbert Report material as a result of the looming writers’ strike. Other sources of satire will have to do; maybe it’s time to become a regular reader of The Onion again. And perhaps the loss of scripted television might compel me to get through my geometrically expanding reading pile. As a fellow union worker, my sympathies are with the writers. If I must go without new eps of The Office in order to ensure that my working brothers and sisters get what’s owed them, then that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

Okay, so you want to write a post-apocalyptic story but you want to make sure that it doesn’t end up on the SF/Fantasy shelves between to the novelization of the Transformers movie and the latest doorstop in that tiresome epic fantasy series that the author should have put out of its misery back in Volume Six. If you incorporate the following creative suggestions, you’ll earn yourself a one-way ticket to literary cred and a choice back-cover quote from Michael Chabon:

• Identify your characters in only the most generic terms possible (e.g. “man” and “boy”). This will keep the reader’s mind focused on the universality of human suffering. And critics just eat that shit up.
• Be purposefully vague about the exact nature of your fictional apocalypse. Remember, you’re trying to say something profound about the human condition and plot details just get in the way.
• Limit yourself to one stock female character. After all, the end of the world is no place for girls. And have her say something like, “Because I am done with my whorish heart and have been for a long time.” Everyone knows that all the great writers are self-important misogynists.
• Throw in a scene where a newborn infant is roasted on a spit. Because there’s no rule against dotting the road to profundity with a couple gross-outs.
• End your book with a cryptic paragraph about trout. Yes, trout.

If you follow the five easy steps I’ve outlined above, your dreary and tepid post-apocalyptic fable will be the toast of the literati. You might even get on Oprah.

When Barack Obama first announced his candidacy, my initial reaction was enthusiastic. I believed that he could be an invigorating shot in the arm for the Democratic party. While I never really expected him to pose a serious challenge to Hillary, his passion and eloquence could have stood in stark contrast to Clinton’s sometimes overly-scripted persona. But Obama has demonstrated a troubling tendency to try to be all things to all things to all people. Witness the controversy surrounding the gospel event his campaign sponsored yesterday, featuring a gospel singer who is well-known for his assertions that gays can be “cured”.

I have no doubt that Obama fully supports gay rights, but his willingness to allow a homophobe to stump for him is the hamfisted move of an amateur. The Democratic Party is a big tent and I don’t expect everyone to be of one voice on any issue, but it isn’t acceptable to appease one constituency by metaphorically kicking sand in the eyes of another. I’m a Democrat because I believe in some core principles, including the vision of an equitable society that doesn’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Obama should be leading his followers towards that vision, not tacitly reinforcing old prejudices.