Posts Tagged → family
Good luck today, deer hunters
Like many Pennsylvania families today, ours went afield for the morning. My son, having watched an enormous buck run past us in the early morning dark, minutes before shooting light, decided his feet were cold enough and it was time for him to head in.
None in our hunting party got a shot off, yet, but we are gearing up for an afternoon drive, usually productive.
Good luck today, deer hunters! Hunt safely!
Ode to bear camp
Not too long ago, just a few years, actually, a couple hundred thousand Pennsylvania hunters would gather together for the three days before Thanksgiving.
They’d meet under old tar paper shacks, new half-round log cabins, and “camps” both fancier and more rustic. Wherever they gathered was “bear camp,” the place from which they would sally forth in the state’s most rugged topography in search of a lifetime trophy, one of Pennsylvania’s big black bears.
This 100-year tradition that spawned many long Thanksgiving holidays and peaceful family gatherings among the quiet outer fringes of civilization was inadvertently destroyed by the introduction of a Saturday opener for bear hunting.
Now, pressed for time, bear hunters can get out on one day and say they tried. Lacking Sunday hunting for bears, these hunters might hang out, cut some firewood, and then return home to watch a football game Sunday evening. Fewer hunters make camp together for the remaining Monday through Wednesday season. Sure, hunters are out there, and some camps have tagged incredible numbers of bears in recent years, but the momentum of camp itself is gone, fragmented by the introduction of Saturday hunting and the absence of Sunday hunting.
To say that bear camp was a unique amalgamation of individuals is a gross understatement. Used to be that only the crazy die hard bear hunters would be so driven as to take off of work. Now, so many guys come and go on Saturday that the flavor and chemistry of bear camp is changed, and for the poorer.
I’m an advocate for Sunday hunting. Lots of reasons why, but the loss of that bear camp feeling is a good one by itself. If bear season opened Saturday and continued through Sunday, the old experience would be resurrected. I miss it, because I miss the guys who come up now to only hunt Saturday, and by the time I arrive Sunday, they’re packing up or already gone. Gone are the easy times catching up about our kids, families, and work.
Now, bear camp has evolved two “shifts,” the Saturday hunters, and the oddball crew made of guys who can think of no better way to spend time than out in steep, remote areas, hanging off cliffs, falling down steep ravines, and sitting around with buddies back at camp at night to laugh about it. Two shifts, same camp. Same roof, different people.
Sad. I want that old feeling back. Gimme Sunday hunting for bears, please, so I can reconnect with the old friends I hunted bears with for over a decade before the advent of a Saturday opener.
UPDATE: Well, plenty of people have weighed in on this essay. Seems that Saturday has opened up bear hunting to more kids than ever before, and more hunters in general. Concentrating most of the hunters on one day is a fact of lacking Sunday hunting. And no one disagreed that the momentum has now been lost on the week days.
When a family has a birthday
When a family’s oldest child arrives at the age of 18 years, it’s not just that young person’s birthday. Given how much effort, struggle, work, exasperation, growth, learning, mistakes, love, late night affection, cuddling, coaching, and sacrifices have been made and done with that one person alone, it is really a birthday for the whole family. We all arrived here together.
Happy Birthday, my love!
Last day of summer…so sad
It is tough to know who enjoys summer time more, me or my kids. Every summer we emphasize time together camping, on day trips to historic sites, beach trips and saltwater fishing, and both day camp and sleepover camp. We spend lots of time together, and by the end of each summer I feel like a big kid.
I admit that it’s hard to say goodbye. But it’s necessary.
My kids are mine, lady
“Professor” Melissa Harris-Perry of Tulane University says that kids do not actually belong to their families, but rather belong to the collective community around them. See the brief video here:
Collectivist talk is Marxist/ Big Brother/ tyrannical government, etc., and normally would be greeted in America with disbelief. But American culture has broken down under the weight of years of class warfare led by Obama.
Used to be that academia was for serious thinkers. Consider that Ms. Harris-Perry is a professor, or that Columbia University has hired Kathy Boudin, a convicted terrorist and murderer of a policeman. Boudin is a former Weather Underground member. She is now also a professor, worthy of teaching young people. Really!
Academia has been corrupted by people who are at war with America, with Western Civilization, with your church and synagogue. You’d better fight back, folks, or you will watch the equivalent of Rome burning in your own lifetime.
20 years of the best
Viv and I recently celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary.
Twenty years of the best kind of relationship possible. I get everything, and she works like a slave and gives everything.
Anyone who knows Viv knows she is a powerhouse. An accomplished attorney, a loving and doting mother, a cheerful wife, an incredible volunteer on many boards and charities…really, she deserves a Purple Heart or some other military medal for being married to me for so long, let alone the amazing work she does for communities and individuals.
Thank you, honey, for being with me and my better half.
I am looking forward to another sixty years together…
Josh
The Joe Paterno Empire Strikes Back
The family of late Penn State University football coach, icon, leader, and hero Joe Paterno has struck back at the “investigative” report by former US FBI director Louis Freeh.
Releasing an analysis of Freeh’s report that is similar to one posted on this blog last year (https://joshfirst.com/blog/2012/08/16/the-sandusky-disaster-kids-lose-penn-state-loses-ncaa-loses-theres-still-no-lesson-here/), the Paternos have taken an important step in regaining lost ground.
Lost ground was rapidly created by an uncritical press, willing to serve up maudlin caricatures of what may have happened around convicted child rapist Jerry Sandusky, rather than carefully scrutinize the facts and evidence we have in front of us, and then wait for the facts and evidence that we do not have but yet expect to see come out in the upcoming trials of Spanier, Curley, and Shultz.
A rush to judgment has never been so well documented, and then so well defended by a sea of armchair quarterbacks using 20/20 hindsight. Analyzing the comments on internet sites, like Forbes, ESPN, and any other reporting or opinion venue, you’d think that Joe Paterno was the real culprit, and not Sandusky.
Freeh’s report is as bad as a report can get. It is more representative of a Kremlin kangaroo court than the best America has to offer. After a career-start seven-year stint in Washington, DC, spent writing federal policy and law, my take on the Freeh report is that it is outrageously flawed.
Its worst defect is its use of wild conjecture (e.g. relying on hearsay in one email from Tim Curley to Graham Spanier and Gary Shultz about an unnamed “coach”). Nowhere does it say “While key facts are lacking or presently unknown, it is prudent to await casting judgment….” Rather, Freeh’s report is judge, jury, and executioner all at once, and it clearly aimed to destroy one person: Joe Paterno.
Importantly, Freeh’s report exonerated the sitting PSU trustees, most of whom had sat idly by and never challenged Spanier, even when one or two trustees began to ask him hard questions. Were those lazy trustees culpable? Why not?
Most important, Freeh was used by PSU and the NCAA to lower the standards bar, to decrease expectations in college football, rather than to elevate them. By arguing that Joe Paterno was deeply flawed and a hypocrite, Freeh made the classic morally relative argument that we are all pathetic losers, that there are no real heroes, that there are no really good men, and that no one should expect any to show up anytime soon.
Finally, if the PSU trustees fell down on the job and used the Freeh report to cover up their failings, one cannot escape the sense that at least some of the Paterno family members do not grasp the positive way that Joe Paterno is still viewed by many of us Nittany Nation members.
Last year, while communicating with one of the Paterno kids, I was struck by his inability or unwillingness to recognize the breadth of Joe’s legacy. That is, if Joe Paterno left a legacy, then it is beyond the family to solely claim, because it is carried by his believers. Joe’s legacy belongs to all of us, because he was representative of all of our values, hopes, and expectations, and our support is not about the family, but about the symbol that was Joe Paterno.
To that end, wouldn’t it be refreshing to see the family rally the troops, rather than look so deeply inward. Casting the Freeh report as a culture war attack on rare core values, rather than on a person, would more accurately frame this subject.
Unlike the vast majority of people with an opinion on this subject, I have actually read the Freeh report. It sucks. It is unprofessional. It is unworthy of Louis Freeh’s name, and it is unworthy of Penn State University’s name. It is nearly useless in understanding all of what happened with Jerry Sandusky, and how he continued to molest and rape little boys when some adults around him either suspected or had been told he was a pedophile. Shedding light on 33% of an issue raises more questions than it answers. Truth is not what was sought, but it is what is at stake. Bigger truths, like traditional core values that are under attack everywhere, suffer from this.
So, it is my hope that the Paterno family, and former governor and US Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, will continue their efforts, and also expand them to encompass the bigger picture. Good luck, folks, we are standing with you.
Choosing Love
Modern life is full of oddities, like having a heavy, meaningful discussion about family relationships with a friend, by text, by cell phone. Yesteryear, such communications were reserved for campfires, dim corners of bars, hunting camp late at night, and other out-of-the-way places and moments in life. They happened once a year, maybe. Now, technology creates a sense of anonymity and immediacy, some might say carelessness, that elicits the deepest emotions in the plainest, least number of characters allowed in a text box.
It got me thinking about how it is possible to find love in unconventional places and in unexpected people. Convention says that humans are supposed to expect, and receive, love from their birth families. Love is where you find and make it, of course.
My friend’s brother recently wrote an email to his entire family, asking them to leave him alone, telling them that staying in touch with them caused him more pain than pleasure. Because their parents enjoyed one of those brutal years-long divorces, everyone was scarred from a young age. This 30-ish year-old man has decided to shake off the past and embrace his future with his wife, child, and in-laws.
Naturally, many of his family members are hurt by his emails. A melee of emails ensued, back and forth between this young man and his family members. What impressed me is how matter of factly and clearly he explained his feelings. Of course, most of the family members made it all about them, how hurt they felt, what about their kids (his nieces and nephews), etc. In all of the emails shared with me, I saw not a glimmer of empathy among his family. And they are all decent people.
Off in a distant, far-flung corner of the Mid-West, a young man is starting over emotionally. Finding the love he feels he never received from his birth family now with his wife and child, he has curled up to heal, like a wounded animal or warrior, sleeping off a ferocious fight. If his birth family members love him, they will let him sleep.
Hollywood makes movies about super heroes with super powers, the ability to bend steel, or read minds. Fantasy, yes, and foolish. Because, what strength it takes to merely survive day to day for so many, to get past old hurts, to put one foot in front of the other, to get up and go to work, to smile when crying would feel better, to hold someone when being vulnerable is a risk. These are super-human traits. Surviving is fantastic, and laudable.
You are in good company, Sam. So many of your fellow Americans want to start over, and you found the strength to do it. America is going through a tough time, bringing lots of emotions to the surface in all communities. I salute you and wish you success. And you have my pledge to watch over your little brother. He is a good man, and I care about him.
Happy Singing Russian-Chinese-Nazi American Children
Anyone who has seen the Goodby-Silverstein children’s chorus innocently singing away about how electing Romney will result in a destroyed planet, and how those same children already blame their parents, can only be reminded of the past use of children to attack parents in totalitarian societies.
Mao’s China, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and most infamously the Nazis, all used children’s choruses to both brainwash whole generations and also inculcate a loyalty to the big government that superseded family ties. That loyalty to government was used to break familial bonds and reinforce horrendous injustices by those governments.
Commentators have said for years that the Democratic Party had become the heir to both socialism and the totalitarian methods necessary for socialism to succeed. Over the years, I have come to that same conclusion, with some exceptions.
Watching these little children singing about hating their parents for voting for Romney sends chills up my spine. Here it is, right here on our American shores, kids raised in middle and upper income families, sending a message that the people who created and nourished them are Public Enemy Number One. If this is representative of the Democratic Party, then we are in for a true battle for the soul of America.
And piggy backing on that message is today’s Doonesbury (Gary Trudeau) political cartoon, saying that Romney will win by voter suppression, and voter fraud, and that riots will follow. Why this partisan activist continues to get published next to family cartoons is a testament to the mainstream media’s overwhelming political bias. Is there a right-wing equivalent to Doonesbury? No? Do you think that one would ever be published?
But if riots do happen, God forbid, will Liberals suddenly embrace the Second Amendment? Conservatives are generally a well-armed bunch, having spent the past fifty years voting for the Second Amendment both in the voting booth and with their wallets at gun stores. In a physical confrontation, I’d put my money on the gun, not the knife, or Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” pen.