It’s been a little more than six weeks since I announced The Available Light would be taking a hiatus. In that time, it’s become clear to me that new obligations have made it impossible to blog regularly in the style I have been.
The posts here have taken more time to write than I now have to spare. As a result, I am discontinuing The Available Light for the foreseeable future.
This doesn’t mean I’ll be disappearing from the blogosphere completely. I have initiated another blog. This one will be updated very sporadically and will focus on personal and family life. If you have any interest in reading about our garden, class reunions and the other mundane details of our lives, check it out here.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
In a little less than two weeks, I will embark on new professional and educational ventures that promise to change the whole course of our life as a family.
Committing to such important endeavors means evaluating how I use my time, especially the time I have been putting into this blog.
When I began blogging five years ago, life was very different for us. Blogging was my sole creative and intellectual outlet. Things are very different now. We have been blessed with many opportunities and the possibilities of even greater ones to come. As a result, blogging feels less urgent than it once did.
I very much appreciate all the relationships blogging has helped build and all the positive feedback from readers. So, I’m not sure I’ll ever disappear from the blogosphere all together, but for at least the near future I won’t be putting the same kind of effort into blogging as I have these last months.
The upshot is that as of today, I am placing The Available Light on a six-week hiatus. At the end of that period, I will make further decisions about its future.
I thank all of you who have been interacting for years now and invite you back here in a few weeks to see how things go.
Posted in Everything Else | 5 Comments »
Rod Dreher’s excellent response to a news story out of Texas about young boys being sexually assulated at their middle school can be found here.
Dreher writes:
The eighth-grade thugs would pin younger boys to the ground in the locker room. The ringleader would put his fist into a plastic cone and try to shove it into his victims’ rectums. His pack stood around and moaned to torment the weaker kids.
This went on almost daily, says one seventh-grader who saw it go down. “We’re going to rape you,” the bullies would say to the little guys. A Sheriff’s Department investigation found that the gang of older boys had sexually terrorized seventh-grade boys at Sunnyvale Middle School for most of a year.
Response from readers prompted Dreher to place this insightful post on his blog.
In the ensuing discussion, a commenter nails a few of the reasons so many children suffer this way.
She writes:
I know that school bullying has been around as long as schools have, but I think there are three factors of modern education that make things worse for kids today:
One: Any and all retaliation is both expressly and implicitly forbidden. The popular athlete who bullies risks little; the smaller, more academic child he bullies could end up being punished for “fighting” even if he’s only trying to defend himself. I don’t condone violence as a solution, of course, but there was a time when the school bully had at least to consider the possibility that his victim’s older brother might be waiting in the parking lot after school before engaging in vicious torment of his victim.
Two: The school culture, just like the corporate culture it is designed to groom children to fit into, considers the “complainer” a bigger troublemaker than the sociopath who is causing the problems in the first place. In school, the child who complains about a bully will be treated by administrators as a whining crybaby who can’t handle the realities of life; they will often blame the victim for bringing the problem to their attention more than they blame the bully. In corporate settings, abusive bosses or teammates often get away with taking advantage of subordinates or co-workers; if these complain about the abusive person, they are told that they aren’t being “team players” etc. In either case, the pattern is established early on: don’t tell anyone. It won’t help, and it could very well make the situation worse.
Three: Again, like corporations, schools have gotten bigger and bigger. This doesn’t mean that bullying doesn’t happen in small schools and communities, too–it does. But the bigger the institutional school becomes, the easier it is for a school bully, or even a whole gang of them, to go relatively unnoticed and unpunished, especially given the dynamics at work.
She’s exactly right. I know all these factors, especially number two, played a role in the bullying I suffered as a student.
Posted in Culture, Education | 2 Comments »
Today’s review comes from The Available LIght contributor James Volpe. Anyone interested in submitting reviews for publication here should email theavailablelight at gmail dot com.
Now that I am the proud father of little ones, I only get to the movies once or twice a year. As a Father’s Day treat from my father, this year’s movie was “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”. Since my father is the one who gave me his love of movies, especially epic adventures like “Indiana Jones” and “Star Wars”, I was thrilled to see this installment with him and happy that it lived up to its predecessors.
The movie definitely beat “Temple of Doom”, keeping it out of the bottom spot in the Indiana Jones collection. Interestingly, the adventure took place in South America, an area of archaeological history which is often overlooked. Conveniently, child sacrifices were glossed over, but I can agree to that conceit since contemplating the murder of children is too deep for an action/adventure film. The moral of the story was not as powerfully depicted as in “The Last Crusade”, but it was pertinent to modern life. Finally, Harrison Ford did pull off the action star role despite his age while the car chases and fight sequences were all of “Raiders” quality. “Crystal Skull” also made the required slights against Indy’s age, as well as references to the previous movies. I don’t think this movie will win over anyone who wasn’t an Indy fan, but as a guy who owns a fedora, I’m thrilled the series ended well.
Posted in Books, Film, Television and Music | No Comments »
It’s been a stretch of long exhausting days behind the scenes here at The Available Light. Not to worry. Regular blogging will recommence tomorrow.
Posted in Everything Else | 3 Comments »
