NPR

Tarzan has made a few comments over the years about my lack of knowledge regarding current events. I can't say that he's wrong entirely, but the news makes me so mad most of the time, and if it's really good stuff it shows up on The Daily Show. But the last time he borrowed my car he left the station on NPR; it was a decent piece so I left it and then he and I chatted about it at dinner that night and that snowballed so now I listen to NPR all the time. I am more informed for sure and find I can talk to other people about current events and sound quasi-intelligent. It hasn't made me any less mad though.
Two discussions in the last few days in particular make me want to bite someone.

• The first bit I heard on the way home one day was about how some Silicon Valley employees are wearing hoodies in a show of solidarity after the whole debacle in the news about the kid who got shot by the Neighborhood Watch guy. It's terrible that the kid is dead and that the guy has to live with a death of a teenager but I don't know that it was racially motivated. If I see a person in a hoodie, shading the face, in the dark, slouching down the street, I'm gonna be more inclined to think it's a thug - no matter the color of their skin - than if I see a kid on the sidewalk, in the daylight, with a designer brand, pressed hoodie on, no matter the color of their skin. Situation and circumstance plays a part in these incidents as well. Location, location, location.


• The second piece has to do with a cover of Time magazine about attached parenting. Despite the hideous picture - which I didn't see until just now - my first concern after listening to the guest describe what the group is all about was "just how is that different from what my parents did?" If, as they spokesperson kept saying, their emphasis is on connection between parent and child, talking to the kid, touching, cuddling, eating with and spending time with young ones, I still don't know how that is different from what my own mother and father did. Why do we need a whole new label and 'movement' about it? And the NPR host kept trying to get the guest to specify how her group was different than 'regular' parenting and she couldn't, or wouldn't. The only differences I see are the extreme cases; the nursing until the child goes to kindergarten, or the one caller who still co-sleeps with her son and he's 9. It broke up her marriage because the husband didn't want to share his wife with his son. Other than the weird stuff, it sounds like Parenting 101. Why the big to-do about it?

This is me, better informed but not happy about it.