The Boeskool

Public Nudity, Incarceration, & Setting the Prisoner Free

Posted on May 2, 2012 by theboeskool

“We should go skinny dipping.” The words cut through the evening heat like a sexy summer breeze. It was the sort of hot where people don’t even go outside until after the sun goes down, but the air was still and the night brought no relief. We were young, we were in college, and our clothes were sticking to our sweaty skin—There weren’t a whole lot of other options than to find some water, get naked, and go swimming. So a caravan of about 20 of us drove through the darkness to a little lake that wasn’t too far away. The guys took our clothes off first (as is often the case), leaving our clothes by big tree and running for the water. The girls cheated (as is often the case) and made their way into the lake in the safety of their undergarments, and then took them off in the privacy of the dark water—all the while keeping them securely in their hands. Prudes….

I haven’t been skinny dipping in a long time. I could have just left the word “dipping” out of that sentence….

So there I am, close to an hour later standing in water that has, by this time, lowered my core temperature a solid four degrees. Nobody else in the water acted like they were ready to leave, so I waited for a time when no one seemed to be paying attention, and I snuck up to the tree (which, in the haze of hypothermia, looked much farther away than when I arrived) to look for my drawers. There was a little bit of moonlight, but not enough to for me to locate my boxers. Apparently, there was enough light to see something (“moon light,” get it?), because as I was bent over feeling my way through piles of clothes, someone in the water yelled, “Hey, look at that guy’s ass!!!” I felt like the guy on Fear Factor who is underwater looking for the key that fits the lock–I frantically searched for my clothes, but the laughter of my peers (combined with the poor decision making that comes with a 94° body temperature) compelled me to pick up the first thing I grabbed…. Which happened to be a pair of women’s jeans. They were surprisingly comfortable.

The very deadly and seldom seen Dutch Ninja kick. That’s not a soccer ball in the picture–It’s actually that dude’s brain.

I have never had very good luck with skinny dipping. In high school, a police officer broke up a group of us night swimming sans suits on a beach that was closed. Some people turned themselves in, but I (Dutch Ninja that I was) darted behind a tuft of beach grass. Turns out I was not as stealthy as I thought. The officer was nice enough to let me grab a towel before I went up the hill, stood next to the police cruiser, and gave them my information. The other officer at the car asked for my name, and I giggled out the name “John Smith.” It didn’t seem like she was in the mood for jokes, though, as my attempt at humor was met with a very serious, “If you give me a false name, you’re going to jail.”

I did a whole lot of stupid things growing up–And quite a few of those stupid things were illegal. I was a pretty good kid, but I definitely broke the law. At one point, I had a cigar box full of Cadillac hood ornaments (I’m not proud of this). Heck, I break the law every time I step into a car. If every time I broke the law I was caught, I would definitely be in prison right now. Which would be a shame, because I feel like I’ve got a lot to give to society. Also, you all would probably get tired of reading blogs about me being brutally beaten and sexually assaulted…. Most of you.

No society in history has imprisoned more of its citizens than the good old “Land of the Free.” Right now, more than one out of every 100 American adults is either in jail or prison. The US has only 5% of the world’s population, but holds one quarter of the world’s prisoners. As startlingly bad as these statistics seem, the stats are way, way worse for you the darker your skin gets. Consider this:

About 743 people in the US per 100,000 are incarcerated right now. The only time a higher rate has ever been recorded was in the Soviet Union just prior to WWII when they had about 800 prisoners in the Gulag prison colonies per 100,000.
If you break down our rates by race, there are about 380 white adults per 100,000, about 950 Hispanics per 100,000, and about 2300 African Americans per 100,000.
Things get even worse for African Americans if you filter out the stats by gender. There are about 4350 (one of the lower estimates) black men per 100,000 that are incarcerated right now. To give you a point of reference, in 1993 during Apartheid in South Africa, black men were incarcerated at a rate of 851 per 100,000–If you’re doing the math, the US rate is more than 5 times worse.
The United States is the only Democracy in the world that permanently disenfranchises the people it convicts–For the rest of your life, you can never vote again–and 73% of those who have lost their right to vote aren’t in prison anymore, but on probation, parole, or have completed their sentences.
Once again, the darker your skin gets, the worse things are for you statistically as far as losing your right to vote. 1.4 MILLION African American men (13% of the African American adult male population) have lost the right to vote–A rate that of disenfranchisement that is SEVEN TIMES the national average. * In Florida, ONE IN THREE African American men has permanently lost his right to vote.
More than one in three young black men without a high school diploma are in prison (2010). Additionally, more young black men without a high school diploma are incarcerated than employed.
Prison is big business. America prohibits importing goods made through forced labor or prisoners, yet American prisons produce 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet proof vests, 93% of domestically used paints, 36% of home appliances, and 21% of office furniture–all of which allows America to compete with factories in Mexico. And you get solitary confinement if you refuse to work (These production stats were taken from THIS AMAZING VIDEO).

In The Netherlands, people wear orange for a whole different reason. They actually just closed a bunch of prisons for lack of prisoners…. Imagine that.

Now, add to this disgusting and disgraceful situation a fairly recent phenomenon: For-Profit Prisons–Seriously, just say the words out loud, and taste the insanity of it. It is what it sounds like: Large corporations that take over prisons in order to make a profit off the prisoners. These corporations actively lobby congress to pass laws that not only put more bodies into prisons, but also incentivize keeping prisons and detention centers filled up. They make deals with the states to insure that the prisons with be kept at least 90% full. The largest of these corporations is headquartered right here in Nashville–Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). In 2010, CCA had revenue of $1.7 Billion (and, for those who care, an executive compensation package for its CEO Damon Hininger of $3,266,387–Not a bad gig, if you can stomach it). Earlier this year, CCA sent letters to state officials in 48 states and offered to run their prisons for a profit…. It’s growing and growing. And it has got to stop.

People generally don’t care about what they can’t see, and we don’t see the horrors that go down inside prisons. Last month a federal judge in Mississippi described the conditions in one of these For-Profit Prisons as being “A picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world.” Most Americans feel like the people who have been condemned to prison are in there for a reason, but how much justice can there be in the whole system with statistics like the ones mentioned above? By just about any standard, I could be incarcerated right now for the sins of my youth. They say if you steal $5, you’re a thief; if you steal $5 million, you’re a financier. It has been over five years since the financial meltdown that was caused by criminal recklessness of very wealthy and greedy people (who sold things they knew were worthless and dangerous), and I don’t think that anyone has served any time yet. But get caught selling crack in the hood, and your ass is going to jail. Quick.

“But let justice roll down like waters And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

This is what David said about God: “He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets prisoners free.” Here is what Jesus said about himself: “The Spirit of the LORD is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free.” And this is not some sort of spiritual metaphor–The translation literally means to “release the prisoners.” He tells us that “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” And lastly, here is what the writer of Hebrews has to say about it: “Remember those in prison, as if you were there yourself. Remember also those being mistreated, as if you felt their pain in your own bodies.”

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Jesus never talks about the mission of his Church having anything to do with passing laws to get more people locked up–He tells us to go and love the people who are locked up. He tells us that when we go to visit the prisoner (whom he refers to as “brothers”), we are going to visit HIM. When he is on the cross and the prisoner (who admits he deserves to die for his crime, so he probably did something pretty bad) next to him says, “remember me when you come into your Kingdom,” Jesus tells him he’s going to Heaven–No “Sinner’s Prayer,” no baptism, no nothing. And Jesus is like, “Hey Murderer, you’re in. Welcome to Paradise….” And he said he’s in the business of releasing the captives and setting the prisoners free.

If the Church is ever going to be taken seriously by the world, it’s probably going to have to start doing what Jesus said. And that’s more than just praying for the prisoner–It’s going to talk to him, being his friend, and even working toward changing inherent injustice. Given the choice between someone who prays for justice and someone who works for justice, I’m choosing the worker. Anyway, I’ve never visited a prisoner before, and I’m ashamed of that. That’s going to change soon, though. Who’s coming with me….

Posted in 4) All Of The Above | Tagged Corrections Corporation of America, For-Profit Prisons, Incarceration and Race, Injustice, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr, Shawshank Redemption, Skinny Dipping | 6 Comments

Pink Slime, Whole Foods, and Sweet, Sweet Slim Jims

Posted on April 24, 2012 by theboeskool

Seeing all that sauerkraut made me hungry for some kielbasa.... Or maybe a nice knockwurst. RIP Todd.

For some reason, people who work in restaurants always seem to be ravenously hungry. Every once in a while, after an off-site catering event, the people who worked the event will bring back these big pans of uneaten food and there is a small feeding frenzy. You learn quickly that unless you grab the stuff that you want RIGHT AWAY and put it in a ToGo box engraved with your name, it will be gone and you will left picking through fatty roast beef scraps (not that that is the worst thing that could happen). One time, after just such an event, a bounty–a Cornucopia–A HORN OF PLENTY, if you will–came back to the restaurant, and my eyes beheld a mouthwatering sight: Sauerkraut. Ahh, sauerkraut–Native food of my ancestor’s neighbors…. I’ve loved you since I was a child. It seemed a little out of place from the rest of the menu, but I didn’t care. I walked over and sat down at a table next to a few other feverishly eating servers with my meat, my green beans, and about a third of my plate piled up high with kraut.

May there never come a day when I am too health-conscious to eat a Reuben.

At least I thought it was sauerkraut. I brought a full forkful to my mouth, and instead of the tang of the expected pickled cabbage, I was slapped in the face by an impostor–A mouthful of some sort of cooked sweet onions. Now I don’t mind cooked sweet onions, but NEVER do sweet onions taste as gross as when you are expecting them to be sauerkraut. I leaned over my plate, opened my mouth, and did the only thing I could do: I let the foul, half-chewed doppelgänger fall from my mouth back onto my plate. Disillusioned, I ate a few green beans and I pushed my plate to the middle of the table. Smelling the blood in the water, other servers swarmed the table within minutes. A friend inquired about the nature of the deceptive white food on people’s plates, and someone said, “They’re onions.” Before I could stop him, he had scooped up my rejected mouthful of onions and was chewing it, making faces and noises that let me know he was really enjoying his bite.

I was left with a moral dilema. Do I tell him that I recently spit out the bite he was currently enjoying? Or do I just let him happily eat it, ignorant to the fact that it was warmer and dryer before I chewed it and let it fall back onto my plate? I asked myself if I would want to be told…. And I decided to say nothing. I feel like I did the right thing (by the way–If you are reading this and you realize that it was you who ate the pre-chewed onions, I am so, so sorry).

I long for the days when the only Pink Slime I had to worry about was the kind that would fall on someone's head if she said, "I don't know" on Nickelodeon.

I was reminded of this cautionary tale when the whole story broke about “Pink Slime.” I didn’t really want to know about the existence of Pink Slime, or, as the meat industry calls it, “Lean Finely Textured Beef” (LFTB). For those of you who don’t know or haven’t heard, here’s the basics of Pink Slime: It’s basically the usually non-edible parts of the cow that are heated, mechanically separated, put in a centrifuge to separate the fat from the “protein paste,” treated with ammonia to kill all the diseases, ground up and squished into blocks that are flash-frozen and added to ground beef as a filler (up to 15% of ground beef that we buy in the store can be this sort of “filler” without even having to be labeled). Jon Stewart called it an “ammonia-soaked centrifuge-separated byproduct paste.” If this doesn’t make you hungry for a hamburger…. I think I was happier not knowing.

I figure if God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat....

When I was a kid, I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that the stuff I was eating was crap. A lot of nights, I would make my own dinner. I grew up eating Kraft Macaroni & Cheese (later Cheese & Macaroni), Pimento Loaf and Mayonaise Sandwiches, and Chef Boyardee Beefaroni. And I loved every bite. I didn’t even mind later that night when I burped after eating the Beefaroni and a stubborn little piece of (what I could only assume was) beef jumped back into my mouth. I would simply do the respectable thing and give it a couple of extra chews and send it back down. And I would never give it a second thought that my Pimento Loaf and Mayonaise Sandwiches (or the less appetizing “PLAMS”) would sit in my unrefrigerated bag for a good four hours each day until it was time to eat it. You know, I think it was probably Miracle Whip…. So “PLAMWS.”

Somehow, when you put olives into bologna, it magically becomes "loaf." Also, it magically becomes DELICIOUS!!!

Fast forward some years later, and how things have changed. Here I am, married into a very health-conscious family, and now I find myself actually LOOKING at expiration dates of foods. There was a time when I would have just squeezed past the disturbingly thick part of the 3 year-old Ranch Dressing to get to the part that had the normal-ish consistency–Now I just throw it away. There is a merging of food traditions that happens when you get married. For example, my wife might throw away a jar of spagetti sauce that has been in the fridge for over a week…. whereas I can clearly remember scraping off the moldy part of the sauce to get to the “fresh” part underneath. And now, I’m not allowed to feed my kids bologna. My kids will almost certainly never know the joy that is Pimento Loaf…. I don’t think that it helps people be less grossed out that they use the word “loaf.” Loaf. I am honestly sitting here with a computer in my lap, laughing at the grossness of the word “LOAF” when applied to meat product. I don’t even know me anymore….

Merry Christmas, Everybody!!! And RIP, Macho Man.... We barely knew you.

So now, a lot of the things I eat are very different than before I met my sweet wife, but she has made some compromises as well. I put up with the occasional 20 minute drive to Whole Foods to buy “the good kale,” and she puts up with me enjoying the occasional Slim Jim. There is bittersweetness too–I am happy that my kids are going to grow up eating foods that are better for them than the powdered cheese-laden Kraft Mac & Cheese that I enjoyed as a child, but I’m also sad. Sad that they have already been stripped of the blissful childhood ignorance that I enjoyed–where the “healthy” SpaghettiOs was the can without the hot dog pieces. I’m learning to take better care of my body by making better food choices…. However, I don’t thing I will ever be willing to give up having a Slim Jim here and there–My mom still puts them in my stocking at Christmas, and God willing, she always will. I don’t see why people have a problem with Slim Jims anyway–Anything gross that is in their meat will almost certainly be expelled from your body by the diarrhea that is sure to follow.

What are some things that you know are awful and still keep eating?

p.s. My wife reads through my posts before I publish them, and she pointed out that the two men I have pictured who are promoting the joys of meat are both deceased. So that’s one point for the wife….

Posted in 3) Bathroom Humor, 5) Not Quite Sure | Tagged Beefaroni, Good Kale, Healthy Food, Jon Stewart, Lean Finely Textured Beef, Meat is Murder, Pimento Loaf, Pink Slime, Slim Jims, Whole Foods | 9 Comments

Eskimo Poets and Rich Christians

Posted on April 19, 2012 by theboeskool

I looked like this, only with pastier skin. And fancier facial hair.

There are a group of people in this world that would probably only recognize me as a furry, poetic Eskimo named “Nanook.” Nanook was a character that would come out as an “interrupter” during Young Life Club (Young Life, for those of you who haven’t heard of it, is a Christian ministry that focuses mostly on high schoolers). I volunteered as a Young Life leader at a local high school while I was in college, and I approached my position as a “leader” with the same half-assed style that I approached most things in my life at that time. I really cared about those kids, but I didn’t really put in the sort of effort that it took to actually build a relationship with them.

I tried to keep the poems short, because after about 2 minutes, my head would sweat so much that I would pass out.

Anyway…. Nanook. We tried to make Young Life as fun as possible. We sang songs, we did skits, we played games, and then at the end of Club, one of the leaders would talk about Jesus. It was actually really cool. Sometimes during Club, there would be an interrupter–a person whose only reason for being was to walk in, do something funny, and then leave. I, as Nanook, was one of these pointless interrupters–It was me in a pair of shorts wearing a fur jacket and an Eskimo hat made out of some sort of animal that could survive in the snow. And it was very, very hot. I was an Eskimo poet<–By the way, according to Google, I am the first person to ever write those five words in that order. In my best impression of an Eskimo accent, I would recite a silly poem from beneath a sweat-soaked animal pelt, and then I would leave. It was the least I could do to help introduce high school kids to Jesus. The VERY least.

Hello, High School kids.... Hey, Where you guys going?

One thing I loved about Young Life is that we had a strict rule against wearing any sort of shirt that said anything about being a Christian on it–at least when we were around kids. It didn’t really affect me, as I wasn’t the sort of person with a bunch of Church Shirts, but I liked it as a policy. I’ve always been annoyed with shirts that screamed “LOOK AT ME–I’M A CHRISTIAN!!!” I do have one Quasi-Jesusy T-Shirt (another great name for a band) my wife bought me that says “Jesus Loves You!” and then underneath it says “Of course, he loves everybody.” That’s about as “Church Shirt” as I get…. Anyway, the last thing we wanted for a kid who was desperate for something different was to see us wearing some preachy T-shirt, and then think of all the baggage and negative connotations that come with the term “Christian.”

Greg Boyd's book The Myth of a Christian Nation. My four-year-old found it a little confusing, but you will love it.

But it’s not just unchurched high school kids who are desperate for something different–The whole world is desperate for something different. Even people who have been going to church their whole lives are desperate for something different. All that people see around them is the struggle for more power and more money. The world is full of people seeking power over others. And, like the author of Ecclesiastes, most people figure out sooner or later that it is all meaningless. It’s one big struggle for stuff. And power. And money. And MORE. But Jesus modeled a different power structure–Instead of another structure that exercises power OVER others, Jesus washes his disciple’s feet, and displays for us a power structure that Greg Boyd refers to as power UNDER others. One that has us laying down our life to gain it. One that has us serving in order to lead, and treating the poor like they are more important than the rich. One where the first shall be last, and the last shall be first…. He switches everything around, and he sets up a new system–a new economy–and he calls it The Kingdom of God.

So, for the follower of Jesus, there are two systems. Two economies. Two kingdoms.

There is one system that says, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” It’s an economy that believes that he who dies with the most toys, wins. It’s a kingdom that is all about THE LOVE OF POWER–This is the system, the economy, and the kingdom of The World. But Jesus…. Jesus came and set up a new way of thinking about things. He said stuff like, “You want to be first? Here’s how: Be Last. Be the servant of all.” It’s a system that that says, “Do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also.” It’s an economy that tells us that “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” And it’s a kingdom that is all about THE POWER OF LOVE.

"Please send money--These teeth-whitening treatments are expensive.

There are few things that gross me out more than this prosperity gospel bullshit–I’m sorry, but that’s what it is. All over the place, the Church has been co-opted into believing that its mission is to get itself (as well as the people attending) more power and money–And it’s not just the smarmy televangelists that are doing it. It is everywhere. It’s that classic American story (or Roman, or whichever…. Pick your empire) of “what it means to be successful” that has seeped into the heart of the Church. People stand up in churches with “testimonies” of getting raises and bonuses and inheritances and settlements…. All as a result of giving money to the church and God giving them even more money back. You can walk into some churches and portions of the service start to feel like an Amway meeting–Putting the people who have had some financial success up front to “build faith” for the people who are considering joining. All of a sudden, every good business decision for the faithful becomes “proof” that faith will increase one’s material wealth. Even finding money becomes devine intervention, and people find a $100 bill on the ground and chalk it up to some sort of heavenly payback for tithing–never mind the poor sucker who lost the $100…. He should have been going to the right Church!

What happens if everyone becomes a believer? Maybe then, God will just ESPECIALLY financially bless only the "really good" Christians....

And please don’t get me wrong–I’m not against tithing. Living off the 90% (and still having our needs met–And yes, even believing it can be through supernatural means) is one thing, but treating the tithe as some sort of hot stock tip that will provide us with a healthy monetary return on our investment is something very different. One is Biblical, and the other is just taking a verse out of Malachi that says “Test me on this” and turning it into a whole warped theology. One is like practice at letting go of the stuff we think of as “ours,” and the other is like a Churchy Stock Market, or a man in a suit at a partitioned hotel ballroom talking to you about soap while drawing dollar symbols on a whiteboard with a circle (representing you) and lines to three circles below it. One is distinctly the Kingdom of God, and the other is barely distinguishable from the kingdom of the world.

When the Church is selling the same crap as the rest of the world, what’s the point? People walk in, desperate for something different, and they find something that feels like a shopping mall. It comes across in giant, sprawling church campuses, slick bookstores and coffee shops, and even messages from the pulpit/kiosk that promise financial blessing is the will of God for Christians. But this belief that the Church (as well as the individual follower of Jesus) are called, or even destined, to financial prosperity is completely at odds with what Jesus says, as well as everything the Bible tells us about the early Church (If people are making a Biblical case for an Americanized, consumerist Prosperity Gospel, it’s going to be almost entirely Old Testament stuff, peppered with the trusty old Parable of the Talents as the lone New Testament proof that Jesus was, in fact, a capitalist).

I WANT YOU to stop making me look bad.

People talk about God making them rich so that they can give away even more, but these people almost always live in gigantic houses. This thinking is often known as being “Blessed to be a blessing,” but it reminds me of when I make a deal with God that I will use my winnings to start an orphanage, if he’ll just give me the winning Powerball numbers. This “blessed to be a Blessing” thing (as it applies to riches) moves easily from the belief that “God gives wealth to the people that he knows he can trust with it,” to the belief that your amassed wealth means that God trusts you more than the man with the small house. Maybe you’re just good at making money–and that’s not a bad thing. But attributing (and justifying) your riches to your faith is not just bad theology–It is something that contributes to much of the world thinking that Jesus and his Church are as full of crap as everything else in the world. And that is not okay. In every place that the Church lines up with the system that the world, it looks like idolatry, but wherever the Church lines up with the Kingdom of God that Jesus described, it looks like freedom and growth and power and LIFE.

This guys is awesome. Also, I want this T-Shirt.

So I’d be happy if I never heard the term “Financial Breakthrough” in a Church again. I think people getting out of debt is great, but when we start painting the picture that Christians are called to rich/successful in business/financially prosperous, we are doing more than getting it wrong–We are injuring the reputation of Jesus. I can’t wait for the day when the world sees someone in a Christian T-Shirt, and instead of thinking of people in gated communities who sleep next to their guns, they think of those loving people who are always hanging out with the poor and working to help the most vulnerable…. Anyway, I need to wrap it up, so I’ll leave you with a quote from Shane Claiborne: “I’m convinced that one of the great tragedies of the church is NOT that rich folks don’t care about poor folks, but that rich folks don’t know poor folks. Because when we really have an encounter across class, the discomfort of the poor becomes our discomfort, you know? And it begins to challenge the things that we hold true.”

Posted in 1) Jesus, 2) Politics | Tagged Americanized Church, Eskimo Poets, Financial Breakthrough, George Costanza, Greg Boyd, Jesus, Jesus T-shirts, Jesus was homeless, Nanook, Prosperity Gospel, Pyramid Schemes, Rich Christians, Shane Claiborne, The Church, The love of power vs the power of love, The Myth of a Christian Nation, Young Life | 11 Comments

Billy, The Bully, and Me

Posted on April 3, 2012 by theboeskool

Even this guy shoves bloggers in lockers.

I know that you will probably find this hard to believe about someone who does something as cool as BLOGGING, but when I was a kid, I was a complete dork. At recess in elementary school, if people did things to me that I thought they shouldn’t be doing, I would let them know that I was going to go tell the teacher on them–I didn’t want to ACTUALLY be a tattle-tale, so I would go inside and hide in a bathroom stall, wait a minute or so, and then come back out and tell them they were in “big trouble.” I was the sort of kid who stepped on grapes in my classroom at lunch–Then, for something I thought was attention (but was probably closer to disappointment and pity), I would eat that squished grape. In 2nd grade, I called my teacher “Mom” on multiple occasions…. An error that was made even more embarrassing by the fact that my 2nd grade teacher’s name was Mr. Schaaf.

Although I took copious notes on how to be cool from this man, I always wound up being more of a "Goose" than a "Maverick."

All I really wanted was to be accepted–to be one of “the cool kids.” Unfortunately, I had no idea what it meant to be cool. As far as I could figure out, it had something to do with Guess Jeans, Air Jordans, and attempting to fend off body odor. In 6th grade, a friend told me I had B.O. and I was like, “No way–I shower every day!” He informed me that showering alone was not going to cut it, and told me I needed deodorant. I got my hands on some Speed Stick “Spice Scent” and slathered it on my pits to the point that my shirt became so opaque that you could see all four of my armpit hairs from the outside of my Nike Basketball T-shirt. It was every bit as sexy as it sounds….

It's funny how something can go from smelling like coolness to smelling like desperation in just a couple years....

Before long (not too coincidentally, it was probably shortly after I stopped smelling like a spice rack and got my hands on the chick-magnet that was Drakkar Noir), I started to feel a little bit cooler. Even though the memories of being a complete dork were fresh in my mind, I had no problem fitting in with the group when it came to making fun of people. I could look around and learn–Learn when to talk, when to stay silent, when to joke, when to be serious…. I was always a witty kid, and that wit, combined with adolescent cruelty, made a particularly potent way of humiliating those classmates who were lower on the social hierarchy than me. And at the little, small-town, Christian school I grew up in, there was no one who was an easier target than Billy.

The ONLY person qualified to actually give "Cool Lessons."

I couldn’t tell you what Billy was really like, because even after going to school with him for about nine years, I never really got to know him. I don’t think I ever saw him without his glasses. He was thin and gangly. He was hyper and silly. He was socially awkward, but for most of his youth he seemed sort of happy in his role as our geeky classmate. Once, during a Camporee or a Jamboree or some crap, I and some other “cool” kids decided to do something kind, so we let Billy be in our tent. We decided to do a sort of service project, so we offered to give Billy “cool lessons.” I don’t remember the specifics, but it was horribly demeaning. As Billy got older, he seemed less okay with his role as the butt of our jokes. We were terribly cruel, but we told ourselves that it was his own fault for being such a spaz. His compliance with our cruelty came to an end in eighth grade–He did something or said something that resulted in a few people laughing at him, and he kind of snapped. He flipped over a desk with someone in it, and he ran out of the room crying. We acted like a great injustice occurred when our Religion teacher directed his anger at us when it was Billy who had flipped over a desk, but really, we knew the teacher’s anger and disappointment were pointed in the appropriate direction. Billy left our little Christian School that year and fled to the local public school, hoping to find…. I don’t know. A place to fit in? Something like love? Or even kindness? Some secular acceptance? Something different than what he was finding with us–That’s for sure.

Who am I kidding? I have never been, and never will be, as cool as this guy right here.

The next year, there was a new kid to make fun of. I remember one of the first things I ever wrote that I was genuinely proud of was a short story about Billy (only all the names were changed). The story was in first person, and it told of taking part in the bullying that chased this poor kid away from our “Christian” School, and how we all felt bad about our role in it. The story ended with kids the following year making fun of a new kid because of things that were different about him. It ended with someone saying, “He looks like a monkey!” followed by words showing my complicity in the process: “Yeah,” I said. Unfortunately true-to-form, I was more taken with the praise of my peers pertaining to my writing prowess (that’s some private school alliteration, right there) than I was with the lesson my story hoped to teach.

This is one of the kids from the movie "BULLY." This kid said, "I feel nervous going to school, because I like learning, but I have trouble making friends." Queue me crying.

I thought of that story recently as I watched the trailer for the movie BULLY–One of the kids that the movie follows reminded me of the Billy of my youth. Bullying is basically just cruelty where there is an imbalance of power. I never really thought of myself as a bully. I was a follower. I was the kid who would stand around and watch, and wait for a chance to say something “funny.” But I was also the kid who knew exactly what it felt like to be left out and made fun of…. So I was the kid that should have known better. But I was a scared little kid, whose desire for acceptance was greater than my desire to do the right thing. And Billy, and many other people I’m sure, paid for my cowardice. We were lucky that all he did that day was flip over a desk.

Jesus said that “when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!” At some point in my life, something changed in me. It was something that understood what Jesus was talking about when he talked about “the least of these.” It was a change that understood those words with my heart rather than my head. Whatever…. I don’t know what my point is. I guess I just wanted to write about how sorry I am. Last week while I was talking to some fourth graders about bullying, a little girl started crying. And she didn’t stop. I said, “Baby, are you alright?” and she started weeping. Loudly. I looked to a teacher and made a “What do I do?” face, and she said, “It’s the subject matter.” I tried to continue to talk to those kids about how bullying really hurts people–all to the soundtrack of this little girl’s sobs–but as I spoke, I had flashbacks to those days in school. I saw myself being left out, but wanting a friend so bad. I saw myself laughing and pointing at a kid whose only sin was not knowing how to make friends. I saw myself, and I saw Billy–both of us wanting attention and not being sure how to get it. And my eyes welled up.

So God, give us the strength to love the unlovable–even now. Give us the wisdom to teach our children to value kindness and compassion over acceptance and approval. Give us the courage to speak when it is easier to stay silent. Soften our hearts until we hold “the least of these” as dearly as we hold “the cool kids.” Remind us how fragile we are, and forgive us when we forget (or pretend to forget) the fragility of the people around us. Show us how to love!!!

And forgive me, Billy, for every thing I did and did not do to make your childhood more lonely or awkward or miserable that it should have been. I am so sorry.

Posted in 1) Jesus, 5) Not Quite Sure | Tagged Being Cool, Bully the Movie, Bullying, Christian School, Cool Lessons, Drakkar Noir, Jesus, Loving the Unlovable, Napoleon Dynamite | 12 Comments

Trayvon Martin and Dutch Ninjas

Posted on March 27, 2012 by theboeskool

"Excuse me, Mr. Springsteen--Those are some nice jeans you got there... You're going to have to come with us."

I was racially profiled in college once. For those of you don’t know, that race is…. Uh, I guess “caucasian?” I belong to the Dutch race. Netherlandic, I suppose? I don’t know–I’m a white guy. And I went to a college with a whole bunch of other white people–Many of them also Dutch, or “Netherlandic Americans” as we like to be called. I was minding my own business outside of one of the dorms, and a Campus Security person walked up shining a flashlight (the closest thing our Campus Security had to any sort of weapon) my way. I think that when I saw the beam, I jokingly hid behind a tree trunk, employing my finely honed skills as a Dutch Ninja–Easily the deadliest (and most thrifty) of all ninjas. The next thing I knew, I was being detained. I was told that I “fit the description” of a person who just attempted some sort of sexual assault on Campus. That description? A white male wearing jeans and a T-shirt….

It was the one with the stutter and the limp.

They decided to attempt a line-up, only like a really screwed up line-up with me as the only person being ID’ed–I think they got confused. I would stand outside the glass door of the dorm lobby and the girl (accompanied by a bunch of other girls in order to protect the identity of the accuser–sort of the exact reverse of an actual police line-up) would come out and let security people know if I was the guy. We laughed as we walked over to her dorm at the insanity of it all…. I stopped laughing when I entertained this one thought: What if this girl looks at me and says, “THAT’S HIM!!” Then I got nervous. As I stood there outside the lobby awaiting my fate, a mass of college girls came out into the lobby. I can’t be sure, but I think the one who was ID’ing me was the one in the middle–The one who was crying with six different girls comforting her as she shook her head letting the security guy know he could holster his flashlight. I felt very naked, standing there…. I think I might have waved a “Hi, I’m not a rapist” sort of wave.

I found out later that the “attempted sexual assault” this girl experienced was actually just a guy walking out of the bushes as she was walking by herself. He never even touched her. It was probably just some poor guy taking a shortcut as he walked and he came out next to a high-strung co-ed who was feeling a little nervous and vulnerable and afraid and screamed and ran off.

When you see this picture, the appropriate response is sadness and outrage--not over "race-baiting" media, but over the tragic end of a young life.

I haven’t thought of this story in a while, but I was reminded of it recently after the killing of Trayvon Martin. I posted something on my facebook page right after I heard the story. At that point, it sounded like just another tragic killing: Black kid walking in a white neighborhood gets gunned down for “looking suspicious” (read: “black”) sort of thing–Tragic, but there are stupid people everywhere. There had been some break-ins in that neighborhood, and maybe this Zimmerman guy was nervous and afraid when he saw this out-of-place black man walking through his neighborhood, just like the sexual assault girl was feeling at my college (thank goodness SHE didn’t have a gun). However, over the past couple days, the nation’s reaction to this tragic story has taken a far more shameful turn.

I think that many people were uncomfortable with the story as they first heard it, because the awful injustice of it all sounded too clear-cut: “Wait, you’re telling me that an armed, white “Neighborhood Watch” guy called in a 911 call because he saw a black kid walking down the road with a hoodie on? He was following this kid as he walked, and when the kid started running (whoever ran first–we don’t know) he chased after him even though the 911 operator told him not to? Then when this unarmed kid, who was chased and tackled by someone he didn’t know, fought back ON HIS BACK, he was shot in the chest as he cried out for help? AND THEN THE GUY WHO SHOT HIM WASN’T EVEN ARRESTED!?!?!” I think that people were actually relieved when they heard that George Zimmerman’s head was bleeding, like that was proof that this was actually a case of self defense. But I have a question: Since when does “self defense” look like a man with a gun (who witnessed no one committing a crime of any sort) running after an unarmed kid and shooting him in the stomach? I don’t care what state you’re in. This is murder.

The only one of these young, black men who was shot and killed is the one in the bottom-right corner. The other two are NOT HIM. But really.... SHOULD IT MATTER?

“Wait!” people cried. “It turns out George Zimmerman wasn’t REALLY white! His dad was white and his mom was Peruvian. That makes him sort of Hispanic.” As if Hispanic people are incapable of racial profiling because they are a minority as well… And then, I think an even more dubious part of white America let out another sigh of relief when they found out that Trayvon had been suspended from school. Then, after it was leaked that his suspension was because they had found trace amounts of marijuana in a baggie in his book bag, people believed the shooting was even something close to justified. Like, “See? He wasn’t such a good kid after all.” This sort of sentiment is portrayed in the comment of a New Orleans police officer who wrote “Act like a thug, die like one!” on a thread discussing the Trayvon Martin killing. It’s shown in the picture of a black kid with no shirt on, saggin’ pants, flipping off the camera that people said was a picture of Trayvon. Of course it wasn’t, but when people saw the picture, it made the bitter pill that is this kid’s death a little easier to swallow. Here’s the thing: I don’t care if this kid smoked the whole baggie of pot, sagged his pants below his underwear, and had a 24 karat grill in his mouth–this kid got shot and killed on his back with a bag of Skittles and an Arizona Tea in his pocket! If you are defending his killing there is something very VERY wrong with you.

If you don't think race is a big part of this whole controversy, you are just plain wrong.

President Obama, while talking about Trayvon, said the words “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” And that’s just it. When you think about this in a way that says “What if this were my kid? things start to change. What if this were my brother? Or my friend. What if this were me? What if I had decided to run when that campus security guard started coming toward me? What if, instead of a flashlight, he had been carrying a gun? What if, when he caught up to me, I fought back and got in a couple of good licks? Would that make it alright for that security guard to put a bullet though my chest? What if I was wearing a hoodie? I’ve smoked pot before–would that fact make my death more palatable? Well, I AM TRAYVON MARTIN. And if there can be no justice in this case because of stupid laws or stupid detectives, the least you can do is not try to justify my murder just to make yourself feel better.

I am Trayvon Martin.

Posted in 5) Not Quite Sure | Tagged Barack Obama, George Zimmerman, I am Trayvon Martin, Justice, Racism, Self Defense, Trayvon Martin | 12 Comments

Brewster’s Millions, and Why Politicians Are Like Diapers

Posted on March 26, 2012 by theboeskool

I don’t have a funny little story right now, so I’m just going to go ahead and get to the point: Politics in this country right now is killing the spirit of America (if such a thing ever existed).

I have a theory that John Boehner's skin color is a result of some sort of run-in with Willy Wonka... Like he ate some sort of orange gum he wasn't supposed to while touring the Chocolate factory. Also, his skin has a distinctly Oompa Loompa-ish hue to it. Coincidence? I think not.

Imagine, for a moment, if a republican had won the election that made Barack Obama our first president on the classroom poster whose skin looks different mine (other than Grover Cleveland–I hear he had really bad eczema). Now imagine that this republican president was running for reelection this year, while this nation had seen the same sort of recovery we have seen since the 2008 election–A recovery that has effected almost every aspect of the American economy: Growth in manufacturing, in job creation–with headlines like the one I saw the other day reading “Jobless Claims Fall to a 4 Year Low,” in the stock market, saving the auto industry, …. Good grief, even killing Osama Bin Laden! If a republican incumbent was running on the record of accomplishments that we have seen since Obama has been in office, instead of spouting endless criticism, the republicans would be bragging every chance that they could about this first term. And the other side of that coin is that the democrats would likely be saying the same sort of thing that the republicans are saying right now– “It’s not good enough,” “It’s the wrong direction,” and even saying that Obama’s policies “have actually made our economy worse” as House Speaker John Boehner has been arguing recently…. Which is just not true.

Even Mitt Romney admits that the economy is getting better–And he’s getting a lot of flack about that admission from the conservative right. For example, check out this back and forth between Mitt Romney and conservative radio host Laura Ingraham:

INGRAHAM: You’ve also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the president’s argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying it’s getting better?
ROMNEY: Well, of course it’s getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession, there is always a recovery.
INGRAHAM: Isn’t it a hard argument to make if you’re saying, like, OK, he inherited this recession, he took a bunch of steps to try to turn the economy around, and now, we’re seeing more jobs, but vote against him anyway? Isn’t that a hard argument to make? Is that a stark enough contrast?
ROMNEY: Have you got a better one, Laura? It just happens to be the truth.

This guy, it seems, DID admit to his fair share of oppositional successes. Also, I owe you one if you looked at the circle....

And yeah, it is the truth–Economically, things are a lot better than they were four years ago. But in order to get elected, candidates aren’t allowed to admit this sort of fact (the sort admission that concedes the other side may be experiencing some measure of success) without getting huge amounts of blowback. And people just kind of throw their hands up and say, “Well, that kind of stuff is just politics,” but the thing is: Yeah. You’re right. But it’s gross, and it’s dishonest, and it doesn’t have to be this way. At least, it SHOULDN’T be this way.

Here is an Etch-A-Sketch drawing commemorating one of the greatest movie friendships the world has ever known: The friendship between Chunk and Sloth in "Goonies." "Sloth love Chunk." Sloth love Chunk, indeed....

If a candidate admits that the other side has something that even resembles a good idea, people will call it a “gaffe.” A gaffe is defined as “A politician accidentally telling the truth.” (I was really proud of myself for coming up with this definition, so I Googled it…. Turns out I am far from the first person to come up with it. Crap. Oh well–it’s still awesome.) Last week, Romney’s campaign spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom had one of those “truth-telling gaffes.” When he was asked if Mitt has skewed so far right during the primaries that it was going to be difficult to sway independents in the general election, here is what he said: “Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch–You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.” (For an interesting list of some of the Best Romney Gaffes, click here.) And it’s the truth–You cater to the crazies during the primaries! Everybody knows that. But you can’t SAY that, or you’ll never get a chance to be the nominee. It’s so messed up.

I have never been more serious about anything I've ever written on this blog than these words: GO WATCH THE MOVIE "BULWORTH."

My thing is this: Have these guys never watched a freaking movie about politics or running for office?!? If those communist bastards that run Hollywood have taught me anything (and they have), it’s that the American public is DESPERATE for a politician who will tell it like it is. You got your Dave, your The American President, your Bulworth (Oh my goodness, BULWORTH!! If you take nothing else away from this blog, GO SEE THE MOVIE BULWORTH!!! Please, I am begging you–It is so, SO awesome!), and to a lesser extent, you got your Brewster’s Millions. As Richard Pryor’s Montgomery Brewster spoke the truth about politics and called both candidates a couple of crooks while asking people to vote for “None of the Above,” the city found the truth so refreshing that it looked like he might actually win! I still find it refreshing–if I see Brewster’s Millions on TV, it’s one of those movies that I will watch all the way through, even though I’ve seen it about 50 times (By the way, before the whole Rush controversy, Mitt Romney was asked about the Blunt Amendment–a bill making it harder for women to access birth control–and he said, “I’m not for the bill…. Contraception is working just fine. Let’s just leave it alone.” Then, three hours later, he “corrected his gaffe” and catered to the crazies. Please watch John Stewart explain it better than I ever could).

He may be on to something.

Imagine the Montgomery Brewster-esque reaction the voting public would have had if, after Rush crossed the line, even one of the candidates had had the balls to stand up and say something like, “Yeah, I have agreed with some of the things that Rush has said in the past, and I have disagreed with some of the things he has said…. But calling this woman a slut and a prostitute and suggesting that she film herself having sex and post that video to the internet in order to ‘pay us back’ for buying her birth control is just morally reprehensible. I think that Ms. Fluke should slap his fat head. He really is a very bad person, and I will never listen to his show again.” The one who said that would win in a landslide! At least he would if we’re making a movie. Well…. He’d win the primaries, I mean–If we’re telling the truth, none of these jokers stands a chance against Obama in the general election…. Especially not if Hollywood is writing the script. Those communists.

Posted in 2) Politics | Tagged Barack Obama, Brewster's Millions, Bulworth, Etch-A-Sketch, Goonies, Mitt Romney, Political Gaffes, Politics, Rush Limbaugh, Sandra Fluke | Leave a comment

Gout, Pop, And Being A Quitter

Posted on March 20, 2012 by theboeskool

As soon as you need something like this, it's probably time to cut soda out of your diet.

I’m getting old. I make noises when I put my shoes on these days. Most of these noises are the natural byproduct of bending over while having a belly that is larger in circumference than the circumference of my pants. I’m pretty sure that much of this belly has come from too much soda (too much “pop” for my northern readers). I don’t drink coffee–not for any reason other than it tastes like what I imagine a combination of soil and horse piss would taste like after its temperature was brought to a tongue-scalding level. But oh, how I love the taste of Dr. Pepper. Or to a lesser extent Coke. Or the sweet, sweet flavor of Mountain Dew. When I was about twelve years old, my room was in the basement (where we kept the Pop in order to keep it semi-cold) and I used to wake up in the middle of the night and shotgun a room temperature Mountain Dew. Needless to say, my teeth are filled with so much metal that it makes the airport wand beep.

I'm basically a stone's throw away from this.

I’ve felt justified in my soda intake for the past few years because it was a means of getting caffeine inside of my body–And just about everybody else had the wake-up crutch of coffee, so I felt I deserved it. Unfortunately, my choice of crutch, in addition to leaving me chubbier than the dirty/hot/horse piss leaves its drinkers, also left me with a condition that sounds like the old-maniest thing in the world: GOUT. At least I think it was gout–my feat were hurting, a friend said his feat hurt in the same way because of gout, I looked it up on Wikipedia and saw that corn syrup can cause gout, and I self-diagnosed. I quit cold turkey and conquered my raging caffeine addiction. I medicated the headaches with unhealthy amounts of ibuprofen and ridiculous amounts water. I’m still drinking all kinds of water. The other day, I walked into the bathroom at work and there was a guy using the urinal, so I used the stall and this is how long I peed–The guy who was peeing in the urinal finished, washed his hands, a new person came in, peed, washed his hands, and left–all without so much as a break in the stream. It was epic. I was so proud I wanted to tell strangers about it, but then I realized that taking extra long pees is just another symptom of becoming an old man….

"Wait a second.... were these here when I left?" I was like a young Encyclopedia Brown.

As my head throbbed to the rhythm of caffeine withdrawal, I thought about my dad telling me that breaking the addiction to cigarettes was harder than alcohol or any of the other drugs he was addicted to. My mom smoked when I was young too–I was definitely the stinky kid in class, and I didn’t even know it. After my parents got divorced, my mom didn’t want me to know that she smoked, so she was secretive about it. I remember figuring out that she smoked when I came back from playing in the water at the beach and there were a bunch of butts sticking out of the sand right next to her beach chair. I was like, “What the the hell is this?” After years and years of smoking, she quit some years back…. It’s something for which I still beam with pride–Even with her stressful job, just deciding to quit for herself and her family. Absolutely awesome.

It's like this, only for your fingers. And your breath. And your soul. And (it turns out) your "Viagra target."

So I think that one of the best ways to insure that a kid hates smoking is to have two parents who smoke. I can remember trips with my dad where he would chain smoke and not even crack a window. In college, I remember seeing beautiful girls walk by…. and them seeing them bring a cigarette up to their lips, and just being so disappointed. I used to feel something that bordered on anger when I saw smokers, but now I just kind of feel sorry for them (not in a patronizing sort of way–I am great friends with a lot of smokers). Now I’ll see someone drive by me with their window rolled partway down in zero degree weather, and I’ll imagine their cigarette as a little chain tied to their fingers, keeping them in a sort of slavery.

So for all of the people I love who have tried without success to stop using tobacco, for all the people I love who have absolutely no desire whatsoever to quit, and in honor of the strong mother I love, who kicked arguably the hardest habit there is, I submit to you
The Boeskool’s 8 Reasons to Quit Smoking

It makes you stink. Seriously. You really, really stink. Everything about you–Your hair, your clothes, your hands, your car, and especially ESPECIALLY your breath. It doesn’t matter if you chew a piece of gum. When you do that, it just smells like smokey gum. Or gummy smoke. Either way, it smells gross and stale. And gross. Go take a shower.

You look like a douche. There are only about 1% of the smokers in the world who actually look cool while smoking a cigarette. Everyone else just looks like they are either trying way too hard to look cool, or they have, in some small way, given up on something important. Yeah, I know–You don’t care about how you look while you’re smoking…. But you know what? Yes. Yes, you do.

Smokers are litterers. You are. You all are. Don’t even act like you’re not. Every time I see a little red light fly out of a moving car, every time I see someone put out their smoke with their shoe, every time I look out the window of my car while sitting at a stoplight and see ten thousand cigarette butts on the side of the road–I am more convinced that smokers are the worst litterers in the country. It grosses me out when we’re at the beach and my kids find butts in the sand that aren’t their own. Stop littering.

You’ll have fewer wrinkles. It’s always sad to me when I see someone who is not currently smoking, but I am certain that he or she is a smoker because of the way their face is wrinkled. It gives your lips that dried out look. And no fashion magazine ever described something beautiful with the words “that dried out look.”

It’s so freaking expensive. One of my favorite things to see at the restaurant is when a drunk person asks if we have a cigarette machine and I tell her that we do. Right as she is starting to smile, I let her know that they are $8 a pack. It’s probably mean, but I wish that I could freeze that sweet moment where her inebriated excitement becomes sober disappointment.

You won’t have to hide it from your kids someday. Enough said. Also, you won’t turn your child into the stinky kid in class.

It will probably kill you. Or as least shorten your life. And we’ve all heard the whole “I’d rather burn out than fade away” thing, but all you have to see is one old lady wheeling around an oxygen tank to make that saying seem a lot less cool. Tobacco use is the biggest cause of preventable death in the United States. The WHO says that smoking could kill more than a billion people this century. And, as C. Everett Koop put it, “That equals the number who would die if a Titanic sank every 24 minutes for the next 100 years.

It gives you erectile dysfunction. Easily the worst of the dysfunctions. And the more you smoke the more likely you are to not…. take care of business. I guess that I could have filed this one under “You’ll have less wrinkles.”

Don't be like this guy.

So yeah…. You should stop smoking. There are way too many good reasons to quit, and I didn’t even mention (until now) having whiter teeth, being able to breathe easier, not having to freeze your ass off in the winter, or not having to deal with snarky servers who laugh at you after they tell you that packs are $8. Also, it’s way too stinking addictive. I honestly wouldn’t have a problem with it if it were something that people just did every once in a while, but smoking seems to be one of those things that everyone who “only smokes when they drink” ends up addicted to. If you’re going to be addicted to something, it might as well be something awesome. Like blogging.

Posted in 3) Bathroom Humor, 5) Not Quite Sure | Tagged Caffeine, Erectile dysfunction, Gout, Grumpy Old Men, Mountain Dew, Quitting, Reasons to quit smoking, Smoking | 14 Comments

Jerusalem, Cleveland, and Getting Hit With A Plastic Dinosaur

Posted on March 13, 2012 by theboeskool

"Seriously. It is pizza day today, and I will not hesitate to kill the next person who tries to cut me in line."

Part of what I do for my day job is I go into schools and teach first graders problem solving skills. After doing a program that demonstrates kids solving a problem, we ask them to help us solve a problem. If I’m leading, I’ll set the scene by letting them know I’m really hungry for some lunch. At the last second, as I’m walking to line up in an imaginary lunch line, another person jumps in front of me. After modeling a way to calm down, I’ll ask a room full of 6 and 7 year olds for some suggestions on how to solve my problem. Their answers usually range from “Ask them for your spot back” to “Ask them NICELY for your spot back” to “Say ‘PLEASE, can I have my spot back?'” to “SERIOUSLY. GIVE ME MY FREAKING SPOT BACK OR I WIL CUT YOU! AND I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT A “CUTTING YOU IN LINE” SORT OF CUTTING, BUT I WILL TAKE THIS SPORK, AND I WILL CUT YOU AND YOU WILL BLEED!” We are in a lot of urban schools. The only other answer that comes up with any sort of consistency is the old standard “Jump back in front of them.” We’re always quick to point out that this option might lead to even more trouble, but they are first graders, so they already knew that.

After entertaining ideas that are centered around justice and/or revenge, I usually ask them this question: “What if I just let this person stay there in front of me?” …. Blank stares and blinking…. Followed by the question, “Would this solve the problem?” This question is usually met with a resounding “NO!!!” Okay, is there a prize for the first person into the lunch room? No. Is it some sort of race? No. So if you say, “Hey, it’s no big deal. You can stay there,” and you forgive them, will it solve your problem? Well yeah, I guess so….

When this is what people think of when they hear the word "Peacemaker," something is very, very wrong.

In the news today, I read a story out of the Middle East about more violence between Israel and Palestine. Something like 200 rockets were fired out of Gaza “in response” to the assassination of a Palestinian militant (the rockets didn’t manage to kill anyone) and then “in response,” Israel killed 26 Palestinian militants. Now please, don’t get me wrong–I’m not suggesting that peace in the Middle East is as simple as saying “Hey, it’s no big deal,” or that centuries of offenses on the part of both sides are as easily overlooked as a kid cutting you in line. I realize that there are many people who are very sensitive about this topic (many whom I consider close friends), and I’m not trying to offend people or make them angry–I just want people to think about it…. Think about what we say when we teach our own children about right and wrong. And how does that line up with what we believe about Israel?

This modern dinosaur is every bit as dangerous as the Velocirapturs of old.

I don’t know how my kids do it, but they seem to have a sixth sense that tells them when I’m sitting down in the bathroom. The moment my cheeks touch the seat, my kids turn our living room into some sort of mixed martial arts cage match. It really is uncanny (so to speak). And the violence is always more intense the longer I’m planning on being…. away. Inevitably, one of my kids will come walking in the bathroom with tears rolling down his or her cheeks to let me know about a crime that has been committed. It will go something like this: Someone took something of someone else’s; that person took it back; an argument over possession ensued; someone got mad and decided to hit someone else; that person hit back–usually drawing blood with some sort of plastic dinosaur–and it ends up with someone telling me about it while I’m trying to poop in peace. My response is always the same: I do not care whose toy it was! I am not interested in who did what first! How many times do I have to tell ALL THREE OF YOU that is is not okay for you to hit each other? What do you not get about this?!?!

Do me a favor.... Give me like two minutes before you do the other side?

I don’t want to be sitting in front of God some day (as he tries to poop in peace) trying to explain who the toy belonged to or who threw the first punch–because I honestly think he doesn’t care about property or if they had it coming. God would probably look at me and say, “How many times do I have to tell you–“You have heard the law that says the punishment must match the injury: ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say, do not resist an evil person! If someone slaps you on the right cheek, offer the other cheek also. If you are sued in court and your shirt is taken from you, give your coat, too. If a soldier demands that you carry his gear for a mile, carry it two miles. Give to those who ask, and don’t turn away from those who want to borrow.” What do you not get about this?!?!

Frickin Mayans....

Now–Admittedly, if people are playing by those old “eye for an eye” set of rules, it is a whole lot harder to bring peace to a situation like Israel. But we (people who follow Jesus) are not playing by those old rules anymore–we are a “Love your enemy” sort of folk. Unfortunately, this seemingly clear path for the Church gets less clear because many people believe that prophecies state that certain things need to happen in Jerusalem before the world ends/Jesus returns. To be frank–I don’t care anything about this. People have been trying to decipher things that the Bible says about the end of days for 2000 years, and every generation is convinced that THEIRS is the one, that THIS is the time. And so far, they’ve all been wrong. And what we’re left with is a Church that is trying to figure out the mysteries of Judgment Day and the time of Jesus’ return when we can’t even figure out how to love our neighbor.

"Do not call anything impure that God has made clean."

The Bible says some interesting things about possible roles for Jerusalem, but the Bible says a lot of stuff. So here’s what I believe: The Hope for Peace in Jerusalem is Jesus. There will never be peace in the Middle East without something radical like “loving your enemies” or “forgiving someone 70 x 7 times.” God chose a small group of people to bring a savior. That peculiar group carried the presence of God around with them while they were a people without a land, then they finally built a temple as a house for God’s holiness in Jerusalem. But when Jesus died and the curtain was split, it started a priesthood of all believers—there were not just a few who had access to the holy of holies, but—because of Jesus–all of us can approach God. It went from being something for a small group of people on a small patch of holy land, to being something for ALL people in ALL lands. I don’t believe that Jerusalem is some sort of cosmic linchpin that God is waiting for us to pull. When Jesus talked to the Samaritan woman (in John 4), he said, ““Believe me, dear woman, the time is coming when it will no longer matter whether you worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem…. the time is coming—indeed it’s here now.” Basically, there is no more Jew or Gentile, there is no more clean and unclean foods, and it doesn’t matter whether you worship in Jerusalem or Cleveland–It’s all the same.

My wife just showed me how to put a video on here, so now would be an awesome time to listen to this song by a guy who is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the best living songwriters–DAVID WILCOX. Seriously, shut up while this song is playing.

Here’s my point: Worrying about Jerusalem out of a place of wanting to be on the right side of some final battle is just completely missing the point. We love Israel for the same reason we love Palestine–Because we love. That’s what we do. And we desire peace. And we long for justice, but not the kind of justice that seeks revenge–that’s not our job–we long for justice and peace for people in Gaza just as strongly as we long for justice and peace for people in Jerusalem. Or Uganda. Or Cleveland.

Posted in 4) All Of The Above | Tagged Cleveland, David Wilcox, Gaza, Israel, Jerusalem, Jesus, Loving Your Enemies, Palestine, Peace, Prophecy, Three Brothers | 5 Comments

A Bench Press, A Biskit, and Some Broken Hearts

Posted on March 6, 2012 by theboeskool

Sure, I couldn't bench much, but if we were playing tackle football, I was that kid who would hold on to the big kid's feet while other people pushed him over.... It's an important role.

I have rarely thought of myself as being what doctors refer to as “strong.” While I was in Cadets, a friend of mine was working on his Weightlifting Badge. His dad was one of the counselors, so he had just about every badge there was–So many badges that he was running out of shirt–THAT sort of kid (we all suspected some impropriety was involved with his heroic badge acquisition). I went over to his house and his dad was spotting him as he and his little brother (I think we were in fifth grade and his little brother was in third) were bench pressing on their bench in their basement. His little brother had just benched some amount, and they all insisted that I give it a try. I had never lifted weights before, but I laid back, pushed the bar off the uprights, brought it down to my chest, and pushed up with all my might…. Despite my unmanly grunting, the bar stayed right on my chest (Though, in my defense, if I remember correctly, roughly 70% of my brain was focused on not crapping my pants). The dad laughed and made a comment about how the younger brother was two years younger than me, but could lift more. Granted, the laugh was probably out of pride for his son, but I remember thinking “I don’t have a dad around to lift weights with me, you asshole.” I didn’t try to bench press again for a few years after that.

It was like this, only instead of a watermelon, imagine the duck shoving its face into a Sam's Club-sized tub of beef jerky.

When I did try again, it sure wasn’t going to be in front of people–a few years later, I asked for a bench for Christmas and got it. That same Christmas, my sister got me a smorgasbord of my favorite things. It contained: Movie-theater-sized boxes of Jujyfruits, Jujubees, Dots, Redhot Dollars, and some sort of black licorice candy. In addition, there was a giant jar of Clausen Dill Pickles, and tub of beef Jerky, and a box of Chicken In A Biskit crackers for good measure. Being a teen-ager at the time, I had very little self-restraint. I started shoving things into my mouth like some sort of ravenous duck–attempting to chew, but not letting unchewed food slow me down. When I started to put together the bench, I think all that was left were still a couple pickles left…. A COUPLE.

My love for Chicken In A Biskit crackers waned just a bit after that fateful Christmas, but I've never lost it. I've never lost it....

I was sitting on the ground about ten feet from the box that the bench came in when my stomach said, “No…. This is not okay.” I remember thinking, “Hmm….” at the sound inside me, and a moment later it was as if someone turned on a rainbow firehose. I had just enough time to point my face at the box across the room, and luckily, the force of my Christmas gluttony carried my retch the full ten feet–not a drop (or a Dot) got on the carpeting. As I carried my Box of Vomit (an awesome name for a band, by the way) out to the side of the road to freeze and be picked up by the trash guys the next day, I marveled at the size of the bites of pickle, the whole Chicken In A Biskit crackers, and the seemingly untouched Redhot Dollars–whose date I could still read. Needless to say, between the trauma of my grade school shame and the trauma of that Christmas night, I never did get those really cool bench press muscles that I always wanted.

When our muscles grow, they are actually responding to stress. When we work out (and, just to be clear, when I say “we” I mean “human beings other than myself”), we are actually injuring the muscles we are working. There are all these little micro-tears in the muscle that need to be repaired. As the muscles heal, the repairs leave the muscle stronger than it was before the injuries. Our hearts are muscles….

Mola Kam!!!

A friend of mine recently just got his heart ripped out–Not literally, though I know from experience that when love rips your heart out, it can feel very literal. I have had my heart broken more than once–From elementary school, through middle and high school, all the way to college and beyond–and every single time, that injury to my heart has made The Muscle of My Love (the first single from the band Box of Vomit) that much stronger. I think that, in a lot of ways, you’re not really a whole person until you’ve gotten your heart truly broken. Though, it’s hard to hear this truth when you’re sitting in the middle of the misery that is heartbreak.

No Pain, No Gain.

As I was talking to my friend about his broken heart, I tried to think of something I could say that would help him in some small way. I just had another birthday, and here I am–teetering on the edge of mid-thirties and LATE-thirties…. What can I say to this guy, who I’ve got more than 10 years on, to make him realize that this pain he’s feeling is growth? As I think back on the times in my life that I’ve thought “This is as bad as it gets,” I look at those places right now (with the gift of hindsight) and think, “That is absolutely the best thing that could have happened to me at that point in my life.” The memories of the true struggles of our past are the Ebenezers (Look it up) of our lives. They are the hard workouts that build the muscles of our character and our ability to love.

I can’t imagine what a mess my life would be if I had gotten everything I thought I wanted, but I’m certain I would be miserable. Those times when things don’t go the way that we thought they should…. It’s THOSE times that point us, sometimes against our will, into our destiny. And it may not look like it to everyone–my car is a piece of crap, I have two jobs, our house is small and usually dirty, and I often worry about money–but really–I have everything (not to brag, but whatever….). My kids are crazy sometimes, but they are beyond awesome. And all those broken hearts that I thought were the end of love, they were all just small tears in my heart that prepared me to be strong enough to love the coolest girl I’ve even known: My wife. She challenges me to be a better man, she listens to me even when she already knows what I’m going to say, and she puts up with me figuring it out as I go along…. She is strong and she is tender, she is sarcastic and she is kind, she is stubborn and she is giving. She is one of the most creative people I have ever met, and to top it all off, she is probably funnier than me (probably). I love her, and I love every struggle and every joy that she brings me. And I am SO thankful that at those times growing up when I didn’t know what I needed, I didn’t get what I wanted.

Posted in 3) Bathroom Humor, 5) Not Quite Sure | Tagged Bench Press, Broken Heart, Chicken In A Biskit, Ebenezers, How Our Muscles Grow, Humor, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, My Wife | 8 Comments

Sorority Pillow Fights, and Why I Blog

Posted on February 29, 2012 by theboeskool

There are few things as intimidating as a 6'4" blonde girl bowling in a pair of wooden shoes.

I went to a college without any fraternities or sororities–The closest thing that we had were dorms with very Dutch names. My dorm was Boer-Bennink…. Well, more specifically, it was 1st Boer (The “1st” specified our floor. The floor that you were on was an important subset of our Dutch fraternal system. The people on the 3rd floor had to take the stairs, but they also had higher ceilings which afforded them space for more impressive lofts. Our loft was so close to the ceiling that you had to decide whether you were going to sleep on your back or on your stomach before you got into bed–There was no sleeping on your side). Boer was for the guys, and Bennink was for the ladies. We would do “floor dates,” where the gentlemen of 1st Boer would go bowling with the ladies of 3rd Noordewier, or something…. It was dorky, but a kind of fun, repressed, sexy sort of dorky. If things went as planned, you might find yourself back in your dorm room with one of those fine Noordewier ladies (everyone knows Noordewier girls are a little easy) with your door cracked open and at least one of your feet on the floor. Things never went as planned….

If I've learned anything from movies (and I have), it's that nothing good happens when you put a on a toga.

This is in stark contrast to what we knew was going down at those “public” colleges with their pagan Greek system of fraternities and sororities–Climbing over kegs and unconscious hookers just to get to your bedroom, where you would, of course, find one of your Tappa Kegga Brew frat brothers making sweet, pagan love to some drunken sorority girl who stumbled over to your frat house, tired of the perpetual, lingerie-clad pillow fight at her sorority house and decided to defile your bed on top of a couple of soiled togas–WITH BOTH FEET OFF THE GROUND!!! (That was one of the awesomest sentences I’ve ever written)

And then I went and fell in love with one of these dirty sorority girls…. Not only was she IN a sorority in college, but she loved it so much that after college was over, she actually worked FOR her sorority. I found out that there is this thing called National Panhellenic Conference that is kind of an umbrella organization that the “legit” sororities belong to. The NPC is there to make sure everyone behave themselves and represents their affiliations well. Still, I would watch her cringe at news stories about some freshman kid who died after being forced to eat each ping pong ball that he missed while playing beer pong during pledge week, or some girl ends up in the hospital because she had to do a shot every time someone slapped someone else on Jersey Shore. Even if they weren’t part of the Panhellenic thing that she was part of, it would still make her so mad and disappointed, because she had come to love her sorority. For her, sorority life was not about debauchery and hazing, it was about friendship and philanthropy and fun. So when people don’t represent fraternities and sororities well, and they act like a bunch of stupid jackasses, it sucks because it reflects on everyone.

"Please don't bring me into this...."

This is the way I feel when I see Christians talking about the Constitution like it was the 67th book of the Bible. This is how I feel when Christians cheer for someone to be killed (no matter how “bad” that person is). This is how I feel when I see someone post a hateful facebook status about Muslims. Or homosexuals. Or about people who genuinely believe that there is an inherent injustice pulsing through the form that capitalism has taken in this country, and an evil that is inseparable from the consumerism that drives this nation. Every time someone claiming to be a Christian says something racist, every time a Christian comes across as holier-than-thou, every time someone prays in a way that makes sure everybody sees him, and then leaves a crappy tip, this is how I feel.

In the book, UnChristian (Here is their Youtube Channel), authors David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons write, “We [Christians] have become more famous for what we oppose, rather than who we are for.” The Barna Group, which does research on faith issues, found that when younger people think of Christians, they think of the following six things:

Christians are HYPOCRITICAL–We say one thing and do another.
Christians are TOO FOCUSED ON GETTING CONVERTS–People outside the church feel like targets instead of people.
Christians are ANTIHOMOSEXUAL–We are focused on ‘”curing” gays and leveraging political solutions against them.
Christians are SHELTERED–We are old-fashioned, boring, out of touch with reality, and over simplistic.
Christians are TOO POLITICAL–“Political” in the worst sense, we are thought to be right-wingers who are overly motivated by a political agenda.
Christians are JUDGMENTAL–We come across as quick to judge, and people doubt that we love them like we say we do.

This is heartbreaking…. Every time I or any other person claiming to represent Jesus Christ does something to reinforce these negative stereotypes, it hurts me. It hurts so many people. And it hurts the reputation of Jesus. There are SO MANY PEOPLE whose lives have been changed by who Jesus is and what he said, but THAT Jesus doesn’t seem to line up with what the church looks like in America–People like me, who are tired of Jesus getting a black eye just because the people who claim to follow him are going around starting fights.

When this is the Jesus we're selling, no wonder the world is not buying it.

Don’t get me wrong–I’ve started my fair share of fights…. But most of the arguments I started were because I saw people doing and saying things that reinforced the stereotypes that are listed above. I don’t want any part of those stereotypes. It probably sounds grandiose, but I kind of think of this blog as a ministry. It’s me saying to anyone who will listen: I’m a Christian and I believe in science. I believe the Bible is inspired by God, but I don’t believe that means we have to draw retro grade circles to explain the things that contradict the other things–Inspired does not necessarily mean every word is factually true. Also, I do not think this country is somehow more special to God than any other country. I am not a republican. I am not a democrat (though, given the choice, I’m going to vote for the one that I believe offers the most help to the powerless and an evening of the playing field between rich and poor). I love to make people laugh, and I believe that laughter is an arrow that points us toward the existence of something bigger than ourselves–namely, God. And I believe that we are made in the image of God, and God is a creator, and this blog is a way for me to practice being creative.

Jägermeister is German for "Bad decisions."

One of the main reasons I started writing a blog was because I was causing so much trouble on Facebook–It’s just not the venue for some of the stuff I like to talk about. It’s better suited for posting silly things your kids say, letting people know that you’re working out, and showing people pictures of things you’re about to eat. Turns out it is also pretty good for letting people know you’ve written a new blog–Right now, Facebook is pretty much the only way people find out my blog. So forgive me if you are one of my Facebook friends and you are annoyed when I share this on my wall three times. Part of what I’m trying to do here is to get the word out that just because a bunch of jokers are paddling the freshmen’s asses and shotgunning bottles of Jager, it doesn’t mean that is what ALL fraternities are about.

Also, it would be pretty awesome to get a book deal, so if you can share these blogs as well, that would be super cool….