Col. 11, June, 2009: Why is America the way it is?

How It Came To Be

by Christina Hazelwood
Recently I went to a Greek diner for lunch. The hostess brought a family, consisting of parents, two children (a boy and a girl), the paternal grandparents and the maternal grandmother to a table next to me. The paternal grandparents made their way to the back of the table, the maternal grandmother to the front. The girl sat in the chair nearest her.

Her younger brother dashed to the girl’s seat and attempted to squeeze her out of it. The father appeared and said, “Both of you cannot sit in the same chair. ” But the boy protested and continued to battle his sister. The girl tells her father she sat in the seat first. The father tells the boy to go to another seat. The boy refuses and says he does not want to sit anywhere else. He wants only the seat that his sister is in. The battle continues and the father tiredly says, “Come on you two.”

The father sits down and converses with the grandparents. The boy continues to squeeze, battle and protest, getting louder. The father says, “Come on.” Finally the girl gets out of her chair and sits in another one. The mother appears. The father tells the mother that the two children were duking it out over a chair.

The mother looks at the daughter and says, “You must learn to share.” The father tells the mother, that the daughter gave up her chair to her younger sibling. The brother says to the mother, “I wanted this chair!” The mother says, “Well it’s nice that your sister let you win.” The daughter responds, “He always gets his way.” The mother says, “Well next time you can win.” Under her breath, the daughter says, “Yeah, right.”

The father then tells the family how he played softball over the weekend and hurt his back. He says he’s concerned because he has to go to work on Monday and must sit in a chair and he’s afraid that will hurt his back even more. He says that because he works at a bank, his job is very important, so he cannot afford to take a day off and this is causing him concern. He says to the grandparents that since he is a loan officer, no one else can do his job, but him. He said his job is so very important and he must work very hard at it and he is the only one who can do his job, as no one else at his office is capable of it.

The mother then tells the grandparents that her son played softball this weekend too. She begins to regal the grandparents with stories about her son’s great athletic prowess. The son gets excited over his mother’s boasting about him, saying, “Yeah, I did that!” The mother gets up out of her chair and starts physically acting out for the grandparents the various athletic skills her son had demonstrated.

I had just been sitting there wondering why things were the way they were and how they got this way. I had been pondering the curious inequities between the sexes and how the male ego had gotten overblown, causing needless suffering. I was wondering why women are so often expected to “give in, take the high road, and be the mature one.” I was wondering why men seem to incessantly talk about how hard they work and how important they are, even though their wives, mothers and the women around them usually do three jobs to their one.

These days most women hold down full-time jobs, run the household, do all the domestic chores, plan, organize and orchestrate the social events, administer to and discipline the children and take care of elderly parents. While the men, by-and-large, have only one job about which they very often complain.

I had been wondering how banks and bankers had gotten so powerful, having little regard for their customers, or the taxpayers who bail out their companies and poor business decisions. I had been wondering why people endlessly battle each other over some scrap, like the Israelis and the Palestinians. I wondered how some bearded Iranian fellow came to be known as “the supreme leader,” expecting all citizens to do whatever he tells them to do.

And here in this one incident at a diner, the full explanation for why was played out right in front of me. The problem is us. It’s how we raise our children, how we choose to interact and how we treat each other. It’s how we allow bullies to be bullies and expect others to cave into them, even when those bullies and blowhards are our husband, our wife, brother, sister, banker or friend. This is how we create monsters out of people who once fought their sister for a chair. Instead of confronting their selfish egos, we inflate them, by regaling their prowess in another area. We keep our mouths shut, like the grandparents, lest we become involved. We kowtow to the powers that be, like the sister, and we live in someone else’s limelight like the mother. We exaggerate our own importance like the father, missing the mark by making mountains out of molehills and molehills out of mountains. As has been said, we have met the enemy and the enemy is us.

Associated Links

Supreme Leader Demands End to Protests

Judicial Watch Obtains Government Documents about Bank Bail Out