Butterflies and Helicopters
July 9, 2014
I’m doing as much as I know how to attract butterflies to my garden. For example, I’ve planted a butterfly bush and milkweed plants. I do this because these plants are supposed to attract butterflies and bees, and I know butterflies and bees are essential to producing vegetables.
One of the greatest miracles any person can observe is to watch a butterfly emerge from a cocoon. It was as wondrous to me last summer as the first time I saw it occur when I was a young child, when I first saw a butterfly emerge with damp, shriveled wings.
I was told then that we shouldn’t interfere, that we shouldn’t help the butterfly escape the cocoon and shouldn’t help spread the wings. We had to let the butterfly struggle. We were instructed that the struggle would give strength to the wings, and that would be essential to the butterfly’s survival.
Childhood is much like this, but too often helicopter parents intervene and interfere with the growth process and, ultimately, weaken their children’s ability to fend for themselves, to overcome adversity and to take flight.
Helicopter parents endanger our butterfly children.
NFL Misdirection
September 26, 2014
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell did something I really respect; and then he didn’t.
On Aug. 28, the commissioner sent a letter to the NFL’s 32 owners in which he admitted that he “didn’t get it right” when he assessed a mere two-game suspension for a player who was seen on videotape to be involved in domestic abuse. I admire his admission. (The player later would be suspended indefinitely from the league following additional evidence in the incident)
Unfortunately, the commissioner accompanied his mea culpa by describing a series of initiatives the league will undertake, one of which – once again – attempts to deflect a public relations disaster upon high schools.
When the NFL was under attack for the head trauma its players were experiencing, the league responded with a state-by-state campaign to impose youth concussion laws which, in most places, were mostly unfunded mandates that are more about symbolism than substance.
Now, again under attack for malfeasance by a workforce with more money than maturity, the league’s leadership is deflecting the blame to college, high school and youth football programs by planning educational efforts aimed at those levels.
Commissioner! Clean up your mess, but leave us alone. You are gutting public support of school sports with one televised game Thursday, three on Sunday and another on Monday, and adding Saturday games in December. Don’t have this out-of-control league lecture our level about restraint and responsibility.
Ours is the level that prohibits sack dances and end zone prances. We insist that our interscholastic players demonstrate maturity that the NFL’s players do not.