B Roll
I hope I didn't give the impression that I support all the material junk that kids have these days. I do not. I agree with you for every reason you state and another. I think our kids have a diminished capacity to visualize.
I travel a lot in Asia and South America [Argentina is my new favorite place] and see [and play with] those kids using sticks and bottle caps and imagination to make the most marvelous creations. Those kids are visualizing.
I think technology is value neutral. Fire can burn your house down or create electricity. I love the fact that I can keep in instant touch with my friends overseas or across the country. I am no Luddite.
I think babies are hardwired to empathize and if that capacity is not nurtured it diminishes. There is an educator in Canada who saw kids at recess fighting to resolve disputes instead of negotiating and distinguished that empathy was missing. She created a program in which a baby was brought into a classroom and the students were told that the baby was the "professor" and the students job was to understand what the baby was telling them. Recess became peaceful as the kids started seeing other points of view and negotiated instead of using force.
Here's an interesting link: http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/ubcreports/2005/05sep07/babypower.html
Thom gets into some stuff in the Edison Gene about how too much exposure to TV in children produces so much cortisol in their systems that their brains develop with flight or fight being dominant over reason and logic. I think when as a society we use TV as a babysitter and Baby Einstein to teach kids instead of talking and reading to them to give them a greater vocabulary and therefore more symbols to create with, society pays a price that results in a loss of community.
I think we need to be ever mindful that the rest of the world isn't like us. I am confronted by that all the time. The kids in my circle are nurtured, creative, verbal, curious, empathetic and inspiring. I see a brilliant future for the planet when I am around them.
I live in rural Texas and when I go to the grocery store I see a very different expression of childhood. I try to interact with those kids as much as I can, not to make their parents wrong but to be an example that they might do something with their lives besides getting pregnant at 15 and working in Walmart.
As to the body language reference, I did a weekend seminar about brain plasticity and that was something the leader mentioned. I'll ask him where that study was done.
I met you through technology and while we will probably never meet in person, I have enjoyed our communication. Thanks

I agree with the caller who indicated that using the terms 'terrorist' and 'terrorism' to describe every violent, frightening act of Ideologues is a poor and dangerous choice. Those terms now carry the fear mongering taint of the Bush/Cheney Years of LIes and Misleading! Avoid them. They are now made too broad and emotional, meaning all things to all people and serving only propaganda purposes.

We can handle criminals by prosecuting them for SPECIFIC crimes. We do not need generalized, fear-mongering vocabulary to address their crimes and confuse the degree of their damage.

(Isn't a prison full of detainees with no specific criminal descriptions proof enough that the term "terorist" is too broad and confusing?!)

We have all kinds of crimes we can prosecute, like vandalism, stalking, arson, assault, murder. And the addition of legally formulated, clear criminal classifications and definitions of violent expressions of intimidation, hate, racism, sexism, and other bigotted ideologies that amp up the violent activities and foment further violence -- these would be SPECIFIC solutions to specific criminal behavior.

And don't dismiss these criminals as mere "CRAZIES". Their acts are NOT the acts of momentary emotional explosion. They learn and teach their violent ideologies, they ORGANIZE, they raise funding and RECEIVE funding from removed and secret parties, and plan longterm their hate mongering and violent acts.

When we angst about terrorism, we sacrifice our cool heads, risk our civil rights across the boards, and miss the opportunity to use logical, legal means to contain these elements of our population with easy to understand language and the resulting specific laws and legal approach.

Bill Jezzard,

I recall that Thom talked about research in Hawaii (I think) that showed that very poor kids who suffered hardships grew up to be more resilient adults than children who hadn't grown up with such hardships.

His comment today brought his previous comment to mind. That's why I posted the comment you responded to.

My problem with material abundance you refer to is that it's bad for the ecology and is an indication of the unfair distribution of wealth in this country and worthwhile. You can still see children in underdeveloped countries that make their toys out of sticks and parts of old manufactured products.

It may be true that children and adults have become somewhat isolated due to modern electronic communications. But I don't think that most children have lost their ability to feel empathy. Some children and adults have it and some don't. I don't know if that's increased to any great degree lately. I don't know if children are any less able to read body language than they were before. There always have been people who are more intuitive about body language than others.

And there are benefits to the electronic communications. I've had the ability to meet people from around the world over the Internet, and I would never have been able to know them without the Internet. If we use electronic communications properly, it could expand our humanity.

Lately, I've been thinking about how our modern society has been affecting families. When my parents grew up, extended families often lived on the same or adjacent pieces of land. When I grew up, my immediate extended family lived in the same community, sometimes only a block away. When one family moved to another community, the rest followed. Now my generation lives in different cities and different states. With the next generation it's even different countries and continents. There are people I grew up with, in and out of my family, that I know so little about, I couldn't even tell you where they live or if they're still alive.

The strange thing about the Weathermen and the Weather Underground was that they were a mostly apolitical group as they demonstrated against the Viet Nam war when Johnson was President as well as Nixon. They were not against Democratic or Republican agendas only the war that they were forced by conscription to participate in.

i emial newt asking him if i need to be a christian to be a member of the republican party. no aswer yet

Thom,

The position you stated who is responsible for 911 isn't going to satisfy people who support the thermite and no plane at the Pentagon scenarios. In fact, the point you raised undermines those scenarios.

If multiple governments, intelligence agencies and the Clinton administration were warning the Bush administration that a major terrorist attack was coming, what were they telling them? Were they telling them that the Bush administration was going to attack the United States? That doesn't make sense, does it?

Among the claims that have been put 911 was an inside job is the claim that John Ashcroft stopped taking commercial airline flights around 2 months before 911. Ashcroft denied that he stopped taking commercial flights when asked about it at the 911 commission hearings.

But let's say that it's true that Ashcroft had stopped using commercial flights 2 months before 911. Doesn't that indicate that he (or whoever warned him) didn't know when the attack was going to happen and which flights were going to be hijacked? Maybe they'll say that it was an inside job but Ashcroft wasn't into it.

Recently there have been reports about how panicked and disorganized the administration was after 911. We all remember how Bush sat in the classroom looking stupid after being told about the attack. Why would they be panicked and disorganized if they were behind it. I would think that if the Bush administration was behind 911 and it was done, in part, to gain political capital, they would have had Bush spring into action looking heroic rather than sit on his ass and then go into hiding.

a story my mom shared with me about granma during the depression was that if people where coming to the door asking for food she would feed them. granma would say if i have at least a piece of bread i can share.

The discussion this hour shows how people can so differently internalize the same input (in this case information about the shooting yesterday and your description). In your discussion with Mr. Vadum, he seemed to me to be assuming the mantle of "right-wing extremist" for himself and he was totally unable to just see the term in an objective way. When the caller responded, he seems to have become effectively terrorized at even the thought of the idea domestic terrorism.

Maybe it's just me. I'm beginning to think that America's wealthiest work from the position that, perhaps by divine right, ALL the money is THEIRS! It's common these days at corporate board meetings to refer to any opportunity to make a profit that was not pursued (for whatever reason) as money LOST.

Just 'cause that dollar is in your pocket NOW, doesn't mean that it doesn't really belong to KBR!

B Roll,
Thank you for your stand.
My take on what Thom said was not that suffering is good but challenges can be. I think kids today aren't given enough opportunity to find satisfaction and success absent material abundance. The common remark I hear from my parents [great depression] generation is that "we didn't have much, but we had each other and that was more than enough."
Sadly, one of the side effects of the technological revolution is that people today don't need to be in each others presence to share information. Young people today can't read body language or physical clues and have little empathy because they don't spend physical time with each other.

Thom,

I can see how facing difficulties when one is growing up can make a person more resilient. On the other hand, aren’t there difficulties that children shouldn’t experience? And don’t you think that difficulties are disproportionately distributed based on factors like geography, race, gender and ethnicity?

Does anyone need to toughen up by being hungry or homeless? It seems to me that children that experience extreme hunger and homelessness don’t grow up to be successful adults.

Even with a world population approaching 7 billion, we still have the ability to ensure that no one (child or adult) should have to endure hunger, homelessness or the lack of clean water.

There will always be challenges in life. Not everything will come easy to everyone and people have to work to progress as individuals.

Thom, Would you please remind anyone who mentions "eco terrorism" that while some groups have destroyed property, and that is wrong, none have ever killed a single human being.