Jewish Musings, Thursday, January 19, 2017

[peachymom1]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:

Angelika
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you that stop by to read this thread without posting - you are welcome to do that but you are also welcome to chime in!

[peachymom1]

Good morning everyone! Today I’m thinking a lot about the younger generation. Everyone on my floor at work has had more time to chat with each other in the halls, since we are all temporarily blocked from doing a number of tasks on our computers. So I’ve had a little time to catch up with some people I haven’t talked to in a while, and one subject that always comes up is what our kids are doing at whatever age/stage they are in their lives.

I may have talked about this before, but it still amazes me. When my kids were growing up, I was pleasantly surprised to find that their schoolmates were much more accepting and tolerant of differences than my own schoolmates were. For example, I was teased relentlessly for wearing glasses, which is no big deal at all these days. A kid with ADHD and an anxiety disorder, like my geek DS26, would have been subjected to merciless torment. But he wasn’t. Maybe it’s because we live in a big city with a very diverse population, or maybe things have just changed over time since the sixties, but whatever it is, I love it. DS26 didn’t grow up feeling inferior or judged or even just like an oddball. To him, his differences are no more significant than anyone else’s unique attributes. Thank God.

What are your impressions of the younger generations, compared to how you grew up? How do you think things like social media and an increasingly global community have influenced their perceptions of others? Do you think their challenges are any tougher than yours were?

[lee058]

Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well. It's very gray here in VA but it's not supposed to rain until tomorrow. I hope it pours on the inauguration, except that I feel sorry for the protestors.

Re today's topic: I'm very glad that my family lives in Northern VA, where there is a lot of support for autism. DS23 had a lot of school-related support, plus state and county programs. As a result, he has been able, more or less, to accept his Asperger's and to not feel badly about himself because of it. He does not have an easy time accepting his differences, but thank goodness he doesn't feel inferior to other people. He also is pretty much colorblind as regards to other people, and very accepting of people's differences. I hope he finds someone Jewish to marry and have children with eventually, but since he interacts with all different sorts of people, I don't know if that is going to happen. At any rate, hopefully he won't get serious about anyone for awhile.

I don't think that his generation's challenges are tougher than mine; some aspects are easier and some are harder. The world is a very different place from then though.

I'll be back later. Have a peaceful day, Lee

[peachymom1]

Yikes, it's pouring here and going to keep pouring for the next day or so. I hope everyone is warm and dry!

Holly, how is it going with the house situation?

[hollygail]

I don't remember being teased about wearing glasses (which I started to do in 5th grade). However, things like sexual orientation were never a topic of any kind of conversation. My students openly talk about their gay friends (although I found out when a former transgender student was in 7th grade that she had been the target of some not-nice comments from schoolmates, not religious schoolmates, when she was in 6th grade). I think sexual orientation may be the biggest difference between when I was growing up and my students today.

As for social media, OMG... I collect the cell phones of my students before class begins and return them before dismissal! (at least that's true in the once-a-week 45-minute, sometimes 90-minute, class where we concentrate on Hebrew prayers and blessings).

Tougher? Hard to say. Different challenges, definitely. Difficult to say which are/were more difficult... too different to compare.

[gazelle18]

I do think that more of an effort is made these days for adults to model behavior which encourages color blindness, gender neutrality, and disability acceptance. And I do think it rubs off on the kids. The other day, I was watching as my seven year old was playing at the playground. An African American boy, who she did not know, was acting bullyish, and at one point, he pushed my granddaughter. SHe came to me for help. She said, Grandma that boy over there is being mean. He pushed me." I hadn't seen the incident, so I asked, "which boy?" She pointed to him, and said: "Right there, in the plaid shirt!"

This granddaughter was not trying to be politically correct. She was too young and too upset. But what she saw was a kid in a plaid shirt, not a black kid in a plaid shirt. Nice.

[peachymom1]

Great story, Lynne!