A Great Man Leaves the Unicameral

I am going to miss Nebraska Senator Ernie Chambers. Last Thursday was Chambers’ last day in the Nebraska legislature. Although he has been accused of racism against white people and considered by some to be a nuisance, Chambers achieved more than many are willing to give him credit for during his 37 years in legislature. With more years in the Nebraska legislature than any other senator, Chambers remains a controversial figure even at 70 years old.

Let’s consider, too, that Chambers likely would have remained in the Unicameral for many more years were it not for the term limits imposed for Nebraska state senators in 2000. An effort, Chambers and others believe, was targeted at him. Chambers made noise in the legislature, and plenty of people were tired of hearing it.

However, Chambers likes to make noise to see who he can wake up — and that was a good thing during his tenure as a state senator.

He’s been called an “angry black man” and those with whom Chambers sits in disfavor claim that he doesn’t like white people, that he only looks out for black people, that he wasted the legislature’s time filibustering, that the crazy old coot sued God last year, and that he was a pain in the butt.

Although laced with truth, those statements are inaccurate.

White people in Omaha generally accuse him of reverse discrimination and catering to the black community and North Omaha. I, however, have never considered Chambers’ actions discriminatory. As for catering to the black community and North Omaha, where Chambers grew up and still lives, well … someone has to look out for that area and its people because it doesn’t seem to be on the radar of other state and community leaders. I won’t fault Chambers for looking after his community and his constituency.

I sincerely doubt that Chambers hates white people, considering that some of his best friends, including former State Senator Kermit Brashear, are white. Furthermore, a white couple recently asked Chambers to preside over their wedding, and Chambers accepted.

And yes, Chambers sued God in 2007. That action received nationwide attention. However, in typical Chambers style, there was indeed a point to the lawsuit, and it wasn’t to get God to pay up. Rather, it was Chambers’ unique way of showing rather than telling people how ridiculous their frivolous and inappropriate lawsuits are and demonstrating how much of the courts’ time they waste. Some of us got it. Others are still shaking their heads that a man actually tried to sue God and believing that Tom Osborne truly is God.

That was something that Chambers excelled at: taking an issue to an extreme to show the people or his peers in the legislature how ridiculous they were acting.

Chambers is indeed also famous for his filibustering talents. Well-known for filibustering by lecturing about the legislative rules or reading the Omaha telephone book, Chambers managed to block bills that would have had negative effects on Nebraskans. You see, Chambers made it a habit to actually read the legislative bills he was voting on, so he understood the terms of the entire bill, and he often accused his contemporaries of failing to read and fully understand the bills they voted for or against.

Chambers came from humble beginnings in North Omaha and became a barber. He later earned a law degree. He was an activist for black rights during the 1960s. And unlike most other state senators, Chambers doesn't supplement his $12,000 annual salary from his work in the legislature with other income. Perhaps this is because Chambers lives and breathes his job as a state senator. He entered the legislature a poor man, he has said, and he will leave the legislature a poor man.

There is more about Ernie Chambers that his detractors would rather hide than exploit. For example, Chambers demonstrated sensitivity and sensibility about issues that concerned rural Nebraskans, and during the farm crisis of the 1980s, Nebraska farmers sought his help. Look back even further, and it was Chambers who penned a bill abolishing corporal punishment in schools. He is also responsible for assuring women equal treatment in the state pension system, blocking the legalization of concealed weapons, requiring grand jury investigations of deaths that occurred while suspects or inmates were in police custody, and introducing an amendment for stricter standards for DNA testing by police.

Moreover, Chambers has for years denounced Nebraska’s electric chair as cruel and unusual punishment, and he has repeatedly tried to repeal the death penalty in Nebraska. At one point, he had majority support from the legislature only to be vetoed by then-governor Charles Thone.

Chambers looked out for people’s rights and wasn’t afraid to limit government while doing it, which, frankly, gave me comfort. Unfortunately, our current politicians care less and less about our rights. We could use a few more leaders like Chambers looking out for us. Chambers has always worked to protect the First Amendment, and he also halted Omaha’s attempt in 1998 to install red light cameras, arguing that such an act was against the state constitution. And it turns out he was correct. Omaha was forced to deactivate the cameras they had already put in place and was prohibited from installing more red light cameras unless a law was passed to change the state constitution.

Chambers’ fiercely independent, maverick style of legislating wasn’t for everyone, and I can’t help but wonder if he would have been more warmly received if he were white. Chambers probably wonders this, too, and that may be why he never lets us forget he’s black. He has said that he is a black man in a white, racist society, and that has obviously influenced his political career. But I think that’s OK. He has a point. Although we have made progress toward improving racial equality, that progress has been slow, and there is still a long way to go. When you really examine Chambers’ political career, you find that his work helped all of us, not just black people, and that is what truly counts.

Ernie, I will miss you, and I appreciate all you have done for the people of Nebraska.

Competitive Birthing: Keeping up With the Joneses

I completely missed the announcement that the more children a family has, the higher their status. A recent op-ed in the Washington Post brought this trend to my attention.

“… the desire to have another child opens one up to charges of elitism and status consciousness,” wrote Pamela Paul. “In many major U.S. cities and their suburbs … having three or more children has now come to seem like an ostentatious display of good fortune, akin to owning a pied-Ã-terre in Paris. The family of five has become ‘deluxe.’”

Seriously? When I think of families with more than two or three children, I think of one of the following, usually in this order: 1) Poor, unemployed and too stupid to use birth control. 2) Catholic and stupidly adhering to the “no birth control” rule. 3) Some other strict religion that advocates huge families and outlaws birth control.

I do not think, “wealthy elitists” or “affluent country clubbers.”

I fully realize that I am out of touch with the whole parenting thing because I have never had a maternal instinct toward anything other than an animal or a plant. My biological clock is broken — or perhaps nonexistent. I have never wanted children. When I was in my 20s, people said, “Oh, just wait until you hit 30; you’ll start wanting them.” Well, I passed 30 four years ago, and I’ve yet to have any inkling of yearning for a child.

Nevertheless, refusing to believe that this is actually a trend, I did some digging around on the Internet. It turns out this trend has been around for a couple years. Maybe I haven’t heard of it because I don’t run around in the baby-maker circles.

NPR published an article on its Web site in August 2007 stating that the more children a couple has, the more affluent they are considered. Furthermore, “some say the trend is driven by a generation of over-achieving career women who have quit work and transferred all of their competitive energy to baby-making.” Competitive birthing, the article calls it.

That’s just sick. Take up a hobby or something, but the idea of continuing to squirt out kids so you can one-up your pals is outrageous. I suspect like most trends, Hollywood had something to do with the competitive birthing trend. Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and Angelina Jolie start popping out kids and everyone else thinks they should, too. Having a kid because your favorite Desperate Housewife did is absurd.

An Associated Press article from October 2006 was one of the first to announce this trend. Apparently the reason for the belief that more children equal higher status is that since it costs more than $204,000 to raise the average kid, you must be well off if you can afford to have more than three. Well, folks, you don’t have to be wealthy to breed, and I think people analyzing this “trend” are forgetting this.

I think of people with whom I work who have five and six kids. They are not affluent. In fact, a co-worker with six kids is constantly pinching pennies in ways that would be embarrassing except that I know he has six mouths to feed. Furthermore, a few of us are convinced that the only sound sleep the man gets is at his desk, when he occasionally nods off for a few minutes while sitting at his desk during the day.

Other people I know who have a herd of children are basically in the same position, and they all admit that if they lost their jobs, they would be ruined. In fact, I have yet to meet people who have a plethora of children and do not worry about finances or layoffs. So I’m not sure where these wealthy competitive birthers breeding to keep up with the Joneses live, but they don’t live in Omaha.

I thought it was bad enough when people kept reproducing in an effort to have a baby of a certain gender. I can’t tell you how many people I know who have three boys and keep trying for a girl or vice versa. I thought the point of having children was — well, frankly, I’m not sure what the point of having children is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be to keep trying until you get the one you want.

I don’t feel sorry for people who have loads of kids, and I don’t think they’re saintly, either. I don’t understand the point of television shows that focus on some family with eight kids and how they manage. Who cares? Am I supposed to feel sorry for them and say, “Oh, how do those poor people manage?” I don’t. They put themselves in that situation. It’s not my fault they’re stupid.

And I’m tired of people becoming pregnant with six fetuses because of artificial insemination and expecting the general public to donate supplies and diapers to them because sextuplets are such a burden. First of all, if you couldn’t get knocked up naturally, then maybe you should have considered that it just wasn’t meant to be and either remained child-free or adopted one of the thousands of unwanted children. Or was it that you couldn’t find that perfect little Caucasian baby that would make your family complete so you decided on insemination?

Second of all, you knew early on that you had six fetuses growing in there, and you chose to carry all of them to term rather than keep one or two. All the suckers donating money and supplies to such couples ought to consider this. Great, reward them for over-reproducing.

The fact of the matter is that whether couples keep squirting out kids because it’s a competition or because they want a certain gender or because they refuse to use birth control, they ought to be thinking about the state of this world they’re bringing these kids into. We live on an already overpopulated planet that we are destroying (mostly because of the overpopulation) and these people think it’s a good idea to bring more and more children into it.

Bad Kids Come From Bad Parents

I’m fed up with my generation. Generation X has a lot going for it. We’re intelligent, innovative, liberal and hard-working. We tend to be sensible and healthy, and we are wealthier than our parents. Why then, are the people of my generation raising such awful children?

While grocery shopping last weekend, I was reminded why I don’t like children. A social worker friend of mine has said for years that it’s not the children I don’t like, it’s their behavior, which is the fault of their parents. She may be correct, but all she made me realize was that I can’t stand the children or their parents.

Our Baby Boomer parents were decent parents for the most part. We were disciplined and taught from a young age to behave in public as well as at home. Yet my generation of rebels has veered so far from their parents’ teachings with their own children that they are negatively affecting society and making some of us agoraphobic. Online shopping has never looked so good; I find myself buying more and more online and going out in public less and less because I don’t want to listen to screaming children and look at their lousy parents.

While grocery shopping last weekend, any maternal yearnings that I may someday experience — which, I should add, is highly unlikely, as I have yet to have a maternal yearning toward anything other than cats and plants — was squelched by the masses of screaming children. I saw a mother with two screamers in her cart, walking along as though she had no idea they were screaming and crying. And this woman was pregnant with a third future screamer. Minutes later, another woman drove her cart by with a screaming child. She, too, acted as though she couldn’t hear it.

When my siblings and I threw tantrums in stores or acted like little assholes, my mother dragged us right out of that store. I’m sure there are stores that still remember the woman who left a full cart in the middle of the store and dragged her ill-behaved children out of it. By that time we were quiet because we knew we were in deep trouble, and making any more fuss was going to make that trouble worse. My mother never once drove her cart around a store with screaming children as though she couldn’t hear the noise.

Frankly, if you choose to allow your children to remain undisciplined, then leave them at home. The rest of us don’t want to be around them. Maybe you are immune to the crying and screaming, but I am not. If your children can’t sit in the cart or walk beside you, then leave them home. I’ve grown tired of having to look out for ankle-biters running around in the stores. I just run them over with my cart now, which actually gives them something to scream about.

It’s not that parents are unable to control their little monsters. I see it as parents don’t want to control them. And this irresponsibility on the part of Gen X parents isn’t limited to toddlers. No, these little monsters are growing more monstrous as they grow older.

My mother works at a high school, and she is continually appalled by the behavior not of the children, but of their parents. Unfortunately, we have not only unruly children in our midst today, but we also have unruly parents. If I caused trouble at school and a teacher called my mother, I was in deep shit at school and at home. Nowadays, however, if the school calls the parents about a student’s behavior, the parent becomes irate, claiming that the school is wrong, their child is guilty of no such infraction. Instead of disciplining the child, the parent tells the school to go to hell.

Which perfectly explains why children today are out-of-control brats — because their parents allow it, and in many cases condone it.

A couple weeks ago, a kid called in sick at my mother’s school for himself from his friend’s cell phone. Since schools now have caller ID, my mother knew the call didn’t come from his parents. She called the boy’s mother, who said she’d have to check and find out what was up with her kid. Minutes later, the mother called back and said, “Oh, yeah. He’s sick.”

If my parents had busted me skipping school, there would have been hell to pay. Not only would I have been grounded by my parents and assigned extra chores, but my mother would have called the school back and told them I had skipped just so I’d have to pay the price at school, too. She never would have covered for me by telling the school I was indeed sick. And she would have taken enormous joy in watching me suffer my punishments.

This child is going to grow up like the 18-year-old jackass who hit my car a few months ago and lied to the insurance company, claiming I hit her car. She called me the day after the accident and still accepted responsibility for it. Later that day, both of her parents contacted me asking what had happened. When I explained the incident to them, they both said — repeatedly — “well, it’s her word against yours.” It wasn’t until her parents told her to lie that she did. Now that’s the kind of lesson you want to teach your kid, isn’t it?

The lie bit her in the ass, though, when she lost in court. Now, do I think she will pay me? Hell, no. I’m sure her parents have told her not to. I’ll have to go through garnishment proceedings to collect the money. And I’ll do it for the same reason I took her lying ass to court: Someone needs to teach her responsibility and honesty, and her parents aren’t doing it.

Unfortunately, Generation X is guilty of perpetuating the worthless practice of “time out” while calling spanking “abuse” in an attempt to abolish it from discipline. Frankly, every child needs his or her ass spanked once in a while. “Time out” is not discipline. It’s the lazy parent’s way of avoiding discipline.

I’m not so sure the old “children should be seen and not heard” adage is so wrong. In fact, in public places, it should be adhered to. Let your children run around and scream at home or at places designed for children. In stores, restaurants, the workplace and school, your children should behave and display manners. Otherwise, leave them at home.

I am usually proud to be a Gen Xer. That pride wanes when I am forced to experience the result of my peers’ horrible parenting. Wake up, Gen X, and take some hints from the way you were raised. Rebelling against your parents by raising your kids the opposite of how you were raised isn’t benefiting you or your children.