That heading says it all, doesn’t it?
We all have to battle our tendencies to lie, and cheat, and be selfish, and take mean advantage of weaker people. Some of the weakest people I come across are my students. Some of them cannot do a single thing for themselves, but I just can’t make myself do those things for my students, because there’s a nagging feeling that sooner or later, these kids must learn to take matters into their own hands, and get their own answers. But few of my colleagues really grapple with this problem; they just adopt, wholesale, some approach someone else has advocated. I can’t be that objective about the matter. When I throw them to the wolves, I want to have them watching me throwing them very carefully!
Our public radio station is now hurting for money. At first, I thought, well, the more I support the station, the less the State and the Federal Government is going to support it. If private individuals support it entirely, the government has that much more money for its slush funds, and of course they will just run out and lower taxes. Apparently all the friends of members of State Houses are the super rich, and all they think of doing is lowering taxes at the highest income levels. I just don’t understand it. I would be embarrassed to be known as a friend of the super rich. But not so for lawmakers.
Most of the characters in my stories are soft-hearted, sympathetic people who give, and give, and keep on giving. I’m not that way, and so I suppose I had to make my characters that way, as one method of living a virtuous life vicariously. The very first character I invented, Helen Nordstrom (my friends just could not understand why I chose her to be a Scandinavian-American, since I have practically no Scandinavian heritage whatsoever. I believe that it was so that Helen would have no ethnic traits at all, since Helen’s ancestry plays hardly any role in her story) is an ultra-warm-hearted Polyanna of a girl.
I keep wanting to make Helen have ordinary failings, but I just can’t do it. Her only failing is that she simply cannot resist any girl who makes a play for her; she just swoons right into their arms, with very few exceptions.
I was going somewhere with this, but I need to think it out a little more clearly!
Kay
