Nadja Spiegelman at the Forward women’s page says that this non-complaining project Jessica and I have launched this week is not really normal, or healthy. She knows because she tried it herself. Spiegelman got herself a job at a camp for disabled kids, where infrequent smoke breaks involved gossiping and bitching about fellow counselors and campers. Only she didn’t participate. She just smoked silently. Consequently, everyone thought she was totally weird and unfriendly. I would say the problem there is obvious: Jews are not supposed to camp. Cold nights and plastic mattresses are a recipe for semitic disaster.

Otherwise, I know what she means. Just after we got married, my husband’s family set up a hiking and walking trip. I got through it—I would say I even loved it—but only because I complained endlessly, rudely. During this month of non-complaining, my hardest moments so far have been when friends come over, especially friends I haven’t seen in a while. Normally, I would reconnect by doing a kind of complaint performance, where I annotate the updates with sardonic asides. Without it, I’m kind of stuck. What are we supposed to talk about? The unseasonably warm weather?

That said, I know this is a problem Jews are supposed to solve, only because I have sat through many a Yom Kippur service and said the “Ashamnu” prayer many times. If you’ll notice, half of the sins we confess to are synonyms for gossip.

We have become guilty, we have betrayed, we have robbed, we have spoken slander.

We have caused perversion, we have caused wickedness, we have sinned willfully, we have extorted, we have accused falsely.

We have given evil counsel, we have been deceitful, we have scorned, we have rebelled, we have provoked, we have turned away, we have been perverse, we have acted wantonly, we have persecuted, we have been obstinate.

We have been wicked, we have corrupted, we have been abominable, you have let us go astray.

Tags: Non-complaint, whiner's guide to non complaining

My jaw fell to the floor reading this story. Three years ago, a young black woman named Heather Ellis was shopping with her cousin in a Missouri Wal-Mart. As I’ve done more than once in my life, Ellis and her cousin split up into two different checkout lines to see which would go fastest. When her cousin’s line started moving quickly, she joined him. The clerk accused Ellis of cutting in line, an argument ignited, security was called, and lo and behold Ellis, a pre-med honor student, now faces up to 15 years in prison on charges of disturbing the peace, trespassing, and assaulting a police officer. Her trial is Nov. 15.

As if the preposterous circumstances of the case and the grossly excessive charges weren’t enough, Wal-Mart has opted not to release the security tapes, which Ellis’s father argues will prove his daughter’s innocence. And when Ellis publicly protested her charges, the KKK reared its ugly head, sending Ellis threatening letters, one of which, according to this account, was delivered to her by a police officer.

Meanwhile, Syracuse professor Dr. Boyce Watkins, along with Your Black World Coalition and National Action Network, have put together a support site, SaveHeatherEllis.com, in hopes of garnering attention to the story. Those who wonder “Is racism over?” need to look no further than Ellis’s case for the obvious answer.

Tags: heather ellis, racism, Wal-Mart

In a pathetic bid to recruit new members, the Pope suggested that Anglicans who share his homophobia and sexism leave their church and join the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has created an initiative for Anglicans to switch while retaining many distinct Anglican cultural aspects, available mainly to Anglicans who reject their church's willingness to allow gay men and women to become priests. This means, in theory, that large numbers of married Anglican priests could make the switch, the first time that the Catholic Church has ever allowed married priests to join the church in a big group. Which means that the Pope has taken a large step toward increasingly defining Catholicism by bigotry more than by its other elements.

Escalating bigotry and cruelty as a recruitment strategy might sound like a good idea, particularly if you are personally a mean-spirited bigot, but the Pope should look to how that strategy is working for the Republican Party before going further down this path. The Republicans and the Catholic Church are in surprisingly similar situations. Both are watching their membership run out the door, and both are responding by becoming ever more shrill and hateful, which then sends another round of supporters out the door. For the Republicans, the result has been that they're becoming defined as the place to go if you're a nasty, hateful human being. And with this overt appeal to the bigots in the Anglican Church, the Vatican promises to become something similar.

Of course, if you have much experience with Catholicism, you've probably already seen this transformation happening. I've only darkened the doors of a Catholic church in recent years to go to weddings, and even joyful occasions like that are impossible to get through without sentimental posturing about the evils of legal abortion. But for all the shrieking that the official church does on these issues, the congregations don't seem to go along. Despite the endless drumbeat about abortion, the majority of U.S. Catholics remain pro-choice. And the more the Vatican insists on making homophobia and sexism central to its mission, the more they will push the faithful away, and there won't be enough bigoted Anglicans around to replenish their ranks.

Tags: abortion, gay rights, Religion, sexism, vatican

Nothing moves papers (or, more likely, brings clicks) like an article fostering parental guilt. Pieces I said in a previous post might as well be headlined "Talking on Your Cell Phone Means You Are Not Bonding With Your Baby," and "Letting Your Child Walk Instead of Driving Her Everywhere Because You Have a Job or Life Is Putting Her in Danger" garnered plenty of clicks and comments for the Times. (Pieces on yelling, in particular, are so popular that today's piece is the second one for the Times in the past four years.)

But does this glut of parenting advice and commentary (which I've been known to dispense on occasion) really change the way we parent? When I read a piece like today's in the Times, my first reaction is invariably to go on the offensive. Oh, come on, paper of record, leave us something! I mock the parents who've put themselves up for scrutiny. You have a relationship "based on reason" with your 4-year-old? Who are you kidding? I take issue with the experts. "If someone yelled at you at work, you'd find that pretty jarring," one says. Yes, but I would also find it pretty jarring if my boss dropped to the floor in a screaming, sobbing tantrum because I brought her a latte instead of a mocha (although if it happens, I promise to videotape it). Next, I reach for the old standby, in this case, "my parents yelled at me and I turned out just fine."

And then the back-of-the-mind pondering begins. Do I yell at my kids? Why, yes I do. Does it make me feel better? Sometimes. Do I feel guilty afterward? Depends. I'd defend yelling in response to the discovery that your "reasonable" 4-year-old has markered all over the car upholstery. But yelling won't make a child who's struggling with his shoelaces tie faster, no matter how bad a morning you're having—and I'm guilty of that kind of yelling, too, from time to time. Absorbed and digested, that piece probably will change my behavior, at least for today, just as I do think a little more now before whipping out the iPhone instead of talking to my kid at the playground. Another decade of reading might turn me into the perfect parent after all. (But then, what would my kids have to complain about?)

Tags: parenting

Florence and The Machine, a critically and commercially successful British band led by the huge-voiced Florence Welch, dropped its first album, Lungs, on our shores this week. Lungs, which was released in July in the U.K. (it’s been available ‘electronically’ in the states since then as well) and promptly nominated for the prestigious Mercury prize, is a great album. As proof I direct you to the euphoric “Dog Days Are Over.” (Or you can try the more misleading “Kiss With a Fist,” the only track that sounds like a White Stripes song, albeit a good one). The uniformly positive reviews of the record have compared Florence to Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Grace Slick, Tori Amos, The Cranberries, Bjork, Siouxsie Sioux and Joanna Newsom. These comparisons are apt, but there’s someone missing from the list. Florence and The Machine also sounds like Sarah McLachlan. This is not an insult.

Of course, it seems like one. A decade removed from her chart-topping, Lilith Fair glory, McLachlan is synonymous with treacly, sentimental, spiritually acoustic floss like “I Will Remember You” and “Ice Cream” (the dessert which your love is better than). She’s not very rock n’roll. Florence is. She sings louder and lower than McLachlan, her songs have aggressive, pounding beats (drums even!) and her lyrics are controversial (“A kiss with a fist is better than none”).

And yet, Florence shares with McLachlan a mood, a certain melodramatic ambition, a taste for organs, yearning and soaring, highly-produced, multi-layered, heartsick tracks likely to put an ache in the back of a 14-year old's throat. Or, simply put, this owes a lot to this. Without McLachlan’s “Possession” or "Fear," there is no “Cosmic Love.” (Anecdotally, Florence Welch was 11 when McLachlan’s Surfacing and “Adia” first charted in the U.K. Barely teenage is just about the perfect time to be exposed to McLachlan and all her pretty, angsty sentiment).

Whatever the connection between the two women, calling attention to the fact that Florence sounds like McLachlan comes off as a diss, which is probably why reviewers have avoided the comparison, unless they’re dissing (See: “The Sarah McLachlan-on-Broadway ‘I’m Not Calling You A Liar’ ... is just so dumb.”) And, fair enough, you wouldn’t call an up-and-coming actor the next Chris O’Donnell if you were trying to make him seem cool, now would you? So Florence sounds like Kate Bush, and not the founder of Lilith Fair. No big.

Except, what again is so terrible about Sarah McLachlan? If you have any natural aversion to the maudlin, the over-earnest or angels that sounds like a rhetorical question. But it’s not. Sarah McLachlan’s not cool, but, well, do you need to feel cool when you’re watching the In Memoriam video play at the Emmys? (That is a rhetorical question.) If we only evaluated art by its ability to make us “feel stuff,” horror schlock would be Shakespeare, and yet, music’s ability to move is the best thing about it. More than anything, Sarah McLachlan’s music wants to make you feel stuff and it’s pretty effective, especially, I would wager, if you are a teenage girl.

McLachlan's lameness can't have precluded her from influencing cooler musicians—but does it preclude her from being cited as one of those influences? And would Sarah McLachlan be less lame if she her Lilith Fair sisters—the Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, Melissa Etheridge, etc.— hadn’t been on a stated mission to promote crunchy girl-power? If they hadnt been making music for girls? If more rock critics were chicks who had listened to McLachlan (perhaps ill-advisedly) in their youth, would they be more likely to give Sarah her due props? Florence and The Machine’s album is worth a listen, no matter what you make of McLachlan, but we're going to have more chances to consider the Candian's legacy. She sold a lot of records.

Tags: Florence and The Machine, Music, Sarah McLachlan