A neat quiz on telling whether or not you've been persecuted for your faith.

Clicky!

Now, a note. There are some people who, upon finding out that THEY are not being persecuted (and, in fact, are in the majority and often benefit in material ways from their religious ties), will go and say "Well, YOUR group isn't either, because it's so much worse in Iran/China/Afghanistan/North Korea!!!"

That's probably true, however, it seems to me that justice isn't served by simply being better than a totalitarian state.

Here's a quote put up over at FRK:

Come on, the world is a way scarier place than it was when we were kids.

In the ’20s, moms let kids play in the street while they cleaned. In the ’60s, kids went out in the morning and bounced around all day playing Ringolevio.

These days, kids get snatched off the street and people try to bomb Times Square and the Herald Square subway station.

I said something about it there, but I'll say it again here:

Back in the 20s? There were pedophile scares then. It's not like child molesters suddenly appeared 20 years ago.

Back in the 20s? If your kid got a cut on the street and it got infected? There was no penicillin! Your kid might lose that limb, or even die. I hate those commercials for Neosporin which show people putting antibiotics willy-nilly on every little scrape and cut, but when there weren't any at all, that was no joke! Why do you think people started overusing antibiotics in the first place? They were thrilled people wouldn't die of these diseases anymore!

Back in the 20s we'd just finished the War to End All Wars, which was rapidly followed up by The Great Flu Epidemic - that's the same epidemic people are *still* scared of. Very few people alive nowadays know anybody who died back then, and we laugh about flu vaccines, but there's a real reason governments and scientists are working overtime to keep this from showing up ever again. (Not sure the resulting hype is a good thing, no, but I know why it's there.) We were starting to get those polio scares - my mother remembers those.

I don't know if anybody really felt particularly safe. They just lived.

There were bombings in the 20s, too. I remember reading about one in Manhattan, some Italian socialists bombed something, I think a bank, with - of all things! - a car bomb! (Or a horse-drawn carriage bomb, actually.)

In the 60s? Well, in the 60s you didn't let your kids go to Times Square, first off.

But in the 60s we were living under the threat of the Cold War. We had just finished the Second World War, with the Holocaust and all. There was a constant threat of nuclear bombs at any minute. There were riots.

The 70s and 80s, when most of these people making these comments grew up, were actually scary. (This is probably why they're so freaky paranoid now - when they grew up in a dangerous, scary world, they're inclined to think that it's kept on getting scary. Silly, but there it is.) There was that new scary disease, AIDS. There was still that threat of nuclear war. There were serial killers - my mother claims to have actually met Son of Sam, but declined to go home with him. (Good thing, too!) There were bombings in subways, yes, really. There was terrorism. There was a genuinely high crime rate. There was that Satanic Ritual Abuse scare, which is STILL terrifying people on two fronts - either they're scared it'll happen to their kids (I know, it never really happened) or they're scared they'll be accused of doing it to somebody's kids.

We're now at a 30 year LOW in crime. This is all over the nation, not just New York. (And some of these crimes have always been rare. Abduction and rape by a stranger? Never common - most rapes, of children and otherwise, are by people you know. Bombings? Never common, thankfully.)

What's really funny is people want to live in some idyllic time in the past when "things were better", but they're so caught up in what actually was going on in the past, in their own childhood, that they can't see that things are better now. They're scared of the crimes and problems that happened *then*, even as they say the world is scarier *now*. It's not scarier now! THEN it was scary. Now... not so much.

But they're living in the past, and they WANT to live in the past they've made as well. Convincing them to live in the present (and to want to) is close to impossible.

Two quick articles

This is one on how US schools are more segregated today than in the 1950s. This is no surprise, I think I've seen articles on this before.

And here's one on three citywide gifted programs in Manhattan, two of which are predominantly white, and one of which is largely black.

Now, to explain, the "citywide" gifted programs aren't zoned in any way. Other gifted programs are limited to children in a certain borough or district, or you have to get a variance to go there. (Going to a school out of district has some arcane rules I don't understand, and in all honesty schools don't always follow those rules. They didn't when I was a kid, and I doubt they really do now.)

As far as other schools sharing the building, in the past NYC public schools were huge affairs. Now the push is for smaller schools, but there isn't really any place to PUT these smaller schools, so many of these older school buildings have been divided up so that there's several smaller schools within them, each with their own principal and teachers... and uniforms, and teaching styles and so on. My understanding is that some of these schools, the different schools work together to share their building, thus enabling them to save money on certain resources, such as books or instruments. It's not impossible for two schools to share one music teacher or something like that, or to offer a shared afterschool program. And in others, they don't, for various reasons.

This should help clear up some of the background information there.

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Sometimes, I know the strangest songs.

I pick up songs because they sound nice. Unfortunately, me being me, I try to gather all the verses up, even if the various versions don't mesh well together. Sometimes two verses are saying the exact same thing, or one more or less contradicts another, but they both sound nice.

So, here's one I like, just my favorite three verses, and you can do what you want with it. I used to sing it to Evangeline when she was a baby. I hadn't just been dumped or anything, but it was winter and cold and gray and dreary, so singing about goodbye to winter and frost seemed apropos :)

It's been gray enough for May lately I keep remembering winter then. I guess May showers and chills will bring June flowers?

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Googling was no help to find the tune *I* know to this song.

There's some at mudcat, but last I checked I couldn't find MINE, although I didn't listen to them all. I need to find the site I first learned this from, is the problem.

At any rate, I made one of The Dreaded PHONE POSTS so the curious can find it.

Before my grandmother came here, last time we visited her in California, we got lost.

REALLY lost. And we drove back and forth several times past a school which had a banner about praying for some girl. I looked her up when we got back to the house, she'd been missing for close to a year.

A few months ago her body was found. There was a thing on yahoo about it, and even as I clicked the link about how "missing girl in cali found" I knew it was going to be this girl. And it was.

She had been murdered, and they found the guy who did it, I believe.

The wide coverage of cases like this leads a lot of people to feel that these cases are increasing. They get scared, and no surprise.

But when you think about it, consider this: California is a big state. This girl had already been missing a long time when I was there, and longer, of course, when her body was found (just this past winter). And yet, when I clicked the link thinking "It's going to be the same girl who was missing this past summer" I was right.

There weren't so many notable cases of missing, probably abducted teenagers* that her name was buried in the mix, or that I was going to be surprised when I clicked the link. That is the fact to take away from this.

*The tragic thing, of course, is that there are plenty of missing teenagers who are probably runaways or "throwaways" whose parents or foster care just don't care. But there's no media storm about them... maybe because they're far more common than happy middle class kids who get picked up off the streets in SHOCKING cases. And not all of those kids end up happy when they're grown, with a few funny stories about their exotic past. At any rate, though, if you care enough about your kid to worry about them, this probably isn't going to be your personal problem.