Our Parents Being Human, and Stephen King’s IT

In this post, I will muse and ramble on the subject of regarding one’s parents as real people.  I will be drawing from Stephen King’s IT, but I will begin this post by quoting from Rachel Held Evans’ Evolving in Monkey Town.  Rachel talks about her struggle as an evangelical Christian with the issue of hell, particularly how God could condemn people in non-Christian cultures for not believing in Jesus.  Rachel discusses the issue with her father, a Christian professor, and he tells her that God’s ways are higher than our ways.  Rachel is not satisfied with that answer, and she wonders if the God of evangelical Christianity is just as bad as a Nazi prison guard.  Her father then gently says that she should be careful about what she says.  On page 100, Rachel states the following:

“I think you officially grow up the moment you realize you are capable of causing your parents pain.  All the rebellion of adolescence, all the slammed doors and temper tantrums and thoughtless words of youth—those are signs that you still think your parents are invincible, that you still imagine yourself as powerless against them.  As my father and I talked in his office that afternoon, I imagined how devastated I would be if I ever left the faith, and I realized for the first time that I could break his heart.  I realized for the first time that we were made out of the same stuff.  Fear and insecurity felt the same to him as they felt to me.  He had no special immunity against disappointment or guilt, no built-in armor to protect himself from the pain I might cause him.  For the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to relate to my father as a peer.  It was scary.”

This passage really hit home for me, for I myself tend to put my parents on a pedestal.  It’s not that I regard them as flawless, mind you, but I’d like to think that their approval of me is rock-solid.  Consequently, if I am cross or impatient with my Mom, I chalk that up to my weak human nature, but, if she is cross or impatient with me (which doesn’t happen that often), I feel devastated.  In short, I don’t give my parents the space to be human that I allow for myself.  It’s like I see them as God-like, but not totally God-like.

In a variety of ways, Stephen King’s IT touches on the issue of our parents being human, just as we are.  Here are some examples in what I have read in the book so far (and, just to be clear, much of the following has nothing to do with how I see my own parents!):

1.  After IT kills Bill Dengrough’s little brother, Georgie, his parents are not the same.  Laughter is gone from the house, and, when Bill’s father does smile, his smile is merely a shadow of his old grin.  Bill’s parents are silent and distant.  Bill understands his parents’ grief, for he shares it himself.  But my impression is that he longs for his parents to be stronger for him, or at least to be available to him as parents.  (Pages 242-243, 671)

2.  Henry Bowers is a bully, and he is abused by his crazy father, who intensely dislikes his African-American neighbors, the Hanlons.  Henry hates his father, and yet he also loves him and desires his approval.  In a disturbing and horrible scene, Henry lures the Hanlons’ dog with chips and treats, then he kills the dog by feeding him food laced with insect poison.  Henry then ties the dog to a tree and watches him die.  On page 666, we read: “And that afternoon, after he had told [his father], he felt he had finally found the key to his father’s affections, because his father had clapped him on the back (so hard that Henry almost fell over), taken him in a living room, and given him a beer.  It was the first beer Henry had ever had, and for all the rest of the years he would associate that taste with positive emotions: victory and love.”

3.  On pages 662-663, Richie is frustrated with his mother because she will not listen to him.  Richie’s glasses break after a bully (and friend of Henry Bowers) named Gard Jagermeyer pushes him into a gutter.  But Richie’s Mom reprimands Richie, saying, “Honestly, Richie, do you think there’s a glasses-tree somewhere and we can just pull off a new pair of spectacles for you whenever you break the old pair?”  She later says, “the next time you see your father come in looking whipped after working late three nights in a row, you think a little bit, Richie.”  Richie tries to explain to his Mom that it wasn’t his fault, that he was pushed into the gutter by a bully, but she will not listen.  We read, “This failure to make his mother understand hurt much worse than being slammed into the gutter by Gard Jagermeyer…”  The concern of Richie’s mother is certainly understandable, for glasses are expensive, and Richie’s father (as the breadwinner) would have had to work extra hours to replace them!  But Richie was hoping to find compassion and understanding from his mother.

And, while I’m talking about Richie’s mother, I wrote an exclamation point by something on page 366, which talks about what Richie’s mother was thinking about Richie and Bill:

“I don’t understand either of them, she thought.  Where they go, what they do, what they want…or what will become of them.  Sometimes, oh sometimes their eyes are wild, and sometimes I’m afraid for them and sometimes I’m afraid of them.  She found herself thinking, not for the first time, that it would have been nice if she and Went could have had a girl as well, a pretty blond girl she could have dressed in skirts and matching bows and black patent-leather shoes on Sundays.  A pretty little girl who would ask to bake cupcakes after school and who would want dolls instead of books on ventriloquism and Revell models of cars that went fast.  A pretty little girl she could have understood.”

This took me aback because I expect parents to be unconditionally loving and approving of their children, and so it seems out-of-place to me when a parent—particularly a mother—is scared of her own son and deems him to be so inadequate that she wants a daughter.  But I’m probably speaking from my own sheltered experience.

4.  The Hanlons are the only African-American family in Derry, Maine, and Will Hanlon is Mike Hanlon’s Dad.  On pages 668-670, Will has a talk with his son about how he should be careful in a world in which many don’t like African-American people.  This scene reminded me of the Family Matters episode, “Fight the Good Fight” (see here—though the YouTube video no longer works), in which Laura is the victim of racism when she tries to start an African-American History class at her school.  Her parents, Carl and Harriett, are broken by the incident, and they realize that they cannot shelter their daughter from the realities of racism in the world, as much as they’d like to do so.  Many of us would like to think that our parents are God-like oracles, who are above the unfairness of the world, and who can protect us from it.  But, like a lot of human beings, they, too, are its victims, and sometimes all they can do is share their experience.

While I’m talking about Will Hanlon, on page 455, Will on his deathbed is telling his son Mike about an incident that occurred when he was a young man in the military: the burning of an African-American night-club by white racists (who were prominent in the Derry community).  Before he arrives at that part of the story, however, Will discusses his social life with his friends: “Oh, you could pick up a woman at any pig, you didn’t even have to work at it that hard—there was a lot of them wanted to find out if a slice off’n the rye loaf was any different—but to kids like me and Trevor Dawson and Carl Roone, my friends in those days, the thought of buying a whore—a white whore—that was something you had to sit down and consider.”

Mike then narrates about this: “As I’ve told you, he was heavily doped that night.  I don’t believe he would have said any of that stuff—not to his fifteen-year-old son—if he had not been.”

And, with that, I’ll close this post about parents being human!

Do You Think About the Things That You DO Think About?

I’m reading Rachel Held Evans’ Evolving in Monkey Town right now, and I’ll be writing some blog-posts about it, on-and-off, that is.  I also have Jason Boyett’s O Me of Little Faith, and I will get to that, at some point.

The Scopes trial in the 1920′s plays a significant part in Rachel’s book.  At the Scopes trial, renowned statesman and devout Christian William Jennings Bryan assisted in the prosecution of John Scopes, a science teacher who violated a Tennessee law against teaching evolution.  Famous attorney Clarence Darrow assisted in the defense of Scopes.  The climax of the trial came when Darrow put Bryan on the witness stand as an expert on the Bible.  Rachel includes pieces of that interaction in her book, and it overlaps with how the movie Inherit the Wind depicts the scene (though scholars have pointed out that Inherit the Wind is inaccurate in certain areas).  I think that the most poignant question that Darrow asked Bryan was this: “Do you think about the things that you do think about?”  Darrow asked Bryan if he ever studied ancient civilizations—which pre-dated the time that Archbishop Ussher calculated (from the Bible) that God created the heavens and the earth.  Darrow inquired if Bryan ever wondered what would happen if the earth stood still—as supposedly occurred during Joshua’s long day.  To these questions and others, Bryan responded that he had not thought about such issues.  Rather, Bryan believed in the Bible, and he found the Bible to be a sufficient source of spiritual nourishment.  Darrow criticized Bryan’s apparent lack of intellectual curiosity.  As a result of that incident, Bryan’s fundamentalism became a laughing-stock to many.

According to Rachel, Bryan’s inadequate answers on the witness-stand prompted a wave of Christian apologetics, as apologists faulted Bryan for being unprepared to defend his faith.  Rachel does not explicitly say this, but I can imagine that these apologists thought that, if they were put on the witness stand in Bryan’s place, they would have done a whole lot better, and would probably have sent Darrow packing!

But Darrow’s question of “Do you think about the things that you do think about?” got me thinking about when I am curious enough to research a topic, and when I am not.  There are situations in which I can be as intellectually lazy as William Jennings Bryan, perhaps because I feel that a topic is not important to me, or I am uninterested in a topic, or I am interested in other things, or I am content having a particular worldview and do not want to change.  But there are other times when I do research—because I am trying to win a debate, or a topic really does interest me, or I want to uncover the truth about a matter.  Then there have been times when I have been reluctant to research a topic but have forced myself to do so.  In some cases, I feel like I’m being absorbed into a bottomless pit of uninteresting data.  In other cases, I find the process of research to be enjoyable, and the results to be fascinating.

I’ll use the age of the cosmos as an example of when I feel like researching, and when I do not.  Recently, someone posted on a site an excellent blog-post by famous atheist P.Z. Myers, entitled Dear Emma B.  At a NASA display of a moon-rock, a lady said that the rock was 3.75 billion years old.  Nine-year old Emma then asked the lady a question: “Were you there?”  Creationist Ken Ham is praising Emma for her question, for he himself has asked how evolutionists can be so dogmatic about their claims, when none of them was actually present when the universe originated.

In his blog-post, P.Z. Myers praises Emma for asking a question, for inquiry is essential to science.  But he disputed that Emma’s question was really all-that-productive.  Of course the lady showing the exhibit was not present at the origin of the moon-rock!  Emma has learned nothing by asking that question!  A more productive question would have been, “Why do you think that the moon-rock is that old?”  Emma would have learned something new had she asked that question.   Myers then proceeds to tell Emma that we all make conclusions about events at which we were not present, but that doesn’t mean that the conclusions are wrong.  For example, many of us were not present at the American Civil War, but we believe that there was one.  Then, Myers explains radiometric dating in a clear and cogent manner.

Underneath the post of Myers’ piece, a creationist posted an article from Creation Science Evangelism, entitled Evidence for a Young Earth.  This article argued that the earth is young, on the basis of trees, reefs, the earth’s rotation, population, the magnetic field, Niagra Falls, and salt in the ocean.  Here I was, applauding P.Z. Myers for urging Emma to be curious about people’s positions, and the rationales behind them.  And yet, I was uninterested in evaluating the basis for a creationist’s arguments!

Why?  Part of it is that I am content with my notion that conservative Christianity is wrong, on account of my own bad experiences with conservative Christianity—with all its dogmatism, its arrogance, its manipulation, its authoritarianism, its bullying, its group-think, and its cliquishness.  (Man, you can tell that I feel strongly about this!)  But part of it also is that I’m not all that interested in science, and I feel out-of-my-league when it comes to science.  As I’ve said before on other sites, I’d probably lose a debate with a creation scientist or an evolutionist—for the simple reason that I do not know much about science, and, therefore, I can’t evaluate claims that are made.  Plus, I have often doubted the importance of the issue.  A creationist can present me with what he considers to be evidence that the earth is young, not old.  I can respond that most scientists disagree with him.  He would then reply that there have been times in history when most scientists have been wrong.  But here’s what I can come back with: Even if the world is young, what does that prove?  It doesn’t prove that Christianity is true.  It doesn’t even prove that all of the Bible is inerrant in every detail!  All it would prove is that the earth is young!  Many conservative religionists act as if proof for one piece of their ideology means that their entire ideology is true, and they then feel free to bully others with that ideology.  But, in my opinion, their “proofs” for particular ideas do not prove their ideology!  Suppose an archaeologist finds proof that King David existed.  That doesn’t prove the truth of conservative evangelical Christianity!  All it proves is that King David existed.

Okay.  So I didn’t want to evaluate the creationist’s claims because I’m uninterested in science, and I don’t feel that the creation/evolution debate really matters.  But this isn’t entirely the case, for I have read debates between evolutionists and creationists, as well as books about the topic.  A debate that really got me questioning creationism was that between Berkley-educated scientist (and creationist) Duane Gish and scientist (and evolutionist) Ken Saladin of Georgia College (see here).  I’ve also read a debate between Intelligent-Design proponent Phillip Johnson and evolutionist Ken Miller.  I blogged through Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True, as well as looked at arguments by Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis against the sorts of arguments that Coyne presents.  So I am interested in the issue, on some level.  Why?  I think it’s fun to look at arguments and to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, to see why people believe the way that they do, and to weigh different interpretations of data—even if there are cases when I feel way out of my league.  That said, perhaps I will look at Creation Science Evangelism’s arguments for a young earth, as well as how an evolutionist site (such as www.talkorigins.org) addresses those arguments.  And I will blog about it, since blogging helps me to think through things, plus I want to create a resource of information for others.  But I don’t feel like doing so right at this moment, since there are other issues that interest me—such as stories about people’s faith journeys.