Author Archives: jtjim

Abstaining from Failure

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

February 7, 2005

There’s no better time of the year to look at what makes a winner than at SuperBowl time.  New England made it look easy. But Philadelphia gave no easy ground, and to the very last second on the field, and in the minutes following in the locker room, both teams showed us the character of champions.

We can take a lesson from the big league winners when it comes to teaching our kids about life and success.  Players like Bruschi, Owens, Branch, McNabb and Brady don’t rise to the top by accident.

1.  Game Plan for Winning.

Any good game plan is based on the fact that you want to win.  You don’t build success on a plan that says you plan to lose gracefully.

You make a plan to win.  You study the plan.  You analyze and revise and execute and analyze and revise and execute…according to the plan!  Winning is not an accident.

2.  A Coach for Winning.

Winning teams are made of people who want to win.  Top on this list is the Coach who inspires with leadership, encouragement, correction, and celebration.  Sportswriter Vic Carucci gives them proper credit, “Bill Belichick and Reid are two of the finest football strategists to ever don a headset.”

3.  A Respect of the Rules for Winning.

Belichick and Reid plan their strategies around the rules of the game.  They know football backwards and forwards.  They earn the “highest respect for their depth of football knowledge.”

4.  Heart on Fire for Winning.

Winning is the goal.  It is not a suggestion.  It is not something that happens because you hope it will happen.  Quarterback, lineman, receiver, defender or kicker…your heart is on fire for winning.

5.  A Team United for Winning.

Every winner stands on the shoulders of people who made it possible.  In three years, the trophy for Most Valuable Player has passed from Jackson, Brady, to Branch.  Each MVP stands on the shoulders of unmentioned yet dedicated players who blocked, received and kicked.  They play as a team. They win as a team. They celebrate as a team.

6.  Practice Unending for Winning.

Winning teams are built with players who show up for practice…on time…ready to work…day after day after day.

7.  Imagination for Winning.

Practice on the field is not enough to win.  Tom Brady is reported to call in the middle of the night, “Can you come up to my room? I’ve got a couple of things I want to go over with you.”

“I promise you while everyone else is enjoying Super Bowl week,” said outgoing Patriots offensive coordinator Charlie Weis before the game, “two nights I’ve been sitting in my room between 10 and 11 going over the game plan per his request.”

Good players exercise the body.  Winning players exercise the mind.

8.  Accepting Personal Responsibility for Winning.

Brady is being compared to the great quarterbacks.  “He’s poised. He’s accurate. He responds to pressure. He deflects praise in victory as eagerly as he absorbs responsibility in defeat.”

9.  Regrouping from Failure for Winning.

A good team doesn’t always win.  But it knows what to do with losing.  When asked about their slow first half in SuperBowl XXXIX, Deion Branch said. “We went inside and regrouped, and figured out what we were doing wrong and had to capitalize on a lot of things.”

Winning comes from knowing what makes you lose. Winning teams learn and grow from each defeat.

10.  Accepting the Hard Work of Winning.

The Patriots are being billed as a Dynasty.  But they know they cannot rest on past success.  Sportswriter Pete Prisco sums it up.  “[Y]ou can bet the Patriots will forget any mention of [dynasty] by the time they report for offseason work in March…. Remember, this is a team to a man that doesn’t allow itself to look back.”

Football…or life…winning requires more than a game plan and practice.  Winning is a team affair, a plan to win, fueled by a burning desire to win, supported to the max by every single person:  player, coach, trainer, wife, and friend.

If we want our kids to succeed, we need to take a lesson from the pros.  Whether it’s drugs, tobacco, alcohol or sex, we need to create a society that takes winning at life seriously.  Our game plan must be fixed on a plan to win.

Winning in life is also a team affair.  It’s long past time we built a culture of support for our kids where the media, teachers, and parents are unified as part of the solution and not part of the problem.

The rules for winning make one thing crystal clear.  Our kids fail…because we fail to lead.

July 30, 2004  James Bond in Danger…For Real 

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Big Kids, Little Kids

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

January 31, 2005

He is the cutest little mouse, wide-eyed and innocent, wearing a red Russian peasant shirt with his soft blue hat slightly atilt.  And for $3.95, he can be yours this week on E-bay.

Fivel was the American sensation in 1986, the hero of An American Tale, a spectacular Disney animated feature cartoon.  At the time our kids were four and six, and it seemed like the perfect family outing.

Anticipation was high as movie theater lights dimmed and the music began.  Louder and louder, the music pounded as we squinted to make out dark sinister creatures slinking and skulking around what appeared to be an evil ship tossing wildly about in a raging storm.  Out of the darkness, small mouse eyes popped open in fear.  Drums pounded, lightening crashed and fangs big enough to drool over the entire movie screen snapped down over the horrified eyes.

Mice shrieked in terror.  And a scream rose from the chair next to me.  “Mommy,” my son cried.  “I want to go.”  Another larger-than-life cat screeched in the dark, and Justin pulled on my arm.  “Now.”

Suffice it to say, my husband stayed to watch the movie with our daughter.  Justin and I left the “room of doom” and spent two hours instead at Pier Imports playing with sea shells and beads and furniture.

I learned an important lesson about cartoons that day.  There are cartoons.  And THERE ARE CARTOONS.

It used to be enough to make a cute little cartoon to entertain children.  In the early days of television, while Bugs battled with Elmer Fudd, parents cooked dinner in the next room.  Cartoons were for little kids.

Not any longer.  Matt Groening was one of the first to break into popular culture with the “crass charm” of “Life in Hell,” featuring a rabbit called Blinky who lived “on the dark side of life.”  Seeing the potential for a wider audience, he gave Blinky a family…the Simpsons.

In 1989, Fox commissioned 13 episodes of The Simpsons.  Bart was originally the main character, an anagram of “Brat.”  However, after two seasons, Homer emerged as the viewers’ favorite.

Three years after Bart and Homer arrived in family living rooms around the country, Michael Medved published Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and Traditional American Values.  The Simpsons were a prime example illustrating his message…”that the entertainment business follows its own dark obsessions.”  Medved’s alarm fell on deaf ears.

In 1993, trying to teach fifth-graders American history, I overheard two boys trading insults.  “Butt-head!”  My ears turned red.  I was indignant.  I launched into a teacher sermon on manners and consideration and language.

The kids in the class started laughing.  All of them.  “But Mrs. Jimenez,” the offender protested, “it’s on television.  It’s a TV show.”  I couldn’t believe it.  Beavis and Butt-Head were the MTV sensation of the year, and I had no way to convince the kids that they were being rude and crude.

Not to be outdone, in 1997, Comedy Central aired the first episode of a cartoon created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker.  Touted as a series for big kids…its stories satirized American culture, challenged deepset convictions and taboos, and quite often topped everything off “with a thick coat of black humor.”  It was also a hit with kids…of the little kind.

Cartoons used to be for little kids.  And that has made cartoons a perfect tool for big kids.  Michael Medved’s message rings more and more true all the time.  “Hollywood ignores–and assaults–the values of ordinary American families, pursuing a self-destructive and alienated ideological agenda that is harmful to the nation at large and to the industry’s own interests.”

It is no wonder that cartoons form the center of a new controversy in America.  Poor SpongeBob.  It’s not his fault.  But he doesn’t get to plead innocence just because he’s a cartoon.

In the world of modern marketing where big kids want to reach the hearts of little kids…cartoons provide access.  For those who want to reach the heart of the matter, they must take the time to ask the right questions.

Yes, SpongeBob is a cartoon.  But what is he saying and who is he saying it to?  Big kids?  Or little kids?

See Archives for past editorials.

 

I Think I Can’t….I Think I Can’t

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

January 24, 2005

Her question stopped me in my tracks.  “So why can’t you have a baby and go to college?”

I opened my mouth to speak, “Because….”  I stopped.  “Well, it….”

The modern proscription for a successful life in America is rigid.  You graduate from high school, you go to college and graduate, you get a master’s degree, and you begin your career.  Only then are you given permission to settle down and consider having a family.

The promise of “success” hangs in front of our nose, like the hare racing in front of the greyhounds at the track.  We have our life mapped out, no time to waste, and no room for detours.  But why?

It wasn’t always this way.  There was a day not so long ago when diversity was more than a political slogan.  It formed the very fabric of life, a patchwork of possibilities, a life of beauty designed around the varied circumstances of men and women.

Once upon a time, we took life as it came.  We planned.  But we also made allowances for the turns in the road, the detours and side trips that inevitably occur.  They were not evidence that life was over.  They were moments of creativity, unbidden opportunities to incorporate the unexpected into life and call it success.

Love wasn’t rejected until we had our college diploma framed behind the leather chair.  It came in joyful moments of surprise, and it was received as a gift.  Students in love got married.  If children came along, life wasn’t over.  It was extended.

Married students moved into married housing.  And if they became pregnant, the children were welcome.  Life was big enough to have it all.

Not so today.  For all the pride we have in our ability to plan the perfect life, we have created the ultimate rigid path that rejects life’s diversity.  If success is only possible as single men and women without children, then our fate is sealed.  Sex is recreation, relationships are void of commitment, and babies are unwelcome.

Thus, it is quite an easy matter for clinics on college campuses to sell young women the solution to unplanned pregnancies.  Abortion in college is just one more part of the so-called prescription for success.

Abortion counselors don’t counsel.  They simply latch onto our fears and reinforce them.  “Oh, my dear,” they tell young women, “you don’t want to drop out of school.  You’ll never be able to do it.  Here let us fix it for you.”

Sealing their fate, reinforcing the promise of failure, we withdraw support from pregnant women.  If they want acceptance, love, careers, and a future…they have only one path, one narrow path, just big enough for one person to walk alone, no babies allowed.

As a nation we are all caught in the fear of failure.  Parents push their daughters to abortion.  Boyfriends expect abortions.  And women have bought the lie.  They can’t be a woman, a mother, a wife, and a student…because we tell them they can’t.

When did we decide that the best life to be had is the life of a sterile woman?  What justification do we have for preaching the Mother Goddess in feminism even as we demand that she sacrifice the joy of mothering in order to move ahead?

Do you plan joy?  Or does it flow from your ability to accept the unexpected treasures found along the way…love, commitment, marriage, and family?  If humans were created to be parents, what kind of happiness will we find by denying our creation?

Babies are not the enemy…but only if we are willing to believe in the value of life and all that it brings.  What joy have we lost today by pretending that the best of life can be planned?  When did we give up on ourselves?

 

June 5, 2004:  Unplanned Joy

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The Pregnant Elephant in the Room

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

January 17, 2005

It was a shocking statement to hear my friend Joan say, “I personally don’t think sex education is comprehensive enough.”  But she made perfect sense.

“Comprehensive” has come to mean “condoms and birth control” in debates about sex education.  Comprehensive sex educators insist on the necessity of demonstrating condoms and instructing students on birth control.  But condoms and birth control were the last thing on Joan’s mind.

She has spent years counseling women who sought her out to deal with the negative consequences of their abortions.  Their pain is easy for her to understand.  At the age of 19, over twenty years ago, Joan had an abortion, too.

“I was a college freshman when I got pregnant,” she recalls, “and my boyfriend insisted that I have an abortion.  He wanted to finish school and we would get married after that.  I gave in to his desires.”

Like so many young women today, Joan thought love was the focus of their relationship.  “I thought we were in love….I wasn’t disturbed by the pregnancy at all.  I was excited about it.  I really wanted the baby, but he put pressure on me….I didn’t want to lose him.”

Isolated at the time, relying on her boyfriend’s advice, Joan had the abortion.  Only later, after severe medical complications arose, did her parents find out.  But more important to Joan were the severe emotional consequences.

Her boyfriend was unable to handle her emotions and took Joan to see his family psychiatrist.  “His psychiatrist told me that he couldn’t see any reason for my depression and my grief and my regret…that I had done the right thing and I needed to get over it and get on with my life.”  Only two months after the abortion performed for his sake, her boyfriend left.

Not a religious person at the time, and unaware of fetal development, Joan still felt extreme shame and guilt.  “I knew that I was pregnant with a baby I wanted.  And immediately afterwards, I knew that that baby…I would never hold that baby.”

Eventually, Joan married and became the mother of two children.  Her life then was filled with “triggers,” moments when her abortion would come to life, and emotions would flood her.  “When our son was born, I just looked at him and thought, “He’s not your first child.  He’s your second.  And your first you gave back.  You don’t deserve this one.”

Striving to become the perfect, loving mother and to reclaim the pain of her abortion, she began working at a local crisis pregnancy center.  It was there where, working over eight years with pregnant moms and women who had had abortions, Joan found healing.  She learned she was not alone.  Her experiences of abandonment, shame and guilt were common among other post-abortive women.

Joan looks at sex education today and criticizes the failure to discuss the obvious…the pregnant elephant in the room.  “I don’t believe they talk about the consequences strongly enough.”  Condoms have a pregnancy failure rate for teens of approximately 22%.  “I believe,” Joan says, “that if abortion is talked about as a possible consequence to sexual activity. Kids might make a different choice about becoming sexually active.”

Even when abortion is discussed, Joan points out, “It’s been sugar-coated… ‘This is nothing more than a very simple, quick medical procedure, probably not as traumatic as having a tooth pulled.’”

While some educators have begun to change their rhetoric, Joan is quick to challenge their fence-sitting.  “Either it is a horrible heart-wrenching difficult decision with all of the implications of that, with the emotional damage and the reality of what it does to the child…or it is simpler than having a tooth pulled.  Which is it?”

Coupled with the lack of comprehensive discussions about abortions, sex educators offer almost no information on fetal development.  Over 138,000 abortions were performed in 2001 on women age 19 and under according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Often facing an abortion decision in isolation, teens may lack true knowledge about the stage of development of their baby.  Years later, when pregnant with a child they will keep and with intimate knowledge of fetal development, they often experience a delayed and traumatic reaction to their abortion.

Joan speaks openly about abortion these days.  And she calls others to do the same.  There is a pregnant elephant in the room, and we need to start talking openly about what to do with it.

The next time an educator promotes comprehensive sex education to you, ask them if they present the harmful consequences of abortion to young people.  Ask them if they teach young people about the development of a baby in the womb.  And if they don’t, ask them, “Why not?”

Joan is right.  If we’re going to be comprehensive, it’s time to start discussing the pregnant elephant.

 

 June 5, 2004:  Unplanned Joy

December 10, 2004:  The Best Part of Snuggling

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Condoms: Context Counts

Jane Jimenez

Jane Jimenez

January 10, 2005

Condoms have made front page news again this month.  They have been tested.  They have been ranked.  They have been inflated and burst and charted, from high risk to low risk.

Once again, our discussion of condoms is boiled down to a statistical “failure rate” expressed as a measure of “strength and reliability.”  These tests by Consumers Union will be reported February in Consumer Reports.

But buyer beware.  It’s not the condom we must worry about.  More important than the statistical reports of failure is the report of how…and where…these tests are conducted.  Context counts.

In a well-lit laboratory, one by one, a laboratory tech unwraps each condom and follows a well-rehearsed, methodical, and uniform procedure to place the condom on sterile lab equipment and inflate it with air until it bursts.  No STDs are present.  No sperm, no emotions, no shadows, and no youthful inexperience will cloud the results.

Using the context of controlled laboratory “perfection,” some educators want us to believe we can rest assured that condoms will save our children from the consequences of sex.  Touting statistics from laboratory tests, they say condoms “only fail” three percent of the time to prevent pregnancy.

If our children were stainless steel robots living in a germ-free laboratory, they might have a point.  But they aren’t…and they don’t.

In the context of real life, measuring the failure of condoms in the shadows, in the heat of the moment, to prevent pregnancy, the statistics demonstrate time and again that context counts.  Condoms fail to prevent pregnancy 13-15% percent of the time for real people outside of laboratories.  And if the real people are teenagers, the failure rate can be as high as 22%.

In the context of germs…bacteria…and viral infections without cure…condoms are a veritable catastrophe waiting to happen.  In the context of the real world, there are now over 25 different STDs, each with its own peculiar way of attacking the human body.

Speaking of only one of the 25 STDs, the virus that causes genital herpes lives on the body outside of areas covered by the condom.  It can be present on the body even when no symptoms of the disease are present.  This may help to explain why a disease largely unknown to the general population in the 1960s today infects one out of five people over the age of 12.

The context for condoms, considering genital herpes…and each of the other 25 STDs, is not mentioned by Consumer Reports.  It’s not their fault.  Real life doesn’t happen in a lab under bright lights with reliable machines and technicians.

The context for Consumers Union’s chart on condoms…in a magazine generally devoted to toasters, automobile radiator caps, and power drills…clouds the truth about condoms and why they fail.  Condoms are not mechanical devices submitted to uniform stress.  And when they fail, you don’t get to return the toaster for a refund.

The context for condom failure is magnified because it is the context of our life, here and now, and into the future.  Twenty percent of our adult population now lives with genital herpes.  Infertility now prevents couples from having the babies they desperately want, the result of STDs attacking the reproductive system.  And each year, in numbers equal to death from AIDS, women die of cervical cancer which is linked to an STD at least 97% of the time.

The context for condom failure is magnified because it is the context of human hopes and dreams.  Toasters don’t rejoice when they make perfect toast.  And they don’t care if they explode and burn up.  They are things.  Their failure rates are cold numbers without feeling.

Failure rates for condoms touch the human heart.  The context for condom failure, most especially for teens, is a crash and burn world where relationships last for months, weeks, days…or minutes.  If love was never present, we have taught them sex is sport.  And if love was present, it was the fleeting passion of youth that vanishes at the first sign of trouble or boredom.

When February comes and Consumer Reports hits the stands, step back a moment and remember.   Condoms that fail in the lab are one thing.  Condoms that fail in real life…that’s another thing.  Context counts.

April 2, 2004:   Sex Education: Spinning the Truth

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