November 5, 2007

Jane Jimenez

My father’s dart board hangs in the garage unused.  A great rainy day game, years ago we could happily pass hours waiting for the sky to clear.  A steak on the grill under the eaves, a football game on a television to the side, and a dart game for the commercials…good memories of good times.

Like all things from the past, it is amazing to see what modern technology has done with a simple game we once played on a 14-inch paper target with plastic red and yellow darts.  The Hot Seller at www.dartboards.com boasts 5 bright LED lights and comes with both soft tip and steel tip darts.  With 210 variations of 37 games, you will never lack for a partner.  The Halex CricketView Dart Board Package features Cybermatch, letting you play against the computer.

Modern technology has done a lot to update the game of darts.  But one thing hasn’t changed.  At $219.99, complete with computer partners and LED lights, the Halex Dart Board still has the familiar scoring system around the edge funneling in to a small precious bull’s eye at the center.

Bull’s Eye!  This exclamation first evidenced itself in print in 1825, being used to describe much more than the center of a target.  Broadly speaking, “a shot that hits the bull’s eye” is, according to Webster’s, “something that precisely attains a desired end.”  You succeeded because you were focused on “something central or crucial.”

Life is like a good game of darts.  You can set out, throwing darts all day, all week, all year long, and here and there, you will certainly rack up a fair number of points.  But if you want to play the game to win, life works much better when you are aiming for the bull’s eye.

No wonder today’s kids are having such a rough go at the game of life.  Raised in the modern age of relativism, the bull’s eye has been painted off the board, leaving a game with no focus, with nothing “central or crucial.”

A report appearing in the Journal of Adolescent Health sheds light on a tragic example of life without a bull’s eye.  The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation studied in detail how California teens ages 12 to 16 interpret abstinence and sexual activity.  Their results will make your eyes pop.

According to the study, 12 percent of the children believed they were abstinent if engaging in sexual (vaginal) intercourse.  For 14 percent of the youth, anal sex was considered abstaining.  More than 44 percent considered genital touching an abstinent behavior, and 33 percent believed oral sex qualified as abstinence.

These teens have done a great job of learning what they have been taught.  On the popular advice column posted by Columbia University, a student asks Alice, “I have a question from my college sexuality class: In what behaviors can one participate and still be sexually abstinent?”

Alice responds, “To some, abstinence is not having any type of sexual experience. To others, it means not having oral, anal, or vaginal sex. Some define abstinence specifically as not allowing penetration or not having vaginal or anal intercourse, but believe that oral sex is acceptable for them to give or get.”

To clarify, Alice offers up concrete examples.  She advises this student that “with a partner” she can try “window shopping”…or “taking a shower.”  Tomorrow the student and her “partner” might enjoy “picnicking in the park”…or they might “cuddle, caress, or stroke each other with fingers, lips, and tongues, with or without clothes on.”  Either this…or that…it’s all abstinence.

And just to make sure there is no confusion, Alice wraps up her 500-word description of sexual abstinence with this guiding light, “It’s important to think about what abstinence means to you, and then to live by that belief (until you choose to change your mind, rather than changing it in the heat of the moment).  [underlining added]

Ask Alice at Columbia University is not an aberration.  She is representative of comprehensive sex education programs.

“In California,” explains Valerie Huber, Executive Director of the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA), “96 percent of schools teach comprehensive sex education, and according to a recent report in the California Journal of Health Promotion, there has been 1.1 million new STD cases reported in Californians ages 15 to 24.  A careful review of the most popular comprehensive sex education curricula reveals that it leaves definitions for abstinence up to the discretion of the individual student.  It is not surprising that teens loosely define the term and end up acquiring an STD as a result.”

Without a bull’s eye to define sexual abstinence, the results of the study by the Pacific Institute are completely understandable.  No bull’s eye.  No need to aim.

The stake in a game of horseshoes, home runs, uprights or darts is points, and it is senseless to play the game without a target to aim for.

The stake in the game of life is…life.  Why be surprised at the tragic results of the game of life if we hand our children a target without a bull’s eye?

July 16, 2007

Jane Jimenez

Daddy was a product of his generation, growing up on a large Kansas ranch in the 1930s.  Behind the barn, he smoked his first cigarette at eleven years of age, the initiation of a life-long habit that eventually killed him.

Marlboro Man…Lucky Strike…the sign of “cool”, a cigarette perched on the lips of cowboys and movie stars…kids were naturally born on a path to become smokers, and in 1955, the cigarette could claim 57% per cent of the male population as “users.”

Undaunted by the social acceptance and prevalence of smoking, in the 50s, health workers launched a campaign to begin an education of the public to the dangers of tobacco.  In 7^th grade science, I watched movies of smoking machines depositing tar into glass tubes.  And in spite of denials from the tobacco industry, news reports began to link smoking with heart disease and cancer.

Progress was slow.  By 1965, 52% of males were still smokers.  Ten years of advertising for change, and still over half of American men 18 years of age and older continued to smoke.  One might have considered the campaign doomed to failure.

Daddy was evidence of this failure.  In spite of his analytical nature and the mounting evidence against cigarettes, he remained entrenched as a smoker.  His sister died of emphysema…my Dad continued to light up.  My uncle underwent surgery for lip cancer…my Dad continued to smoke…two packs a day.

My sister and I went off to college, non-smokers both of us.  Eventually, my mother gained a concession from Dad.  He would at least move his smoking out-of-doors, onto the back patio.  But elevators, restaurants and offices…those were a different matter.

One night at the dinner table, he recounted the insult of being asked by someone not to smoke in the elevator.  “Can you believe that?” he asked.  “This is a free country.  They don’t have any right to tell me what to do!  If I want to smoke, I’ll smoke.”

The Marlboro Man eventually died of smoking.  So did my dad.  Joe Camel Cool was sent to prison.  The tobacco industry finally caved in to the evidence.  Warnings from the Surgeon General are legislated on every pack of cigarettes.  And Turner Classics have been edited to remove cigarettes from the lips of Bogey and Bacall.

But wouldn’t you know it.  The campaign to rid our country from smoking is doomed to fail.  In 2004, one fifth of the total population, male and female, continued to smoke.  In the prior year, 48% of young adults 18-25 had smoked, and during their lifetime, 69% of them tried this deadly habit.  Failed. We are doomed.

We might as well admit that smoking is a temptation that will entice young people.  We may as well face failure straight in the face and give up.  Let’s not hurt their self-esteem.  We certainly don’t want to make them hide a secret habit.  Since kids are going to smoke anyway, let’s teach them to choose their cigarettes wisely.  Smart smoking…if they are going to ignore our warnings and light up, let’s at least teach them “safe smoking.”

Ridiculous?  Then consider the consistent doom and gloom of “sexperts” who chastise health educators who want the best for our youth and have set their expectations on creating change.

Abstinence education?  Doomed!  Kids are going to have sex anyway.  Give up.  Let’s teach them to enjoy sex.  We don’t want them to hide their sexual encounters.  We don’t want the facts to scare them…let’s let them believe the myth of “safe sex.”

Doom and gloom?  This is the foundation of the push to legitimize sex for teens as an acceptable and “safe” behavior.  They’re going to do “it” anyway.

But are they?  Data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggest that the fear of increasing rates of teenage sexual behavior may be unfounded. For example, teenagers seem to be waiting longer to have intercourse. The percentage of 12th-grade U.S. students who reported having had intercourse declined from 66.7% in 1991 to 60.5% in 2001.

This six percent decrease is all the more incredible when you consider that these teens live in a sex-saturated culture that refuses to deglamorize casual random sex.  It is miraculous when you consider the prevalence of “sexperts” who continue to promise “saferrrrrrrrrr sex” as the follow up to “safe sex” which has been thoroughly discredited by science.

Doomed to fail?  If history is any teacher, the surest way to lead our youth to failure is to teach them they have no other alternative.

Doomed to fail?  If teachers believe teens are doomed to fail and build an educational program founded on failure as an expectation, what choice will our teens have?

Failure as an expectation?  Then we are indeed doomed.