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Who Are Clara’s Buddies? (Liberal Parenting Honorary Mentions)
Short preamble from me: I was brought up in the Midwest by liberal parents from NY State. My dad is originally from NYC and my mother from Long Island. I was always baffled about why they left NY, where everyone is cool, open-minded, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated.
I went back to “my roots” for college and until HRC won the nomination, spent a lot of time as a knee jerk liberal. So why did my Dad leave NYC? It had to do with being an iconoclast totally uninterested in image — he loves the Midwest, always hated East Coast snobbery and NYC chauvinism. And, as he once deigned to explain, in response to my repeated questioning of his decisions, because he felt that the sins of the popular kids I would meet in the Midwest might be less seductive to me, and ultimately less dangerous to my future. In other words, instead of doing coke and talking about Black Power and Foucault, he preferred that I play beer pong with people in crew cuts and polo shirts (or rather watch them play beer pong).
This calculation of his paid off. I was hopelessly unsophisticated in college, to my great disappointment. Never could overcome the uncoolness of my youthful social life. It always showed through, and I was always too stable to be cool.
This was circa 2003 so the rot wasn’t very advanced. Even the Coolest, most Jaded, East Coast kid I met in college wasn’t violent, and therefore couldn’t hold a candle to Clara Kraebber and her friends.
Preamble over. Remember my post about NYC child psychologist Markus Kraebber and architect wife Virginia Kindred and their lovely child Clara?
Well, turns out the whole group of Clara’s friends are Sarah Lawrence-educated (didn’t I predict that school would have something to do with this?) graphic designer, model, European-vacationing violent Maoists.
By the way, the NY Post has published some of Clara’s musings, about appropriating luxury apartments in NY, a “revolutionary strategy” inspired by Stalin, Trotsky, and the Spanish Civil War.
Interestingly, when the Post called Clara at home at her parents’ 1730 country estate in Litchfield, Connecticut, following her arrest, she was suddenly less inclined to expound on the details of her “revolutionary strategy.” It could have been her opportunity to martyrize herself for the cause, but she is as cowardly and craven as she is violent.
I here pay homage to my dad’s prescience (at that time he was a liberal too!). He saw the writing on the wall. I feel like I have had a close call.
Published in General
In college the kind of kids who weren’t cool in high school often became cool.
My mom has always complained about my friends from Vassar, “losers, except for that one that became a high school English teacher.” One day recently, I got impatient: “I thought they were future genius creatives! Obviously I didn’t know they were clearly pointless future baristas. You have to be at least 50 to see that.”
The big test for me, brought up as a liberal, is whether I can train my kids, brought up by conservative parents, to recognize pointless people early on. If you can, you have a huge advantage in life.
If you google her name you find her (more conventional) model shots. She has a particular set of chin. Reminds me of a Nazi guard at Ravensbruck or something.
Speaking of “cool” there was a “cool girl” at Vassar who had that kind of look. She was in the Student Activists Union and I thought she was a bit terrifying.
My late wife and I managed to do that. My kids are doing great.
Your mileage might vary. My brothers and their wives were less successful in doing that.
Why ? How? Please explain!
😊 thank you!!
I have to say, this turn the left has taken really spoils the blue states for me.
I inherited the familial politics hysteria, even if I changed teams. maybe the northeast is fine, full of nice people camping & sailing & not all obsessed with getting your children to change sex or break the windows of Starbucks?
How I and my late wife succeeded? Or why my siblings failed? Thinking about it I guess it is the same answer in both cases.
I should probably write a whole post on it. But let me sum up.
My wife and I were alike in one way: even as children we both wanted to be adults. By adults I don’t mean the adult indulgences: alcohol, uninhibited sex, pigging out on whatever food we wanted, and sleeping all day because no one told us to get up. I mean assume adult responsibilities: get a job, take responsibility for our own lives, start a family, stand on our own two feet. Weird stuff like that. Have people respect us for our accomplishments, not because it was owed to us because were were special.
We were not the oldest children in either family, but we were the first to get real jobs, get married, have children and raise a family. (I was 21 and she was 19 when we got married.) When we had kids we instilled that virtue on them.
As early as when they were age 10, I told them them mom and I had succeeded as parents once they had an education, a job, were living on their own and starting their own families. That if made them so comfortable they were still living at home without jobs or lives in their 30s it meant that we had failed them. I told them I did not care what they chose to do so long as it was worth doing and they did a good job at it. Being gainfully employed at something meaningful was the most fulfilling thing an adult could do. “Something meaningful” was pretty broad and wide. It could be controlling space flights (I was a space navigator at the time) being a plumber or simply raising children. But your life had to be more than converting food into excrement. That was the mission I gave them, and kids generally want to live up to their father’s expectations.
We also prepared them for life – for living on their own. Jan had them learning to cook and wash their own clothes in their early teens. I showed them how to balance a checkbook and handle their finances. We let them do things to test their limits – manage their own money, do things around the house. A lot of times they failed the first time, but we had them try again.
We set the example we wanted them to follow. We showed them what a functional family was. We put family first in our lives, lived our faith, paid our bills, and met our responsibilities even – or especially – when it would have been easy to shirk them. We also refused to play favorites and got our children cooperating with each other rather than competing with each other.
My brothers did a lot of this, but one brother really did not try to prepare their kids to be an adult. Mom wanted them dependent on her, and my brother indulged her and her kids. Another one ended up divorced, and had to play a very bad hand. (Although his daughter turned out pretty good, although she is handicapped by being an atheistic lefty who buys into the whole “I am woman, hear me roar,” bull. She may grow out of it in time that her daughter doesn’t fall into that trap.)
Yes, you should.
And with more proofreading, please. :-)
@seawriter, you should write a whole post on it. But you shouldn’t neglect what you feel your brothers did wrong. I know quite a few families that think they are doing things right. everyone does at my stage in life, unless they are really gravely going wrong. I have some ideas.
That aggressive feminism often conceals very submissive and frustrated women I think.
I plan on writing a post on the American Library of Paris, because I find that institution so rotten. One thing I found ominous is the enormous 6 ft x 6 ft floor pillows they installed in the kids section, because kids these days aren’t even expected to be capable of sitting on chairs or even sofas like normal people. It starts there, I swear. More ominous still is the Brooklyn/West Coast, pseudo-open minded, woke lilt of the 30 something children’s librarian. I overheard her, when I was still a liberal, talking to the teen book club about “identifying as…” and it froze my blood.
With today’s technology, any one of them could be.
Dove Evolution
I was trying to remember how to embed a YouTube video directly. I never can remember how to do that. This time was no exception. Sigh.
All you have to do is paste the URL on its own line:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U
However, it will not work in all cases. Some are disabled from embedding.
Thanks for trying to help, Arahant. Maybe this is one that can’t be embedded. Either way, it’s worth a watch. Seriously, today’s technology can make even the plainest person look model perfect.
You are looking at the best case scenario, @weeping ! I see this truculent angry look in models all the time now for the Brooklyn brands I used to like, and full disclosure, still wear. One of my favorite stores took a fancy to putting the clothes on fat black models with big ‘fros. However they are back to thin girls, albeit with that aggressive truculent look. Like your Dove girl actually. But that’s a thread for another day.
Here’s an example of a lefty poster girl: https://www.francesmay.com/collections/new-arrivals-women/products/rust-bamboo-jersey-tank-top
As my wife is French, I would have been able to move to France rather easily, and my children have the option, too. I’m sure it would be a mistake. For the coming storm, Red State America is the only place I know that has a chance to hold onto liberty, and for one reason: lots of guns in private hands. I agree that Poland is a good outlier in Europe, but as usual, they’ll be overrun by evil. I don’t think they have the political will to arm up like Americans, and only that will suffice.
Already happening. Suppressing unwoke history and literature in public schools is functionally equivalent to book burning.
And having search engine results that find only woke entries, while not finding entries with the truth is another. It’s online book burning.
It is so depressing. The worst is the UK: the U of Edinburgh just renamed their David Hume center because Hume once encouraged a friend to buy a slave plantation AND an Oxford museum has removed shrunken heads made by an Amazon headhunting tribe after bosses said exhibiting human remains ‘reinforces racist and stereotypical thinking’.
My parents are so depressed about what’s happening in the US, they say they look to France for law and order. We have a joke that my dad will be an émigré sitting on a Paris park bench muttering to anyone who will listen about how grilling Costco steaks.
But in all seriousness, the gilet jaunes are out again in force, as of this weekend and they carry the flag and sing the Marseillaise. The French left has not yet adapted a hard anti-France stance seen in the US and UK, in which the flag is denigrated as far right nationalist symbol.
Mwahahaha!! Ok, if you live close to a blue city in a blue state, you can be excused for such absurdities. Otherwise, no. France’s car-burning «jeunes» have been at it for years. I think they have a lot more riots under their belts than America’s BLM. BLM is just more newsworthy in leftist/statist eyes. And one mustn’t offend the muslims in your midst.
Not really applicable, as the Marseillaise evokes The Terror in my mind. Just like BLM. That the gilet jaunes have some legitimate complaints doesn’t really mitigate the vile nature of the revolutionary methods they seem to be trying to inspire.