The Invisible Counterpoint

Child abuse doesn’t get talked about much by progressives these days—the prevalence of it, especially. When we hear of abuse against a single women, the story is usually expanded so that it illustrates how women in general have been suffering. When we hear of abuse against a minority, the same. But when we hear of a horrid case of child abuse we rarely are encouraged to think of its prevalence. Instead, we row against the perpetrator. Or, if it’s one of those women driving all of her children into a lake, balk back from it exploring it entirely—no thanks! But the case of Adrian Peterson was different. It was going along its normal route—how dare he, stuffing leaves into his child’s mouth and then beating him bloody with a belt! Destroy the beast! But then something unexpected occurred. This story of child abuse got innocently expanded, and you could feel in its brief flash of a full expose of the nature of childrearing across a broad swath of Americans, not what occurs when th...

Andrew O’Hehir recently wrote about the Republican victories in the midterm election, saying essentially that it really doesn’t matter if one party wins or loses because without systematic change, either way we’re headed for doom. Specifically he wrote:  This is not a “seismic shift” in favor of the Republicans or the so-called conservative agenda, no matter what John Boehner and Mitch McConnell may say this week. Reading an off-year election result as an indicator of larger societal trends is like interpreting a blizzard as evidence against global warming. The political clock is already ticking toward 2016, when the pendulum will swing in the other direction and Democrats are nearly certain to win back some or all of what they just lost in Congress. If the human conundrum known as Hillary Clinton runs for president she will be the prohibitive favorite; Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. No, what the dire 2014 midterms re...