Cindy Moy's Blog

Nirmala Rajasekar is a world-renowned artist of Carnatic (South Indian) music. I met her when she gave a presentation at our local library as part of a state arts grant. We’ve kept in touch, and she sent me an email inviting me to a concert she was giving at a local Hindu temple.

I’ve never been to a Hindu temple, and I asked her if it was okay for non-Hindus to attend. I was nervous because I used to accept invitations from other Christians to attend their services, and one time a Pentecostal friend told me that I was not welcome at her church for a second visit. They felt that I was “not ready for Jesus.” (Let’s just say they didn’t get my humor.)

If other Christians are telling me that I’m not welcome, what hope did I have at a Hindu temple?

When I was in the local Rotary club, one of our members invited the group to his newly-built synagogue for a tour. I went and learned a lot, and the people there were very nice. Still, it was not an actual synagogue service. I don’t have the courage to show up for a service at the synagogue.

The Husband and I visited a Buddhist Temple in China when we adopted BaoBao. The Buddhist priests offered to give blessings to the little girls who were joining their forever families, and we thought it was a very kind gesture.

Some of the other Christians, though, were appalled at the thought. They felt that accepting a Buddhist blessing was a very un-Christian thing to do.

I decided to go to the concert at the Hindu temple and said a quick prayer that I wouldn’t embarrass myself. I entered the wrong door and walked smack into a room full of Indian-Americans eating lunch. All conversation stopped.

Even among white people, I stick out as WHITE.

A gentleman approached and asked if he could help me, and I told him I was there for the concert. A woman jumped up and told me that she was the person with the tickets, and after I purchased one, another woman offered me directions to the auditorium.

There were dozens of people at the concert. Three of us were white. (The other two white people at the concert study under Nirmala.)

On my way out of the concert, I ran into a musician who often plays in Nirmala’s ensemble, and we talked for a bit about the music. He mentioned that he attended a different Hindu temple and suggested that I visit it sometime. No one tried to convert me or tell me why my religion is wrong. The entire afternoon was about building friendships.

Christians invite people–even other Christians–to their churches with an eye to converting them. Do we ever extend invitations that include no ulterior motive?

Can we build relationships through religion without converting people?

In 1860, a young lithographer named Milton Bradley invented a game he called The Checkered Game of Life. Bradley intended the game to “forcibly impress upon the minds of youth, the great moral principles of vice and virtue.”

Players who landed on squares labeled Honesty, Bravery, or Success, ended in Happy Old Age. Players who landed on the squares labeled Poverty, Idleness, or Disgrace ended in Ruin, or perhaps, Suicide.

Such squares of vice and virtue do not exist on today’s version of the game we know as LIFE. What happened?

In 1959, the Milton Bradley toy company introduced a new version of The Game of Life to celebrate the company’s 100th anniversary. The object of the game was now to make the most money.

The game of LIFE made Bradley a wealthy man, and do you know what he did when he made his fortune?

He decided that the key to success for poor children was a kindergarten education, particularly learning through art, and devoted his life to creating tools to help children. He set up a manufacturing plant to make crayons, watercolor paints, colored paper, and flashcards.

That venture earned him little money at all, yet in his old age he considered his greatest accomplishment the opportunities he had created for young children.

It should be noted that Bradley was able to create those opportunities because he first became financially successful.

So what constitutes success?

Is it becoming financially independent, or is it being of service to others?

How do you define success?

My oldest daughter, JJ, graduated from high school with great friends, a very good education, and nearly a year’s worth of college credit. The Husband attended that same high school 30 years ago. Yet, I am considering switching school districts for BaoBao.

The Husband thinks the current district is just fine, and I agreed until we attended JJ’s graduation ceremony. JJ was one of 671 graduating students. This was difficult for me to fathom, as there were fewer than 400 students in the entire school system of K-12 that I attended.

It is one thing to KNOW that your child is Student #377, and another to SEE your child being #377 at graduation.

Then there is the school culture. We live in one of the most racially diverse congressional districts in the U.S., and that is reflected in the student population. JJ is of Chinese descent, and I wanted her to be among a diverse student body.

That there is conflict among the student groups is not surprising, but what worries me is that the school district does not address that conflict. And that conflict is now prevalent in BaoBao’s elementary school, where Caucasians are the minority.

In JJ’s senior year, several students were suspended due to a fight that was racially motivated, and a classmate was arrested for sex trafficking. Yes, a high school student was pimping out developmentally disabled classmates.

Minnesota offers open enrollment, which means we can leave our school district and apply to a different district, which may or may not choose to accept BaoBao. State funding follows the student, and schools use open enrollment rosters to keep their classrooms up to quota.

There’s a snag, though. BaoBao attends a Chinese immersion school, and there are few of those around. We have the option of a nearby private prep school with a Chinese program and a $26,000/year price tag, a less-diverse public school district with a Chinese immersion program but a class size just as big as the one we currently attend, and looking for a school without regards to whether it has a Chinese program.

The prep school claims to offer scholarships, but do I really want my kid to be the “scholarship student” among much wealthier classmates?

Will attending a less-diverse public school eliminate the social problems we saw in JJ’s school?

How do you decide it’s time to switch school districts?

The scenario: You are at the local pool with your children. A man with a swastika tattoo walks by. You are offended by this tattoo, so you talk to the pool manager. The manager tells you that she can ask the man to put on a shirt, but she cannot force the man to cover up.

She asks. He refuses.

Do you approach the man yourself? Do you leave?

A friend went through this dilemma. She stayed.

I brought BaoBao and my niece to a different pool when they were both 7-years-old. They were in line for one of the water slides when they noticed that the very large and intimidating man in front of them had a tattoo of a naked woman on his back.

The little girls started talking to each other about how the tattoo was icky and stupid, and how a grown man should know better than to get a tattoo like that, and how a nice man would wear a shirt over such a tattoo when he was around children.

I watched that man wince with each word they spoke.

Perhaps he was already embarrassed by his tattoo choice. (One study showed that 70-percent of people regret getting a tattoo.)

Perhaps their words made him think about how men with integrity behave around others.

Would words from others make a difference to a man with a large swastika on his chest?

Would your reaction be different if the tattoo spelled out the “N” word, or a curse word?

If people with inappropriate tattoos can be made to cover those tattoos at water parks, who gets to decide what is ‘inappropriate’?

what would you change?

Sure, there are the BIG things, such as ending world hunger and preventing families from breaking apart and global peace and all that. Those are the OBVIOUS changes. What about the smaller things that would make living more pleasant?

If I ruled the world:

every night, people would be given a list of the lies they’d told during the day
no one would give a sh** about the Kardashians
my hair wouldn’t get frizzy when it’s humid
interfaith cooperation would be a required course
fracking would be banned
prom dresses wouldn’t be skanky
college & vocational courses would be free and easily accessible
ditto for birth control
people would listen more than they talk
parents would never outlive their children

Your turn. If you ruled the world, what would you change?

The Sis owns and runs a commercial cleaning business. She and her business partner have 18 part-time employees. The Sis makes enough to send both of her kids to private school, and, if necessary, to support her family if her husband lost his job.

One of her part-time employees is my daughter, JJ. There are some family members that cringe at the thought of JJ working a custodial job on her breaks from school. These family members believe that, as the daughter of an engineer and lawyer, JJ should not have to take on what they consider a menial job.

Unfortunately for JJ, who would much prefer to spend her breaks sleeping in and hanging out with her friends, The Husband and I do not agree.

We refuse to give JJ an all-expenses paid trip through childhood, and here’s why:

Manual labor teaches the value of choices. I grew up on a farm. Farm kids are well-versed in manual labor. It was the summers spent walking fields that made me decide to go to college.

No way did I want to do that kind of work for the rest of my life. On those days when I was convinced that I would never survive law school, I remembered those days in the field, hauled my ass out of bed and went to the library to study.  JJ needs to have a point of reference for her difficult days as well.

Hard work teaches the value of a dollar. A lot more thought goes into the purchase of a $50 video game when a kid has to pay for it herself, rather than the parents footing the bill. That video game means a lot more to JJ when she knows she had to clean bathrooms to get it.

Manual labor teaches empathy. The Sis and her employees tell stories of the rude and shabby treatment they get from some of the office workers.

“They think we’re stupid,” she says.

The Sis is one of the smartest people I know. She can make a souffle from scratch and discuss Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables. (I’ve been reading that book for four years, and I’m on page 57.) I want JJ to know that everyone she meets deserves respect for the job they do, whether it is the janitor or the CEO.

At the end of the day, I think the people that are happiest in life are those that find fulfillment in their work, whether their collar be blue or white.

Do you think there is value in manual labor?

I don’t watch much television, and when I do, I generally prefer British crime dramas (Inspector Lewis, Poirot) or HGTV.

One evening I was flipping through channels and found a show about ‘Real Housewives’ of somewhere or other. I’ve been a real housewife, and I can tell you that my life of laundry and dishes and diapers bore very little resemblance to the lives of the women on that show.

What really captured my attention, though, is that the women had undergone so much plastic surgery that they barely looked human.

My guess is that these women are being held up as examples of appropriate femininity. They are ultra-thin and wear tight clothing and toddle around on 5-inch heels.

My friend Sue once dared me to put on a pair of 4-inch heels when we were shoe shopping. I could barely keep my balance standing in one place. How on earth do these women chase their kids around a playground?

Back to the plastic surgery question: Is it a good idea? I agree that every woman (and man) has the right to do whatever she wants to feel better about herself.

There are also situations where plastic surgery is considered medically desirable (ie breast reduction.)

Is there some point at which the doctor should say, “Maybe breasts the size of beach balls aren’t a good look for you,” or “That Botox-zombie-eye thing makes you look ridiculous.”

Confession Time: I hate needles. I’m not particularly fond of doctors or hospitals, either, so my opinion on this subject may not be completely unbiased.

At what point do we stop promoting “plastic” as the norm? Is plastic surgery a good idea?

Immediately following WW2, many Americans were stationed in Japan as part of the Occupation. One of these Americans, Lucy Herndon Crockett, spent 18 months there on a Red Cross mission.

She wrote about the growing influence of Americans on the Japanese, about the tensions and the friendships between the two groups, and how every American in Japan  was a representative of America and democracy in her book Popcorn on the Ginza.

Even the civilian file clerk, eating popcorn while walking down the Ginza, a street of high-end shops in Tokyo, is a reflection on America and our way of life, according to Crockett.

This is true today, as well. Every American is a reflection of our beliefs as a country.

In 1996, I traveled to China. There were few Western travelers to China at that time, especially in the smaller cities.

“Some of the people here have never seen Westerners,” our travel guide told us. “You may be the only Westerners they see EVER.”

Local residents would crowd around us, touching our hair and our clothes. Some pulled out cameras, snapping photos of us as we walked around the lake. We soon realized how imperative it was that we not act in any way that would reflect badly on our country.

Eight years later, I returned to China. This time, Westerners were not such a rarity.

Interracial couples, such as The Husband and myself, however, were something to be stared at and followed and sometimes questioned. In every conversation, and every interaction, we were well aware that we represented more than just ourselves. We represented Americans, and America, and other families that looked like us. We felt a responsibility to represent them all well.

Americans travel all over the world, and everywhere we go, people look at us as more than individuals. Like or not, we represent our country and its ideals. It is a heady responsibility, and one we should take seriously.

Do you think we are all ambassadors for America?

Every Saturday, the courts at the Reed-Sweatt Family Tennis Center in Minneapolis are filled with hundreds of children, including my daughter, BaoBao, practicing tennis drills as part of the Inner City Tennis Program (ICT).

Along with tennis drills, the children are taught seven character values throughout the program. Sometimes the value taught is Perseverance, which ICT defines as “I will try one more time. Forever.”

This is a great lesson for kids, and I hope that BaoBao takes it to heart, but in reality, I find myself needing that lesson more and more.

My life contains more failures than I care to recount.

Fear and self-doubt are constant companions.

Whenever I think about giving up, I now tell myself, “Try one more time. Forever.”

How do you define perseverance?

When have you persevered?

[This post first appeared on The Socratic Project.]

I am a Christian. My religious beliefs influence my political views.

My friend is an atheist. Her religious beliefs influence her political views.

Religious beliefs and political views inescapably intertwine. This would not be a problem, except that our political leaders are elected from only two major parties: Republicans and Democrats.

The exception to this rule is when a third-party candidate manages to get elected to a state office. (i.e. The Reform Party’s Jesse Ventura becoming Governor of Minnesota. Minnesotans have not elected a third-party candidate to a major office since Ventura. We learned that lesson the hard way.)

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.

Courts interpret this to mean two things:

No national religion may be established in the U.S.
The U.S. government may not give preferential treatment to one religion over another.

When all of our politicians come from only two political parties, and those parties espouse a particular belief in God, does that violate the Establishment Clause?

Political platforms are not laws enacted by Congress. However, as was repeatedly stated by both sides in the recent campaign, a politician’s religious views are integral to their political views.

So if all major politicians embrace God in their political platforms, does that not create a preference for one religion over another?

Would you feel the same way if politicians replaced “God” with “Allah” (Islam), “Deva” (Buddhism), or “Waheguru” (Sikhism)?