Talk about overreacting!

I’m sure that by now most people have heard about the plight of the Demaree family who took a memory stick containing 144 family photos to Wal-Mart to get them developed. Included in the huge batch of photos were 11 shots taken of the Demaree children during bathtime.

I have a hunch what these photos were like, because similar photos are strewn throughout my kids’ photo albums. And according to the parents that I have been talking to, they have the same kind of photos in their family albums. In fact, many of us recall the proverbial professional photos of yesteryear when tots were photographed naked on bearskin rugs.

In the context of 144 photos—most of which were of the family’s vacation—it’s difficult for me to believe that there were not some important clues regarding whether or not AJ and Lisa Demaree were exploiting their children for pornographic purposes.

I can’t emphasize enough how thankful I am that the powers that be are taking the matter of juvenile pornography seriously. It truly is a huge problem that needs to be addressed aggressively and continuously. However, this should never give license to people with authority checking their common sense at the door when evaluating which situations to pursue.

The danger of overreacting to situations such as the one in which the Demarees took photos of their children in and around bathtime goes beyond the trauma that the entire family sustained. It threatens all of the progress we have made toward helping kids develop positive body images and attitudes about their sexuality.

This whole episode harkened back to my strict childhood in which I was instructed to never look at my private parts, let alone touch them. Great pains were taken to show me how to use a washcloth and never my hand when “washing down below.” And greater pains were taken to insure that I was supervised at all times so that something so “unacceptable” would never happen.

Anyone who has endured this kind of negative indoctrination knows how damaging such a Victorian introduction to human sexuality can have on a young child. In the end, it was extremely counterproductive—especially given the expectation that young women should be able to simply switch on their sexuality when it became necessary to please their husbands.

The human body is a beautiful thing and anything that might cause a child to think differently is simply unacceptable. Hopefully the threat of having one’s children removed from one’s home for a month, losing one’s job for a year, and being placed on the sexual offenders registry for taking bathtime photos was a horrendous fluke and not a trend.

Yesterday I did a book signing at the Ronald McDonald House in New York. It’s a wonderful place, and I had a wonderful time.

As a cancer survivor, I was reminded of an experience I had many years ago, immediately following the final surgery that has allowed me to be cancer-free for over 35 years. Part of my recovery program included doing volunteer work at the City of Hope in Southern California.

Naturally, due to my interest in children, I was assigned to the pediatric ward. That’s where I met an amazing doctor who taught me everything I needed to know about death and dying.

It was my observation of a therapy session that the doctor had with a terminally ill child that changed my life forever. I recall the child asking the doctor, “Am I going to die?”

The doctor responded by saying, “Yes. And so am I. So is your mother. So is your father. And so is Joy. Everyone is going to die. Death is a part of life.”

Next the child asked, “When am I going to die?”

Looking straight into the child’s eyes, the doctor said, “I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. That is one of the great mysteries of life. No one knows exactly when someone is going to die. And if anyone tells you they know when you are going to die, they are lying.”

That conversation motivated me to write my book titled, Good Answers to Tough Questions About Death, and to this day the book continues to evoke positive responses from both parents and children.

Taking my cue from the doctor at the City of Hope, I tried to be as honest and accurate as I could with the information that I provided in the book. In the end, that’s the way kids like it. Most of them know when someone is telling them things just to make them feel better, and in the long run, they don’t like it. That’s because kids are just like everyone else. They like to know the truth so they can decide for themselves what they can and cannot do about it.

While it’s true that death and terminal illness are tough subjects, they are not too tough for a child to handle, especially when the child is surrounded by honesty and most of all, love.

A few days ago I went in for my annual mammogram. For anyone who has not had this procedure, it would be difficult to understand how painful it can be. However this wasn’t true for the seven women who shared the waiting room with me.

Everyone was engrossed in the soap opera playing out on the TV monitor when a piercing scream emanated from behind the closed door. All of a sudden, the TV drama wasn’t half as engrossing as whatever was going on in the other room. Some of the women shot each other knowing looks, while others shifted nervously in their chairs.

Five turns later my name was called and I solemnly shuffled toward the nurse who was beckoning me into the inner sanctum. When I arrived, I was instructed to disrobe and put on a hospital gown that opened in the front.

The technician led me to the huge machine that was about to squeeze the living daylights out of one of the tenderest parts of my anatomy. And that’s when I saw the sign. It would have been quite impossible to miss it as it was positioned at eye level directly in front of the machine.

The sign read:

Good Morning.
This is God.
I will be handling all of your problems today.
I won’t need your help.
So relax and have a good day!

I can assure you that nothing would have pleased me more than God appearing in the room at that very moment and standing in for me during my mammogram. But no such luck.

Besides, what good would it have done for God to stand in for me? God didn’t need a mammogram. I did.

I started to think more about the sign.

Why in the world would God get involved in everyone’s problems? Isn’t running the universe enough to keep him or her busy?

I made it through the procedure and started home. I was still thinking about the sign.

When I got home I decided to write my own sign.

Good Morning.
This is God.
Most likely you are going to face some problems today.
But don’t worry. You have within yourself everything you need to resolve any problem that you encounter.
And the good news is this—with every problem you resolve you are going to grow and become a better person.
So relax and have a good day!

In two weeks I’m supposed to return to get the results of my mammogram. When I go back, I’m thinking about bringing my sign with me.

Then again—I just might not. After all, what woman is going to be able to focus on a sign while getting a mammogram?

Smile.

I’ve always liked Walter Cronkite. That’s why I was one of the first people in line to purchase his autobiography shortly after he passed away.

It’s a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in reading about politics from an evenhanded perspective. There was just one quote that made me wince—even though I am certain that it was not intended to be controversial. In fact, it was almost a throwaway line.

The sentence was intended to set up some astute observations about President Nixon. It read, “Nixon’s social awkwardness, possibly induced by his impoverished childhood, was in sharp contrast to the sophistication of the Kennedys.”

I’ve only lived on the east coast for a few years. However, that has been long enough to encounter the “east coast snobbiness” to which many of my west coast colleagues refer. All too often people of means in this part of the world associate a lack of material means with a lack of breeding and social skills. At the same time they confuse material wealth with sophistication.

I’ve always linked sophistication with knowledge and enlightenment. Consequently the material assets that a person does or does not possess are inconsequential as to whether or not he or she is sophisticated. The dictionary seems to agree with me via its use of words like “knowledgeable” and “advanced” to help define the word.

I’ve met a lot of sophisticated people while living in New York—people who have worked to become educated and enlightened, people who apply everything they’ve learned in wise, meaningful ways. Many of these people have come from “impoverished childhoods.”

The seventy-eight-year-old woman who lives on the third floor of my building is such a person. She was born and raised in our area of Brooklyn years before it became gentrified. And she taught at one of our local schools for many years.

Every time I encounter this woman in the laundry room or at the mailboxes, she always has something profound to say. In fact, after each encounter I usually remark to my children, “I want to be exactly like Lorraine when I grow up.”

In Lorraine’s wildest dreams she would never have hobnobbed with the likes of the sophisticated Kennedys, and as far as I am concerned, that was their loss, not hers.

I’ll be so glad when the human race becomes enlightened enough to distinguish the difference between sophisticated social behavior and true sophistication. I’ll also be glad when all people realize that every childhood, whether impoverished or not, has the potential to produce positive or negative results—depending on how the person who has lived it utilizes it.

Now that would be sophisticated indeed.

My sister is a librarian and has impeccable taste when it comes to evaluating anything with a storyline. So while I was laid up with recent foot surgery, I decided to follow through with her recommendation that I watch the TV show Mad Men. For an entire weekend, I hunkered down on my living room couch and powered through back-to-back episodes from rented DVDs.

Having been a young adult during the era that provides the backdrop for the Mad Men series, I was impressed with the show’s authenticity. The accuracy of the costumes and sets alone are enough to transport one back to the 1960s—a time of heavy smoking, hard drinking, and the endless pursuit of “the good life.”

In fact, the smoking, drinking and partying that is non-stop throughout every episode leads one to wonder how anyone survived that decade. The truth is, people not only survived, they became better because of it.

For example, when one compares the current smoking laws to the fact that people in the 1960s were allowed to smoke nonstop in all public places including airplanes, one can begin to appreciate the never-ending struggle in which humans engage for the purpose of changing and becoming a more enlightened species.

Nothing illustrated this phenomenon better than a Mad Men episode during which the principal family went on a picnic. When the outing was over, the family left its trash strewn all over the place. Thankfully, this would be completely frowned upon today, and the environment is better off because of it.

So, thanks to watching Mad Men, the next time I am tempted to lament, “Things just aren’t what they used to be,” I’m going to remember that things not remaining the same is more often than not something to celebrate rather than something to regret.