Tainted Peanut Butter An Extreme of Corporate Greed

Just before she finally gave into sleep a few nights ago, Julia and I had a lengthy recap of her day, which included a circle-time conversation at school about what to do if a stranger approaches you. I was quizzing her on various situations: if someone you don't know says he/she has candy in the car, what do you do? Puppies? Kittens? Trained by her powerhouse teacher Miss Brenda Julia dutifully answered no to each question, though I suspect she would waver if chocolate, a fistful of sugar, or a stick of butter--her three favorite food groups--was the lure.

As a mom, sometimes I feel that these early lessons--how to look before crossing a street and what red, yellow, and green mean--are among the most important I can impart to my kids. Certainly there are more nuanced values about lying, for instance, to pass on as well as other things down the road about drugs and sex (they'll have to teach me about rock 'n' roll). But these first conversations--all bright lines--are like an old-fashioned orange life-preserver: you can't get in the boat without them.

I know that even as a diligent parent I can't protect my kids from everything. When Sam had just turned 1, we were in a car accident caused when a woman too old to be driving ran a red light (she had perhaps forgotten that red means STOP!) and broad-sided me. The car was totaled, but Sam, our family friend/babysitter, Marguerite, and I emerged unbruised. Sam thought the crash was great fun. It was hard to accept that bad things could happen on my watch, but it did make me slightly more forgiving when bad things happened on other people's watch. (Bad is a relative term here, because I'm not talking about anything more major than rug burn or a cut over an eye, thank goodness.)

But even knowing that my ability to shield my kids from danger is limited, I am enraged by the Peanut Corp. of America's behavior. It has been a bad few weeks for Corporate America. 

John Thain's $1.2 million redecorating job came to light as did Wall Street bonuses and news that Citibank, the recipient of federal bailout dollars, is buying a new jet. All of that is inexcusable, but it's not as irresponsible as the peanut people, who knowingly distributed salmonella-laden products, killing at least eight people and sickening 550. That puts them down on a par with kidnappers and pedophiles. Worse, really, because I can't drill my kids on a threat we can't see. 

I had been thinking last week when Barack Obama rapped Wall Street's knuckles that if his plate weren't so full, he should also do the same to the peanut folks, and yesterday on the Today show, he did, suggesting that the Food and Drug Administration needs to do a better job: 

"That's what Sasha eats for lunch probably three times a week. And you know, I don't want to have to worry about whether she's going to get sick as a consequence to having her lunch." 

I have no illusions that the President wakes up and makes the sandwiches every morning, despite the Obamas' exertions to normalize the White House with Pottery Barn furniture and J. Crew clothing, according to the cover of this week's US Weekly. Nonetheless, I am glad to have a dad (a mom would be okay, too!) running the country. Perhaps our everyday concerns might get a little more attention. And though neither I nor anyone else I know personally will ever have the President's secret Blackberry address, it does make me feel that we and the Obamas are having pretty much the same conversations, if not also the same food, come dinner time. 

Republicans Against Stimulus Package Take Note

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed Barack Obama's $819 billion stimulus package without the support of a single Republican, who worried that once states got used to a temporary infusion of federal money into education and Medicaid, it would be difficult to pull back. 

I don't know enough about the bill on its merits to say one way or the other whether it's good, although on the surface it makes sense to me to put money into the economy where it's needed most, and certainly education and health care are two top candidates for that. And I certainly feel better about my tax dollars going toward Pell Grants and rebuilding decrepit schools than to John Thain (formerly of Merrill Lynch and Bank of America), say, who saw fit to use $1.2 million of our money to redesign his office (including a $1,405 waste basket). Or to Wall Street, more generally, which used it to pay out bonuses many multiples larger than my annual earnings.

On the point of an addiction to federal funds, I can say this: there's a really simple and effective tool against making the federal government's temporary expansion permanent. As a parent, I use the same tool all the time. It's the word "no." And I know all about addiction. Over the winter break when we were visiting my family in Atlanta, Sam experienced a similar expansion of TV-watching hours, and it's been a bear of a habit to break since, at home, we're stricter than the 18-hour maximum he enjoys in the face of an ailing relative at his grandparents' house (no TV on school nights and 2 hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). Sometimes we have to spell out "N-O!." Sometimes we have to resort to "No, no, no!" (The glitch in my argument, I realize, is that at home we enjoy a benevolent dictatorship, not a democracy, and our two parental votes carry more weight than the Republicans' votes in Congress these days.)

Still, it goes without saying that if the country had said no sooner and more often, we wouldn't be in quite this deep of a predicament.