Another birthday party, another war

My daughter Lekha turned 5 recently and we celebrated her birthday with a party for her preschool friends in our backyard. Unfortunately, several couldn’t make it. They had other appointments and commitments. I thought four-year-olds had tight schedules, but 5-year-olds are busier than Prince Harry in a bar.

More dismaying to me was that a few of their parents didn’t even bother to reply to our invitation. I’d like to assemble them in a room and give them a lecture on etiquette. “Ladies and gentlemen – and I use those terms loosely – do you remember seeing the abbreviation R.S.V.P. on the invitation card? Well, despite what you might have thought, it doesn’t stand for ‘Refreshments served very promptly.’ Nor does it stand for ‘Receive some vanilla pudding.’ R.S.V.P. stands for ‘Respondez s'il vous plait,’ which is a French phrase that, literally translated, means ‘Reply please, you thoughtless idiot!’”

Actually, it means just “Reply please,” which is much too polite for most people, except perhaps the French. Next time I’m going to write “R.S.V.P. (Reply soon, vagrant punk!)” That should get their attention.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but when people don’t reply to an invitation, it means more work for the hosts. My wife and I had to be prepared, just in case a couple of extra kids showed up, demanding to be fed vanilla pudding.

Not only did we need to have enough food, we also had to have enough favor bags. I don’t know who started this tradition of giving parting gifts to the guests, but I’d like to track her down and give her a piece of my mind (preferably the piece where I’ve stored all the information I don’t need anymore, such as “calculus,” “algebra” and “how to get the most out of your 8-track player”).

Organizing a birthday party is stressful enough without having to worry about favor bags. Besides, I know what happens when a kid returns home with a bag of goodies and his brother or sister wants some. As I keep telling my wife, “You cannot hand out favor bags and also say that you’re for world peace. It’s hypocritical.”

With three children, we’ve certainly seen our share of armed conflict over favor bags and other gifts. The kids don’t have guns and bombs, but they do have nails and teeth, which create much louder sounds. Ear-shattering screams. Bloodcurdling shrieks. Daddy-awakening squeals.

It’s usually the girls, Lekha and 3-year-old Divya, declaring war on each other, while our 14-month-old son, Rahul, can do little else but serve as an embedded reporter. Every now and then, he gets caught in the line of fire and ends up as “collateral damage.” It isn’t easy being a war correspondent.

If kids are willing to wage war over the candy and trinkets in a favor bag, you can imagine the scale of conflict that erupts when one of them has a birthday party and receives a dozen gifts while the other receives a dozen reminders that her birthday is “only eight months away.”

Lekha, basking in the glow of new toys and other gifts, completely forgot the meaning of ‘share,’ a word that had been such a big part of her vocabulary just four months earlier – on Divya’s birthday. Divya, having just re-learned the word, was only too willing to educate her sister on its meaning.

Divya: “Share, Lekha! You need to share.”

Lekha: “Share? There’s no word like ‘share.’ Stop making up words.”

Divya: “There IS a word like ‘share.’ It’s in the dishnary.”

Lekha: “What does it mean?”

Divya: “It means you have to give me all your toys.”

Lekha: “They’re MY toys. It’s MY birthday!”

Divya (grabbing toy): “No, it’s my birthday too!”

Lekha (pinching Divya): “No, it’s not! It’s my birthday only. We’re not twins. I’m 5 and you’re … you’re not!”

Divya: “Mommy, Daddy! Lekha doesn’t want to share her birthday with me!”

Rahul: “Yet another war has broken out between the two sides over disputed toys. Casualties are mounting on both sides. Calls for a ceasefire are coming from the kitchen and living room, but the fighting remains intense. It’s almost as if the two sides are trying to act like grownups. I’ll have a full report for you at 11.”

Everyone has a Voice on the Internet

The N-word is forbidden in many places and rightly so. But it doesn’t take long to come across it online. Just Google it and you’ll get four million hits, almost as many as Mike Tyson endured in his last fight.

Racism, it seems, is alive and well on the Internet, where leaving hateful messages on a website is easier than burning a cross and you don’t need a white sheet to hide your identity. This isn’t your grandfather’s KKK. This is your out-of-work cousin’s WWW (Wired White Whackos).

They aren’t all white, of course, the people who spew their hatred all over the Net. You can find black whackos, brown whackos, even green whackos with pointy ears who won’t rest until they achieve green supremacy.

The Internet is all about freedom of speech. Everyone has a voice and some people have three or four: their own and the ones in their head.

Most news and blog sites allow readers to leave comments. They can usually remain anonymous and say whatever’s on their mind. The “discussions” on some sites can get quite heated, with plenty of foul language and name-calling. It’s like the British Parliament, but slightly more civilized.

Some articles and blog posts attract hundreds of comments. I have no idea who has the time to read them all. Some folks really need to get a life. I mean, I usually lose interest around comment No. 243. (That’s usually the point where it’s clear that all the problems in the world – crime, global warming, male pattern baldness – can be blamed on one thing: illegal immigration.
If we could just close the border, life would be so much better for everyone, except perhaps the toupee salesmen.)

Thanks to some hard-working WWW members, CBSNews.com recently stopped allowing readers to leave comments on stories about presidential candidate Barack Obama. The stories had been generating far too many racist comments, even when Michael Richards was offline.

"It's very simple," Mike Sims, director of News and Operations for CBSNews.com, told one of their bloggers. "We have our Rules of Engagement. They prohibit personal attacks, especially racist attacks. Stories about Obama have been problematic, and we won't tolerate it."

CBSNews.com does indeed have ‘Rules of Engagement,’ which state: “No libel, no slander, no lying, no swearing at all, no words that teenagers use a lot, no words that are used by rappers, hip-hop artists or Don Imus, no words that might offend any group or person or member of the animal kingdom, no ethnic slurs and/or epithets, no religious bigotry, no bathroom humor, no bedroom humor either, no comparing anyone to Hitler, Stalin or Ann Coulter, no references whatsoever to Katie Couric’s weight or Andy Rooney’s age.”

The ‘Rules of Engagement’ may seem strict, but you can still get away with a lot. You can still compare someone to Osama bin Laden or make references to Mike Wallace’s age or say something nasty about a cucumber.

CBSNews.com is aware, obviously, that it’s not just racism that thrives on the Net. It’s all kinds of bigotry and incivility. People write almost anything they want. But isn’t that what freedom of speech is all about?

Perhaps so, but I wish they’d exercise this type of freedom of speech on websites I don’t visit, websites that are designed specially for them, such as InternetIdiots.com and ImbecilesUnited.com