journal features

my parents are awesome

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2010.05.21

There's a blog out there called "My Parents Were Awesome".

The idea is that you post pics of your parents when they were young, hip, and groovy. It's amusing.

But it kind-of misses the point. There really should be a time in your life when you realize everything that your parents went through in raising your ungrateful self. This moment can come, for instance, when you're out of school for a few years and working. Or when one of your parents falls ill or is struck down in accident. Or perhaps when you've got a two-year-old child in the home.

No matter, the point is that I appreciate my parents for who they are and what they've done on my account. So here's my pic of them on the day they got their wedding certified down at the city hall in then-beautiful St. Catharines, Ontario.

my parents with their wedding certificate

Three good things that happened in this pic:

1. my dad's checking out the flying conditions instead of looking at the camera

2. my mum's not evidently pregnancy despite my being only five months away (not that she ever cared what you think, buster)

3. they actually were young hip and groovy

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)