Be like the Dutch — drop your kids off alone in the forest and drink tiny beers

Though we’ve raised two sons, the last thing Betty wants me to do is to offer unsolicited advice to parents on how to bring up their own children.

Giving parental advice is often arrogant and stupid. Besides, she’s right, it also upsets people.

Once I would tell new parents they just had to get their kids into soccer at a very young age and tie a ball to the left foot at the age of 2, because all the top teams want players with a good left foot.

“And what happened?” she said. “People would run away and roll their eyes.”

They still do. So, I stopped, because in America, telling parents how to raise their kids is the job of the federal government.

But thanks to the idiosyncratic people of the Netherlands, also known as “The Dutch,” there is plenty of parenting advice being tossed around lately and I can’t be blamed.

It’s based on one of those weird Dutch customs. They reportedly have many cultural idiosyncrasies, including drinking tiny beers, combining curse words with diseases and putting peanut sauce on fries.

But this one involves abandoning your preteen children in a scary forest alone at night. Then you wait for them to make it home alive.

They call it “dropping.”

The New York Times wrote this story, and it started a “thing” among arrogant parental advice columnists on the internet.

“You just drop your kids in the world,” novelist Pia de Jong, who raised her children in New Jersey, told the Times. “Of course, you make sure they don’t die, but other than that, they have to find their own way.”

Apparently, they do make their way home after being left alone out there in the creepy, dark forest with only a map and a flashlight. Sometimes a parent will hide in the bushes and make sounds like a wild Dutch boar to scare the kids for fun, but that’s about it.

Naturally, this has triggered American helicopter moms and tiger moms — I can’t tell the difference between them, though I’m sure there is one, since tigers are animals and helicopters are not. The Dutch are naturally bragging that the Dutch way is the best way to raise kids, and they’re probably correct.

My advice to American parents is to give your credit cards to the kids and see if they can survive at the mall.

Just don’t do what my wife and I did — abandon the children in the suburbs in the snow with only rude wooden spears with which the boys were expected to each kill a wolf and wear its pelt, Spartan style, as in the movie “300.”

But don’t try appropriating my culture, yo.

Naturally, some Dutch people were upset with the news stories, since who likes their weirdness on display? Others, though, were quite proud.

Ellen, at @EllenNGNG tweeted the kid dropping story was absolutely correct.

“True,” said Ellen. “It’s part of our beautiful Dutch culture. That’s why I gave birth 8 times in the forest. 3 of them eventually made it home, the strong and independent ones.”

Daan Koopen, @D_Koopen, said, “You miss the part where our children have to fight an angry cow at the age of four. Those that fail are sacrificed to the ocean so we may survive another year without being flooded.”

What is dead may never die but rises again harder and stronger.

My own experience with the Dutch — I got drunk with a few after watching speedskating at the Sochi Olympics — was that they were bluff folk of excellent manners and good humor.

We talked endlessly through the night about mayonnaise on fries and the great left-footed player Arjen Robben of the Dutch national team.

But I never saw them drink “tiny beers,” although that is said to be the Dutch practice, at least according to a story “8 Customs Only the Dutch Will Understand” found on some site called The Culture Trip.

The writer looked as if he were an American habitué of the hash bars of Amsterdam, but I can’t be sure.

Of the other (allegedly) weird Dutch customs, the use of diseases as curse words was truly weird:

“Whereas English speakers usually rely on bodily waste and sexual organs to insult one another, the Dutch have instead developed a whole lexicon of swear words that refer to life threatening illness such as typhus, cholera and cancer. Among the many disturbing insults in the Netherlands, common curses include pestpokke-tering (plague boils-tuberculosis), krijg de klere (catch cholera) and the particularly nasty tyfushond (typhus dog).”

One of their great accomplishments is the world-renowned soccer team FC Barcelona. Cultural philistines think Barca plays in the Spanish style, but in reality, their “Spanish style” was invented by the great Dutchman Johan Cruyff, the father of “totaalvoetbal.”

Instead of Barcelona, they should call themselves Cruyff-a-lona.

Which forest he may have dropped his kids in and whether he opted for mayo or peanut sauce on his fries remains a mystery to this day.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

I used to read him but then it was like deja vu. didn't I just read this yesterday? he's got Democrats living under his bed.

It's more fun to be a victim

There will never be an effective vaccine. I'll never get one anyway.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

Can anyone who has read this column attempt to explain what message he is trying to convey?

Can anyone who has read this column attempt to explain what message he is trying to convey?

Also, he tries too hard to be Mike Royko.

I am not a legal expert, how many times do I have to say it?

He should try real hard to be present day Mike Royko.

Democrats are the cause of all life's problems and Donald Trump is here to save us.

Surprise! Another Kass article about how turrible Democrats are.

The victims are the American People and the Republic itself.

Column: Lamenting the last of Tom Ringhausen’s Calhoun County peaches, so sweet they’ll crack your jawbones off.

I suppose most of you — and my editors — would rather I focus on the big issues of the day than offer my absurd lamentations on the last of the Calhoun County peaches.

But I say screw it. I really couldn’t give two figs. I love those white Tom Ringhausen peaches, dammit.

And we just finished the last of them, brought to me by two kindly retired Chicago police officers. They, too, are peach freaks. The rains and floods had washed away Tom’s peach stand on the Illinois River. They found him in a tavern.

I paid them $35 for a half bushel and bought breakfast at Harvey’s on 31st for their trouble. They’re old-school coppers and didn’t want to be identified.

“Put me in the paper?” he asked. “Hell no.”

“In the paper? No way,” she said.

Still, we had a good breakfast, and it was nice to be in the 11th Ward not wondering if I’d run into a short-shanked Daley.

Yet the peaches are gone now. There should still be some more growing on the trees down there, and I might drive down and get some. But now, today, without them, I’m a bit malevolent in my peachlessness.

If you’re upset that I’m writing about my Calhoun County peach desires, do what others do, send an email, or tweet at me, calling me a (deleted) bedbug or whatever the insect of the week is now.

Or you may join the mob and say you wish I were (deleted) dead, my (deleted) sightless eyes staring into the (deleted) void from the (deleted) pike upon which my ripening (deleted) head is pinned.

Or hiss at me for ignoring that idiotic franchise chicken sandwich debate.

Yes, it’s idiotic. If it’s from a franchise, then it’s crap and you know it. Crap is the base element in any franchise business model: crap consistency. The crap chicken, or burger, you get in Seattle is the same you’ll eat at 96th and Commercial or on Long Island. Franchise chicken sandwiches? Please. It’s all crap, my friends. Eat and enjoy.

You may also hate on me for being a (deleted) peach-eating Chicago Fire fan. We actually hate ourselves now.

I won’t mock you in return. Insulting people on Twitter over their fruit of choice while wearing a fuzzy pink hat and a false identity, perhaps even a ridiculous cartoon head, is as common as nihilism.

And what is a peach, anyway, but a piece of fruit?

But this was a white peach from Tom Ringhausen’s orchards in Calhoun County, Illinois, grown on the high limestone bluffs between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers.

We had a big basket on the kitchen counter, but the last of the peaches are gone. To eat them by hand without ruining yet another polo shirt, you’ve got to do the lean, the way you eat a good Italian beef sandwich or a succulent drenched goat meat taco from Birrieria Zaragoza on 48th and Pulaski. Those peaches are so sweet that your jawbones will crack from the sensation and joy.

My friend Jeff Carlin, the WGN radio producer and a baker of some renown, loves them, but says they’re far too juicy to make a pie. That’s what I like. A peach as large as a softball, ripe and firm and juicy. And for those about to accuse me of food porn, take your mind out of the gutter. Ringhausen peaches taste as pure as the voices of angels. I can no longer hear them sing.

There are other important topics, yes, but who cares now that the Ringhausen peaches are done?

The New York Times and angry left-leaning journalists everywhere (is there any other kind?) are upset that stupid stuff they post on Twitter may be quoted by President Donald Trump and his friends, and used against them to demonstrate their political bias.

Isn’t that exactly what we do to politicians, plumbing their social media — even old high school yearbooks — hoping to unearth weapons against them in our woke-a-thon culture wars? And isn’t that exactly what advocate groups on the left do to conservatives?

But that jabbering isn’t a Ringhausen peach, is it? No. That’s just a bunch of self-important people who once thought they’d grow up to become heroic iconoclasts but instead found they’d become Kemalists of the Washington Way, protecting the establishment. Now they seek to become a protected class.

Reporters quote politicians. But politicians can’t quote us? What’s next, Newspeak? Ah, but Newspeak is already here, isn’t it?

Locally, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx wants to erase all pot convictions in a desperate grab for positive spin, given her bungling of the Jussie Smollett hate hoax case. I’d much rather that she vows she won’t invoke the Fifth Amendment if questioned under oath by the special prosecutor.

But that is merely the dry, bitter fruits of what passes for Cook County justice. It is not a Ringhausen peach. Now that the white Ringhausen peaches are gone, I threatened them at work that I’d write a rhyming poem about them and touch my inner W.S. Merwin.

Instead, let me just say that Tom Ringhausen called with the bad news that the spring floods had washed out the bridges and roads down there, and growers had trouble bringing their produce to market.

He said some have lost 40 percent of their crop. That’s devastating. And depressing. But he’s a tough old jarhead Marine, determined to fight, and he will.

He’s got to. Without those Tom Ringhausen peaches, what’s a summer for?

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/john-kass/ct-chicago-teachers-kass-20191016-7sutzji7z5hxncplgawj33qn4i-story.html

If you want to save yourself a click, the column can be boiled down to "teachers bad because property taxes".

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.