Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Babbling Botkin: "What If My Husband Dies?" - Part One

 Hello, folks!  I hope things are going well for you and yours!

We're getting ready to send the Spawn back to school in early September. 

 I'm nervous because his school is too rural and too poor for COVID preparedness to mean much.  We're rural enough that high speed internet is not available out here.  My husband and I willingly pony up $54.00 a month for the highest speed we can get which measures between 9-13 Mbps.   What this means practically is that we can stream one video from Netflix or YouTube as long as we don't try to do anything more complicated that loading a single webpage or refreshing a Kindle at the same time.   We can kind of do a live stream for Zoom or Facebook Live - but it's glitchy.  I can't complain much; we are ideally located in line with a tower and can afford the cost.  A lot of families are less well situated or can't afford the cost. 

I'm excited because Spawn did really well at school last winter and he's much stronger and sturdier now.  His class is fairly small - there were 7 little boys in his room last year - and the school is doing what it can to keep the kids from sneezing in each other's face for the fun of it.   

I also expect that Michigan will be unceremoniously dumped backwards into Stage 3 where schools have to be online only within 4-6 weeks.  After that, Michigan will either keep moving between Stage 3 and 4 all winter - or worse - we'll stay in Stage 4 with districts having close randomly when their student body drops below 75% attendance.  It'd be a bit like snow days meeting whack-a-mole.

I needed something to amuse me - so I was incredibly happy to see that Geoffrey Botkin has made another stab at becoming a media mogul. The fifth times a charm I'm sure!  He's created a dotcom website of his own name and linked that to the a YouTube channel he titled "Stand Up and Lead".  It looks like he did a dump of a bunch of videos and podcasts in mid-July and has been posting a few new videos a week.   

He seems to be attempting to position himself as a source of information in a world that is falling apart due to a pandemic.  That surprises me none at all.  See, Geoffrey Botkin's free podcasts from back before Vision Forum imploded always began with a section about how Western Civilization was teetering on the brink of complete collapse into anarchy.  Honestly, I find those kind of doom and gloom predictions funny because Americans often do their best when faced with stressors.   In true American fashion, most people have responded responsibly to the pandemic - and the increased sense of duty helped Black Lives Matter focus on police brutality finally receive the public support it deserves. 

Most of his videos and podcasts seems to fit into revisionist history, lightweight prepping, and advice column fare.   While revisionist history is fun when I'm looking for a rabbit hole of White Supremacy to debunk, today I'm picking "Advice column fare with a CP/QF twist" for $100.   

The first video column that caught my eye was "What If My Husband Dies?".   Since half of my objections to the meager educational offerings given to SAHDs can be summarized by "What if you need to support yourself?" I was extremely curious to hear Geoffrey Botkin's take on this one.  

Let's dive in!

The video opens overlooking a fog-filled forest as gray clouds roll overhead.   Soft music plays beneath. The title "What If My Husband Dies?" appears in the lower right hand corner as the mystical chimes swell.    Suddenly, we are in Geoffrey Botkin's study.  There is a large slider door behind his right shoulder, bookcases in the corner directly behind him and a leather couch in front of a window behind his left shoulder.   He's working at a L-shaped desk as we see him working at the computer.   He completely believably pivots from the spreadsheet/corn futures report/widgets screen of his computer to face the camera.
[00:00:05] Ok.  This uh tough question that we get today is from a a wife and mother whose says she's concerned about her husband dying.  He has apparently chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.  It's a chronic inflammatory lung disease and there is no known cure at this at this point right now.  And I could say `you know to this mother and wife you know something really cheery about  you know "Don't worry.  Uh.  The death rates are so way far below early projections.  The infection rates are lower than the projections.  You know.  It's that he's probably not going you know gonna get this coronavirus thing and have to go to the hospital where there are other people with the coronavirus. 
We are less than a full minute into the video and I've already created a macro so that typing "yk" substitutes "you know" in my transcription program.     We all have filler  phrases we use when our fluency fails - mine are "like", "uh" and "you know" - but I'm more interested in when Geoffrey Botkin uses more stutter phrases and when he uses less. 

 Why?

Fluency drops for a lot of reasons - but emotional reactions and cognitive dissonance both tend to increase filler words.    

Geoffrey Botkin is struggling hard with describing a man who has an untreatable chronic lung disorder in the middle of a respiratory virus pandemic.    I can't blame him for that; it's a scary situation at any age.   Botkin comes up with an allegedly upbeat comfort line for the mother - but nothing in his body language or voice makes me believe in his dismissal of coronavirus.   And honestly - I suspect Geoffrey Botkin knows his words of comfort ring hollow because he's inserting multiple filler phrases per sentence.  

My son had damaged lungs from birth until he was around 18 months old.   For the first year of his life, an ordinary cold would have likely sent him to the hospital.  If he caught RSV, he would certainly have back in the hospital with a life-threatening attack on his lungs.   From that experience, I'm well aware that the overall death rate and overall infection rates mean nothing when the one person you care desperately about might die if he catches a minor virus that most people never know they have.  

The fear never really left me during the first year.  I couldn't let it; being aware at all times of proper handwashing and isolation techniques was all we had to keep Spawn safe.   We did keep Spawn safe - but it's much easier to do so with an only child who has two parents and grandparents who are onboard than an adult man who has to support a family and has children at home.

Bluntly, 160,000 people have died in the US from COVID-19.  The lower infection rates and lower death rates are of little comfort to their families and friends.

[00:00:51] Yes, it is a - quote - comorbidity that he has but this is not really the heart of your question. It's not really about worry, but it's about a situation that could happen not just to you but any mother.  The death of your husband.  I mean it could happen to anyone of you wives and moms out there so let's talk about life for you and your sons - a life with no dad in the house.  That's what you are really asking about.  And what your future could be. Yes, it could be.  And statistically more than a lot of other moms and wives out there.
Statistically speaking, marriages end in two ways: death or divorce.  This mom is more likely to face an early widowhood - but CP/QF moms still face divorce far more regularly than the death of their spouse.  Of the five CP/QF mommy bloggers I followed starting around 2010, two have divorced in the last decade.

Let's be honest here - there's another set of dependent children we need to be thinking of.  Stay-at-home daughters (SAHD) who are deeply sheltered from the scary world of working outside of family businesses are in perilous positions once the primary breadwinner of the family dies.  Alison Greene of Ask A Manager recommends people work while they attend school  because by 20 job candidates who do not work are being compared to other candidates who have worked four years in various teenage jobs.    Sarah Mally would be compared to candidates who have worked for two decades or more if she needed to enter the workforce now.   So would Sarah Maxwell, Anna Sofia Botkin and Elizabeth Botkin.

Geoffrey Botkin is directing this at an unnamed woman - but Victoria Botkin should be taking notes for how to support herself and her two unmarried daughters if Geoffrey dies before them.

[00:01:25] Now. let's look at the situation in America for a second.  
Where else would we look, O Guru of Global Perspectives?   

Geoffrey Botkin was born in the US.  He was raised in the US.  He went to college in the US and married an American woman.  He worked for a US lobbying group trying to bring Biblical norms back into power.  To the best of my knowledge, all of his kids were born in the US.  There was that time that the Botkin Family moved over to New Zealand for two years to try their hand at creating a media empire Christchurch. Spoiler alert: It failed. (That was Attempt Two of Five based on my informal, off-the-cuff reckoning.)  So....he could talk about the situation in New Zealand a few years after the turn of the millenium compared to now - but would that attract an audience?   Hard to tell - but since he and his  family's returned to the US, I'm gonna guess not.  

The letter writer - if she exists - will probably never read this - but my advice based on the first 90 seconds of this talk is to loop your husband's pulmonologist in on any concerns your family has.   If your husband doesn't have a pulmonologist, please get a referral from his general practitioner.   COVID-19 has made life a lot more frightening for everyone - and triply so for people with chronic lung conditions.  Having said that, a discussion of what your husband can do to improve his lung health right now and what to think about if he does come down with COVID-19 will likely be less frightening than feeling helpless and hopeless.  Good luck! 

11 comments:

  1. Cannot believe this weasel has popped up again. Ugh. I'm sure it's no coincidence that we are currently living in a period of instability, fear, isolation, and economic recession -- things that leave many people more vulnerable to manipulation and extreme ideas. So glad that you are taking him on, so that people who are truly questioning will hopefully happen upon your well-thought-out responses.

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    1. Thank you!

      I read it as a combination of excitement that the US might be scary enough to listen to him - and the restless anxiety that comes when you realize that your 200-year plan is nowhere near where it's supposed to be in 2020. The crux of the 200-year plan revolved around outbreeding the rest of us. Geoffrey and Victoria have 7 kids - that's a good start! The problem is that those 7 kids have had a total of 10 grandkids. Will there be more grandkids? Probably - but out of the remaining 4 unmarried kids, Anna and Elizabeth are around 35 and 33 and single. That's quite old for a first-time marriage in CP/QF society - and quite old for a family larger than 3-4 kids each. The youngest two boys are unmarried - but if they marry women younger than themselves, they could have very large families. None of that, though, will do the same as if all 7 kids had families of 8+ kids.

      Take heart! Most Botkin websites start strong - like the sorta-defunct Western Conservatory of Arts and Science site along with the defunct Visionary Daughters and mostly defunct BotkinSisters - and become defunct. The only websites that the family seem solid at are career based ones like most of the sons have - but the real winner is Victoria Botkin's blog on homeschooling. She publishes non-inflammatory posts on books and homeschooling and which homeschooling conventions she'll be selling books at at a steady pace. Nothing about this site reads like a slow, steady, sensible way of sharing material with viewers.

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    2. It really does make me wonder what they do with all their time. All these adults with skills and time to contribute. None of them really allowed to work outside the home, so we know that's not consuming their energy. Cognitive dissonance consumes a ton of energy, so it really is possible that they simply don't have it in them to do much more than what we can find from them online.

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    3. So....one of the daughters is kinda working outside of the home. Anna Sofia's facebook has her listed as self-employed AND working at the local chamber of commerce for her county. As someone who lives in a rural county that struck me as *rather* strange since she wouldn't be bringing many connections to the chamber. Then -remembering the Botkin haphazard use of everything - I wondered if she confused being a member of the chamber of commerce with working for the chamber of commerce. I'm pretty sure she's a member of a MLM that sells protective devices for women like purses to conceal carry and a wide range of stun guns - and a member of the chamber of commerce.

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    4. I just can't stop thinking there's going to come a time for both these women where they will hit the "what if all this was a lie?" brick wall. Maybe they've already hit it and don't know what to do. I would think it would be really easy to hit hard depression when you realize all your father's grand visions are just snake oil.

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    5. So far, the only person I can see who might burst the bubble for them is their younger brother Ben. He works as a freelance composer and has three boys despite having been married for ten years - which makes him and his wife ~30 years old. His wife publically posts very liberal things on her FB - like pro-BLM and pro-LGBTQ things - as positive things.

      Outside of Ben and Audri, their world is constructed to keep other viewpoints at a safe distance away.

      Honestly, I don't have any advice to give them other than to get some education first with an aim at a high demand career. Colleges do tend to be liberal - but that's like 1% or less of all of the material covered in a class - while building their knowledge base and career options. A lot of high demand careers like nursing or IT or business are more focused on career training than teaching people how to argue - so the liberal shock would be a lot less than if they got an English degree or a History degree.

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    6. I thought of Ben too! Not only is his wife sweet and seems a normal middle, but he now seems like the most laid-back sibling. All three of their married brothers seem happy in their marriages and have moved on from the constant family diatribe, with some still pretty conservative viewpoints (which now seem more mainstream, with the exception of David), but Ben married first, moved away from the family pretty young and was able to make a living doing what he loves. All that, combined with his genuine love for a very reasonable woman, sets him apart and he seems genuinely..lighter, I guess, than the other members. Granted, none of the kids seem really unhappy at least (even the daughters looked happy enough at public gatherings..and wearing pants a few times!) but you can tell Ben is out of the "America's doomed and we have to restart it" loop altogether.

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  2. 152 views. Wow, his videos are going VIRAL. (I hate that I added to his hit count, but the curiosity got to me.)

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    1. *giggles* Don't worry; a few of those are mine anyway because I need the video to transcribe it.

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  3. I just have to chime in about the attitude I sense from GB about his "global perspective".

    I know people who have either traveled a lot as a child or worked in a missions organization with a global focus and it's not at all unusual for them to come across as thinking they are the authority on global trends.

    Unfortunately what I've seen from them is it's all subjective, experience-based or third-hand knowledge. Or they were outside the US once and then suddenly they know all about everything in the whole world.

    That's how GB strikes me. Christchurch isn't exactly the epicenter of the world, geographically. In fact it's way more isolated than anywhere in the US (except Hawaii). So he has his experience in the US, and then his experience in NZ, and THAT'S ALL. None of this "global" perspective baloney.

    Once he has a PhD in international relations or something I'll give him a chance to be heard.

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