Hi friends - I hope you tune into the show today. AM 1160/WYLL Chicago (2:00 central time), streaming live on wyll.com, or podcast after the show on the site here and on NationalReview.com.

This week is all about when it takes a parent - to care for a parent! Many of us are in the sandwich generation - we’re called on to take care of young kids and aging parents. We talk about managing those challenges, and the options available today to an older generation that, blessedly, rightly expects to live longer fuller and more independent lives than ever. I have two great guests on from Park Place of Elmhurst, a vibrant senior living facility in Elmhurst and part of a network of such facilities in the Chicago area. We talk about some of the unique challenges facing the elderly, including health and emotional changes. And why is that so many of us “infantalize” our aging parents? How can we still honor and respect our parents even when we have to start making some decisions for them, or caring for them in a way they once cared for us?

My guests talk about these issues, and the options for both independent living and senior care available under one roof that are springing up all over the country and that were not available to my grandparents. I hope you’ll tune in, and check out their site below (I plan on talking to my own dad about considering Park Place!)

Park Place of Elmhurst

Next week, my guest is Kate O’Beirne on women in the military. Should it really take a mother to go to war?

I hope you’ll tune in, and have a great week!

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Betsy’s Weekly Column
Released Thursday, March 1
© Scripps Howard News Service 2007

I never get to see new movies, unless they are kids’ fare. Four of them, one of me, do the math. I rent “my” movies, which at my pace means I’ll be seeing “The English Patient” around February of next year.

The same is true for books. That’s the long way of explaining how I happened only recently to pick up a delightful little tome that came out in 1999, “The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at The Turn of the First Millennium” (Little, Brown), by noted British historian Robert Lacey and journalist Danny Danziger.

It’s an incredibly interesting and fast-paced read.

But there were a couple of pages for which I really had to slow down _ when the authors reveal what is commonly known about the climate of the time. It turns out it was a heck of a lot warmer than our own.

They note that “archaeological evidence indicates that the years 950 to 1300 were marked by noticeably warmer temperatures than we experience today … Meteorologists describe this medieval warm epoch as the ‘Little Optimum,’ and they cite it as the explanation of such phenomena as the Viking explosion into Russia, France, Iceland and the northwestern Atlantic.” Oh, and during the Little Optimum (as in “optimal”), conditions were such that, contrary to both today’s conventional wisdom and the reality of later, colder centuries _ the relatively well-nourished people at the turn of the first millennium grew to statures similar to our own today.

Who knew?

Well, apparently a lot of people. The authors note: “The northerly retreat of icebergs and pack ice under the impact of warmer temperatures is a plausible explanation for why Lief Eriksson was able to sail around the top of the Atlantic as far as Newfoundland in or about the year 1000.” And it’s why Eriksson and his seafaring band described that far northern land, in which they were excited to find grapevines growing, as being so “warm and fecund,” as the writers put it, that Eriksson called it “Vinland.” Read: “Wineland.”

Interesting. It turns out that in the year 1000, it’s known that Earth was 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is now. Yes, up to 4 full degrees warmer. “Edinburgh enjoyed the climate of London, while London enjoyed the climate of the Loire valley in France,” note Lacey and Danziger. (All this is readily confirmed in other sources.)

Now, let’s fast forward, oh, say, 1,000 years or so to today’s educated, enlightened, baby-boomer generation, which has _ as the baby boomers of course discover everything for the first time _ revealed to us the phenomenon of “global warming.”

What’s more, it turns out that today’s baby-boomer leaders, such as former Vice President Al Gore, know exactly what Earth’s temperature should be. Think about it: Unlike anybody before them, the baby boomers know the correct temperature of the planet! Incredible. Interesting again, the correct temperature corresponds exactly with the temperatures the baby boomers were born into.

It really is all about them.

So much insight for one generation. Not only that, but the boomers have figured out that it’s mankind’s actions that are primarily responsible for any temperature variations we experience today. It seems the baby-boomer generation is the one that can profoundly impact, for better or worse, the physical well-being of the planet in a way no other generation has ever been able to do.

Of course, that means the baby boomers have the moral right to demand that all human beings everywhere fundamentally change their lives, economies and standard of living _ except for all the boomers who like their big cars and houses _ because Earth depends on them.

That sure is a lot of responsibility to shoulder.

The authors of “The Year 1000″ note that what C.S. Lewis calls the “’snobbery of chronology’ encourages us to presume that just because we happen to have lived after our ancestors … we must also know better” than they. “But,” the writers continue, “whether today we display more wisdom or common humanity is an open question.”

Actually, I’d say that when it comes to today’s baby boomers, as a generation _ that question is answered.

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Betsy’s Weekly Column
Released Thursday, February 22
© Scripps Howard News Service 2007

I sometimes find myself encouraging my likeminded conservative friends not to go believing this or that conspiracy theory. I think we folks can get a little overwrought, a little too fearful, over the government’s, or the schools’, or Hollywood’s, latest “attack” on the family. I sometimes want to say, “Friends, relax a little _ these organizations just aren’t as focused on us family-values types as we may wish they were.”

So when I heard initial reports that many states were considering mandating that a new vaccine that protects against a sexually transmitted disease be given to girls ages 11 and 12, I really didn’t believe it. The vaccine, Gardasil, protects against human papillomavirus (HPV), which is sexually transmitted and can lead to cervical cancer.

Then, a friend animatedly told me a pharmaceutical company was secretly pushing the mandates because it stood to make billions from the required vaccines. And I thought, “Oh, good grief, here we go again.”

But as my mother would say, just because you are a hypochondriac doesn’t mean you’re not going to become terminally ill. Sometimes, conspiracy theories really are true. So I realized, as I watched the furor over the attempt to mandate the vaccine erupt around the country.

In my home state of Illinois, it turns out the legislature really is considering requiring that Gardasil be administered to all rising sixth-grade girls (some of whom are only 10). Those not vaccinated would actually be barred from attending school, even though HPV is only communicable through sexual contact.

Yes, religious or medical exemptions would be allowed. But talk about being made to feel like a pariah.

Oh, guess what? Gardasil’s maker, Merck, which currently has a monopoly on the vaccine, really was “quietly funding the campaign, via a third party, to require 11- and 12-year-old girls to get the three-dose vaccine in order to attend school” in some 20 states, Chicago’s Fox News Channel reported.

At $360 to vaccinate each child, it’s no wonder. Merck was “channeling money for its state-mandate campaign through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators across the country,” as the Associated Press revealed and Fox reported.

I’d love to know more about that connection. But, anyway, in the wake of the controversy, Merck announced this week that it has suspended its lobbying efforts.

Other states, particularly California and Texas _ where the governor has signed an executive order mandating the vaccine _ have also seen firestorms ignite over the issue.

Well, I have a rising sixth-grade daughter, and whatever the state of Illinois ends up deciding, she won’t be getting the vaccine.

Here’s why:

That same daughter recently came home talking about the anti-smoking campaign that goes on in her school. No cigarettes. Ever. I’m all for it.

So then, if a vaccine were invented that could largely protect children from getting one or two of the many serious diseases and chronic conditions caused by smoking cigarettes, would we say, “So many kids are going to smoke whether we like it or not, let’s mandate this vaccine for every child”?

Not an exact analogy, but imagine if Big Tobacco were secretly behind the move to mandate so that it could “safely” sell lots more cigarettes.

Somehow, I don’t suppose the same people who advocate mandating the Gardasil vaccine would be for such a thing. I think most people would say that it’s fine the vaccine is out there, and if some parents want to pay the big bucks for their kids to get it, or if adults want to receive it, OK.

But smoking is still a terrible habit that causes all kinds of collateral damage that can’t be protected against. And for the government to mandate the expensive vaccine for children would be for Big Brother to reach past the parents and into the home, and seek to “protect” children _ in a way that doesn’t really protect them at all. That in fact, by essentially throwing in the moral towel on the smoking issue and taking parents out of the equation when it comes to their kids, it may leave kids more vulnerable than ever on smoking and other matters.

Apparently a lot of parents, including this one, get that, even if our elites don’t. And that’s why I have a feeling that the uproar over mandating Gardasil is not going to die down until the state legislatures back down on mandating it.

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