Originally published in the Grand Rapids Business Journal, May 24, 2004.

I have three children and sometimes you just have to wonder about the wisdom of that. When it comes to kids, anything more than one is a big number and it's already a crazy, overloaded, overburdened world. That and Jane and I are crazy, overloaded, overburdened people -- do we really have the time and energy to be properly raising three new human beings?

Duh! -- of course not! That's why God gave us parental guilt -- so that we would constantly be aware of this.... Well, "properly raising" may be debatable, but there's certainly no chance of us raising them perfectly. But in the end, I think that may be okay. Because in the gaps of parental attention, siblings find opportunities to develop certain life-skills. For example, how to deal with sniping.

If nature abhors a vacuum, siblings abhor peace and tranquility. Otherwise kind and caring kids will start to pick, pick, pick at each other until the probing finds a vulnerability to exploit. This is sniping. It's not necessarily name calling. It's rarely vicious or nasty. It's almost idle, really, but it causes a reaction, and that's the whole point of it.

Our daughter Natalina is an expert. With a subtle efficiency Jane and I have come to grudgingly admire, she can toss a few well-chosen words over her shoulder that in moments turn her brother or sister into sputtering balls of fury. The other day I was outside and Atticus came stomping over to me. "Lena said I can't jump far enough to be in a basket jump win forever!" (I'm pretty sure that's what he said -- I hardly ever ask for clarifications.) I looked over at Lena who was drawing the world's longest hopscotch box down our driveway and paying no attention to us with great intensity. I told Atticus, "Well, go someplace not next to Lena." He said, "But I want to see what she's doing." I said, "Then don't listen to her." And then I remembered some friends had come over to play basketball, so I went to play ball and left it at that.

Let's be honest: "Don't listen to her" is among the crappiest of parental advice. I know that. But he didn't come back again. And I didn't hear any screaming, so he may just have found his own way to deal with the sniping. That's what I'm hoping for, anyway....

There's been an awful lot of sniping going on in Michigan these days. Most of it begins with Betsy DeVos, the leader of the Michigan Republican Party. Her job, seemingly, is to snipe away at the Democratic Governor, Jennifer Granholm. Granholm, or more typically her office, returns in kind and then there's quite a bit of a public nattering. Like all good sniping, the topic is immaterial, and so the actual sounds of it have become fairly ridiculous. That's what I tried to show in the comic.

But if they asked my advice, I'll tell them not to listen to each other....