I was twenty four when I started working with adjudicated juvenile offenders, three years older than the oldest, eight years old than the youngest. You’ll have to trust my math otherwise it’ll take three pages to explain the parameters of the program. I was thirty when I started working with, for lack of a better term, parental offenders; legally that’s too strong a term, morally far too weak of a term. More than three quarters of them were within ten years of my age either way.
If I were to take a single phrase and say it was the number one phrase I heard it’d be “My parents beat me.” With the juveniles it usually was followed by something indicating that they were victims, with the adults, believe it or not, it was almost always “My folks whupped me and I turned out ok”. With the delinquents I was obligated to tell them a lot of people were abused as kids and didn’t turn around to abuse someone weaker. I was obligated to tell them that they made their own choices and once let go they’d have to continue making their own choices. The hope was that someday that’d sink in. It’s possible it might have.
I really didn’t have a good answer to “…and I turned out ok.” If I really liked them, and it happened occasionally, I hold with the secular version of ‘hate the sin not the sinner’ I’d tell them ‘No, you didn’t turn out ok. I wouldn’t be involved in your life if you were ok. I don’t work with anyone remotely ok. If your case goes to court I will spend five to seven days explaining in graphic detail to a judge and a jury of your peers the precise nature of how ok you didn’t turn out.’
I wasn’t thinking about this when I decided to write an entry. The one I was composing in my head was pretty good. If I can connect just one of those dots I’ll pretend this entry is a success.
Over the past twenty years or so an idea has floated around, usually in the form of a joke or such, that we (baby boomers for the most part) didn’t wear helmets or knee pads and we played games with things that could be swallowed or poke an eye out and then there’s a punchline or what passes as irony that is almost a punchline.
Truth is beating your kid is a time honored tradition in the history of mankind. When Charles Dickens was writing all those poor lovable waif tales there were no child labor laws in the western world. Um, two different ideas, but similar, 1) intimate home abuse 2) institutional exploitive abuse. By the time I was in Oregon it was against the law to hit your child in the State of Oregon. You would think I knew when exactly that law was passed, I don’t. I don’t know how many states of countries where it’s actually a law. I’m sure that in the states and countries where it’s a law someone hears “My folks whupped me good, and I turned out ok.”
There is a sound follow up, I mean the reasoning is sound, behind that question; what else am I supposed to do? How do I teach my kid right from wrong? One of the standard things we did with every parent whose child we had taken temporary custody of was send them to parenting classes. I sat in on some of them, even participated in a few. Bullshit, complete and utter bullshit. I mean the concepts weren’t, the concept is simple; don’t fucking hit your kids. But they were sort of like those tests popular now for new hires with questions like ; If you see a fellow employee dip into the till do you !) Ask them to grab you a fistful 2) Call 911 3) tell management 4) yell rape 5) tell them you will wrassle them for the dough. Everyone that can read and write knows that 1) is the wrong answer. If you had a program to teach budding thieves how to take the straight and narrow telling them that 1) is the wrong answer — wouldn’t be very effective. That’s sort of how parenting classes are.
In one respect or two the bad parents had a valid point. I’m going to make a statement now that is pure opinion and yet absolutely true; nobody who says that they were ok with being beat as children are ok with it. It’s not an excuse, it’s a complaint. The only analogy I can think of is also an opinion and also absolutely true; the guy who is swearing and talking about how many asses he has kicked when a fight is about to break out, is scared witless, he is not a fighter, and if he ever kicked anyone’s ass it was an accident. The guy who isn’t saying anything and isn’t moving away, he’s the guy who is going to win that fight.
So, in a lot of cases the State of Oregon intervened between helpless children and frightened adults, either scared stupid or out of some coincidence were already stupid and then got scared. These people have more to do with helmets and knee pads and child safety caps than litigators or allegedly benevolent corporations (Christ I can’t even type that with a straight face).
You know how in like sixth grade social studies they showed you the timeline of the earth and made a big point of how insignificant the history of mankind is in that timeline? Well, I mean, maybe you did, the tea party seems offended by the idea, it leads to abortion and taxes just like homosexuals lead to hurricanes. But, you know, ten years or so either side of me you were shown that timeline somewhere during secondary ed, probably. It’s been only seventy years since the norm has been pre-natal care and a hospital birth. It’s been much less than fifty years since all the ingredients needed to be listed in food, clothing, pharmacological. Helmet laws are less than fifty years old. I’d wager that places with laws against hitting your kid that the laws are less than fifty years old.
A first year student taking psych 101 will tell you the guy talking about what a bad ass he is, is overcompensating. If they’ve gotten to Freud yet he’s calling himself a bad ass because his dick is small. People with big dicks that are scared do the same thing. Despite the opinion of freshman pysch students, no one actually fights with their dicks. If your dick is big enough to be used as a club you could stop the fight just by showing it, because straight or no, everyone would rather look at a big dick than fight.
Um, we can pretend that last paragraph didn’t happen (though I swear all I had to do was unzip …) my point sort of is that we’ve overcompensated for the perceived flaws of our forbears. For the sake of cold objectivity, Delayed Stress Syndrome existed before there was a name for it. Babies were born before hospitals even existed. Plauges … aw shit, I’m not going to do that. There’s a huge list either you or I could come up with just off the top of our heads or things the human race endured without taking preventative measures. Hell, the idea of a surgeon washing their paws is less than two hundred years old as far as standard practice goes. Silverware, or you know, eating with something other than your grubby paws is less than four hundred years old and still isn’t completely standard practice universally.
Shit, shit, shit. I really did lose my pristine and clear idea in this mess. We’ve become very big on preventative measures and it hasn’t prevented anything, it might have even made us weaker, there is a presumption of stupidity in many preventative measures and a kind of reliance (e.g. if something could go wrong I’m sure they’d let us know) and, of course, fear. The kind of fear that’s inherent in “… and I turned out ok” and “I swear to fuck motherfucker I’ve kicked the fuck our asses twice as fucking big as yours”. All I meant by the first paragraph is my clients were peers in the sense of age and a common culture. Objectively and optimistically for all the preventative measures the world is not any safer (the optimism is in not saying it’s worse).
Shit. I’m spent. I’ve read back through things I’ve written in the last year. One of the reasons I haven’t been editing is to see how many honest mistakes there are versus how many lapses, mistakes of the mechanism in me that processes thought into language and language into the written word. It’s frightening. This entry is not meant to wag a finger at fear and say ‘For Shame’ it was meant to connect some dots. I’m afraid I didn’t do that very well.
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