“Phil” Goes on a Rant

10:11 PM - Jun. 10, 2006 - Add to the Wildness

My kids don’t accept bad language. They hear it enough – on the elementary school playground, for instance, when we’re in for Spazzerific’s soccer games. They get to see drunkenness and people being high in the same location. People a lot bigger than them. I let them stay to play after soccer the one evening, and a bunch of high-school-or-slightly-older individuals descended. Spazzerific came over and said to me, "There’s a bunch of drunks playing basketball." I sort of laughed, but it turned out he was right. Am I more naive than my ten-year-old? I wondered for a moment.

These are relatively harmless sub-adults. They weren’t the type to surround a young child and beat him up to shake the coins out of his pockets. They got off the swings to share with my girls (in good part due to the disapproving mother figure standing over them). At the same time, though, some of them were getting behind the wheel and ripping away from the curb in a zone where young kids were walking home from the game unattended. So, yeah, they got to see my not-impressed face.

What possesses a person to get smashed at eight o’clock on a Wednesday night when they’ve got their whole life ahead of them? I didn’t understand that illogic even as an unsaved high school student. Where were their parents at the time of life when foundational attitudes and behaviours were being formed?

My guess is, knowing the towns, getting drunk and/or high at eight o’clock on a Wednesday night. Quite possibly with the parents of the group of friends who now do the same thing together. Role modelling is powerful.

This is where you get left-wing thinking on how to break destructive cycles – more "interventions," more required re-education a la Nineteen-Eighty-Four, more and more of the caged-animal treatment. At least psychologically. Is it right to hem others in mentally like that? I wouldn’t want it done to me.

I prefer to blame it on Masculinism, a.k.a. Sixties Feminism, which dragged so many women out of the home by utterly mocking and devaluing their work there. Would it make a difference to have a mother in the home, even a bad one?

Bad mothers – that’s a touchy argument. Ooh, goody. I like those.