Just a thought ....
Scribing at 10:09 a.m. on 2005-11-21
.. sitting here reading Empire Falls by Richard Russo.
Coming across, midway through the book, the character of John Voss and having it rocket me back to junior high; and possibly even before that.
When I was in school, I probably was that kid. I say probably, because I can remember so little of actually BEING in school that most of it feels like conjecture at this point. The very relaxing way our brain has of shutting out the really crappy things that happen to us, yeah? That's not always a bad thing.
I got picked on .. a lot. The butt of most jokes, or the punchline of someone else's picking on. The inferred love interest vehemently denied, even by the next-to-lowest level rung on the ladder kids.
Not just sometimes .. literally every day I showed up. Because I was shy, I guess, and wouldn't punch them back. Because I was handy, and didn't lay them out flat.
It's one of the reasons why I became so adept at disappearing; why I had to keep reintroducing myself to my teachers even halfway through the year. Why my last year at school I was gone 160 out of 180 days. Why I ended up in juvie, of a sort, for truancy. Ironic, eh? I loved learning, but got locked down for skipping school too much.
It's something that is impossible to understand unless you were one of those kids. One of the ones they set aside in the cafeteria for their own protection, practically.
Funny.
Well, not funny per se.
I was thinking, you know .. how can you reach out to these kids? How can you reach out to the ones that are pestered incessantly; teased and harassed every day by someone else's monster children, without going to jail? Because you can't even give a kid a hug these days without someone looking at you funny.
You can't hug the ones that really need it the most.
And the others .. you can't beat them. You can't smack them when they're evil, and you can't hug them when they're good. I read the papers these days and these kids are growing up in pods. And then no one can understand why they go out with guns and blast people in the head.
They have no physical contact.
I read a book a while ago that listed one of the ways that serial killers have a commonality. Very few, according to the book, had any sort of physical contact while they were growing up. No hugging, no gentle contact, no appropriate physical affection.
And in these days when hugging someone else's kid equals child molestation; and whupping someone's ass has turned from correction to child abuse, what do these people expect?
We have evolved into a society with no repercussions, good or bad. A child can behave like a monster and if they get a 'time out', that's about all. And they know it. We have now, a generation of parents who 'don't want to break their children's spirit' by spanking them. Consequently, these are the same parents/children that no one can tolerate in public. They grow into the children that bully and pick on other kids (and adults) because they know that nothing can touch them. The idiotic state of the law protects them beyond reason. There are no ramifications for interrupting, screaming, etc.
It is a frightening cycle.
the government (which isn't doing a bang-up job as it is) is now the arbitor of how we are allowed to raise our children. Social mores have changed so much (and not in a good way, I feel a lot of the time) that there is no threatened ass-whupping for bad behavior.
I've heard children threaten their parents that if they don't get their way, they'll report them for child abuse. How sick is that?
Ok, maybe I'm old. Maybe I've become one of those people who think 'when -I- was a kid, my ma would have broken my neck if I had acted like that in public'. And maybe that's why I can function in society today; because there were limits set then, when it mattered.
I'm wondering how much longer, in this society the way it's going, that someone down the line will think to themselves 'my ma would have broken my neck if I acted like that'.
