Three Cheers for Mr. Shaw

I don’t consider myself to be an expert on raising children, but it does not take a Dr. Spock to look around and realize that most kids these days tend to be a royal pain in the ass.
Ironically while do-gooder liberals and do-gooder conservatives debate, label, and obsessively bureaucratize, order, and provide contradictory directives to poor people and non-white people, it’s their kids that are the ones causing the most damage.
Remember: Columbine High is in a very serene, plain white suburb, not in the inner city. In fact just about every case of a kid gone nuts and shooting people up with a gun has happened in a safe, suburban school – not in the inner-city.
There’s all sorts of culprits – you can pick one depending on your ideological bent: TV (too permissive), TV (not permissive enough), schools, home schools, right wing politicians, left wing politicians, internet porn, “those” people (pick any ethnic group you don’t like), cell phone usage, whatever.
People are quick to pick any one of these, or more, and of course petition the government to legislate laws based on their own sense of what’s right and wrong. And lest you think it’s just the liberals who legislate behavior, keep in mind that hard core right-wing politicians are just as bad at whining to the government to solve their beefs with society JUST like the liberals.
Problem is, parents are unable or incapable of realizing just whose fault it is if their kids are out of control – it’s THEIRS. The kids didn’t petition to be born – the parents made a decision (how they did is irrelevant) to have kids – and now have a responsiblility to raise them. It’s not the government’s job to raise their kids for them – either by proxy in the schools or by govenrnment run day care centers, or restrictive laws on television programming (Did you hear this Mr. Lieberman?)
If people are too stupid or too irresponsible to raise their kids right they should let the kids live with people who WILL raise them. It’s ironic that when I talk about this they think I’m talking about taking poor kids away from their parents, but in fact in my own personal experience I think its the children of over-indulgent baby boomers in desperate need of an intervention of some sort. By whom? I have no idea. God, Jesus , Buddha, whatever.
Robert Shaw has a new book sure to piss off liberals and conservatives alike but after reading it today I think it’s a breath of fresh air. Check it out at the SF Gate sight. And let’s just hope that little Zutroy and Hortense in suburbia get their act together before it’s too late -for all of us.
Heresy or Why the Greatest Generation’s Grandkids are a Pain in the Ass
© 2003-2006 Greg Dewar | All Rights Reserved | Originally Published at www.schadelmann.com