I’ve been thinking about the hours I listen to my son talking to other kids online. I don’t let him wear headphones and this is so I can listen and intervene when necessary.
I know not everyone can or would want to listen to what’s often a bunch of loud annoyingness interspersed with occasional adorableness and a lot of negotiation-building skills.
But I also hear a lot of reg flags.
I hear kids trying out being mean to each other. I hear them leaving each other out on purpose. I hear them being exposed to inappropriate material and turning it into a joke bc they don’t know how to process it. And I hear them laughing at people when they’re being vulnerable.
I’m able to intervene. And I do. Some call it helicopter parenting but sometimes, in my opinion, a fucking helicopter is what’s needed these days.
Bully behavior starts young. So do ways of concocting unsavory styles of defending oneself. Like purposely hurting someone after you’ve felt hurt. Or wanting to sabotage someone in micro-acts of revenge.
It’s junior caliber now, but if it goes unchecked, what might these kids grow into? A benign asshole? A perpetrator of domestic violence? A corrupt politician? Worse? Who knows.
My son has me to process all this stuff with him and I go to extremes to make sure he’s heard and validated and I make sure to help him understand the situation through my own perspective.
But some kids don’t have a parent to process with. I know I didn’t.
In fact a handful of times, I’ve heard kids get interrupted by a parent who storms in the room yelling, “Get the fuck of that fucking computer!”
I’ve heard parents refer to their kids as cry babies and tattle-tails and idiots.
In fact you can tell what kind of role-modeling the kid has by what comes out of their own mouths: Suck it up. Stop being a spoiled brat. You’re so stupid! You f-ing idiot! Don’t be such a baby. Etc etc.
I’m not really interested in words like ‘mental illness’. In fact I highly dislike that duo of words.
To me, here’s what exists: there’s actions and there’s consequences and there’s coping mechanisms and there’s support structures and there’s basic needs and there’s the passing of time.
When something bad happens to a kid, and there are consequences without support structures and the kid is also without resources to get their basic needs met, plus, has no skills to understand what’s happened or keeps happening to him—if this kid’s pain gets unbearable enough, over time, the kid will resort to coping strategies that can range from self-soothing, to self-destructing, to the destruction of others.
And in a society where the village has all but become extinct, and parents don’t have the resources they need for themselves let alone their children, and you’ve got social services that require a degree just to navigate the bureaucracy to access it… people will gravitate towards ways to cope with their pain that are much easier to access, like drugs and alcohol and distracting devices like screens and gaming…
And what about those tragic few who have become so completely unhinged, and are drowning in the hell of their circumstances with zero support and zero resources and their brains haven’t even had an opportunity to develop clear thinking?
Well, we already know what happens. They’re not going to go and meditate. Or stand in line to see a social worker.
They’re either going to become an addict of some substance that makes them feel better than their pain, or they’ll wind up in prison and maybe find some support in there, but for those few totally fucked up people, maybe they purchase an assault rifle and maybe they turn it on themselves or maybe they unfathomably turn it on another or unspeakably turn it on a group of innocent grocery shoppers or on a group of beautiful thriving innocent kids.
But to me, the flip side of this sickening awful equation is just as tragic. These politicians. These negotiators of policy that could in fact provide services to meet the needs of these parents and kids at these moments when they’ve fallen through the cracks.
Of course that’s not usually what happens bc what we’ve got a lot of, is politicians who are also not thinking clearly, who’ve also fallen through different kinds of cracks.
Who knows what some of these guys have gone through as kids—what actions led to which consequences—so that they’re now avoiding their own personal pain using coping strategies like getting elected on platforms that sound an awful lot like secret revenge for everyone who was dumb enough not to believe what they were capable of…
Standing before their constituents speaking revenge-talk disguised as morality, and finding every like-minded pissed-off person to agree with their tough love agendas, and with their promises to protect what they all worked so hard for, before it’s taken away by ‘them,’ whoever that is.
The intention of these sorts of agendas don’t sound to me like the goal is to contribute to society, but instead to make sure that what they personally stand for is so beyond criticism that their unresolved personal pain gets to be soothed by the loyalty of their constituents who believe their words to be so true, they figure they must be ordained by god himself.
Well to me, its disgusting. It’s one dysfunctional context feeding the other.
And it trickles down so that society’s investment becomes to protect this ‘moral’ fiber (aka the personal agenda of politicians needing to feel important and adored) instead of investing in mental health education in schools and in free access to health care (mental, physical, etc) for all, childcare and support for families, decent working wages and yes, gun control.
And I don’t see things getting much better so long as people are not based in reality.
When people are incapable of getting off their platforms to talk about what’s underneath them, when they’re speaking words to protect some unresolved pain or insecure part of themselves instead of speaking through values that care for all people. And they speak these words to other scared people who are going to run out to support their agenda. Well—that agenda turns into policy that has nothing to do with what’s real.
Because to me, what’s real is that there is no morality on earth, no Jesus on earth, no fetuses on earth, not even any democrats or republicans on earth.
There’s actions and there’s consequences and there’s coping mechanisms and there’s support structures and there’s basic needs and there’s the passing of time.
And there are human beings on earth coping without much other than pain and uncertainty.
They’re disconnected confused broke lonely, their education has little to do with what they really crave to learn—like, how to find a purpose that’s aligned with their interests, or a place to stand that feels like a place to feel proud of, and the skills to function with dignity and the courage to communicate what’s real for them, and to authentically connect with people instead of constantly feeling like they have to protect themselves. Not to mention the physical toll of living decades like this.
Thankfully there are a lot of quality humans that work hard to find solutions so that society can work for everyone.
But instead of making bridges between the people who need support and the people who have the skills to offer it, these other particular people in politics who are avenging their own unresolved issues from their past are going to keep standing in the way and have everyone watch how tough they are that they can have their equivalent of diarrhea in a public restroom and put a stop to everything.
There are a million issues that need to be improved upon, but in my opinion, considering what’s just happened, any jerk who would defend the right for anyone to own an assault rifle instead of switching allegiances to make sure assault rifles aren’t being sold to unhinged people is pathetic and embarrassing.
Owning an assault rifle is not a need. Quality mental health education in schools is a need. Support for families is a need. Universal Health care is a need. People listening and caring for people is a need. Politicians not being given hundreds of thousands of dollars to pretend to care about anything but being right is a need.
When politicians sit in their own context imagining they know what’s right for other contexts, it’s not only small-minded, but it’s a magnet for small-mindedness.
To me, quality policy makers leave their personal contexts to learn about what others need and get busy figuring out how to get those resources to people who need them, simply bc it’s the right thing to do.
-JLK
