Fathers and Sons

Went out to eat with one of my sons and his fiancé last weekend. Had a great time. Spending time with my boys is something I rarely get to do anymore. It got me thinking about the whole ‘Father-Son’ dynamic. As it is with most men and their sons, this relationship may be tenuous at best, and non-existent at worst. We fathers want our boys to become successful men. Not only in their chosen occupations, but in all aspects of their lives. And with that desire, we tend to appear harsh and judgmental with our ‘constructive criticism’. In turn, we sons want to figure things out for ourselves.  We have a different world view, as we feel we live in a different world. And we think we know far more than that old dinosaur ever will. But as it is written, ‘there is nothing new under the sun’.  When you strip away all the distractions of technology, politics, etc., nothing has ever changed. We parents still make major mistakes. We still carry around huge regrets. We still try to train up our kids the best we can. And they continue to try our patience, cause our hair to turn gray (and even turn loose), they keep us stressed, worried, and cause us to stay up late at night. This has been from the beginning, and will continue to the end.

Was I hard on my sons? Probably, but I truthfully feel that that’s a relative question. My father was a hard man,as was his father, and the father before that. My Dad never told me anything, except what I was doing wrong, which was everything. And this was his way until the day he died last year. (Not whining, just fact.) But his dad wouldn’t say anything at all. He would just haul off and hit you. Usually with his sixty year old sweat hardened felt hat.  (Don’t know which was worse from getting hit, the sting or the gross factor.)  And I won’t even get into how hard my Great-grandfather was. Let’s just say he was a real sweetie.

In other words, an exchange of compliments and niceties were not practiced between the males in my family. Was I any better? Probably not. Just like virtually every other man, I came into fatherhood with a lot of baggage. I had treated people I truly cared about, and who cared about me, with total disregard, and caused them unwarranted pain and sorrow.  I made choices and did such atrocious things that I can’t even talk about them, much less tell my kids. All these things I live with daily. So, there were things I didn’t want my kids to go through, but couldn’t (or wouldn’t) explain why. So, no, I didn’t do as good of a job as I should have. But by God’s merciful grace, three of them have turned into awesome men whom I respect and am truly proud of. Number four currently appears to be out in the world going through all the things I wish I could’ve kept him from. So, not knowing where he is or what he’s doing, I can’t include him in that statement. (And, Son, if you’re reading this, know I am constantly praying you’re doing well.) This I will say without hesitation, I love all my sons. Do they do things that irritate me? Of course. Do they fall in line with everything I taught them? Of course not.  But such is the way of fathers and sons.

Oh, and knowing just how sensitive daughters can be if they’re left out of something, let me add that the dynamics of a Father-Daughter relationship is quite different. For one thing, girls are moody. I mean they can go from giggles to sobs in less than a blink. Though we try to make both our sons and daughters tough and self-reliant, we will rarely jump to our son’s defense, demanding he ‘man up and deal with it’.  When, on the other hand, we find our daughters in tears, we want to go kill someone. And if the reason turns out to be something we did or didn’t do, we get all apologetic. ( I'm talking my generation of fatherhood. Nowadays a lot of boys are treated as if they were the daughters)

Bottom line, if a man’s home is his castle, then his daughters are the princesses. And mine are the most straight-up, flat-out, no holds barred, quintessential personification of princess awesomeness. Even with a basket case for a father, they are truly amazing.

What's With All The Gun Nuts

(This was actually written on March 12, but forgot to hit 'Publish')

What is going on with the proliferation of so many gun nuts in this country. What is with the illogical and emotionally charged rhetoric from the self appointed ‘champions of safety and wellbeing’ and the ‘defenders’ of our nation’s youth. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those who desire to change our nationstate made up statistics that have no basis in reality.
Case in point, when rape survivor Amanda Collins, who bravely addressed the Colorado legislative hearing regarding its proposed ban on concealed firearms, Sen. Evie Hudak (D – CO) chimed in with “actually, statistics are not on your side, even if you had a gun, …for every one woman who used a handgun to kill someone in self-defense, 83 were murdered by them.”  (View Video)
The Senator’s stats may say that, but the facts do not side with her. According to the FBI, Americans use firearms in self defense 2.1 million times annually. Cases where firearms are used criminally amount to 579,000. Seventy percent of those cases are carried out by criminal repeat offenders.

These gun nuts are so freaked out about firearms they present some of the most bizarre methods of defense imaginable. We’ve been told that a woman carrying a whistle is safer than one who ‘conceal carries’. (“It’s why we have call boxes, it’s why we have safe zones, it’s why we have the whistles.” CO State Rep. Joe Salazar D – Thornton). In an era when 1 out of 5 young women are raped on college campuses, they have been instructed to pee and/or vomit on the attacker; tell the attacker they have a disease or are menstruating; and if that doesn’t work, they are to yell, hit and bite. Talk about a war on women.

But these gun nuts aren’t content in just taking law abiding citizen’s defense away, they are brainwashing a whole generation on the ‘evils of anything gun’.

In Florida, three high school students put themselves at risk to disarm a young man who was pointing a loaded gun at the head of another student. The culprit was arrested. The heroes who reacted and possibly saved another student’s life were suspended. Yeah, that’s right. The Cypress Lake High School in Fort Myers, Florida, suspended the three brave students for having been involved in an incident involving a weapon. One of the suspended students was shocked and confused: “How are they going to suspend me for doing the right thing?”

The school justified the suspension, which lasted for the rest of the week, on the ground that the students who prevented a deadly shooting were part of an “incident” involving a weapon. Alberto Rodriquez, speaking on behalf of the Lee County School District, stated that “If there is a potentially dangerous situation, Florida law allows the principal to suspend a student immediately pending hearing.” To bad the law doesn’t ‘allow’ removal of administrators for blatant stupidity.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, schools around the country have reacted with indecorous hysterics at the slightest hint of “gun possession.” And there doesn’t even need to be any actual guns involved for the schools to act.

When 9-year-old Hunter Fountain’s mother brought 30 homemade cupcakes to Schall Elementary school in Caro, Michigan, each decorated with two-inch high toy soldiers, the school principal removed the soldiers from the cupcakes.  Why? Because the toy soldiers were “insensitive.”

In mid-February, a seven-year-old boy in Loveland, Colorado was suspended from school after throwing an imaginary grenade at a box that had imaginary bad guys. According to Mary Blair Elementary School, the boy broke the school’s rigid rule against pretend weapons and pretend fighting. Wish there was a ‘rigid rule’ against pretend education that plagues too many American public schools.

One would think that this “make-believe grenade” incident, which was widely ridiculed, would have halted the schools’ mad rush to expel imaginary guns, but no such luck.

7-year-old Josh Welch was trying to make a mountain with his strawberry pastry, one bite at a time. He ended up with a squished mess that was said to look like a gun.  What did the Baltimore Park Elementary School in Maryland do? Yep, they suspended him for two days on the ground that he “used food to make an inappropriate gesture”.

But that’s not the end of this litany of stupid. As if their hysteria wasn’t enough, a short time later the school sent a letter home with the students informing the parents that, due to their children possibly being traumatized by this “gun” incident, the school offered counseling.

Right. We now need to counsel our children against the trauma of seeing a kid make a mess of his Pop Tart.

But wait, there’s more food violence from our little psychopaths. A ten-year-old boy at the David Youree Elementary School in Smyrna, Tennessee, was punished with social isolation at lunch time because he brandished a pizza slice at his school friends. It wasn’t just any pizza slice, of course. As Nashville’s News 2 Investigates reported, it was a slice of pizza that after David took a few bites of, vaguely looked like a gun. When a fellow student commented on the slice’s resemblance to a gun, the ten-year-old picked it up and pretended to fire shots into the air. School officials, terrified by the danger the pizza posed, suspended him.

James Evans, the Rutherford County School District spokesman, said, “students reported he was making some threatening hand gestures, that he was shooting other kids at the table.” Worse, when school officials interrogated him, he denied that he’d done anything wrong. He obviously didn’t know that it’s a crime to make-believe.

Few would argue that schools need to take shooting threats seriously. But what if it’s not even a threat? What if it’s just a perceived (as in manufactured) threat. What if it’s from a five-year-old girl, who’s talking about using a bubble gun that she had at home? Well of course the culprit must be suspended.

This was the stance of the Mount Carmel Area School District in Pennsylvania, where a 5-year-old girl told a classmate that she wanted to shoot herself and a friend, with her pink “Hello Kitty” cartoon-ray shaped bubble blower. All the little girl wanted to do was blow bubbles on herself and her friend.

Proving that there’s no stupid like liberal administrator stupid, the school termed the “incident” a terroristic threat,” searched the girl’s person, (even though she truthfully told them that her “gun” was at home), threatened her with arrest, yelled at her in front of her classmates, and then suspended her for 10 days.

In Maryland, again, two six-year-olds in kindergarten were suspended for one day. Their crime? During recess, they pointed their fingers at each other while playing “cops and robbers.”

Then there’s Sumter County School District in Sumter, South Carolina. For show-and-tell, a six-year-old girl brought a broken, transparent plastic airsoft gun that contained some easily-seen soft plastic bullets to her school. If this toy really had upset the teacher, she should have placed it in her desk for being inappropriate, and returned it to the little lady at the end of the day.

Unfortunately, we no longer live in a rational world. The teacher confiscated the toy and the administration called the police, who threatened the little girl with arrest if she dared to set foot on school grounds for the rest of the semester.

I could go on and on, but hopefully you get the point. By observing the actions of our public schools, and not just with the above subject, but an assortment of other subjects, it appears they are hell bent on promoting increased illiteracy, violence, and entitlements; while pushing forward the decline of innovation, motivation, and self reliance.

When I was in school, we were taught ‘how’ to think. Now our children are taught ‘what’ to think. This causes the elimination of true debate. When young boys and girls are praised for doing nothing but showing up, and publicly ridiculed and punished for playing make believe, we eliminate individual thought.  Arguments are just regurgitated talking points force fed to our youngsters. Now, instead of looking at the whole story, forming an honest opinion, and citing  facts, they take any opposition as a personal attack, to which they react with emotional outbursts and insults.

But we can’t completely fault our teachers. Many are fine caring individuals. But their hands are tied. No, the blame falls on us, the parents. We allowed for the nationalization of our education system. This took it out of the local level (the parents) and put it in the hands of bureaucrats. We also drank in the notion that we (parents, grand-parents, etc.) are incapable of overseeing the education of our children.