More things that make me wonder: Friday, September 19, 2014
We read with appropriate concern and sadness that
a UVA coed has gone missing some 48 hours ago and Charlottesville police and the
girl's friends are very concerned regarding her safety as well they should be. What seems to be added by the talking
(heads?) almost as an afterthought is that she was, apparently, very
intoxicated and that her last known communication was from her cell phone letting
someone know that she was on her way to yet another party.
In none of the
several media sources I watch/read throughout the day , has more than a passing
reference been made to the obvious , at least to me, fact that at 19 years of
age, she should never have had access to alcohol. Period! Having played for
frat parties at UVA in the remote past, I guarantee that the Charlottesville
Police turn right much of a blind eye to events on UVA campus involving
alcohol. This isn't simply restating the
standard "UVA is the ACC's biggest
party school" line, it is based on my
own eyewitness account. Making matters worse, is the fact that the young lady
was very drunk and got that way off campus in a public
facility, where she obviously was illegally served the substance which
made her lower her judgment. This
makes the fourth UVA coed missing in the lat 5 years. If this were an isolated
account, it would be bad enough but it
is, it seems, an almost daily occurrence
somewhere in America.
We read a
little over a year ago of the Ohio high
school girl who was raped and drunk out of her mind at the time, There was attempt
to "victim blame" in that instance - wrong and always invalid, but
the third leg of the argument is seldom given as much emphasis - that we seem
to have in many cases an unspoken agreement that "kids will be kids" and this
implies that getting drunk at as early as 13 is somehow either a rite of
passage or simply unpreventable. I would call an emphatic "bullshit!" on both
arguments.
As a public
school teacher, I knew of many parents who rationalized that "Well,
they'll drink anyway, so why not at home?" This manifested itself in, one case, in a
ninth grader (who may well read this!) showing up to their first high school
dance snot flinging, commode hugging,
drunk! The answer, when questioned as to how was alcohol available in the first
place, was that another student's mom
had allowed drinking at her house before the dance! Had I been the parent of an
early teen child given alcohol by
another adult, I'm not sure what I'd have done, but you'd probably have been
able to read about in the paper!
We know from
brain research that humans don't get their 'full set" of intellectual services (specifically including
judgment and evaluation of consequences for actions) until their 20s. Although
age 21 was chosen in some distant past as the age of majority, neuro-science and
research from those most impartial judges, Insurance actuaries, tells us that it was actually
a remarkably accurate age setting. Some parents, either having alcohol issues
themselves, or wanting their child to "like" them, don't ever send
the right message regarding the hazards of teens with poor, or no, impulse control mixed with seven or eight wine
coolers.
I recall as a teen (eons ago) making judgments,
considering
actions, and holding opinions which I know now were ill advised and dangerous. A strong parental involvement, by example as well
as verbally, kept me far "straighter and narrower" than I might have
done left to my own counsel and the example of some of my peers. I hurt for the
parents of the lost girl and her friends who tell anyone and everyone what a
wonderful person she was. It would all be unnecessary if she had also been a
prudent and law abiding one. This, as it always does, will be forgotten by most
UVA students in a week or so, and remain a distant memory until another
illegally (or legally, for that matter) alcohol impaired student is raped,
taken, or killed driving while drunk. Pity, that!
Next
I wonder why we
recently saw the picture of the "journalist" held in Syria and felt
sorry for him once we were made aware that this idiot had been captured once
before by the same (essentially) bad guys and had escaped! At the point where
you manage to escape those who would behead you in public just for being there
And YOU GO BACK , you're simply fulfilling your death wish. Have you noticed that no female journalists
seem to be that stupid? Is there a sex linked chromosome for "dumber than
dirt adrenalin seeking imbecile?" I can guarantee that even if a female
journalist somehow found herself in such
a situation and escaped, the first person who even hinted that maybe she'd like
to go back would be impaled on a spike heel.
Last
What's going on
in the NFL these days is being seen by some pundits to some degree in the media as an upswing in domestic violence and that it is somehow
the league's fault. Domestic violence, as child abuse, has always existed, unfortunately.
What has changed is media and communications channels of information taking very
public notice of both. I think it possible, actually probable, that many of the
current crop of publically exposed abusers
of their significant others are doing little more than parroting the behavior
seen in their own childhood homes.
The dean of American sportswriters, Grantland
Rice, told of being on a train while covering the Yankees on a western road
trip, and being in the club car when Babe
Ruth, clad only in boxers, ran through the car, chased by a woman, not his
wife, clad only in her scanties, waving a knife. The consensus among the
several reporters was that it was a good thing that they "hadn't really
seen what they had just witnessed, or they would have had to write about
it!" Today, the cell phone video
would be viral in 10 minutes.
Blaming Roger
Goodell for the NFL's domestic violence is somewhat akin to blaming Victoria's
Secret for rape. In business, an employee charged but not indicted or tried would
still be an employee. Several of the recently uncovered (yeah, I think they're
like cockroaches) abusers have been
given zero due process, because of the public uproar surrounding the Ray Rice
case. Is Rice a shithead? Of course, and a violent one as well. It is specious,
however, in true NFL fan fashion, to blame Goodell for not already having a
policy in place for "what do we do if some animal is so uncontrolled that
he KO's his fiancée in public?" Ten
years ago, only Rice, his fiancée and maybe a bellhop would ever know truly
what happened.
I guess what I
find a bit strange is that an
organization which glorifies violence every day and encourages players to be
"tough," "hit hard",
and (clandestinely) do whatever it takes to maintain an unnaturally large and
hard physique have suddenly developed such a conscience. I doubt very seriously that the incidence of
domestic violence is really any greater, in fact may be less, since finance
drives so much marital discord, than the general public.
The issues
surrounding the Adrian Peterson child abuse accusations come from another
place, however. Many players have acknowledged
what we already knew to be true, that
they were harshly physically disciplined as children. Here's a revelation, many lower
income parents and a surprising number
of affluent ones, have marginal (or, in fact, zero) parenting skills!!! Of course in Peterson's case, he has so many
children from so many different women that he may have acted out of ignorance. Why
would we suspect that Peterson, who recently had a child die that he didn't
even know existed until weeks before , would have a strong sense of mature reasoned approach to parenthood? Why
should we expect men, some of who have only one skill set, hurting people, and
have lived with a heightened, although unmerited, sense of entitlement due to this ability, to
be rational, literate and concerned parents? Isn't that why they finally married the woman
they occasionally beat after a bad game - to raise their kids?
No comments:
Post a Comment