adventures in disaster

sigh

I picked Lucas Rossi right from the start! Damn, I can always tell who people will spend money on to watch.
He is strangely magnetic, all weird moves and screaming and then this gentle, reasonable voice . He seems kind and all Canadian laid back.
Canada does seem to have an abundance of rock and roll talent. Maybe it's because we spend so much time stuck in our igloos hiding from the arctic wind. heh.

I want to not write about what happened in Montreal. Children are clinging to their lives. There is nothing to say.
But I am raging about the monsters mother. How did she close her eyes to this ? She woke every day to her child dressed in black playing with his weapons while playing a videogame that had him murdering students at Columbine.
Did she not see? Was her life so hectic, so chaotic that she walked past the monster she had made?
I am a parent. My child leads a full and interesting life. I talk to my kid, I notice her dress. I don't allow piercing or tattoos. I don't allow violent videogames. I expect an interest in the world. I expect my child to be engaged, to volunteer, to excel in school and outside it.
I know my kids friends..I know their parents. I know where my kid is.
My kid isn't allowed a television or a computer in her room. If she wants to spend any time on the computer she has to do it in the living room in full view of all of us.

I don't say all this in self congratulation, this is how parents normally parent. This is what the majority of parents do or at the very least hope to do.
There is a small minority of parents that don't do any of this. They probably have a list of excuses a few pages long but I am sick of excuses. When you refuse, willfully refuse to be a parent your children will find parents somewhere else. Sometimes they get lucky and find a role model that will keep them safe and successful but for the most part they find gangs, television, religion or some cult nut that encourages them towards destruction.

That once human thing that walked into Dawson? He was a baby, a toddler, a child, a teenager, a man. He was never someone's son. He was an orphan raised by television, violent video games and no sense that the rest of us were human beings..Just like him.
Sociopaths are shaped, built, created by the environment around them. Empathy, compassion are taught to us by our parents. Learning to share, to play with other people teaches us that we are all connected.
Sitting in front of a screen in a dark bedroom with the door closed pressing a button to kill a cartoon figure with a human face day after day, pretending to be a vampire.....and his mother blind to it all.
These monsters come as no real surprise to their own families in the end, but those families live in silence and give the rest of us no warning that the evil they grew is now loose upon the world.

Take a look at your children. Does the phone ring all the time with their friends calling? Or has the phone gone silent?
Do they spend all their time in a darkened bedroom in the glow of the computer screen?
If you asked them to name the most important event of the week would they tell you who killed the most in their favorite online game?
Does your entirely clad in black multi pierced twenty five year old son live at home and work at a minimum wage menial job? Is he friendless? Does he play endless violent videogames while playing with his guns and knives?
Please get him into counseling right now, commit him as a danger to others if you have to.
This isn't normal , this isn't a phase he is going through.
How about getting the damn weapons away from him while we're at it?



What would make a mother so blind? Her failure to parent has cost so many so much.
Frankensteins monster cannot be blamed for his atrocities, Frankenstein can be.


It's not about gun control, it's not about violent games or crappy television. It's about parents and children. It 's about parents that don't care anymore. It's about parents that no longer believe that children have to be raised with limits, boundaries and demands that they must be good citizens. It is about parents that don't care that their children are drowning. Parents that don't notice that their children cannot maintain simple friendships, can't engage in the real world.
Parents completely asleep at the switch.
What do we do? Do we create a draconian system that evaluates who gets to have a baby and who doesn't? Who enforces that? Jackbooted secret police?
The only thing we can do is be present in our childrens lives. We may have to accept that a monster or fifty is the price we are forced to pay for a free society.
We cannot force someone to love their kid, we cannot demand they get their kid help.We can try to help them see what their child is becoming, we can reach out to that child but if they both look away we are helpless.
It's a huge price but any other would make our world more terrifying than anything the monster could ever have envisioned.

I hope with everything I have that the children will survive. I hope too that somewhere a mother looked at her son and saw him for what he has become and put him into treatment.

posted by adventures in disaster @ 9:25 PM