Fairy tales and bikini briefs

I think I just heard some of the most profound bullshit that I have ever heard in this long, foolish period of romanticizing force.

We have a paraprofessional who drives the kids (and her colleagues, too often) crazy. She's abrupt. She's too often rude. She's far too dependent on others to make decisions for her. The kids hate her guts, is the truth, some of which she has earned.

And she's gotten a lot better. I've stood by her when others were ready to throw her overboard because I felt like everyone needs a chance to learn and get better at life.

And I just listened to this woman say that she was well-behaved as a kid because her parents forced her to behave.

And I'm thinking, "So what fucked that all up?"

Because she's got a long way toward learning to be a better behaved adult, nevertheless a kid. Many, if not all, of the adults who are caught up in the most popular craze in child-rearing - forcing, people, and among them, your kids to be good - are like this, in some relative degree. As were their parents. And their parents before them. And their parents before them. It's not really the most original idea. And it never really has delivered on the goods that it promises.

It's a big load of horseshit, is what it is. It's a lot of people pretending to be better than they really are. So of course they know what to tell everyone else to do because look how great and infallible they turned out. It's the most vomit-inducing form of undeserved self-congratulation that I've ever watched a whole society of adults ever engage in.

And this woman had the gall to say to a group of fairly real world-savvy adults that she couldn't misbehave as a kid because she was forced otherwise. And this is a woman who has a hard time getting along with teachers, some of the nicer folks in the world, nevertheless with students, who think of her as rude and overbearing, which she too often is.

The sad thing about not being honest with yourself is that it is you who suffers for that, ultimately. When you claim to be a better person that you really are to justify whatever it is that you want to justify, you are the one who starts to lose touch with reality, as your defenses for your self-image loses track of the reality of who you really are.

We all do this. Me too. I was just thinking about it yesterday morning, actually. All the ways I have to work to be the kind of person and man I would like to be. And who I am absent those qualities in the meantime. I have a long way to be my most positive image for myself.

And so do we all. Which is exactly why we are all in such need of looking after the beams in our own eyes more than forcing out the splinters in the eyes of others.

This is where Twain was brilliant and I have such a long way to go. To give us all needed shit, all in good fun and in loving seriousness, about what jackasses we so often are, especially when we are getting all worked up about one thing or another, and often when we are getting worked up about our children.

We're all a bunch of petty emperors, bossing everyone around and wearing nothing but our bikini briefs. And telling everyone about what saints we were as children because our parents had the sense to shackle us to the prevailing moral and legal order.

And the really big question is, "If we're really all so damn good, then why has the world turned out to be such shit so much of the time?"

And the other really big question is, "If this is a route that has been tried and true in the past, and has never really gotten us to the promised land, why do we keep pretending like we've crossed the Red Sea?"

I know, I know. We haven't done it enough. One elusive day, we will have used enough force and imposed enough of our will and coerced our way to higher ground and then it will finally be enough and the world will live happily ever after.

Nothing wrong with a fairy tale. But I think I'll stick with Twain.

Love,
Ben