The major news of the day, aside from Diane Sawyer's interview with North Korean officials who are basically telling the world they're going to fry us all within the next week, focuses on a rash of sex crimes across the entire spectrum of American society.
A new twist in the Foley scandal: his childhood priest revealed that he used to massage a young Foley in the nude back in the 60s, in addition to skinny-dipping with him and sharing hotel rooms with him.
As if that weren't enough, 125 people have been rounded up in a child porn raid that caught adults subscribing to sites that featured sex between adults and INFANTS.
Finally, two teens on Long Island are accused of attacking a developmentally disabled man in a bowling alley and sodomizing him with a plumbing snake. Yuck.
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What are we to make of all this?
I don't know. But in my opinion, "culture warriors" need to be riled up about real sexual deviance. There is more indecency on TV news than on HBO or on any rap CD. The disintegration of the family, the lack of mentorship and guidance for our nation's youth, it's all catching up with us in frightening ways.
I agree, GCL. I think for a long time there was a train of thought that parents needed to make every kid exactly like the other. There was little room for independence. Then, the pendulum swung far in the other direction. Parents decided that they had no place to guide their children at all - and you got kids who kick the crap out of homeless people, who sodomize a guy, who tie up a gay person and leave him for death in an open field, etc.
ReplyDeleteNot that kids - and people in general - just started committing these crimes. But my firm belief is that public opinion is swaying in favor of the perpetrators. Take the recent vigil for Tookie Williams who shot, among others, a young man with a young wife who was working at register at a 7-Eleven. That young man died. And Tookie williams joked about the sounds he made as blood gurgled through his throat. No vigil for Albert Owens (barely anyone knows his name), however.
What is particularly disturbing about Mark Foley's childhood is that it involves an ongoing scandal - "Celibate" priests molesting the children in their care. Like the Tookie Williams case, the victim is put aside while the Church defends - and protects - the molesting Priest.
I think when public opinion begins to side WITH the victim - not with the molestor nor with the murderer - whether it be a priest a gangmember, these tragedies will become increasingly isolated. Let's hope that partisanship and vain loyalties don't continue to cloud the people's objectivity. MOre and more often, they do.
"""". Parents decided that they had no place to guide their children at all - and you got kids who kick the crap out of homeless people, who sodomize a guy, who tie up a gay person and leave him for death in an open field, etc.""""
ReplyDeleteI don't think this is what causes it at all.
I think that in most cases, you find that kids who did that, whether they got 'guidance' or not, have come from households where their parents, on some level, talked bad about the "homos" or "bums' or "retards" or whatever. The reality is that kids often pick up their prejudices, even indirectly, from their parents.
Jason -
ReplyDeleteI think in some cases your probably right. But I think the permissiveness of parents these days to indulge every whim is probably more to blame. I am not even sure that most of these crimes are the result of a prejudice as much as they are the result of an impulse they felt the need to satisfy.
I think you're completely wrong, 100%.
ReplyDeleteImpulses don't appear out of the aether, and targets, no matter how much it seems so, tend not to be chosen at random. Many of these sorts of crimes have a clear angle of learned prejudice to them that doesn't just appear out of nowhere thanks to permisiveness.
Every single person I know from permissive househoulds is completely nonviolent. Its the ones who came from strict households that are totally messed up and tend to do this stuff.
Jason -
ReplyDeleteI think you're wrong---about 75%.
I do think a lot of this impulse ESPECIALLY when it's a group of kids - not adults - but kids. To attribute a rational motive (rational as in planned, etc.) to these actions - or to assume that if there is one - it comes from their families instead of their "friends" I think is simple, neat and generally wrong. More often than not - it's a bunch of fucked up kids egging each other on to kick the shit out of an easy target.
If I gave the impression that I somehow came from or would choose a "strict household," I certainly didn't mean to. But I do think what was once unthinkable behavior has become, well, thinkable, doable, and done. And I don't think it fits into the neat, textbook, parental prejudice model you seem to hold to.
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