I've read half-a-dozen articles about the six-year-old first-grader who shot his teacher two days ago. The following statement from a CNN article is the only one to come close to allowing, alluding, blushingly hinting, leaving open the pearl-clutching possibility that there may be some background to the incident other than a post-toddler's willful initiative:
"Authorities are 'working diligently to get an answer to the question we are all asking – how did this happen? We are also working to ensure the child receives the supports and services he needs as we continue to process what took place,' Jones said."
None of the articles, stupefyingly, included the words "parent," "father," "mother," "gun safety," "irresponsibility," "negligence." Are the media this cowardly, this petrified? Do parents – in our time when 14-year-olds carry their psychiatric diagnoses like backpacks, know abused classmates and crisis hotlines, have unselfconscious contempt for their teachers' ignorance and incompetence, recite their parents' and grandparents' childhood trauma histories, know their fathers are narcissists and their mothers are drug addicts – still possess the magical cachet of the inculpable, the perfect harmless? Shouldn't we be saying, as an obvious and "educated guess," that the boy's father is a scumbag or at least a complete idiot? Shouldn't he be expecting jail? Shouldn't we be telling the parents of Idaho murder suspect Kohberg: You raised a complete piece of garbage, and you turned a blind eye or condoned him for twenty-eight years?
Abusive priests can be condemned, but less likely the Pope. It took decades, and Christopher Hitchens, to reveal that Mother Teresa was a hypocrite and a fraud. Geniuses and other luminaries, once admired, have feet of clay today. But parents – they seem to be above them all. They may very well have a labor union in heaven that has made them the law of right nature.
Would the world collapse if parents are condemned and ostracized for their failures? I believe that's the unconscious known. That without that anchor – the Parent as Good – living itself will be unmoored, there will be no certainty, no security, no peace and no meaning. We will be destroying our ground, to fall blind in the darkness forever.
The parent is our hope and our succor. We, the children, will always need, or dream, their godliness.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.