Tag: Child Abuse

Texas, Bloody Texas

Greg Abbott has blood on his hands; and not only Greg Abbott, but every voting Republican in Texas has blood on their hands today. Eighteen children and three adults are dead in Uvalde (Texas Standard) and these additional victims can be added to the numberless other people killed as a result of the Texas Republican party’s reckless actions last summer. Numberless dead because there is no way to keep track of all the people killed as a result of constitutional carry.

These results were predicted when Governor Abbott signed the law:

House Bill 1927 eliminates the requirement for Texas residents to obtain a license to carry handguns if they’re not prohibited by state or federal law from possessing a gun. The signing was reported by the Texas Legislature’s official website, which tracks the progress of legislation. Abbott’s office has announced a ceremonial signing of the bill and other gun-related legislation at 11 a.m. Thursday.

Abbott’s signature seals a win to conservative activists who have long sought the measure without success. Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and other Republicans who were initially noncommittal about the bill were under immense political pressure this session from conservatives and gun rights advocates, who have long lobbied the Texas Legislature for permitless carry but historically struggled to win support.

texastribune.org

Anyone can carry a gun in public anywhere in Texas for any reason and no one can stop them. Even the perpetrator of this latest mass shooting in Uvalde had every right to carry his weapons, right up to the point where he shot his first victim. Anyone who tried to stop him would have been violating his rights.

There’s no vetting whatsoever. None at all.

Mike Taylor, Texas Standard

Everyone who backed the constitutional carry law is guilty of murder now. All of you have blood on your hands. Governor Abbott might as well have gone to that school and shot those children himself for all the difference it makes. All the thoughts and prayers are wasted. Your god is vengeance, and these dead children are his vengeance on your stupidity.

Death Cult

It’s time we left the death cult that is the belief that more guns will solve a problem. More guns are the problem. We need there to be fewer guns and those guns in the hands of people who are trained, licensed and insured against accidents. Until that happens there will only be more senseless death at a rapidly increasing rate. I will be keeping my children as close to me as I can until these cruel Republican bastards are removed from office.

twitter

The 2022 NRA Annual Convention will take place at the George R. Brown Convention Center May 27-29 in Houston, Texas. Among those people confirmed to be attending the convention are: Donald Trump, Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz, John Cornyn and Dan Crenshaw. All of these people should be up on charges right now as accomplices to murder. Actual children, not the imaginary children that they run around saying they want to protect every day, but actual children lay dead in Uvalde because of their actions, and they are going to have a convention before the bodies of their latest victims are even in their graves.

There should be mass protests in Houston. Access to the convention center should be blocked by chains of people handcuffed together. This murder of innocents has gone 0n long enough. Action is what is required now, and not the hateful action of the people who buy their murder tools. We Texans must stand up and put things right. The time is now.

There is a tendency in media these days to stampede to the location of the latest atrocity and then blanket cover the minutest detail of everything about the subject; as if there is any story deep enough to bear the scrutiny of the entire world twenty-four hours a day or that the bereaved parents and families in a small town in Texas will welcome your invasion of their backwater community in this time of tragedy.

Where was the interest when the interest could have made a difference? When the independent school district appointed the security chief that kept parents and officers out of the school building for an hour while the shooter continued to rampage?

Arredondo believed that the shooter had barricaded himself and that the children were not under an active threat.

nbcnews.com

That would have been the crucial moment when something might have been done that would have changed the outcome on that fateful day. There is no point in asking these suffering people about their opinions of State politicians right now. No point in torturing them with what if questions. You are just adding insult to injury.

Those are questions for the rest of us to ask ourselves and find our own answers:

On the Media – Again and Again and Again and Again (and Again) – May 25, 2022

There are several good answers to many questions we might ask ourselves in that episode of On The Media. Will we ever tackle those tough conversations?

A citizen of Uvalde has come forward to speak on the subject of what we need to do next:

C-SPAN – Matthew McConaughey Complete Remarks at White House Press Briefing – Jun 7, 2022

We want secure and safe schools and we want gun laws that won’t make it so easy for the bad guys to get the damn guns

Matthew McConaughey

I refuse to accept that there is nothing we can do about this subject. I know what I think should be done to stop mass killings and maybe even impact the even greater number of individual gun deaths across the nation. I’m going to vote to do something different:

This is on you [Governor Abbott] until you choose to do something different. This will continue to happen. Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will be continue to be killed just like they were killed in Uvalde yesterday.

Beto O’Rourke
Gun Safety

To the Republican politicians who lashed out at Beto for his interruption of that news conference, and to their self-satisfied base of voters who see nothing wrong with the way the the death toll is mounting, I only have this to say; your time is coming to an end. There will come a day when the people you have abused and mislead will wake up and realize that they have the power to fix their own government and that they don’t need guns to do it. All they have to do is stand up and act as one. Act as one indivisible unit. That day will come. I hope I live long enough to see it.

These are the kinds of school programs that need to be spread throughout school systems so that these disaffected teens can find the help they need instead of burning out and lashing out:

NPR: Short Wave – Can The Next School Shooting Be Prevented With Compassion? – June 16, 2022

The boy in that story, Mishka? That boy was another version of me, another version of so many children who are overlooked by education systems too overloaded to have time to avoid injustices like multiple injuries inflicted on a child that just happens to be the target of physically aggressive bullying. If you want to stop these children growing up into violent adults (if they are lucky enough to grow up at all) you have to intervene when the problem starts, not after it explodes in blood and violence.

As Texas Goes, So Goes the Nation

The Supreme Court has decided that they like more shootings in public places. They want the rest of the United States to be more like Texas, overturning a century of legal precedents when it comes to the carrying of firearms:

Since 1911, the state of New York has required individuals who would like to carry a concealed weapon in public to show a need to do so for the purpose of self defense and to require a license. More than a century later, the United States supreme court has chosen to strike down New York’s long-established authority to protect its citizens.

Joe Biden

Now you can’t stop mass shooters from massacring, you can only respond after they open fire with volleys of your own. You can’t stop them because there are no laws that stop people from carrying weapons into places where weapons don’t belong.

Make no mistake here. Unless we both limit the access to guns; train, license and insure gunowners, as well as start caring for the abused and mistreated among us, we are going to see an increase in gun violence. In every town, in every city and basically anywhere a disagreement occurs and one of the parties has access to guns and violent tendencies at the same time. This is inevitable and has been inevitable from the very beginning. We are trying to deny human nature when we act like everyone is reasonable and rational and can be trusted to not blow up the world if we give them access to the power to do so. This is simply not the case.

Abuse

Children these days don’t know what child abuse is.

That’s what she said. After having child protective services show up at her house because her child called them after a spanking. After attempting to send the child away with child protective services for their temerity at attempting to tell her how to raise her children. After the door of the narrative was closed in the face of intervention by others in her desire to raise her own children the way she wanted, she said “children these days don’t know what child abuse is.”

I wish that were true. I want that to be true.

I was beaten every day as a child. Through almost two years of school, I received daily licks for refusing to participate in class with the other children. Autism or dysgraphia, take your pick. My father used a belt on us at least weekly if not more often. My stepfather, offended at something or other I said, or perhaps outraged at my attempts to deflect his anger at my mother away from her, knocked me to the floor and kicked me in the stomach.

I know what child abuse is.

There is a quiet, calculating place in my mind. I know it well. It is where I go when I feel that the pressure outside myself is more than I can handle. I hide there while the tumult goes on around me. I go there when people talk about punishing children, talk as if children deserve punishment just for being children. When they talk about how guns aren’t a manifestation of physical violence solidified (they are) I went there while I was being beaten as a child. While I was on the living room floor being kicked in the stomach. While I was on the laundry room floor of my apartment building after being punched in the face by a neighbor. It is my hiding place.

In that place I contemplate revenge. I contemplate what justice would look like, if there were a thing called justice in the world. Would the children be given permission to beat their parents? Could you make neighbors who assault their wives and other people around them disappear, without having to face justice for your actions in making them disappear?

Gun owners statistically face justice for owning physical manifestations of violence since a significant portion of them will end up taking their own lives with their treasured possessions. But what about the victims who never know the peace of a wrong made right? Where is justice for them?

I tried never to exact corporal punishment on my children. I have tried never to physically lash out at anyone all my life. I cannot trust myself. There is too much rage in there for me to ever be capable of measured violence. My children begged for spankings, because a spanking would be easy and that would get the punishment over with in their minds. They had to come up with the punishment for their own transgressions. Frequently the punishments they devised were harsher than what the wife and I had agreed on as a proper punishment for whatever it was they did.

That is what children are, just like most people are. Harder on themselves than any outside observer has the right to believe based on the behavior in question. Only sociopaths and psychopaths (and other extremely mentally challenged types) lack those self-monitoring default behaviors. Adult supervision just means watching the children. It doesn’t mean you have to punish them.

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child
Postscript

I’ve written a lot more on this subject since:

Adverse Childhood Experiences

Suffice it to say that the well of pain is dark, swift and deep. Treacherous waters.

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child

I’ve been having a bit of a tiff with a poster on a list of late. Yes dear reader, I know you are shocked by this. I’ve been arguing with a professed christian about the origin of the phrase Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child and the nature of the proper disciplining of children.

As for the first part, the phrase originates in a satirical poem concerning the Puritans by Samuel Butler. The poem, Hudibras goes like this:

If matrimony and hanging go
By dest’ny, why not whipping too?
What med’cine else can cure the fits
Of lovers when they lose their wits?
Love is a boy by poets stil’d;
Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I doubt that the average fundamentalist would be comfortable repeating the phrase if they knew that it’s origin was in a poem that lampoon’s their ideological forebears. (editor’s note: a close reading of the poem results in the observation that the final word of the final verse has to be pronounced ‘chilled’ rather than ‘child’ in order for the rhyming to work properly. I wonder if that represents language drift over the centuries or poetic license by the poet?)

On the subject of corporal punishment, I’ll say this; I don’t do it. It never taught me anything as a child, other than to mask my behavior so as to avoid punishment, and to spend hours trying to figure out how to get back at those who punished me.

I was taken out in the hallway on a daily basis in first grade, and given ‘licks’ (application of the paddle to the posterior) because my teacher was convinced that it would make me work faster. According to my mother, what it got her was fired. I never noticed any motivational improvement, myself. I’m reasonably certain that it made me more of an introvert than I already was, and insured that I would never draw attention to myself during class time for the rest of my term of imprisonment in government school.

It probably has something to do with my complete unwillingness to conform to any imposed standard as well. But I digress.

The few times that I have ever attempted to use corporal punishment on my children, it has backfired, with one exception. Both of them, as toddlers, attempted to wander out of the yard and into the street near our home. A quick smack on the behind was all it took to keep them from ever trying that again. The unfamiliarity of the pain is the key. If I had smacked them every time some little transgression had occurred, they wouldn’t even have noticed when I was trying to warn them away from a life-threatening action. Every other time I’ve given in to the urge, I’ve regretted it. It just doesn’t work.

Rather than punish, the wife and I attempt to impress the consequences of the improper action upon the child (Faber and Mazlish have a bit to say on the subject) It’s not always easy, and it’s not always effective. But I’ve never regretted taking the time to try something other than lashing out at the offending child, which is more than I can say for the alternative.

Of course, I said something a little more inflammatory to my opponent. Something like this:

I’m glad they aren’t allowed to beat my children. I don’t beat my children, and I’m the only one who should be allowed to beat my children. I was the target of choice in school for bullies (students and teachers alike) for most of my school life. My children are in school because I want them to learn rather than be forced to dodge bullies on a daily or hourly basis. You have to earn respect, not beat the students into submission in order to get it.

…and it’s a knee slapper, the idea that beating children is something Jesus was in favor of. I pity your children. Hopefully they’ll find good recreational drugs to ease the pain of their existence.

In hindsight, I think I was too easy on him.

Editor’s note 2020. Featured image added. It is Hudibras First Adventure – Plate three by William Hogarth. Hat/tip to the Art Institute of Chicago. Gutenberg has all twelve of the plates in a collected volume of Hogarth’s work, none of them appear to feature the specific passage of the poem that is related here.