Hear hear!
To all both of Marcus' and Leigh's comments and to Doug's quote from the
most insightful cartoon philosopher of all!
Leigh -
As a (mostly) single father of two (now grown) daughters, I am very
sympathetic with the (more common) single mothers who have had the
burden (and privilege) of raising children without the benefit of the
"help" of the other parent. In my case, and many cases I am personally
familiar with for women raising children alone, the absence of the other
parent can be a blessing, albeit mixed (psychologically as well as
financially).
Nevertheless. I agree that this does not absolve the absent parent nor
the "village" of the responsibilities of raising a child. As you point
out, we are already failing at that fairly badly *even* when the kids
manage to not become mass murderers.
I am trying to use the acuteness of this event to return my gaze to my
own immediate surroundings... my relationship with gun and violence
culture, my relationship with the young people in my life and their
parents, etc. I don't see any budding mass murderers, but then... I'm
not sure they are that easy to spot except from the armchair on the day
after the game with our most excellent rearview binoculars.
- Steve
"We have met the Enemy, and he is us." - Pogo
On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 11:10 AM, Leigh Fanning <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
This is a country producing substandard students unable to compete
intellectually with their peers, with school budgets a perennial
mess. It's also a country that primarily serves compliant,
malleable girls in the school systems. Problem boys are fast-tracked
to deficit drugs rather than creating educational systems that
actually work for them. It's unlikely that the schools could
handle filtering for future mass murderers given that they can't
even manage their primary mission.
It seems the entire surrounding group was out of touch. Was the
father
so removed that he spent no time with his son and simply paid
off the mother to make a problem go away so he could continue his
wealthy much better than yours life? Are we really to believe that
he had no knowledge of his son's activities?
Who are we to judge these people anyway? We should be judging
ourselves that we have allowed such disconnected social systems
to become commonplace, and feel that we bear no responsibility
to each other or towards the communities we live in.
Leigh
On 18 Dec 2012 at 12:38 AM, Marcus G. Daniels related
> Hi,
>
> When it comes to gun control and parents, does the government try to
> cross-examine parents seeking purchase of weapons to be sure their
> remarks about their children are sufficiently detached and
analytical?
> Do we expect parents to know the inner lives of their introverted
> children, and even adult children? The hopes by and
expectations of
> parents seem counter to an honest assessment of an odd child,
especially
> in upper-middle class Connecticut. It seems Nancy Lanza did have a
> basic misapprehension of her son. If she didn't she would have
known
> it was inappropriate to have such efficient weapons in the house.
>
> I think the kind of cultural change that would be needed to identify
> cases like Adam Lanza would, in general, be considered too
intrusive and
> rejected by most Americans. It would involve, I expect, that
> apparently introverted kids would receive psychological
assessments, and
> that those assessments, would need to be actionable without parental
> consent. Like most school assessments, they would discourage any
> subtle judgement by the fraction of teachers capable of the task.
>
> Marcus
>
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