How To Consume A Child

Recently, the people of Florida were shocked when a 14-year-old girl by the name of Rebecca Sedwick tragically took her own life due to the ravages of cyber-bullying and other difficulties with particular kids at her school. The details surrounding her death are tragic at best and enraging at worst. 

Any child lost is a failure of human beings as a species; either we failed to protect our offspring or we produced offspring that we could never protect in the first place. However, I am personally at an impasse about how I feel regarding this terrible situation. 

You see, the party most responsible for bullying this girl has been arrested by the police for just that: being a bully. In this particular case, the bullying was primarily via Twitter, Facebook, and other electronic forums; not the old-school type of bullying where someone beats you up for your lunch money. This is a new breed of bullying, but it is no less damaging. 

Children rarely fear physical danger; we know this from when we were teenagers. What they do fear is being ridiculed, ostracized, and separated from their peers by status and social class. 

Adolescence is a difficult transition period for everyone. It is a time where one is figuring out who they are and what place in society that they will best fit. Teens are forming their own identity based at least partially on the characteristics of those around them. Without some kind of support system that is equally balanced between friends and family, perceived or actual, then we become no one.

Feeling like you don't belong to a peer group,  paired with the actual desire to belong to something, goes against the social-evolutionary processes of our species. After enough ostracization, abuse, neglect, anger, solitude, bitterness, longing, and all of the other feelings that we are meant to release to others, others like us, we begin to adapt. Evolve. Change. Bottle up the anger. Force down the sadness.  Disconnect the wiring that promotes socialization.  

Then what? Some say to get a hobby. Find something you love. Rewire the brain towards a creative endeavor. Obviously, these ideas are fertile and beautiful in their intent, but tumultuous without nurturing and guidance. It requires work on the part of those close to the ghost in question. 

Sometimes we have to be the helpful spirit that holds a lantern in the darkness so that the lost ghost of a downward spiral can find his or her way back home.

Some embrace their solitude and develop something exclusively for themselves. Some become guitar virtuosos. Others lose themselves in books and literature. Writing poetry. BMX racing. Exercise. Video games. Anything. The reasoning behind the drive to hone in on a particular thing is unique to the individual. Some do it as an offering to the altar of society's acceptance. Others want to meet like-minded individuals. The strongest require no such reasoning and just want to be a bad motherfucker at whatever they are doing. 

But as we have all learned over the past decade (+), this solitude can have a darker side. This is where we get school shooters, teenage suicides, and other emotionally hardened outsiders who no longer desire to be with us and don't care whether or not you are with them. Often, this is where we get the bullies, which is a weird circular pattern that has a lot to do with power and little to do with sense.   

Bullies have usually been robbed of their voice or any kind of control over any aspect of their life. In combination with the lack of tools necessary to compensate for this, they too are led to the frantic, destructive pursuit of power and dominance over others to splint the fractured structures of their own self-image. 

People who make it a point to ridicule others simply because they do not like them or because they are different are punishable by having their teeth kicked in by those people to act as a proverbial eye for a proverbial eye. If a bully continues to stomp, emotionally or physically, on their target(s) long after their surrender, then society should be able to deftly recognize the sociopathic traits of a person who has attached emotional weight and value to extreme acts of violence and cruelty, sometimes to a perverse degree. 

If you are a parent, as I am, then imagine writing these words on what would have been your child's 13th birthday:

"I remember so clearly the moment you were born. I knew I was gifted with a precious life and every moment since, I did my very best to protect you and now I feel like I failed that very important job that God gave me because He took you from me way too soon,"

Those are the words of Tricia Norman, the mother of a ghost.

If you are a parent, as I am, then imagine a total of 15 other teenage children blasting your child relentlessly on Twitter and Facebook, by email, in class, and on the streets with words like: 

"nobody cares about u"

"you seriously deserve to die"

Those are the words of Guadalupe Shaw, the accused "leader" of the pack of wild-dog bullies.

If you are a parent, as I am, then imagine the last words of your child's life that you will ever read are the following:

"I'm jumping. I can't take it anymore."

If you are a parent, as I am, then imagine the heartache of hearing your child's tormentor make this comment after you bury your baby:

"Yes IK [I know] I bullied REBECCA [a]nd she killed her self but IDGAF [I don't give a fuck],"

Those are the words of Guadalupe Shaw: technically human, obviously very far behind her peers in the study of spelling, and by no means destined for great societal contributions. 

I digress. Bullies are, in their own way, victims. Shaw has been arrested for aggravated stalking and will likely not fare well at the other end of this situation. The punishment she will probably receive for her "crime," the social stigma that will hang around her neck for years to come (during the most trying years of life for a child, to be sure), and all of the related trimmings are simultaneously inadequate as a trade for Rebecca's brief life, yet abhorrent as a punishment for a child in America.

Don't we have a right to be assholes, so long as we aren't actually impeding on someone's freedoms? Can we not talk shit anymore? Fuck me, I want to do it for a living. Wasn't free speech one of the main points that America's patriarchs made certain to put near the beginning of the Constitution?

Are children not exempt from many punishments because it is understood that they lack the necessary capacities to make rational decisions? Meaning, don't we know that they're mostly stupid? Isn't that why we cannot let them work real jobs and drink? Should we arrest children who have been raised poorly and have little to no supervision? Should we punish children for having bad examples of how to behave as adults?

I don't know that we should. Someone is at fault (see also: parents), certainly. But if we're going to punish children as adults, then I'll have to cook up another blog about how we'll have to extend all of the other freedoms afforded to adults to children as well. 

Back to the point: I am conflicted about how I feel about this whole situation. I understand that Rebecca had long been wrought with mental-health issues that possibly put her in a compromised position susceptible to bullying. I understand that Guadalupe's parents are grossly uneducated to a fault, and that such people breed incessantly, much to the chagrin of humanity.

I don't know how this fits into my political leanings, but I think that intelligence testing (to include critical thinking and problem-solving skills) should be mandatory prior to conception. Abortion and sterilization should be the consequences of failure to comply. Hello future, as seen in Fortress!

As long as they don't take my guns away. God forbid.

We cannot really punish bullies for the same reasons that we shouldn't punish musicians for making violent music or ban video games due to their content. These things are meant to be entertainment and are in no way substitutes for positive role models. 

For the sake emphasis, here's a list of factual reasons why I should be boiling kittens on my stove and knifing hobos to death:

• I've listened to violent music throughout my entire life: old-school gangsta rap and rock of all subgenres. 
• I've often favored video games based solely on their violence. 
• I come from parents who divorced when I was four years old.
• My family was well below the poverty line for the first half of my life. 
• I was sexually abused by a teenage girl as a very young boy (<10 y/o).   

I have all of the ingredients of a full-blown weirdo (easy, people). But I didn't become a killer (time will tell). I didn't become a sexual deviant, at least not in an illegal way. I have never bullied anyone. Furthermore, I have actual morals and values that are intact and were impressed upon me by good parents! I went to college! Became a professional in multiple fields!

I'm not bad at dad-ing, either.

Now that's not to say that I don't have issues. I think that mental issues are requirements for good comedians. But the real terror in the world comes from how we rear our young. They are a caffeinated, tech-savvy, brutal lot who think in black and white, on and off. Weighing one's actions against the way they will impact others is what makes us distinctly human. This is not a genetic trait, but rather a genetic capacity. We learn this. We are not born with empathy, but are capable of it. 

We need to learn about the action vs. reaction butterfly-effect of what we do from those around us just as much as we need to belong to a group of like-minded animals of the same species to learn from. If you leave a human child in the wild to be raised by wolves, he or she will act like a wolf without the societal trappings of rational thought. 

The world is the pack of wolves. If you intend to reproduce, then intend on raising the child like a human, a person, a valuable thing, because they truly are. Otherwise, you will get the wolf. 

I hate all kids, save for my own, but I know that they are going to inherit the world while I still occupy it. I love my son beyond measure or state of being: being a father is a truly supernatural experience.

Beyond selfishness, the reason I didn't want to have children of my own is that the world is too horrible to inflict upon anyone. This is especially true if that newborn someone would never have existed in the first place were it not for my superior genetic material and my distinct loathing of condoms.  

You'll have to take my word on that "superior genetic material" part. 

If we let the TV, movies, video games, music, and other damaged kids hatched from shitbird parents take the place of legitimate parenting, then we should not be surprised by the bedlam that they leave behind them. 

My heart and best wishes go out to the family of Rebecca Sedwick and to any parent who has ever had to bury a child for any reason.

Fate, it seems, occasionally forgets the appropriate order of things.