student_weapons_da_300.jpgInvariably after getting married come the flood of questions about children; “when will you have kids?” or “how many will you have”. A couple of days ago I was discussing this with co-workers and wondered why anyone would choose to have kids in this day in age with little way to keep them safe. You can do a great job raising intelligent, unselfish, self-aware children only to see the damage done by their peers. The threats seem to increase in volume and in seriousness with each passing year. The bullies don’t just beat them up after school, they create blogs, and post videos on YouTube, and trash them on Myspace; the bullied retaliate in kind. And in some rare cases they go much farther than we could when I was a kid.

I’m sure you’ve all read about the 14 year-old kid and his arsenal of guns. 14 year old kids aren’t renown for their impulse control so the number of guns this 14 year old had immediate access to is sobering. This comes one day after a 14 year old in Cleveland killed himself after shooting four people.

I want to blame the parents for this. Not the parents of this kid (although there’s a ton a blame there). I want to blame the other parents. On whole, today’s generation of children are uninformed, selfish, and unintelligent. It’s a combination that might make you President, but not a good person. Parents have created monsters and don’t know this because of either ignorance or a lack of caring. Most of them don’t worry as long as their kids are on top - no matter how they get there. Is it no surprise that the cheating in school, in sports, in society is at an all-time high? When I was a kid, if you found out your child was a bully, you were ashamed - now it’s “better you than him”.

You wonder if you can send your kids to good schools, but Plymouth Whitemarsh is a good school. (I guess the poor get shot on their way to school, the rich get shot in school). How in the world do you keep your children away from this element? And if you can’t, how does a parent live with it?

Mind you, I don’t want the parents of this child to go unnoticed. The mother bought and gave guns to her son. The guns were in plain sight. The NRA will say we don’t need new gun laws, to enforce the ones we have, but these guns were legally purchased and once in the house, what’s the police to do. How can anyone not see a problem with the system here?

In the book Children of Men, the world suffers from mass infertility. With this, there is a selfishness that grows because people can only live for themselves - there’s no future in the world, no children to instruct and pass wisdom to. It’s as if we’ve created a similar world in reality. No mass infertility, but no future either.

I’d love to hear from parents on this.

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