While the killing of Osama bin Laden is being enthusiastically celebrated throughout America and parts of the world; to say that such merriment is out of order will surely be considered heresy. Nonetheless, I’m saying it — because it needs to be said. What I am tempted to say is this: Get a grip, celebrators. Have you so little decency?
On Facebook, a lengthy exchange of written posts and ripostes by some of my Deming neighbors on HB 172 actually roused one person to cheer the armed policemen who recently used pepper spray on an eight year old in a Colorado classroom. “Kudos!” she wrote. “That kid will think twice next time.”
It is remarkable to witness such enthusiasm for police violence, appropriate or not, even when the subject is a child, with no equivalent enthusiasm for social workers and counselors who heal children’s hearts with listening and compassion. Children are not our enemies, but our deepest and most sacred responsibility.
Do child predators bamboozle you? This is the headline from an email I received from Yello Dyno.
“We’ve been bamboozled long enough. The old saying ‘out of sight, out of mind’ has become the social norm, much to the delight of child predators.”–The Yello Dyno email continues. Yes, I agree we have been bamboozled long enough by predators–and society is also being bamboozled by Yello Dyno. Yello Dyno’s focus regarding child sexual abuse looks at the sexual child abuse predator outside the family. This is totally misleading. Studies reveal that 80% of children, who are sexually abused, are abused by a family member; 19% are abused by people the child knows and trusts.
Last week, a Brookhollow Elementary mom reported that she was furious since her son had been spanked twice by the principal. She says the school did not have her consent to use corporal punishment on the fifth grader. In response, LISD’s Superintendent Roy Knight is not making any apologies.
By the time she spanks, it is the mom’s second misbehavior. The first is whatever she did or did not do to cause the child to “misbehave.” A 15-month-old or a 3-year-old may be curious, impatient, goading, erring, attention-seeking and cuddle-requiring.