Pussi-what?

Pussi what?

I often ponder the deterioration of society as a whole. This brings to mind one of my favourite emails that has been going around for a few years. It talks about the kids of the sixties and seventies. Remember when…..

You did something stupid as a kid and it was your fault?

One of my brothers, when he was about 9 or 10, liked to play with matches. One day he set fire to the shower curtain. My mother was home, thank God, and he promptly got a spanking. Not knowing what to do about this child pyromaniac, she did what any mother should do when unsure about how to handle something like this.

She called the fire station.

She spoke to one of the deputy chiefs there and explained her problem. His response? Bring him by. We can show him what happens to children when they play with fire. So she did. And he never played with matches again.

A few years later, that brothers twin, at the age of fifteen, stole my mothers car. Well, not really stole it, but took it without permission. My Dad was away in England at the time and this particular child was often a handful for my mother. He was taller than her by then so spanking him wasn’t going to work. So she called the police. They showed up at my mother’s door, she let them in and while they were speaking, in walked my brother. That put enough of a scare into him that he didn’t pull that stunt again.

The point of these heart warming little anecdotes is this: In those days, when you did something wrong, no one said “Ah, it’s okay little Johnny, you’re just a kid, you didn’t mean to set fire to the house and kill your sister”. Or “Well, he’s just a young ‘un. Yeah, he shouldn’t have taken the car, but he didn’t know what he was doing.” Huh? Most mothers I knew when I was a kid taught their children a few basic rules: It's wrong to steal, it's wrong to kill and be respectful of your elders.

When I was a kid, the blame for something I did didn’t get shifted to the music I listened to, the movies I watched, the books I had read. My parents didn’t blame the teacher if I got poor marks in school. They didn’t blame my friends when I got caught shoplifting a chocolate bar. Do you see where I am going with this?

We were taught to take RESPONSIBILITY for ourselves. When something went wrong (usually something stupid we had done) we had no one to blame but ourselves.

The tendency now a days, I feel, is to focus blame to someone other than our beloved children. When those kids shot up Columbine, the parents tried to blame Marilyn Manson. It’s this sort of blame shifting that does everyone in our society a huge disservice. It teaches our youth, the people that will one day be our workforce, our leaders, our teachers and bankers, truck drivers and politicians, that it’s okay to screw up, we can blame someone else for it.

Instead, we should be teaching our children that yes, it’s okay to make mistakes, we’re human, everyone screws up once in a while, but you have to accept responsibility for our actions. Our justice system makes us take responsibility for our actions, (not always fairly, but that’s a discussion for another day).

The morning show on the radio station I listen to put it best: it's the pussification of our society. They maintain that we're bringing up a bunch of wimpy adults that put the blame on everything or everyone else. I agree. I think it's time to teach our children that they are the architect of their own lives.

Pussi-fication is preventable. Only you have the power!!