DADWAGON

Listen up, assholes: if you want to beat your kids, do it yourself.

That’s the moral of this (un)godly tidbit from Southern California’s Inland Empire (yes, San Bernardino actually calls itself that) over the weekend. Some parents thought their 15-year-old son had been smoking. Punishable offense? Maybe. My kids don’t smoke. They’re still in preschool and such. So who I am I to judge parents of teenagers?

[Although, really, isn’t that kid going to be out of the house soon enough? At what point do you start planning for the day when they’re going to have to make their own decisions without the threat of your furies? Wouldn’t talking with the kid be just as effective, which is to say, as completely ineffective, as beating them? Because we are all born alone and will die alone and the years in between are infused with savage doses of free will that allow us to injure ourselves in the most spectacular ways anyhow.]

Whatever.

There is a HUGE difference, however, between “Beating Your Child” and “Having Your Child Beat”. From the AP article:

The parents asked Paul Kim, 39, to discipline their son after finding a lighter in his possession, dropping the boy off at Kim’s Chino Hills home with permission for the beating, San Bernardino County sheriff’s spokesperson Cindy Bachmann said Saturday.

Kim hit the child with a metal pole about a dozen times, causing severe bruising on his legs, according to Bachmann. The pole was about an inch in diameter, investigators said.

See? This is bullshit. Not just because you have a church acting as a sort of Craigslist for beaters—apparently other parishioners had relied on Mr. Kim for his child-beatings before. And not just because this goes way beyond corporal punishment and into mobsters-collecting-protection-money type violence. Rather, this is bullshit because it robs the parents of the only verifiable result of beating your kid: the smug sense of satisfaction mixed with vengeance.

Corporal punishment doesn’t actually help the kid, doesn’t straighten them out or toughen them up. It’s really mostly for the parent. They’re angry, they’ve been lied to or they feel inadequate. And hitting their child is a great release for them, at least for the moment. That’s why they do it: to answer their own dismal set of emotions. Sending some dude from your church to do it for you takes all that away, and your just left with an ineffective bit of brutality. And, thankfully in this case, a big fat criminal charge.

For the past two months, I haven’t had much to say about Occupy Wall Street. I mean, I agreed in principle with the protesters’ arguments: the inequality of wealth in this country is staggering, and rich people and corporations essentially control politics. And one day I even toured Zuccotti Park with DadWagon’s own Theodore Ross; it was interesting to witness, but it didn’t bring about in me much of an emotional response. Perhaps it’s because I’m deathly allergic to drum circles, sloganeering, and the human microphone. At best, the whole thing depressed me, because despite the media attention (and widespread public support) OWS has attracted, I couldn’t see it changing much in this world. I may be on their side, but I had to watch from the other side of the barriers.

But as of yesterday morning, I’m more than depressed. I’m frustrated and angry and nearly totally disillusioned. Of course, it’s not like I expected Mayor Bloomberg to allow the protests to go on forever; he’s too much of a classical tyrant for that. It’s just that I’d hoped that the NYPD would go about clearing the demonstrators in an even-handed manner. That was obviously an unreasonable expectation, and I knew it at the time, but still, having watched the videos, scanned the photos, and read the eyewitness accounts, I’m appalled at the fury and glee with which the cops cleared the park, as if they truly enjoyed knocking hippies’ heads and sending these spoiled, whining kids to jail.

What makes this ever more frustrating is that my daughter, Sasha, is now almost 3 years old—an age at which she can spot policemen and police cars on the street, and so is probably old enough that I can start telling her that if there’s a big problem, if she’s lost or if someone’s hurt, she should go fetch a cop. Which is absolutely what she should do. It’s what I would do, too.

Except that I absolutely do not trust the police at all. It’s not just the clearing of Zuccotti Park. There’s the gun-running, the needless arrests, the planting of evidence on thousands of people, and the assholish culture of impunity that pervades the force. My lack of trust isn’t exactly new: As a teenager, I was a skateboarder, and skateboarders in the 1980s and 1990s quickly learned that guys with blue uniforms were to be avoided at all costs. They were jerks, and jerks at our expense.

Now, however, I’m ever more conflicted, because I live in a small corner of Brooklyn that needs more police presence. Things aren’t apocalyptic here—instead of rampant murders and violence, we have teenage vandalism, drug-dealing, and the occasional gunshot. But those are precisely the things that an increased police presence would help prevent, if the local precincts were willing to send more car and foot patrols around.

Some (particularly those in the Bloomberg administration) might argue that it’s partly because of protests like Occupy Wall Street that the NYPD is stretched so thin. Which is bullshit. I’m willing to accept that the protest needs some police oversight (there have been crimes like theft and sexual assault in the encampment), but the protests have been largely peaceful—i.e., not deserving of a massive police presence capped by a clearing-out by cops in riot gear. If the mayor is really interested in preserving public health and safety, he could, you know, start in my neighborhood.

Except that now it’s too late. Who trusts the NYPD anymore? Certainly not the kids in the housing projects that bookend my block. And now not us concerned, progressive New Yorkers. When If I see the cops circling my neighborhood, am I supposed to feel safer? Given what happened Monday night—and over the past several years—I have to say the answer is no. Would I still call 911 in an emergency? Of course—what choice do I have? But would I expect prompt, reliable, professional assistance? Not really. By its actions, the NYPD has eroded whatever sympathies it might have built up in this era of historically low crime.

And again, how do you explain this to your kids? How do you convey the necessity of trusting authorities that you—equally necessarily—cannot actually trust? At 3 years old, Sasha is still too young for such a complicated discussion, but I know exactly what I’m going to do when she’s the right age: I’m going to give her a skateboard, and let her find out for herself.

I have on various occasions written of JP’s taste for both videogame playing and the use of e-readers, and described my at best ambivalent feelings about said pursuits.

Now, from the Demise of the Childhood Mind chronicles comes a story with a (relatively and likely temporary) happy ending: JP has become so engrossed with learning to read (on paper) that he has utterly forgotten about videogames and the Nook!

It’s kind of amazing, really: my child has forsaken Angry Birds in order to spend time reading the Biscuit book series. I didn’t expect this. I tended to think that the road into the world of electronic temptations ran but one way–down, my friends, down. Apparently not.

So, now, of an afternoon, instead of JP bitching that I don’t let him play his Nintendo DS enough, he’s bitching that I’m not reading enough books with him (and not playing enough chess, another obsession of late). This is good! My child still bitches–incessantly–but about things I believe are benevolent! Who knows how long it will last, but for the time being, I am pleased.

I will abstain for complaining for at least the next 24 hours.