He isn’t half as retarded as the system that makes such stories predictably inevitable.
“Juvenile” would say “Hold my beer” on arrests if he were old enough to have beer and his name wasn’t withheld to protect him from consequences of being a congential parasite.
And sorry, lady. “We” haven’t done this and they’re not “our children.”
Collectivist thinking is what got “us” into this mess.
[Via Michael G]
So we go from “It takes a village to raise a child” smack into the realities of “When everyone is in charge, no one is in charge.”
I think I met my paternal grandfather once. My understanding is that he was quite capable of, and quite likely to, drink his entire week’s wages on payday if he wasn’t stopped. As the youngest child and only son, and from an elementary school age, it became my dad’s job to stop him. My dad’s success or failure on his job of getting my grandfather home with money in his pocket determined how much money my grandmother and two aunts had available to support themselves for the following week.
From my dad’s life lessons, and his refusal to use his dad’s choices as an excuse, I learned that no one is responsible for my behavior, and that I am not responsible for anyone else’s behavior.
The bottom line is that the young man in the above story is f*cked up because he chose to be f*cked up. It may or may not be possible to teach him to make better life choices, but very likely society as a whole would be better off to write him off and use those resources to help out those better deserving of help.
“And that is all I have to say about that” — Forrest Gump