Proverbs 13, Verse 1
"A wise youth accepts his father's rebuke;
a young mocker doesn't."
---
CHIPPED WISDOM:
Sometimes, in life, you're just chatting away with your barber, and the subject of corporal punishment comes up. Maybe, another month, you're talking about capital punishment. Who knows how these things happen?
They just do.
If you know me at all (and, just so you know, you do) you probably know that I've gone to the same barber who gave me my first non-mommy-spinning-me-around-on-the-toilet-and-giving-me-the-Moe-Howard-special haircut. He's closing in on eighty, but even over half-a-century of ardent cigarette smoking hasn't dulled his good Italian looks. Of course, the false teeth help.
Anyway, today, as my locks were tumbling down around my plastic gown and onto the floor below, waiting to get swept away by the slightly overweight broom princess, the subject of corporal punishment came up. I have no idea how. These things, as I may have alluded to earlier, just happen. Like pimples. And jokes about dirty vicars. And people who like Jodie Foster maybe a little bit too much.
So this thing happened today, and my barber was telling me what the problem was, as he saw it, with corporal punishment. Oh, boy, I thought. Here we go.
"It's that so many parents these days hit their kids out of anger," he said.
Right, I thought. As if you're going to discipline your child with your hand out of compassion, or slight hunger.
And I was thinking to myself at that moment: well, old buddy, you've got a wide breadth of vocabulary on you. You've got tact and style and a fine ol' way a' talk that makes people feel right cozy like: are you going to use your tasteful, carefully-selected words to gently offer this aging hair care professional whom you've known all your life a different perspective on the world? Are you going to judiciously counter his views and proffer your own kinder, gentler ways as a fitting substitute for the barbaric practice of physically harming your own children to prove a point or drive home a particular lesson?
Want to know what I said?
"Well, right. Because, when you're angry, you're just not in full control of all your faculties, and it would be easy for a parent to go too far."
"Exactly!" he said.
Snip snip snip.
Snip.
Internally, I shook my head. To actually do so would have caused unfortunate and undo damage to my do which, to be honest, doesn't look so hot anyway. I wasn't internally shaking my head at him-- at his truculent insistence that there is nothing wrong with laying a hand on your child, (you know, as long as you're not angry) but at myself, for essentially agreeing with him, and validating him.
Look, I get it. He's nearly eighty: his spanking days are over. That came out wrong. (So did that, but you know what I mean. Perv.) But it's not about him; it's about me. About my spineless reluctance to avoid confrontation. To abhor it. To run screaming from it. Well, silent screaming. Real screaming would engender too much chance for confrontation. Someone might yell at me to "SHUT UP!" and then, well, that's a confrontation. I have strong opinions, but don't always have the willingness to back them up, especially if it's involving someone I care about.
You know, like my barber.
Can't we just have a conversation about how annoying it is to drive down a highway with the setting sun directly in your fucking face? That's something we can all agree on. And it doesn't involve hitting defenseless children who are under your care and it doesn't involve hurting anybody's feelings or making anybody mad or making anyone sweat or causing undue stress or concern or even the slightest little teensy weensy bittle tittle of discomfort. Because driving into the sun fucking sucks, and you know it and I know it.
Even my barber knows it. He also knows that, every two months or so, my eyebrows need to be trimmed. And that breaks my heart in a way that I can't really fully describe to you. I don't want to grow old. I don't want to spank my children. I don't want to be angry with you or my barber or the sunset or my children or my father or his father, or yours.
Snip.
No comments:
Post a Comment