Innocence Not So Much Lost As Thrown From A Moving Car
As a Democrat during the quadrennial (my new favorite word) Parade of Rich White Folks that is the Republican National Convention, I feel something of a hypocrite. Again.

As I may or may not have mentioned in my last post (I could check, but eh...), Mrs. Pops and I have eschewed the fine public school system here in Riverside in favor of a Catholic school.

Without getting into too much detail about the Dickensian details of my upbringing (we weren't poor, just surrounded by a bunch of oddly named characters with gross melodramatic tendencies and Victorian English accents), Big Government has been helpful here and there. Public school should be a no-brainer for my own kids.

So the decision to go parochial wasn't made out of any kind of hostility toward public education. After all, I am a product of public school. Not only am I cultured and urbane, I can use words like "cultured" and "urbane" and mostly understand what they mean. Also, I can read passingly well, I'm six feet tall and devastatingly handsome. So there are plenty of things about public school to recommend.

But I've found out through experience as a parent that things sometimes do not go the way you plan. For instance, I planned on being able to sleep in for the next fifteen years or so. Not going to happen, apparently. I swear, just as they're getting over sunrise feedings, they all of a sudden need to be driven all over the goddamn place at all ungodly hours. It's a conspiracy.

The real reason is that at five years old, our son was exhibiting all the tell-tale signs of juvenile innocence. He's trusting, credulous, friendly, and only occasionally sarcastic. So when we got the orientation packet from the school and saw we were required to sign a paper agreeing to supplement, encourage and in no way countermand the teachings of the school in particular and the Church in general, we gleefully did so.

We were worried his disillusionment and hostility toward organized religion would be partial, incomplete, so we decided to take the only step we know of that can ensure a lifetime of internal spiritual confusion and unresolvable personal guilt. By teaming up of Parents and Church and School, we can triangulate our authoritarian bearing and wear him down to the point where intellectual rebellion will be an inevitibility.

If he went to public school, he might find all kinds of ordinary, unsophisticated ways to rebel like underage drinking or promiscuity or a bloody multi-state crime spree. You know, the things that kids do.

But this way, if we all try our best, we can break him spiritually by the time he's 12. I think of all the stinging, willfully hurtful things he will direct at me and "my church" which he "never asked to join" and how I should take "my God" and "shove Him up [my] ass" and I just about weep with joy.

O, the angry, cynical man we will make of him. It will be my gift to the world.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 5.1


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 2:06 PM