I hate to say it, but if my child was 18… and did something reprehensible… my response would be, “He’s eighteen. He made his choices. Let him live with them.”
As it is, my child is 21… and I made damn sure she knew, WELL before she was 18, that she would be living with any choices she made… as well as paying the consequences of any mistakes.
(True, her mother and I would have helped her, but we didn’t think she really needed to know that. And I’m not sure I would be helping my kid beat the rap, if I saw her on videotape, jackbooting some retarded child…)
I’d just like to share something semi-sorta related. My brother in law is mentally retarded- he probably functions at about an 8th grade level, maybe. He lives in a group home and works full time and has made a great life for himself and is a very happy person.
When he was younger (around 18), he was at a town fair. Everyone in his small town has known him since he was a child, and people generally stayed out of his hair and didn’t pick on him. He had never been aggressive toward anyone and any picking was just met with laughter. Well, he was at the fair, and an older boy started in on him- making fun of how he talks (he stammers and has a high pitched voice), and things of that nature. All was OK until the guy made a comment about having “fucked his mother”.
Before anyone could blink an eye, my brother in law punched this guy square in the face, knocked him OUT (as in, unconsious), and stammered over his bloody knocked out self “NO ONE talks that way about MY MOTHER!”. My husband said he’d really never seen anything like it- a one punch, out cold knock out like that. He’d endured personal taunts all his life, but by God he was having NONE of this asshole talking smack about his mom.
Just nice to know that sometimes these losers get theirs. I’d be willing to bet that was the last time he ever harassed someone he perceived to be weaker then him. He got one hell of a surprise. Two wrongs don’t make a right, but I love the thought of that guy bleeding all over and heading to the hospital for having told a retarded kid that he fucked his mother. Beauty.
I, too, think that the parents should have some culpability in this crime. For the love of pete, they raised fucking ANIMALS. What is wrong with people?
Dude. WHAT THE FUCK IS UP with all the ‘good kids’ committing crimes lately?
And not only that, but video taping them.
I really have to start asking myself what has changed in the world since I was a teenager (because it wasn’t THAT long ago), but I just don’t remember people being this sick and strange. Is it because I was a kid at the time? Or because I’m remembering a world through rose colored brain waves?
I mean, we had a kid spray paint our gym bright pink one weekend and he was just about compared to Hitler in the paper. That was the ‘bad seed’.
I remember the days when you used to have to be a good kid in order to be called one. And of course, back in those days, I was neither. But hell, I’d have been undergoing beautification if measured on the same scale that registers these fucknuts as good.
I can hear the Pope advocating my pending sainthood now, “For continually skipping classes, drinking and smoking on school property, and being a class clown… all without maiming someone while laughing and filming the assault, I hereby recommend Waverly of New York be considered for canonization.” wild applause from the cardinals
I’m thinking that in this context, the term ‘good’ has come to mean ‘not socio-economically challenged’ or ‘who’d of thunk it?’
This kind of butts up against something that I have been unsuccessfully pondering for years. I have seen some delightful, intelligent, thoughtful people raise total snots. I have also seen people I would not have allowed to be responsible for hamsters raise some damn nice people. And I don’t get it. I flat don’t get it.
In one instance, some people with children the same age as my own, who I have watched pretty carefully. One son is as fine a young man as you would want to know. The other is a total skunk.
Had they not been caught, they certainly would have searched out another victim, and then another. If there’s one thing to be thankful for in this, it’s that their stupidity was so grandiose as to be terminal.
Yes, there’s nothing more pleasing than wishing rape on someone,and in turn wishing for another rapist in the world. I guess 46,000 wrongs make a right.
I think it is a little unfair to blame the parents for the kids’ actions, or even for the parents dumbfounded response. First of all, sometimes parents just cannot make enough of a difference when “teaching” their kids. Some kids can’t be reached. It doesn’t mean that the parents did not try, or are eveil people. Secondly, parents often do not want to believe that thier child, the one they bathed, dressed, and brought up, could do such horrible things. It is an idea that will take some getting used to.
Lastly, I am not surprised when I hear people talk about how these are “good kids.” Many of them may have been great kids, who never did anything wrong before, but were pressured by their friends to take part. I am not excusing them, and I fully believe they should have to suffer severe consequences for their behavior. But, it is possible that (some of them anyway) just lost their heads for a while, having never done anything like this before. It is easy to rush to judgement after hearing something like this, but I think we can all imagine situations where we, or someone we know and trust, has behaved in a way we never thought possible. Sometimes people slip up…
I don’t know how a parent, after being confronted with the tape could actually say, “He’s a good kid, and the truth will come out soon.” The truth has come out, twit.
Christ, if I had done what these kids had done, I would have begged the police to keep me in jail because I know what my father would have done to me. I’m damn sure “good kid” wouldn’t have been a part of anything he had to say.
I think a lot of times the phrase “good kids” just means kids that fit a superficial idea of social acceptability. A kid with a sharp haircut and nice clothes is “good,” and a goth or a punk kid with a goatee or a nose ring is “troubled.”
Ted Bundy was very clean cut, intelligent, charming and academically successful. I guess he was a “good kid” too.
Maybe instead of sending these “good” kids to jail, we could simply find several willing citizens to beat the shit out of each of them and videotape each beating. I’m not suggesting a fatal beating for each of them but rather a hospitalization job with some broken bones.
Diogenes I’d add this qualifier to the “good kid” definition,
“good kid” = never been caught being a “bad kid” until now
Back in my own misspent youth, I was very much considered a “good kid,” who helped out his elderly neighbors, stayed out of legal trouble, and watched out for the little tykes who lived on our block (most of whom were the younger sibs of my burnout criminal friends), but if anyone in a position of authority had known half of the stuff I got away with, “good kid” is not the phrase they’d have chosen to describe me.
I’ve reformed a whole bunch since then, but I’m pretty sure I’d have been considered a convict, had my misdeeds come to light.
[sub]And yet the crowd of JD’s I ran with would have organized a lynch party for these 5 (alleged) schmucks. There’s some shit you just don’t do.[/sub]
These were not 6 year old kids here. They were grown ups who made the decision to do what they did on their own. Do you think they didn’t know how wrong it was when they were doing it? Fucking A they did. They just did not care. I highly doubt any of their parents used to sit around talking about how they used to go around beating people on video tape and how it was even FUNNIER when they beat up retarded kids!
When I was 13-14 me and a couple buddies used to pick on this kid for no reason all the time. I won’t go into the details but eventually we got busted by the police for calling his house and being the equivilant af phone terrorists. I knew it was wrong at the time, but I thought it was funny. Within a few hours of getting picked up by the cops it really sank in how awful what I had done was and I felt genuinly bad about causing him and his family all the grief that we did. I didn’t feel bad for myself, just for him and his parents.
It really WAS uncharacteristic of me and I still to this day regret treating him like that. My parents basically threw me to the wolves on that one and let me step up to take whatever legal repercussions were coming my way. I did something that people could say “Oh his parents musta raised him wrong”. But my parents raised me and my sister right and it was all MY fault and there was absolutely NOTHING they could have done differently to prevent it other than lock me in the basement.
The parents shouldn’t shoulder ANY of the blame here and I don’t think it is really all that odd that they are trying to help their kids who did this. They may have personal feelings of failure and that is understandable, but there should be no legal responsibility on the parents.
Baboons do exactly this. The stronger simians gang up on the weakest member and torment him either to ostracism or death. It’s “Nature’s Way.” Keeps the tribe strong, and all that.
This is just one more piece of evidence that humans are, at the basis of our biology, irrational primates with an imperfect veneer of intermittent rationality sprinkled over the top.