My wife’s cousin, let’s call him Chad, is a case study in how bad parenting can cause lasting harm. His mother ran out on the family and his dad is a professional sponge. Chad is 26 and hasn’t been able to hold down a job. Far from being a lazy asshole though, he’s an immensely likable guy. He has no idea that he has a poor work ethic; naively useless, I would say.
A few years back he fell in love with an evangelic Christian who worked her magic on his fragile mind and then left him a foot away from the altar. It absolutely devastated him, partly because he couldn’t figure out why God would bring them so close together and then tear them apart, and partly (speculation on my part) because he was so close to finally getting laid.
After a rocky year things finally turned around; he found a new Christian girl to not sleep with, and he landed a low-paying job as a youth minister. Well, “low-paying” is a bit kind; nearest I can tell his salary came out of whatever donations he could bring into the church, like a horrible mix of an MLM scheme and brutal sales job. He put us (my wife and I) on the church’s mailing list so we periodically got nagged for money that we never sent.
Chad’s real passion, he thinks, is law enforcement, and for the past 4 years he’s applied to every miserable outpost that will let him, but with no experience, a sketchy job history, and a middling GPA, there have been no takers. He even worked some security jobs, although being that those require you to show up at a set time, day in and day out, they didn’t last very long. But he kept praying and applying, praying and applying, until God informed him of his latest plan.
This is all new to me, but apparently most police departments don’t run their own academies. Instead, when they have an applicant that they want to hire, they’ll buy a slot in a nearby school, or if they’re cheap, they’ll reserve a slot that they expect their applicant to pay for. That’s the gist I got. Well these schools have instructors to pay and buildings to maintain, so when the police departments in the region aren’t buying enough slots, they’ll start cold calling impressionable young people to try to get them to pay out of pocket for a slot even thought odds are they won’t be able to land a job afterwards.
And that was how we received a deliciously passive-aggressive letter from the scamchurch wishing Chad the best of luck in his future endeavors while at the same time bemoaning how fucked they are at having to find a short-notice replacement for a guy who’s only worked there for 8 months, despite apparently having talked a big game about how he wanted to build a long-term youth program. This letter was the first we’d heard of any of it, and while discussing it with my [Christian] wife, she said something along the lines of, “What is he thinking? What an idiot.” To which I reflexively replied, “Well, I’m sure he prayed long and hard about this decision.”
I may not have any belief in the power of prayer, but I certainly believe in the power of my wife’s ice cold stare.
I am not a smart man.