<<<kelley I understand that seeing your angel getting raw treatmetn from some crypto-fascist authority figure can be a bit upsetting (been there, done that), but why on earth did you let him hang out at a mall? It's like letting a fox to a henhouse without any supervision.>>>
-------------- first, it's so commonplace 'round here...i expected it. i felt bad for the kid i watched tho: poor little puppy was crying. and from the look on his face i saw, unfortunately, a crypto-fascist in the making that is going to rebel against that kind of crap. my knee jerk assessment, admittedly.
i was more disturbed by the virulent racism. even tho i know better. more disturbed, to put it precisely, by my son having to hurt over it, to see it happen to his friends, to have to live in a world where the option to take the side of the aggressor is a lot easier than it is not to.
my kid was with his friend alex and his mother. she went to another store. even were he alone with his buds, i fail to see what is wrong with that. it is the world we swim in. when i was growing up, it was my catholic friends with strick parents who sometimes pysically and emotionally abused them who went wild when they finally got out from underneath their parents' repressive regimes.
e.g., meg used to get so loaded she'd fall off the barstool. her parents watched every move she made.
buck, his parents were similarly protective and domineering. buck dies in our senior year. he was driving home from his gal's home and hit some fog. truck went off the road. (he was a farmer's child). buck had sneaked out of the house to see her; his parents wouldn't let him.
i have never seen any good come of parents using prohibition like punitiveness to protect their kids from the world.
i spent plenty of time ramming 'round the streets. going to the drugstore to flip thru the mag rack, raising a ruckus here and there, errands for my mother. i see no reason why my son shouldn't go to the store to do his own shopping. he does, afterall, have to purchase things. we work with a budget and he knows what our expenses are and how much i earn. he knows that if he wants something, some other thing will have to wait. etc. see a book called PennyWise. that's how we do it. he's in charge of an "income" some drawn from my sharing my income. he gets it regardless of whether he does his chores or not. i don't hold back money because he hasnt worked. rather, i share my income because i love him and trust him to use it wisely. 1/3 of his allowance is his to spend, another third for med. terms savings. another for long term (for car, for college, for b ball camp)
in turn, the sonshine does his chores because he is a member of this household and does them because he loves us, because he belongs to our family and this is what it means to take care of each other.
when i called my mom she reminded me that my sister had gotten busted for same, tho my sister was 9 or so. see, woj, i and my sisters used to hop on our bikes and do some shopping for our mother--when we were five and up. i fail to see how that turned me into some kinda wack job. similarly, i doubt it turns my kid or others into wack jobs.
also, mom told me that her and her girlfriends regularly got together and made a day of going to the store and lifting 45s (45 rpm vinyl records).
mom says she thinks that the store mgmt probably just charged it to their parents accounts. i'll have to ask my gram if she remembers getting the bills.
what's the difference? the fucking police state. the increasingly dehumanization of society and our institutions. etc. the difference is the encroachment of the state in the service of capital into every sphere of our lives.