Dreams, kids, and failures

So I was writing about dreams for a while, and put this on my iphone but never published it (mobile blogging is really only helpful when I can't get to a computer. Otherwise, the kbd on my iphone is so small it's just annoying). Don't know when I wrote this, but it does seem that I'm starting to sleep more deeply -- I'm starting to remember that I have dreams. Like last night I dreamt something. I can almost see/feel it, but can't remember it. So the day I wrote this post, I titled it "more weird dreams." It said "Last night I dreamed that I saved a little puppy. Went to cuddle with it but its bigger sibling or parent sunk her teeth into my hand. she broke skin, but neither one of us was giving up. Turns out I shook the older dog off, and that's all I remember." Which remind me that last night's dream had something to do with disappointment or overcoming adversity or something like that, but I can't remember.

That's old stuff. What I really want to write about today is our kids. I watched the news this morning as I was getting ready for work, and it occurs to me that we Americans simply make pawns of our children. OK, maybe this is an opinion formed from watching Madea's Big Happy Family last night, but that's not what comes to mind. What comes to mind is the woman who committed suicide and killed three of her kids because she was mad at her husband, the same husband who forced the grieving, devastated families (and older son, of whom he was not the father) to have SEPARATE funerals for the mother and the children. As if that weren't bad enough, the idiot wouldn't let some members of the woman's family attend the funeral of the kids. The surviving child, from what I understand, attended his mother's funeral but not that of his siblings. In life, in death, and even in their funerals, these poor children were simply pawns in the arguments between a stupid man and a stupid woman. May God have mercy on all of them.

God never blessed me with kids. I'm thinking that I may do an Elton as I get older and adopt a kid, but thankfully as soon as the thought enters my head it is chased away. I like kids -- I love kids when I get to play with them for a while and they get to go home to somebody else. They are adorable and fascinating, but they're also a tremendous responsibility and a whole lot of work. I don't understand how people go around having babies at 16 and another at 18 and another at 23, and I sure as heck don't understand why I should pay to support those kids. No, you shouldn't make the kids suffer, but you also shouldn't allow people to continue to reproduce when they have no reasonable expectation of being able to take care of their progeny. Really. We don't let people borrow money if they aren't likely to be able to pay it back, and they have to have some sort of collateral. Why, then, do we allow people to continue to have children without any reasonable expectation of being able to take care of them?

That's an aside, but I'm not talking about just physically caring for them. What about the psychological wellbeing of our children? Really, folks. Yes, I think bullying is horrible. But kids are knuckleheads, and it's human nature to be divisive. I remember being not so much bullied as ostracized -- well, not really ostracized, but everyone thought I was weird -- I was a geek, I hung out with white folks and didn't hate them, I didn't have a dad at home, I lived with my grandparents, I was a "goody-two shoes," -- and I DIDN'T CARE what other people thought. That's what gets me about our kids today. So WHAT if they think you're too ugly or too smart or too fat or too gay or too this or too that -- why aren't we raising kids with enough self-knowledge, self-confidence, self-awareness, self-assurance that they can deflect that criticism and go on with their lives? I'm not saying you need to live with the bullies. I'm not even saying you need to fight back (although the fat kid who got bullied, held his peace as long as he could, finally got fed up and body-slammed the little bully -- that kid will always be my hero) -- I'm not saying you need to go to that extreme. But I'm saying that the answer is not suicide. When bullies do their dirty and kids commit suicide, yes, there's an atrocity committed by the bullies, but there's also an atrocity committed by the kids who committed suicide! I'm reminded of the song: " I know who I am. I know my identity. I know who I am. My name is VICTORY."

If there was ever an indicator that we need to raise our kids up with Jesus, I think now would be that indicator. We've clearly lost our direction as a nation -- we've so diluted our thinking that we have no moral standards, and no moral strength or character to pass on to our kids. We rear them in this falsely idyllic, non-confrontational, pseudo-utopian cloistered lie, and then when the harshness of reality sets in and they're not able to cope, we want to blame other folks. Life's hard, people. Wear a helmet. Mean people are idiots. Killing yourself because people are mean doesn't stop them from being mean and it sure as heck doesn't improve your situation. We need for our kids to understand that. We need for them to understand that perfect love casts out fear. We need them to understand that there's a greater Power than the one that would accuse, berate, steal, kill, and destroy. Our kids are too precious to hand them over to that false power, yet whenever we fail to teach them about the True Source of Power, we offer them up, tender innocents on a silver platter, to be devoured by the ever-present evil ones.

I know I sound like a nut job, but really: aren't the good kids worth saving? Why should their power, value, and worth be subordinated to that of the bad kids? Isn't part of rearing kids helping them to understand and realize their value and worth?

I just think the recent rash of suicide-as-response-to-bullying is a sign that we as a society have failed our children. (There were two middle school girls who had a sleepover and hanged themselves in what appears to be a suicide pact, likely their response to bullying. OK, but one of them was being treated for depression. Where was the supervision? Why is that suicide solely the fault and responsiblity of the bully? What responsibility did the parents have to supervise and protect their children?) I think that atrocity with the mother killing her kids to get back at the boyfriend and him using attendance at the funeral as a weapon against the family is further evidence that we, as a people, have lost any concept of civility and morality. It may not be completely lost, but this kind of crap goes on and "good people" do nothing. We're not outraged, we're not going to stand up and say it's wrong -- and that's how evil flourishes.