Scum
Mamacita says: My adored Tumorless Sister was attacked by a drunk wielding a vehicle the other day, and I am struggling, struggling, with the intense and immense hatred I feel for this driver. I hate it that he has made me hate him. I hate the helpless feeling hatred gives me. I feel that I could change it if I tried, but the truth is, I hate this man so thoroughly that I don’t feel he deserves any other emotion from anyone.
Condemnation is God’s prerogative, not ours. But for perhaps the second time in my entire life, I hope someone burns.
It’s not the addiction that makes me frantic with dislike; I understand that. Addictions can not always be helped; decent people strive mightily to overcome them. The weak merely indulge themselves. I have beloved, BELOVED, friends who struggle with addiction, and I admire their tenacity in TRYING more than I could ever convey to them. I love them. I support them. I will help them in any way that I can, and gladly. I am honored to help them. But they do not indulge their addictions and then get behind the wheel. This is where the line is drawn. This marks the difference between a decent, struggling person and weak scum.
To get behind the wheel of a potential weapon and start waving it around the neighborhood . . . . how is that any different from putting one’s hands on a loaded gun and waving it around a McDonald’s during a child’s birthday party? I see no difference at all.
My sister is a musician. Pianist. The drunk and his lethal weapon broke many of the little bones in her hand. The drunk used his vehicle to break her jaw, and to fracture her right eye socket. Is he sorry? Does he even remember what he did? I don’t care. I loathe him. The drunk was weaving down the street, too out of it to even see her. He didn’t target her, except that a drunk behind the wheel is actually targeting everybody in the world unfortunate enough to cross his path. A drunk driver always hurts the innocent. Sometimes, the drunk driver murders the innocent. It’s murder. The same murder that the person waving the loaded gun at the birthday party commits when he pulls the trigger and blows someone’s innocent little child away.
“He didn’t know what he was doing.” “He didn’t understand what he was doing.” Blah, blah, blah, cry me a river.
Don’t anybody dare rationalize the actions of a drunk driver to me. Life is full of choices. This man chose to be destructive. He chose to be a taker, not a giver. He chose. We all choose. Addictions are overwhelming, but that’s not what I hate.
It was the decision to get behind the wheel of a large, heavy, weapon that I hate.
I am not ordinarily a hater. Just the other day I was wondering how someone could possible HATE another person. I’ve disliked people, but hate? I know now that I never HATED anybody before. I know this because now I know what hate is.
I really don’t care what caused this man to get behind the wheel while he was indulging his addiction. I really don’t. I care only that somehow he is prevented from ever. so. much. as. touching. a. steering. wheel. again. Ever. I thought for a while that it would make me happy to know he was behind bars for the rest of his life, but quite frankly, in the mood I’m in, I begrudge the air that he breathes and I certainly do not want to pay for the food he eats or the clothes he wears.
He attacked my innocent sister with a huge, heavy weapon. He crossed the line. He is scum.
Self-Esteem Is For Those Who Earn It.
Mamacita says: I have never understood the utter gall and entitlement mindset of some parents. At the end of each grading period, these same parents would be storming the school, demanding a few extra points so Lil’ Bubba or Lil’ Miz Fancypants would be eligible to play ball or cheer or be promoted to the next level or jack that grade up a notch so he/she can be in the AP class with his/her friends, all this without doing any actual WORK that would deserve such.
“I’m benched because Mr. Justice failed me.” Excuse me? You’re benched because you failed yourself. Mr. Justice was just the scorekeeper, Lil’ Bubba.
If, during a basketball game, a parent came charging down out of the bleachers and demanded of the scorekeeper that Bubba get points because he tried so hard, the entire gym would rock with derisive laughter, well-earned. Why should Bubba get points when he didn’t earn any points? He shouldn’t, that’s what. To demand partial credit for a ball that didn’t go through the hoop would be ridiculous. Absurd. Laughable. Stupid.
And the same should go for the classroom.
Yes, some students do better than others. Some students are endowed with more brains or more physical prowess. Let these students get the points they so rightly earn. Is it unfair that other students, no matter how hard they try, just can’t seem to get the ball through the hoop? I don’t think “fair” even enters into the picture! Life can be hard, and we all have different strong points. To insist that anyone of any age in any category or capacity be given the gift of points or credit or rewards, etc, for something not rightfully earned is a slap in the face to those who DO earn their points. When everybody wins, nobody wins. When people who don’t earn it, get it anyway, it’s a monumentally gross unfairness to those who genuinely did earn it.
Self esteem, you argue? I call bullshit on that one. Do adults really believe a kid doesn’t know the difference between an earned award and a compensatory parental fantasy award? Nobody is fooled except the adults. Many’s the time I’ve overheard raucous laughter in the restroom after an awards program, because Bubba’s parents were beaming in the bleachers over his foot-high “way to show up!” trophy.
To quote Mandy Patinkin, “Let me sum up.”
A grade that wasn’t honestly earned is worthless and everybody knows it. A parent who goes to school and demands extra credit or some kind of freebie is a bad parent. Extra credit is for students who did the original credit and want some EXTRA. Extra credit is not “in place of” credit. Students who don’t do the work don’t deserve the points. If the student is in Cancun when the midterm exam is given, the student gets a zero on the exam. Must be present to win.
If the ball doesn’t actually go through the hoop, no points are earned. Period.
Not fair? Not FAIR? Fair is just compensation for actual work done. Fair is not freebies, or pity points, or political points. Either the student does it, or he/she does not.
And those school corporations that are now forbidding the oft-earned grade of ZERO? Those schools who require all zeros to be recorded as 60%?
Those schools are administered by idiots.
“But, but, a student can’t RECOVER from a zero!”
Then the student should have worked harder to get some points. It’s all the student’s fault. Life is full of choices.
You work out, you practice hard, and maybe the ball will go through the hoop. You goof off, you show up when you feel like it, and the ball will probably not. If your mommy makes a scene and demands credit for points not earned, Mommy is a nutjob. An administration that caves and forces the teacher/coach to make a gift of earned points to any student for any reason is a bad, bad, incompetent administration.
I would fight to the death for my children. I would lie down in the road for them. I would offer myself to the fire for them. But I would never insist they be given points for something they didn’t do or deserve. We are entitled only to those things we have earned.
Earn it or don’t get it. Period.
Bah. I’m in a mood.
Quotation Saturday: Friendship
Mamacita says: I forgot to do this last Saturday. I was busy with friends.
1. True friendship consists not in the multitude of friends, but in their worth and value. –Ben Jonson
2. Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You, too? Thought I was the only one.” –C.S. Lewis
3. Those truly linked don’t need correspondence. When they meet again after many years apart, Their friendship is as true as ever. — Deng Ming-Dao
4. One must be fond of people and trust them if one is not to make a mess of life. –E.M. Forster
5. A faithful friend is a strong defense: and he that hath found such an one hath found a treasure. — Ecclesiasticus 6:14
6. It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us. — Epicurus
7. It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. — Friedrich Nietzsche
8. What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other? — George Eliot
9. I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing. — Katherine Mansfield
10. It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter. — Marlene Dietrich
11. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
12. Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance. –Rabindranath Tagore
13. Yes’m, old friends is always best, ‘less you can catch a new one that’s fit to make an old one out of. — Sarah Orne Jewett
14. The verb “to love” in Persian is “to have a friend.” “I love you” translated literally is “I have you as a friend,” and “I don’t like you” simply means “I don’t have you as a friend.” — Shusha Guppy
15. Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? –Abraham Lincoln
16. Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. –Anais Nin
17. The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. –Carl Jung
18. You’re supposed to trust friends. You have no reason to be his friend? That is part of the pleasure of friendship: trusting without absolute evidence and then being rewarded for that trust. –David Shore
19. Never explain–your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway. — Elbert Hubbard
20. When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends. –Japanese proverb
21. There isn’t much better in this life than finding a way to spend a few hours in conversation with people you respect and love. You have to carve this time out of your life because you aren’t really living without it. — Real Live Preacher
22. A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.– Walter Winchell
23. Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love. — Charles Peguy
24. Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends whom we choose. — Tehyi Hsieh
25. A true friend is someone who is there for you when he’d rather be anywhere else. — Len Wein
26. Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends. — Mary Catherwood
27. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival. — C. S. Lewis
28. Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. –Artistotle
29. One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter. — Francoise Sagan
30. There is magic in the memory of schoolboy friendships; it softens the heart, and even affects the nervous system of those who have no heart. — Bejamin Disraeli
31. A friend is one of the nicest things you can have, and one of the best things you can be. — Douglas Pagels
32. In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit. –Albert Schweitzer
33. You can always tell a real friend: when you’ve made a fool of yourself he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job. –Laurence J. Peter
34. One doesn’t know, till one is a bit at odds with the world, how much one’s friends who believe in one rather generously, mean to one. –D.H. Lawrence
35. Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend. –Plautus
36. Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts. –Margaret Lee Runbeck
37. But oh! the blessing it is to have a friend to whom one can speak fearlessly on any subject; with whom one’s deepest as well as one’s most foolish thoughts come out simply and safely. Oh, the comfort – the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person – having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. –Dinah Craik
38. The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away. — Barbara Kingsolver
39. I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar. –Robert Brault
40. I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world. –Thomas A. Edison
41. Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years. –Richard Bach
42. The best time to make friends is before you need them. — Ethel Barrymore
43. If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. –E.M. Forster
44. Good friends must not always be together; it is the feeling of oneness when distant
that proves a lasting friendship. — Susan P. Schultz
45. Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light. — Helen Keller
46. Life without a friend is death without a witness. –Spanish proverb
47. Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light. — Albert Schweitzer
48. Love demands infinitely less than friendship. — George Jean Nathan
49. Love is friendship set to music. — E. Joseph Crossmann
50. We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh. — Agnes Repplier
