Sunday, November 2, 2008

Don't Make Excuses...

About 2 weeks ago, in the next town over from us 3 teenage boys went into a church graveyard & knocked over/ destroyed the headstones of multiple grave sites. 2 of the boys were 16 & 17, therefore minors, but one was 18. So, anyways... since the crime was commited the local legal system has been going through the steps. Well, our local paper has a forum in which we can discuss local events. On this forum there has been a strand about the crime commited by these teens. On this forum there have been people making excuses for the boys. Things have been said such as "they had a hard life", & "their parents tried", & "they had been drinking". What I don't understand is how can ANYONE try to justify what these boys did? There is no excuse. There is no REASON to make excuses. I don't care what kind of life they had. I don't care if daddy beat them, mommy ran away, whatever... that doesn't make what they did right. & as for the parents "doing all they could" well obviously not. Since these kids were out at 1am, with a bottle of wine, the parents were NOT doing all they could. Why don't parents check on their kids anymore? From what I understand too, these boys have been in trouble before. Why aren't they on PINS? Probation? In a Juvenile Detention Center? Bootcamp? Boarding school? There are plenty of options out there for trouble children. Why not utilize it? Why not use the state funded options? Why wait until they commit a horrible crime like this & waste the governemtn money on legal defense. I was hoping too, that these boys would go into court & plead guilty, serve their time, pay for the damages, & then go on with reforming their lives, but no. They plead not guilty & are now going to waste coutny money on a case. Makes me sick. What this all leads up to is, me thinking "what happened to 'honor they mother & father'"? What happened to kids that knew better? It seems like each generation that comes along just gets worse & worse. More disrespectful. More rude. Less responsible.

When it boils down to it, it just makes me very irritated. I know my daughter is just 1, & I haven't gone through the whole rigors of being a parent to a teen, but I wasn't a teen myself that long ago & I remember what I did & what my mother did. I know that I NEVER would have thought it was a good idea to go destroy a graveyard. Never. I also know that if I were to ever do something like that, my mother wouldn't have allowed me to pead not guilty. My mother would have made sure I went to jail & served my time, then she would have made me get a job & work & give every cent I made to the church to take care of the damages done. Hell, I went into an abandoned house when I was 13. I didn't break in, the back door was open... we just went in. Didn't vandlize anything, but the neighbor called the cops on us. When the police showed up, my mother was there (the abandoned house was 2 houses from our house). The police told my mother that she could take me & they wouldnt' press charges cause I hadn't actually done anything exceot tresspassing. & do you know what my mother did? She said "No, no. You put the cuffs on her, take her down, book her, & I'll come get her when I'm ready". She left me there for 4 hours. I was terrified. I cried my eyes out. When she did pick me up, she had already filed the paper work to put me in PINS (people in need of supervision) & made my first probation appointment. & on top of that, she grounded me. House arrest essentially. All for walking into a house that was technically owned by the bank. Yet these boys desicrate a graveyard & their parents are letting them get away with it? Disgusting. Children should be raised to have a healthy fear of their parents & the law. Not a "omg, daddy is goign to beat me til i bleed"" fear... but a fear of what their parents will THINK of what they did.

I'm just very irritated I guess with the goings on, & hope that I will do a much better job raising my daughter than these people have done.

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