Sunday Morning has arrived and it’s grab a coffee to survive. Feed the cat and find the paper, it’s Sunday and the NFL shall be around and on. Of course I have to do other chores prior to football and if I don’t like the games carried in my area, well I turn it all off anyway. Football was a religion to me every Sunday, I would gather round as a kid with my step-dad and we would have the fruit and snacks and chips. The games would start and we would watch them all afternoon and into the evening. Football was indeed king for dad and I.
Now a days it is a little different, Dad is long gone, passed away at close to the age I am now in 1990. Mom followed him a year and a day afterwards, but not before throwing herself over his body and coffin at his wake and screaming Why didn’t you take me with you! I guess when you spend 40 some odd years together, raise 5 kids, and go through divorce yet still live together, well, you get the idea.
Today I am 55, been married twice myself, had two children by my first wife and none by my second and my life goes on quietly each day. Yet I stop and look back on my childhood and my parents life together and wonder how the hell they did what they did. They were both born to families in the year of 1932. Back then money was tight and so was making ends meet. Luckily for us they learned from their parents how to survive, so we all did survive. Amazingly, today those of us who were born to my mother and her two husbands are still here except for one. Yet none of the four remaining, are actually normal and uneffected by our childhood days. We lived a life as children that few people survived, filled with violence, beatings,verbal and physical abuse. We survived it all as individuals really not as siblings hanging on all together. Each of us dealt with it differently and I am sure each of us if thrown in one room anywhere, would give you a different version of how we did it.
Today, a child is yelled at, beaten, abused in any way, physically or emotionally or even mentally, they can reach out and get authorities to help them. The late 1950s, 1960s, that wasn’t so and parents still virtually owned their children. The things we survived especially the three eldest is unbelievable. Beatings upon beating over years, for things we never did, or would do, at least most of us. Mental torture such as being told I brought you into this world and I will take you out, or the best line, I don’t care about you, little son of a bitch, I will shoot you and bury you in the backyard and never look back!. Nice lines from a parent to their children right?
Things we survived were crazy, being thrown down three flights of stairs, beatings with two by fours, pipes,and fireplace pokers for coming home late as a young teen. Feet burned on a stove top for stealing cookies as a young boy, and then I was called emotionally disturbed and put away for two years. I was crazy right, wrong!
The point being here that across America the land of the free, the land of the brave, the land of advancement and technical breakthroughs and more, people still get raising their children wrong. They still overstep lines and rules and basics they should never do. Sadly it is indeed passed from one generation to the next in families, for it is all these parents and adults during that time knew. As my step-dad once said, I survived it, I was taught that way and you will too. I remember the old lines of how he got to school, walking miles in the snow with holes in his shoes and freezing hands each day. And how we had no right to complain, we had clothes and shoes and buses and more. I laugh today at the mere thought of the stories my parents told of their sufferings as kids, then I stop and think about my grandparents on both sides and realize, they got it handed to them also.
The cycles of violence, physical, mental abuse, misjudging our children goes on each day in America and across the world in numerous lands and countries. What all the world must now stop and look at is not how to continue it without stopping and doing what our foreparents did to us, but how to end the endless cycles, by not doing it to our own children. The cycles have to end, too many valuable, precious children and human beings get destroyed and end up turning on society and killing, maiming or destroying. When will we as a world, and as each individual country and person learn, violence begets violence, anger begets anger and destruction brings destruction? We need to find peaceful solutions to raise our children, raise our voices, and unite to protect the children of the world, they are its future not us who are elder and old already. The hope is in the children not us. Protect them, teach them right from wrong, don’t beat them or harass or mentally torture them, let them grow and know that mankind has a better side.
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