Dear Mr. McGough,
I’m sorry about my post on your recent article in the LA Times. I could have read your piece in a positive light, but I didn’t. Sometimes supportive parents see slights when they are not there.
I had no right to be as testy as I was in my little rant; all you were saying was that anti-bullying and proactive parenting might not shield a child from a damaging level of peer abuse. And there are many places in this country where I’m sure you’re right.
LIttle kids are amazingly pliable; they can easily be taught to love, or hate. The social conservatives are correct to pull out of public institutions (by their own reasoning) if they want to maintain the status quo with regards to acceptance of sexual minorities.
We live in La La land and can get away with what we’re doing. This is why I’m trying to rhetorically carve out a place for parents to make accommodations with their local realities. But texts can be read in different ways, and I think you hit the raw and exposed nerve we all have, in this community: IF our kid end up like Lawrence King, then we are, suddenly, absurd moonbats leading our children down the garden path to destruction.
It’s like waking on fire without being burned; you become very sensitive to people jiggling your elbow. There’s no comfort zone, really; do you hurt your kid on the inside to police the outside, or try to strengthen his inside, to be able to withstand the hurt coming from outside?
I’m reminded of Ghandi shaming the British through non-violent means into permitting Indian independence. His plan for non-violence action in Nazi Germany, mass suicides to protest mass murder, was utopian liberal moonbatism.
The question for parents is, do they live among the British, or among Nazis?
Camtabridgians and San Franciscans are definitely British. I have no personal experience of the heartland or the South, though I get second hand reports from our network of families. We seem as a nation to be more largely British than you might imagine. Moonbat hyperbole aside.
but it’s a near thing.
