Glenn Beck's Responsibility Beat-Down. I'm in.

I have a secret.  I am a huge fan of Glenn Beck.  I don't care if you are a conservative or a liberal, his talk radio show is one of the most common sense programs on the air.  Good, old-fashioned, small town common sense.

I listen to him on the way to Pants's school and often find myself just driving around while Goose naps in the backseat and I finish listening to the show in the car.  And you know I'm not a political wonk. 
Rather, all politics aside, I think his radio show is a must-listen for today's parents.

Now I'll tell you why.

Glenn Beck advocates personal responsibility.

[insert half of America falling off of their chairs at the horror.]

Imagine accepting consequences for our own actions and choices.  Not expecting anyone to bail us out or smooth things over.  Not getting an endless number of second chances.  Not exploiting every opportunity to place the blame anywhere other than on our own shoulders.

Imagine.  All the people.  Taking responsibility.

It's not easy, Mr. Lennon, even if you try.

Did you hear about the teen girl beating in Lakeland, Florida?  I hadn't until I turned on the radio this morning, as we have opted to not turn the cable on in our new house.  Call it an experiment.

I felt literally sick listening to excerpts of Matt Lauer's interview on the TODAY Show with the mother of one of the attackers.   The excuses.  The explanations.  The justifications.  I was honestly just sick.

I wanted to smack her.  How do you like that for irony?

From the TODAY show site:

For 30 minutes, six girls ganged up on a classmate, slamming her head into a wall and taking turns pummeling her and videotaping it all to post on the Internet. And when they were arrested and were being booked into juvenile detention, they joked about not being able to go to the beach, a Florida sheriff said Tuesday on TODAY.

The emphasis above is mine.  Because, seriously.

At one point in the video, you can hear the girl holding the video camera say, "There's only 17 seconds left. Make it good."

Good God, people. 

And these were not completely trashy girls.  I mean, yes, they are clearly trashy, but they are not "not my daughter."  These are seemingly average teenage girls, aside from the fact that they are demented animals.

What the hell is going on?

Our children are becoming desensitized.  Their understanding of the difference between right and wrong, or worse, their accountability for the difference between right and wrong, has become skewed.  I, for one, want to fight this , but I feel like I'm punching at air.

No, I'm not one of those moms that won't let her little boys play with guns, but I don't allow them to watch violent movies or video games. 

That is, not anymore.

When Pants was younger (and he's 3 and a half, so we are talking very young here), I let him watch Spider-Man and Superman and only peripherally explained that the violence was "pretend fighting" and that "you know never to hit anyone," blah blah blah.

Because at the end of the day, what part of his tiny little developing brain was getting all of the anti-violence language with which I was dowsing him?  Was he hearing anything other than "blah blah blah" as his little eyes took in the flashy costumes and exciting music?

I realized I had made a mistake when my family allowed him to watch something that I considered far too violent.  They explained that they went through the whole "never hit/ this isn't real/ this is all pretend" routine, but I knew that it was just too much. 

My family was visibly and vocally irritated with me because they felt I was arbitrarily drawing lines. What was the difference between Spider-Man and X-Men?  What was the difference between Spider-Man getting thrown against a wall in a bloody mess and Wolverine slicing someone up with knives that you can see break through his skin?

I realized that regardless of how fine the distinctions were in my own mind, I needn't make it the responsibility of anyone else to make that call.  So we began stepping back from the seemingly kid-friendly action movies.

Because I can't even find where that damn line is that is dissolving in our children's minds.

I took responsibility for a mistake that I made.  I shouldn't have let my toddler watch these comic book action movies.  It just made everything too confusing for everyone involved.

I am asking you, where does it begin?  Where does the desensitization begin where our kids start to muddle the line between reality and surreality?   Where they go beyond playing Spider-Man vs. Green Goblin in the living room and begin playing Fight Club in their basements?

And then they post it on the Internet.  On YouTube.  On MySpace.  As entertainment.

And the cycle continues.

The worst part of all of this is that the parents of the kids that took part in the beating in Florida will most likely be fighting tooth and nail to bail their kids out of this.

What I wouldn't give to see one of those parents say, "You have got to be kidding me.  You can sit your butt in jail.  I'm not fixing this for you."

Glenn Beck said that he would love to see these kids serve real time as adults for this.  Count me in.

Because when I was the age of these kids, which is approximately 16, I knew damn well what I was doing.  And I would have deserved to go to jail.

And my parents would have probably bailed me out.

The easiest way to make life hard for your kids is to make it soft for them.

Look, I know that this post is muddled in itself.  I am blaming the parents, I am blaming the media, I am blaming the kids.  I am all over the place.  Because I am confused.  And angry.  And disconcerted.

I need to boil this down:

A lack of parental guidance combined with a lack of the teaching and exemplification of personal responsibility and accountability are, in my opinion, at the root of this.

Am I wrong?

What do we do now?

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