Stepping up to Bat: Lorna
Tychostup urges parents and community members to be examplars for children.
During a recent conversation with
a young friend, we discussed the concepts of brainwashing and indoctrination.
Our talk centered around November’s fatal Egypt Air crash and media speculation
that the pilot had consciously caused the crash by turning off the plane’s
engines—a suicidal mission of sorts, similar to those of Japanese kamikaze
pilots in World War II who were trained to crash their explosive-laden planes
into designated targets.
My friend said that he couldn’t imagine that someone would actually commit
such a deed. I explained to him my belief that most behaviors are learned,
and therefore are indoctrinations of sorts. In many cases, choices regarding
the selection of one’s religion; one’s likes or dislikes of the
race, ethnicity, religion or habits of others; one’s moral beliefs; dietary
beliefs; sexual desires; or the language or languages they speak; are simply
learned. Someone, somewhere along the way, at one time modeled or reinforced
most of the specific behaviors that a given person has since adopted.
The younger the individual, the faster and easier the indoctrination. The
tabula rasa—the clean slate of the mind before it receives the impressions
gained from experience—is just waiting to be filled with whatever surrounds
it. No child on the planet was born with an innate nature to hate “whitey,”
“gooks” or “niggers”; or knowing that blondes have more
fun, or that men don’t cry. And no child ever thought to say to themselves
or others, “You’re such a good girl/boy,” “Shut up,”
“How stupid could you be?” or “It’s all you’re fault,”
without some previous external tinkering done to their behavioral systems.
As Gina Bassinette writes in this month’s “Lost Boys” article:
“We are living in a time in our culture when we hand down death sentences
to children.” In America, this is true in 34 states, with five states
choosing to put a child to death for a crime committed at the age of 17, and
18 states choosing the age of 16. In a system that says that you have to be
18 before you can serve on a jury or vote, an ethical question arises: Can
these children be held to the same standards as adults when they don’t
have the same rights? An additional 16 states consider someone eligible for
the death penalty if they have committed a crime at age 18 or older.
Where we don’t put them to death, we decide to incarcerate them to longer-than-life
sentences, as in the case of Kip Kinkel, who first killed his parents and
then two classmates. Not believing in the “evil seed” mentality
and as the parent of two teenagers myself, the same questions come to mind
each time I hear of such violent actions being committed by a young person
or persons: Who messed with these children to cause them to act in such a
way? What modeling or abuses did they suffer? Who will stand next to the youthful
offender and openly admit that they, however inadvertantly, helped create
this person?
But if these questions were to be answered, we would have to take the time
to investigate into the dark recesses of both the family’s and the child’s
inner wasteland and attempt to reveal the heaps of wreckage created there
by the various people and influences with whom they have come into contact.
The parent who slips into their child’s bed in the middle of the night
is murdering the soul of that child just as the parent for whom nothing is
satisfactory or who is “too busy” to acknowledge the needs of their
child.
The teacher who insists that a child “do it my way” is doing harm,
just as the teacher who screams, berates and tosses chairs around (oh yes,
this does happen) because they haven’t learned the simplest behavior
techniques to appropriately control classroom behavior. That’s not to
mention the vast array of mixed messages that kids today get from the folks
“in charge”:
“Don’t drink and drive.” “Just say no to drugs.”
“Play fair.” “Don’t tell a lie.” After the events
of this past year, which saw a U.S. president lie on TV while my fellow adult
population (70% of them, according to the polls) wiped up after his mess (and
maybe their own) by saying, “Oh, everybody does that,” or “His
sex life is a personal matter,” I wondered if I had been dropped off
on the wrong planet. I also wondered how a child could reach the age of 30
and not completely succumb to insanity amid the “Do as I say but not
as I do” mentality so rampant in this country.
Yeah, we’d all like to believe that what goes on behind closed doors
is nobody’s business but our own—you know, the pot growing out in
the yard, the couple of beers you just have to have after a rough day, the
separate TV sets in each room that prevent any real discussions in the house.
Certainly all those “nice people”—the parents, educators, neighbors
and whoever of criminal #453, age 15, who got her boyfriend, criminal #452,
also age 15, to repeatedly stab that 44-year-old “sweetheart” of
a man they had been drinking with whom—were really too nice, too hardworking,
too together to be responsible for the actions of those children.
That kind of thinking keeps us safe from discovering the truth about ourselves.
How much easier it is to rid the world of these demon seeds by locking them
away or by killing them. Rehabilitate them? No way; that takes lots of tax
dollars and besides, it’s not my kid anyway. Maybe not, but it could
be. Psychologist Michael Schulman, the author of Bringing up a Moral Child,
offers this advice: “You need to teach the child that the family stands
for goodness, not simply comfort and intellectual achievement, but that moral
excellence is honored.”
The best way to do that is, in my opinion, is to model the behavior you want
to create, to be an exemplar. Is anyone ready to step up to bat?