You Reap What You Sow

I really like Glenn Beck. He thinks Americans have lost any sense of personal responsibility and just plain old common sense, and that we're basically going to hell in a handbasket. I think he's right. Do we need to look any further than the story of six Florida teenage girls beating the crap out of a "friend" because she was allegedly talking smack about them on MySpace, planning and videotaping the entire event to post themselves on the Web?

Glenn's coverage of this story was excellent and included an interview with the victim's mom as well as a dissection of Matt Lauer's interview with the (piece of crap) "mom" (yes, I'm calling into question her qualifications for earning that title) of one of the alleged assailants. All I'll add is that we really don't have a right to be too surprised about teenagers displaying a complete lack of ethics, an embrace of violence and depravity and a desire to be "famous" on YouTube given the drivel we put in front of their eyes and in their ears on a daily basis, coupled with a lack of supervision, a lack of teaching, modeling and reinforcing values and a desire to be "friends" with our children instead of parents.

If the princesses ever dared to pull something even close to what those little monsters did, I'd have the same response my mom always said she'd have in a situation like that: "Honey, you'd want to stay in jail rather than come home with me, because jail would be more pleasant." (Fortunately, I never tested her on that particular parenting theory - because I totally believed her, and I was scared.) In our castle, if you choose the behavior, you choose the consequence - and the princesses are already learning that lesson.

On the flip side, I'm also making sure that both princesses know self-defense and have a proficiency in some martial arts form. Just want to make sure that if any mouth-breathing bottom-feeders ever go after them, the princesses will know how to drop-kick 'em into the next county without even denting their tiaras.