Then and now….
Sometimes I sits…..and I thinks and I reflects ….to back in my younger days and to how different things are today. The phrase ” child abuse” must not have existed back then, because if you stepped out of line in school, you either got verbal abuse, the ruler on the knuckles or palm of the hand or, worse than that, the “board of education” making repeated close encounters on an area of your body that you normally sat down on, your okole. I remember getting my taste of it in the fifth grade, after trying to knock Tommy G.’s eye out with a solid right hook during recess.
Back then, if you had a problem with someone, you settled right there and then, behind the gym, or by the Burger Mill, after school. It was bare fist and will power. Now, kids barely out of three-cornered pants (diapers, for those of you who didn’t know) are bringing knives and guns to school and settling differences in a more vicious and violent way. Shootings in the schools, stabbings on the bus and drive-bys, things that were unheard of back then, are front-page news we see so often, the shock effect has been lost.
Child abuse in the home today was what we knew as discipline when I was a kid. I remember one of dad’s favorite lines, “Don’t let me pull my belt!” Us kids KNEW what THAT meant. Because when that belt came out, there was no where to run and hide…..and only two ways you got beaten(HARD and HARDER). I used to watch my other brothers get “the belt” and feel their pain until mom would step in and make him stop. Hah! Where was Child Protective Services and Domestic Intervention Services back then. You misbehaved, you paid the price. It was simple as that. Today, you spank your kids and they call it child abuse. The parents are in trouble and the kids get taken away and put in a foster home.
Where is that happy medium between child abuse and the needed discipline that too many kids are not getting? Where is the proper guidance they are not receiving at home and in school that lead to an ever-growing population of young thugs and gangbangers who will turn to a life of crime and violence, claim innocent victims, die early or end up in the prison system?
Things were so different in so many ways back then. The lines between right and wrong were more clearly defined when I was a kid. Today’s child grows up in a more complex and violent environment but parental guidance is still a key to the choices he/she will make and the path that is chosen.