Mom Who Coached Daughter During Fistfight Cops Plea, Sentenced To One-Day Parenting Class | The Smoking Gun
The Florida woman caught on videotape urging her daughter on during a fight with a high school classmate will have to complete a one-day parenting class as part of a deal struck with prosecutors, records show.
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Here's the thing. In order to learn how to be a 'parent' you first must learn to be 'human'. (I don't mean this personally toward this woman; this situation is just a perfect example.) When we started keeping people alive past their natural ability to survive we began tipping the natural order out of balance. At this point we start the process as early as 24 weeks after conception and it won't be long before we can grow people without a uterus ever bein' involved. For some these interventions come without consequence and actually result in an extended life of a quality most would accept as normal. For some the cost is minimal or acceptable and comes with some degree of reward, and for some the consequences are fairly dramatic (but how acceptable they are is really a matter of attitude). We have bodies and minds that are hypo- or hyperfunctional and we accept a wider and wider range of these... dysfunctions? malfunctions? different-functions? what's the PC term there? as normal as more and more people exhibit them to the point where currently I'd say in general we're both physically and mentally pretty far removed from anything like what our ancestors or anyone living with a bit more natural conception of life and it's processes would consider normal. I'm not saying that's inherently a bad thing but I can't think of any words that, while they are appropriate descriptions of the condition aren't taken as offensive. 'ADHD' is a mental dysfunction, an abnormal function, but who says normal is necessarily good, right? But if our population is significantly off the natural norm physically and mentally, it stands to reason there would also be a divergence in the spiritual arena.
Body, mind, and spirit are capable of existing and interacting in many different forms, but a human being must consist of all three in reasonable balance. Ghosts (spirits and minds without bodies), zombies (bodies without spirits or conscious mind), vampires/aliens/rogue computer brains (bodies and minds without spirit), and sirens (bodies and spirits without mind) may or may not exist in the real world as they're depicted, as wraiths and shambling rotting corpses and alabaster princes and faeries and mermaids, but they do most certainly walk amongst us, looking just like us. They're the mothers who teach their daughters to fight, then go be their cornerman and scream, "Punch [that other *teenaged girl*, for God's sake] in the [effin'] body". I'm all for teaching my kid stand up for himself, but I teach him that it's best to voice his opinions first, to defend himself if he must but to avoid getting into a position of having to in the first place. My place is to help him defuse conflict. In an adult world, when it comes to blows everyone's already lost (but if someone's going to force it to go there they'd better be able to put their weight behind it), so my job is to teach him every other alternative, and then to make sure he could keep from gettin' hit and could land a punch if he has to. That's not everyone's mothering style nor should it be, but I think when we get to where the behavior in this video is anything a 39-year-old woman is able to justify as appropriate, even to herself, we're pretty far off from anything resembling spiritually-informed behavior.
We've got ghosts walking around in the form of people who move through life with as little effect as possible, often trying desperately, like any disembodied spirit, to be noticed, and to *do*, and having less effect the more they thrash and flail as their energy is dispersed increasingly erratically. On the other side of that are those who'll do anything to avoid being seen, due to shyness or furtiveness or any number of other fear responses to internal or external stimuli, those who'd just as soon fade back into the source of the universe but whose very existence has already changed reality so they can't become un-known.
The zombies, these people who act and react through anger and appetite, always, just lashing out and hurting because they cannot feed their hunger. They can't think clearly enough to even define what they're hungry for, and they just tear through life looking for what they're missing, reason and purpose. We can't exist without some awareness, there has to be a mind in there if they can stop and look and suss it out, but the chance of them doing so is slim to none because their spirits, their drive to create and grow, are either dead or never existed. Their appetites control them. They 'think', if it can be called that, that the solution to every problem begins and usually ends with aggression, and apply 'reason' only as it serves the drama that fuels them from one outburst to the next.
The vampires, well duh, those people who just suck the life out of you by their very existence, make ya feel like you'd rather be dead than spend another minute in a universe where they exist. They're often very attractive until the illusion wears off, but by then you're in and the maze has shifted behind you. Good luck. :)
Sirens, nymphs, sprites, faeries, the illusions of easy beauty, even perfection, and of sensual fulfillment; listen, I've seen all but the most recent episodes (the past week's) of every series of The Real Housewives. I like the way Bravo presents it's reality series', and I've got huge respect for anyone who's willing to open their lives to that kind of scrutiny, even the ones that I think fit amongst these sub-humans I'm describing. The RHW are some of the high priestesses of modern mermaids. They want to be good, and some are, and they want to be beautiful, some are, and they want to walk the earth with humans, but the pain of doing so is great for them. Literally, when they get their toes chopped off to fit in shoes and their vaginas... whatever it is a plastic surgeon does to a vagina. Would anyone be mad at Ariel if she'd decided to stay topside? Yes, people who begrudged her her lot in life, knowing or not knowing what she sacrificed for it. But they draw us with this call that says, "You can have this, too," and frankly, many of us can't. It just doesn't work that way. We can, however, be as content in our lives as we believe (and, I hope, hope) they are in theirs. Or discontented with, if we truly believe all those snipy things we say from the comfort of our couches and from behind our keyboards. Or we can be, as they probably are in reality, content with parts and discontented with others, hopefully content with the parts we can't change and working at the things we can, allowing that perhaps people are just people (and zombies are zombies :)).
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