Parenting Tips

So, I got one of those long, pedantic emails today.  Its point - succinctly - is that people raising kids today are too protective.  Their mothers smoked and drank and put them to sleep on their stomachs and not everyone who tried out for the team made it and they stayed out late at night and knew their neighbors and...I think you get the point.

It pissed me off.  It pissed me off even more because it came from my mother, who I KNOW doesn't believe that shit.  So, into the abyss of where ever it came, I wrote the following:
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Sure.  But.

That same group of people are also the ones who have waged nearly perpetual war for most of their and our lives.  They fought the first war, and bits of the next two, but after that, they sent the black folks and the poor folks and the immigrant folks to fight the rest of them.  They also benefitted from those wars, creating the most wealth of any prior generation ever in the history of the universe - and then rigged the rules to be sure only a very select few benefited from it.

That same group cheapened our food the point of making us all sick and then turned access to healthcare into a privilege reserved just some.  They unleashed a drug-dependency culture that changed the face of families and they built neighborhoods with big garage doors to make a buck even though nobody in those neighborhoods would ever know their neighbors because of those garage doors.

They cut funding to aid the mentally ill to keep taxes low and replaced care with custody by demonizing mental illness, casting it to the ever-growing leper pile and then waiting for the mentally ill or drug-dependent to finally break the law so they could be thrown in jail. 

They created and benefited from a financial system that prays on the weak, rewards the lucky and protect the wealthy, and then they set it up so that they benefited from it whether it helped or hurt society.

So, forgive me if I don't put a lot of stock in the parenting and life tips of these people.  These people who now look back over their time here on earth and all they can see is greatness and personal victory because they've trained themselves to believe that Jesus loves them and that someone's success or failure has nothing to do with the circumstances into which they were born - an event over which they themselves had zero influence.  How is someone supposed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if the factory long ago stopped making boots? 

Maybe if they had been born a couple decades later, their self-aggrandizing parenting and life-tips might be different.

So, yea, I wish had the luxury of raising my kids under the same circumstances you had, Mr. Pedantic E-Mail Writer.    But I don't.

So, when I get parenting and life tips from this group that basically call me stupid, weak or self-centered, I smile, even though what I really want to do is invite them to give it a try in this post-them world.  But, I don't because I know it would be pointless.  And I am too tired to bother.