Once upon a time there was a boy whose parents had to go out
of town. The boy, a young teenager, did not want to go with them and asked his
parents if he might not stay home. He promised them that if they let him stay
home not only would he behave, he would clean the house up while they were
gone. Now the step-father didn’t trust this kid as far as he could throw him.
As long as he had known the kid he had never done anything for anyone other
than himself. But the mother for some reason could not see the obvious flaws in
her child. Perhaps it was because the father was always berating him and she
felt it was her job to support him. Whatever the case, the dad weakly protested
but ended up giving in to the mother like he always did, just as the mother always gave in
to her child.
So they left the spoiled child in charge of the household,
and predictably, the moment he was in charge, he invited all his miscreant
buddies over to “take care” of the house. The idea was that if he took good
care of his buddies that they would in turn help with the house. It was flawed
thinking but flawed thinking never stopped an immature teenager from doing
anything.
The kids had one hell of a party, and made one hell of a
mess. The liquor cabinet was immediately raided, the entire store of groceries
for the month was eaten or else wasted in a food fight, and many precious
family heirlooms were broken in the mindless reverie. When all the food and the
liquor were gone, the kid’s friends started looking through the parents’
dresser drawers to find some money so they could order a pizza and get some
adult to buy them beer. And sure enough, they found various stashes of money,
some stored up for a rainy day, some being intended for the kids’ education
expenses, and other amounts intended for charitable contributions. There was
even a pile set aside to help pay for helping take care of grandpa when he was
no longer capable of taking care of himself. These kids didn’t care about
anyone but themselves and their immediate pleasures, and the kid who lived
there didn’t mind because his buddies thought he was cool and he really didn’t
care about grandpa or charity anyway.
They took it all, every bit of loose change, and everything
that could be converted to cash in order that they could have one hell of a
party, because they couldn’t see anything beyond their own short-term selfish
interests. They even found the mom’s credit card, and racked up more debt than
even they realized.
They got high, and they got drunk. They didn’t give a f*ck.
They had cheap sex with lewd young women on the parents’ bed. They broke things
just because they could. They peed in places other than the bathroom because it
wasn’t their house.
The only problem was, they were having so much fun, they
forgot the parents would eventually find out. They did. They came home a day
earlier than they were supposed to, not that it would have mattered much one
way or the other. The place was wrecked and there was no way these kids were
ever going to repair the damage they had done, let alone make it cleaner than
before. Arriving home and assessing the situation, both parents were able to
see the son for what he was. The mother, who loved her son because he was hers,
finally realized what she had allowed him to become. She realized the damage
that had been done because of her foolish trust in a son who had never
exhibited behavior worth putting her trust in.
The father gazed upon the devastation caused by this spoiled
child and his delinquent buddies and it finally dawned on him how he had
tolerated his bad behavior and his wife’s denial for too long, that he himself
had been complicit in allowing the boy’s bad behavior because he did not want
to make tough choices and be the adult the other two needed in their lives. He
had always been content to meekly suggest that the mother might be wrong, but
he never really communicated with her on an adult level, resorting instead to childish
putdowns of the child. He timidly tiptoed at the edges of the issue while
avoiding the obvious problems that needed to be tackled head on.
But in the end the parents realized they must never again
leave their house in the protection of an immature and narcissistic individual.
The day is coming, and it won’t be long, when even the most apologetic of
voters—er, parents will no longer be able to ignore the behavior of their
spoiled, selfish president. I mean son.
No comments:
Post a Comment