Pushing a string

A universal lament seems to be that kids won’t listen to the considered advice of grown-ups. Instead of becoming national merit scholars, many opt for crack cocaine, Budweiser, cigarettes, illegitimate births, and–worst of all–rap music.

This despite the fact they are preached to by everyone: parents, teachers, pundits, writers (not me), celebrity athletes (after they’ve kicked those pesky heroin addictions), newscasters…you name it, we’re drowning in a tidal flood of slogans, posters, sayings, programs, ideas, crusades, and all the rest of it. Adultdom seems to one up itself on righteous preachiness. Teenagerdom is probably sick to death of it.

I don’t mind real preachers, you know, the folks who devote their lives to the church. Our church was an important part of life when I grew up, and I’m grateful for it. And though I can’t claim I understood all the sermons, I gave them a fair hearing. The clergy did, and still does, have a lot of credibility in my book. So to them, I say: preach on. We need you to do so.

But why extrapolate that to every nattering, sour-faced yahoo who wants to cram their opinions down the throat of any kid within hearing distance? Know why it doesn’t work? I’ll tell you why: Because if an non-credible party says one thing, people (kids especially) are inclined to believe the opposite.

Back when I counted pimples in the mirror instead of gray hairs, I noticed an interesting fact about adults in general: The unhappier they were, the more they preached. Public school herded us into classes on “family planning,” a polite word for naughty subjects, where quite possibly the ugliest and most wretched woman in the western hemisphere lorded over us with platitudes and condemnation. I’m telling you, she couldn’t have scored a date at a Sturgis biker beer brawl at two in the morning. Her repressed frustration found a captive audience (us), and she made the most of it. Cazart!–if that’s what celibacy does to people, nobody wanted any part of it. The girls started filling out applications to become White House interns and the guys cracked books on political science.

What moral authority do we really hold as grown-ups, anyway? Uncle Sam puts more money into bombs, missiles, and high-tech death machines than into cancer research. Why? Because that’s what “we” want. Hello, democracy. The world of lethal injections, police beatings, war, human engineered famine, and corruption seems to me to be far from the optimal condition for humanity. But it’s the way it is because we’ve built it that way on purpose.

I’m not, of course, providing excuses for punks to behave like punks. I have no use for them. Nor does anyone else. But kids are merely a reflection of the more senior element of society, and if they’d rather be dope smoking punks instead of being like dear old Dad, then what does that really say?

It’s easier to pull a string than it is to push it, and all the preachiness in the world can’t hide the fact that the only true leadership is leadership by example. To paraphrase comedian George Carlin, if your kid needs a role model and you’re not it, then you’re both in trouble.