Off the Beaten Path

My Dearest Readers,      Last night I found myself rather restless; which was odd as I had spent my typical Monday cleaning yea old domicile, washing laundry and (once again) organizing the closets. Monday is generally my "pleasantly tired and ready for bed" day. So; here it was, late at night and I really did not feel like reading or playing on the computer (I am trying to wean myself off of farmville) and thus I began to flip through the channels on the old telly.     Late night on the television can be a hairy experience to navigate through. Don't get me wrong I am not the least bit prudish in my TV viewing. I enjoy the "shoot em' up, bang em' up" action adventure and the "oooh vampires and werewolves" on cable as much as the next person. In fact; if I am going to watch a movie then those are the ones I prefer. But cable after midnight seems to lend themselves to straight up porno; of which I am not at all interested in. ~Blah~ Dinky Does Dallas (or some equally nonsense title), Taxi Cab Confessions (who really spills their "intimate" guts out to a total stranger in a nasty ass cab?) is just not my cup of tea. But; to each his own I suppose. Must be some kind of audience for these things or they wouldn't air.                     Anywho; as I am navigating my way through channel after channel of junk and re-runs I finally lit on a movie that looked like it had some possibility. The male title character I knew from a Lycan/Vampire movie (Michael Sheen) and I supposed that anything he was in could not be a bad movie. I was not disappointed. The movie was called "Beautiful Boy" and if you haven't seen it then it is worth your while to do so. I won't give away the specifics of the movie (I also hate spoilers) just know that it's about a boy that sets sail for college, goes crazy and kills a bunch of his classmates and teachers.      Sound a little familiar to you?      It seems today that one is hard pressed to pick up a newspaper and not find some article of someone going over the edge and killing people at random. It's a sad testimony of the age we now live in. People simply can not seem to control themselves and teenagers/young adults are running ahead of the pack. But that isn't really what I want to talk about today. I believe that greater minds than mine are stumped as to the "why's" these things are so prevalent in our society today and so I will leave them to continue to explore this and move on to an area that I believe has not really been given a good deal of thought to. Which is how the parents of the murderer feel when their child has committed the unthinkable; unimaginable.     It's so easy (and convenient)  for us to blame the parents when a child does something heinous. Surely they must have done something wrong in their child rearing for their child to have done this. Perhaps we look at the parents themselves and wonder if they (in the wide expanse of their gene pool) didn't somehow pass along some genetic anomaly that gave the child the perchance for acts of violence. We wrongly suppose that it must be that they come from an environment where filth and neglect and want abounds; where abuse and cruelty is tolerated. We suppose all sorts of things to somehow blame the parents for the acts of their children in spite of the fact that statistics do not support our beliefs. But blame them we do.     Even today the court system is over flowing with cases of "wrongful injury/ wrongful death". Parents are held liable for any damage that their child does to another person or their property. People want to be financially compensated when someone elses child runs amuck. I believe this is completely ludicrous and frankly I am ashamed of a Government that fosters these types of suits.  But that too is another subject for another time.   We raise our children to the very best of our ability. We make sure that they are fed and clothed and have a decent roof over their head. We make sure they do their homework and keep good grades. We feed them breakfast and send them off to school thinking all is well in the world and 15 minutes later via "breaking news" we hear that they have stolen the gun from our locked box and killed several of their class mates. How is this; how are these parents at fault? It isn't. They did nothing wrong.     Yet; still we blame them when something occurs.      We don't give any thought whatsoever to what they must be going through. What horror haunts their every waking moment and their sleep as they replay this child's whole life in their mind looking for clues of what went wrong. Did they love them enough? Did they love them too much? Did they give them too much or too little? Were they too strict or not strict enough? Was there some "something" that they missed that would have given them a warning that their child was in trouble and needed help? I am sure that the questions that pass through their minds would count in the millions.     And we forget that they also have lost their child. Rather the child commits suicide after this act of violence or is arrested these parents have also lost their child. We don't think about that. We don't think about how their lives are never going to be the same again either. We don't think about how their lives have also been turned upside down by this. We don't think about their loss, their pain, their grief and their horror in the wake of what has taken place. But we should.   And after reading this I hope that that is going to change and we will.   We should be thinking and then telling these parents and ourselves that it was not their fault. That they didn't do anything wrong as a parent. Remind them often that it was the child's fault. He/she alone is to blame. They are the one who needs to be held accountable in our minds and our hearts for what they did. Not the parents.     You realize of course that if you are a parent and reading this that your child could very well do the same thing; right? As you are telling yourself "not my kid, my kid is fine" remember that these parents once told themselves the same thing. As you tell yourself "My kid is happy, well adjusted, etc. etc." remember that these parents once thought the same thing.  Yeah; sadly this could be your child. All it takes is just "one" thing and then the chips will start flying in all directions. Remember that when you start pointing fingers and placing blame.     The bottom line is that we don't really know what goes on in the mind of someone that snaps and goes on a killing rampage- rather that person is a teen, a young adult or an adult. We don't really know for certain- even after all of the investigations have taken place- what was that one thing that sent them spiraling over the edge and resulted in them causing injury to another. All we really know is that something awful took place and a whole bunch of people's lives were forever changed by it.      So; today I would really like for you to examine yourselves as I have done and correct your thinking on tragedies such as the one I am discussing. Purpose your heart that when something awful happens; and something awful happens to all of us at one point or another in our lives, that we don't begin to look to innocent people to blame. People to bear the blunt of our sorrows. Understand that the perpetrator of a violent crime is the only one that should be held accountable and responsible- even if that person is no longer around to punish for the crime.     If you are the parent of a child that was a victim, God forbid! that was murdered then know that only God alone can bring you peace. All of the blame that you can throw at the criminals' parents, all of the wrongful death lawsuits in the world, all of the financial compensation stacked sky high is not going to bring you any measure of peace. Only God can do that and on Him you should and can rely. He never fails us. But we have to open ourselves up to Him to be helped. Don't wear your pain as a shield. In doing so only hurts those that are left behind.     If you are the parents of a child/young adult/adult that committed a horrible crime against their fellow man to you I say It Is Not Your Fault. You did the best you could as a parent but somewhere along the way they just got turned around and did something that to even them was probably unexpected, a surprise if you will. You can mull it over and over in your mind for the rest of your natural life why they did what they did but you'll never really know. You just have to pick up the pieces of your life and move forward. Don't accept blame from others. Don't accept the guilt that will be heaped on you. It isn't yours to bear. It's your child's. And if they aren't around to bear it then know that it is something that they just have to work out with God. You can't help them.     Thank You Dear Readers for taking a moment to examine your thoughts on this. Thank You for tweaking those thoughts to line up with the Bible that tells us to not hold grudges, to bear no one ill will and to love others as Christ loved us. I know for myself; being a parent and a grandparent that I had to do some long soul searching to readjust my thinking on these things. With God's help I will get there but at least I have started the journey.     God Bless You All,  Dr. Angel Koerner   ~Lazzy~