Inthenews

By now, we’ve all heard the news concerning the terrible
tragedies at the Amish school in Pennsylvania and the scandal
surrounding Congressman Mark Foley.



Now if you follow the news like I do, you can start to see a
pattern in both of these situations. The media and others are
taking the position that these incidents are the result of
earlier abuse in the lives of the guys at fault. In the case of
the murderer in Pennsylvania, Mr. Roberts claims in his suicide
note that he abused young girls when he was ten or eleven years
old and was consumed by guilt which turned into anger which led
him to enter a one room Amish school house and shoot a number of
innocent girls, killing five as of this morning. I can see how
this relates. Yeah, right.



So, let’s see I do something really rotten years ago, but never
attempt to seek any help for this and never tell anyone about
what I did or how I feel, so that somehow gives me license to
grab up a ton of guns and ammunition and storm into a school
house and murder people who weren’t even alive when I did
whatever it was that I did.



Take this guy Foley. He now claims that some member of the
clergy abused him when he was a kid. So, now he’s gay and an
alcoholic and has been discovered doing nastiness with teen-age
boys assigned to the page internship program at the House of
Representatives. I find his comments very confusing. He claims
he was drunk when he made these luring e-mails to these young
boys. He claims he never let his sexual activities get in the
way of his responsibilities as a congressman. However, in one
e-mail released yesterday he claims to have left the floor of
the house during a vote to have cybersex with some young page.




Was he drunk at this time?



Was he supposed to be voting at this time?



Now, he is saying that he is a victim and that the clergy who
abused him when he was just a kid is at fault. I ask you this.
If he was abused, why didn’t he tell someone when it happened so
that the person who abused him could be removed or confronted?
Why not tell someone right then and there to prevent abuse from
happening to someone else? Why wait for years and then after you
get caught, blame some incident or some person for something
that you were a part of in the far distant past?



Both of the incidents turn my stomach, as they should yours as
well. What kind of a society are we living in, in which no one
takes any sort of blame for his or her actions? How sick is it
to say that just because something bad happened to me, then I
have the right to inflect bad on you or others?



I find myself searching for an answer for these questions and
keep coming up short. One thing I do notice which may be part of
this dilemma and that is what we see on our televisions. There
is a new show coming out called…”Ugly Betty”. It’s a series
about a overweight, unattractive young girl and her trials and
tribulations with her new job.



This is supposed to be funny.



I am telling you the truth folks when I say that our young kids
have enough bad stuff in their lives every day without what I
consider to be ‘put down’ shows. Our kids, our friends, our
families need encouragement and positive talk from us, not
negative comments that tend to lower someone’s self esteem.



What little they have.



We have made a mockery of our family lives through sitcoms that
portray the father as a stumbling, bumbling fool incapable of
running his own household, much less being a role model.



Our political system allows for two distinct classes, them and
us. We read about it each and every day and still those of us in
the trenches pick up our shovels and head off to the mines
singing…”Hi, ho…hi, ho ..it’s off to work we go.” As if nothing
was wrong in the world.



Folks, I am telling you that we must wake up and smell the dog
poop. There is something rotten in our land and I’m afraid it is
us. We must snap out of our collective revelry and watch for the
bad guys, no matter how good they seem. We are living in a world
in which our children and future children are being abused by
wolves in sheep’s clothing.



My prayer is for all of us to listen to our children, talk to
our children, watch our children. If they seem disturbed, find
out why. Who wants to be the parents of either a Charles Roberts
of a Mark Foley?