The Annointed Fig

So, you thought your parents were too strict?

Were you grounded when you had brought home an “F”?  Did you have to go to bed without dessert if you didn’t clean your hamster cage?  Were you not allowed to watch a late-night showing of a Freddy Krueger flick on a school night?

What goes around...

Don’t know about you, but I certainly felt supremely used when either of the above chanced to happen.

But after reading a recent report published on life.ru about parents so concerned with their 12-year old’s GPA, they kept him from using a bathroom and stuck hot peppers in his mouth and anus if he brought home a Russian equivalent of an “F”, well, lemme tell you, my inner child is feeling chastised.

Abuse by those you trust the most is to me so much worse than the comparable wrong done to you by a stranger.

You are not expecting those nearest and dearest to do you wrong, and when they do…I think the hurt goes deep.  So deep, many never completely recover.  And those that do not, yet make it through childhood alive — if scarred, in more ways than one — all too often grow up doomed to repeat the same cycle of behavior.  In fact, even infants subsequently adopted out into loving household are now considered at risk for abusive behavioral patterns.  No, it is not a classic argument in favor of nature winning over nurture.

Quite the opposite, in fact.  The theory is, infant abuse in early stages of life may lead to the lowered production of seratonin, a chemical responsible for transmitting brain impulses, the depressed levels of which have long been known to cause anxiety, depression, and impulsive aggression.  The study extending this disturbing school of thought to our youngest members is based on the effects of maternal neglect and abuse on baby rhesus monkeys, whose metabolism and reaction to stress has often proved very similar to that of humans.

Even now not altogether understood, the infant failure to thrive has been a medical staple for many decades.  The failure to develop into an emotionally healthy adult based solely on upbringing in the first few months of life is something that is, also, beginning to make rounds in the professional cycles.

Not to say we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our not so stellar family members.  There are people referred to among behavioral researchers as “resilient” and they are carefully studied – with their consent – for the purpose for of developing programs for “at risk” populace and implementing them as means of preventing the spread of this trend to new generations.

Meanwhile, though, are children are left to rely on civic authorities to protect them from those who have given them life and yet are prepared to make it a living hell for any and all perceived infraction.  But all too often, the authorities fail — either because of frank societal indifference or a gross negligence on the part of the people in charge.

In the case with the disciplinarian couple referenced higher, well, it has to be the former, because action has been taken, just in a mindbogglingly insufficient way.  Having been reported to the police by the boy’s teachers, this particular set of role models was found to have severely whipped their son for every conceivable misdemeanor in addition to their creative means of assuring his study ethics — and convicted by Voronezh court system of cruelty to a minor, sentenced to…8, I repeat, 8 months in a state penitentiary.  With, because it is not separately stated, I assume a possibility of an early parole.

I really and truly do not understand the logic.  Nor, for that matter, do I understand the utter lack of any sort of outrage on the part of the local journalists bringing us that blurb.

Do we have to be cruel to be kind?

There was such a matter-of-factedness in that description, that not even the parents’ contemptible behavior has shocked me the deepest in this sorry mess.  What does it say about the society where this is practically the norm?  And what does it say about our own country, where prohibitive sentencing is practiced and yet, we have equally if not the more disturbing cases coming to light every day?

Is such violence actually bred into us by this point that no amount of prosecution can, at least, scare it out of those prone to it through our genetic and / or learned blueprint?

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