Afshin10, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper acknowledges that while the rules for parenting are so simple that creatures on the lowest rungs follow them successfully by rearing generations of species replacements; complications can set in with parenting when cars and guns saturate the procreating landscape. Some additional parenting rules would seem to be called for: “Do not permit a young driver to use his/her phone while driving the family car,” and, “Do not give an unstable teenager a gun for Christmas.”
Beyond that, parenting rules are up for grabs, promulgated as they are in juggling survival instincts, basic sustenance essentials and the kind of protective love that has parent mice standing up to lions.
Under the best of circumstances, parenting is perhaps life’s greatest challenge, and when that challenge is compounded in a gun-crazed society, it calls for the exercise of basic parental intelligence to counter the absurdity of at least 100 gunshot deaths every day. That intelligence was obviously lacking recently over in Michigan.
If there is a parallel regarding parental helplessness toward the gun insanity, it might be concocted by imagining that in the face of a deadly pandemic, everyone—parents included, refused vaccination and the death toll soared into the millions.
Parents wouldn’t do that—at least not parents with a lick of sense!
