What the heck is wrong with people?

It's 7:05 a.m. on Saturday. I get up and grab the paper and sit down with a glass of milk and a cinnamon roll (made them for the kids but mmmm they smelled too good to pass up). I look at the front cover of the paper...the headline reads "Dekalb Woman Charged with stabbing man" and just below it 'Shots fired in separate gang-related incident'.

Are you kidding me? I live in the corn capital of the United States. We have Friday night football, a dirt race track, a skate park, and lots of country roads. What the hell is wrong with people? This crap just burns me up...

The "incident's" mentioned above happened seriously across the street from me in the University Village Apartments. When I was in High School they were occupied by lots of single moms who were trying to make ends meet. Now they are occupied by a few of the just mentioned and a lot of worthless pieces of crap. I don't want to hear that it's the environment that they know. I grew up in a house with a man who beat the hell out of me (I'm talking broken bones, stitches in the head, bruising so bad that I had to be kept out of school for weeks at a time) and my home is relatively calm if you don't count all the zoo like noises my 3 boys and my husband make while wrestling and being loud boys.

We choose our path in life....by this I mean, each individual decides to either to be a good person or be a bad person. I assure you there was never the thought in my mind that I would beat my children, nor have I ever come close to doing so. However, society needs to wake up...apparently time out doesn't work as well as once thought. Kids don't care about time out or about half of the punishments that people try to give. Bob and I have never beaten or really even spanked our kids yet they know if they do something bad enough they are going to be in DEEP SHIT! They don't even want to do anything bad enough to be in that kind of trouble.

Another point to how things used to be (keep in mind I grew up in a really small town then moved here for high school) when we would walk across town to go to basketball, softball or track practice and we pulled any crap someone was on the phone calling my mom or stepfather and letting them know what crap we had pulled....we got our butts cracked right in front of God and everyone...thus helping to shame us into compliance as well.

I'm not down with beating children but I assure you that what a bunch of these kids need is a good spanking. For example: the kid who choked my son on the bus a couple weeks ago. His mother was letting him outside to play the same day....are you kidding? My son would have gotten spanked! He would have then walked to the persons house with me towing him behind me to apologize for acting like an animal, I would then be driving him to and from school for the rest of the school year while reminding him every day that people are not allowed to act like animals! He'd also have more chores added to his list and he wouldn't be seeing a T.V. or a playground for at least a month.

Kids need guidance. Not moms and dads who want to be their friends and feel cool. They need to know what our (their parent's) expectations are for them and they need to know that there are consequences for not meeting those expectations.

Rewards....allowances and all that other stuff are fine and good, but they shouldn't be used as bribery either....my son when he was 4 asked if he was going to get a pack of bubble gum because he was good at the store...I said "No" because good behavior is not something that should be rewarded constantly....he hadn't done anything above and beyond what my expectations were to be rewarded. You want to be rewarded? Do something above and beyond those levels of expectation...

Don't get me wrong, we reward our kids, even for just consistently behaving well...such as when they have all done their chores all week or for two weeks, we will just randomly take them out for ice cream or to the kite festival or whatever. It's not something they need to expect each time they do something right. Good behavior is the norm.

The girl that did the stabbing is 20...ten years ago she probably could have used a belt across her butt and an attitude adjustment, the gang related shooting those people also are all in their late teens and early 20's....also, could have used an attitude adjustment from a parent or parents who gave a damn! Instead they will now go to jail where they will become bigger jerks and then come out being even less useful in society (can you tell I'm not a big believer in rehabilitation either?).

Anyway, that's my soap box preaching for this morning.