Summertime, and the living is easy...

Summertime, being a parent and a foster parent, Trump is still an ass (though he's got my vote), and Kamala is indeed a DEI hire.

Jul 25, 2024

I’m on a summer break until the beginning of September. For the next few weeks, I’m dealing with my kids, foster kids, music, and traveling across the country to attend my 50th high school reunion. I’ll be around on Substack, but just not as much.

Had you asked me anytime during the summer of 1974, my first summer after high school, if I could imagine that my life would end up the way that it has 50 years later, I’d have said that you were nuts. What a long, strange trip it’s been. There have been a lot of laughs, thrilling adventures (a few heart-stopping), some good times, and some bad ones. I’ve been up, and I’ve been down. I have seen it all, especially that yawning trap door into an abyss that lurks, barely hidden, beneath everyone.

A few times I’ve been down so bad that I wasn’t sure that I’d see the next day. That’s what I wish my older self could have told my younger self all those years ago. It gets better. Sometimes there’s nothing that anyone can say to you in the moment to take away the pain, but it gets better. All you have to do is hang tough and believe in better days ahead. When you learn to do that, you are hard to kill and truly free.

I’m a licensed foster and adoptive parent in Idaho. This week, we are providing respite care for two 4-year-olds. When I was going through foster care training, I marveled at starry-eyed fellow trainees who saw Cecil B. DeMille “God rays” shining on their hacienda at the end of each day of foster parenthood. Maybe that happens sometimes, but I haven’t seen it.

Providing care for children, any children, is ass-busting hard work. And it’s harder when those kids have been raised in environments other than yours. That doe-eyed countenance, should it be your primary move, will very soon be replaced with whatever one uses to express frustration. Fostering is no place for emotionally unprepared or unrealistic expectations. Fostering is about perseverance and small wins. There are going to be potty accidents, spills, things that you like getting destroyed, and lots of crying. My favorite line from this week: “We don’t want to go bed, and you can’t make us.” To which my 6-year-old daughter replied, “Wanna bet?”

The reason that kids need foster parents is that mom and dad screwed up big time. Although there certainly are cases of overzealous social workers removing kids from good homes over BS, it’s far more common for kids to be left in hellish environments for far too long. In Idaho, they are actually housing kids in Airbnbs until they can find placements for them.

I’ve said it before: I can get along with anyone who does right by their kids. If you and I are to be friends, I’m only going to consider two things: are you good in the pocket, and are you a good parent? Anything else we can work around. Taking care of kids is difficult, but it’s not exactly rocket science. Kids need a roof over their heads and an environment that feels safe. They want you to hug them and play with them. They want you to pay attention to their little plays, songs, and games. They want you to tell them bedtime stories. They want you to be an adult so that they can be kids. You can discipline them, and they’ll be just fine as long as you act out of love instead of anger.

Some young parents lack the skills but not the heart. You can teach them up. But there’s not a lot that you can do about the dipshits who irresponsibly produce children for which they have little to no regard.

How hard can it possibly be to love your child enough—the one that you created by getting it on with the other parent—to take proper care of them? Instead, it’s me (and many others like me) who hold your children when they are sad or scared and who teach them about how things work. It’s me who provides them with as much innocence as possible when they are young, before they find out what’s actually out there. I don’t do this because I’m a saint (I am not), but because it’s necessary on account of you. So snap the hell out of your funk and own up to your responsibility. If you don’t and you see me coming, you’d better run.

This, by the way, is why I favor early-term legal abortion. There are, as I have seen over and over, worse fates than not being born.

So why are there so many parents terrible enough to have kids taken from their homes? First off, the fentanyl and meth crises have hit all of America hard. There is not a place in hell hot enough for those who make a living peddling drugs to people, and I don’t care if they are in a cartel somewhere or board members of a Fortune 500 company.

Another problem is several generations of bad parenting. Bad parenting tends to produce spoiled, unaccountable children who have difficulty adapting to a world where personal responsibility is paramount. That’s why DEI is a secular religion. Those who can’t do, preach. And when those kids grow up, watch out. That's us, right now.

When I was growing up, you respected Mom and Dad, or else. If I had ever talked back to my parents or thought that I could negotiate a better deal about what was going down, I’d have felt their wrath. Was it perfect? Nah? But was it better than anything goes? I think the data says yes by a substantial margin. Lack of expectations and discipline are the reasons that I can never get along with younger women who have kids. No, we are not going to negotiate you cleaning up that mess. You made it; you can unmake it. You can have a few more minutes before bedtime, but then it’s lights off. Why? Because I said so, that’s why.

My own children are known for being very active yet polite and well-behaved. They are also aces in their charter school. They didn’t come out of the womb with any of that; it’s the end result of a lot of effort (including a year of homeschooling). I love them dearly. And when they are gone, there’s a hole in my heart that can’t be filled with anything. But I’m their Dad, not their pal. And I’m not going to let my need for affection trump their need for responsible parenting. I’d rather die alone, knowing that I did all that I could and knowing that some of it is bound to stick.

So when new kids come here, it’s often a bit of a culture shock. But it wears off quickly. Most kids that I know like all of the things that we do here and adapt to our expectations pretty quickly. The twins, after just a couple of days, are fully checked out on the John Deere tractor. They are pretty adept little tool users, too. They’ve cuddled our Aussies, stared down the goats, fed the llamas, and run around like joyful, carefree little kids should.

Young parents. It’s a brave new world, for sure. I coached youth sports for decades until I could no longer tolerate younger parents and coaches.

Just before I stopped coaching last year, I had a kid who caught his first pass of the season and, in his excitement, got turned around and ran the ball into the wrong end zone. We all gave him high fives when he got back to our sideline, and I gave him a big hug, but we did mention that he scored for the wrong team while congratulating him on his epic catch and run. The kid took it just fine; he was happy to have caught a pass and made it to the end zone. He could have cared less about who got the points. But his mom had a come-apart on the sideline, screaming at me in front of other parents after the game for being demeaning to her kid. Same mom, I might add, who got into a fistfight with her ex on the sidelines a few weeks before. I’m pretty sure that if you look up “hot mess” in the dictionary, it’s her waving at you in the picture.

OK, bear with me. You may, in my opinion, draw a straight line from all of the above to the recent near assassination of Donald Trump. Low expectations have consequences. Merit and discipline, which should be celebrated and ubiquitous, have been quite out of fashion for some time—and not just in child rearing. That’s how the United States Secret Service apparently let a sloped roof dissuade them from stopping the sniper who got off the shots that injured Trump (along with two others) and killed a bystander. When the entire federal government is obsessed with the destruction of merit as a standard for obtaining and holding a position, why is anyone surprised that we have not-ready-for-prime-time players running things?

On the parenting side, there’s no way that you can grow up to become a would-be presidential assassin without there being some telltale signs along the way. Indulging little Johnny, who’s an obvious antisocial weirdo, with guns and soirees at the shooting range, probably isn’t the most responsible parenting move, even if it feels like a wonderful bonding experience. Ask the kids at Sandy Hook.

About Trump. His near assassination did nothing to alter my feelings about him in the least bit. I know that his bandwagon has grown, but I shall decline, thank you, to hop onboard. Trump is still an ass, a buffoon, every kind of fool there is, and a megalomaniac. The bandage on his ear changes none of that for me. I loathe and despise Donald Trump. And the only reason that I’m going to vote for the bastard is that the Democrats keep making me do it.

The gaslighting from the left about Biden and now Kamala Harris seems most effective on their own. I don’t know anyone outside of acolytes who didn’t comprehend that Biden was demonstrating obvious signs of cognitive and physical decline through much of his presidency. And the DEI nonsense, men competing in women’s sports, Title IX rewrites that erase women, numerous attempts to make end runs around the First Amendment, environmental scolding, and other nonsense have endeared no one to the new left who wasn’t already onboard.

I know that a lot of swing voters will search their souls and come to a different conclusion than me about the 2024 race, but, barring something unusual, my vote is locked. Kamala Harris is the ultimate DEI hire, and a vote for her is a vote for Kimberly Cheatle, Claudine Gay, Rachel Levine, Sam Brinton, Alejandro Mayorkas, and dipshits who would counsel my children into becoming the 21st century version of the Junior Spies.

All of that worries me more than Trump. And I suspect that I’m far from alone.

Now, back to my hiatus. Science Friday’s will continue, albeit on the summer schedule, and I’ll check in here from time to time until September. Thank you all for subscribing. And you paid subscribers are footing the bill for summertime fun for my large, crazy family of kids that I’m going to send into the world, right, or die trying.

Martin Hackworth - Howlin' at the Moon in ii-V-I

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