Some of y’all have legit bad parents but some of y’all out here hating on your folks just trying their best.
Like there’s a difference between your parents trying and failing and your parents not giving a shit.
0 parents go into parenthood prepared for parenthood. It’s just not how parenthood happens.
Suppose I would really like to learn to throw knives well, so I go to a schoolyard and try my best to throw a knife at a log without hitting the children running around behind it.
Am I responsible if my knife hits a child? I genuinely tried my best and failed.
You can’t prepare for every eventuality, but parents are definitely capable of negligent or deliberate recklessness even when they try their best in the moment.
I understand if people decide to have children when oppression means choosing between that and submitting to economic genocide. But those people should then acknowledge the violence the system inflicts on them and their children, so they should be radical leftist.
It is fine to have children in a suburban hellscape if you participate in trying to overthrow the system so your neighborhood can legally be redesigned to allow your 8 year old child to safely explore the outside world without adult supervision. If you support an economic and legal framework that forces your child’s dependence on you, you are culpable in that oppression.
I also understand if people decide to have children in traumatic material deprivation without underlying oppression. Rare now, but it used to be more common and with climate change it may be again. The same logic applies and parents should participate in trying to improve their neighborhood’s material conditions.
In your example everyone is throwing knives. Not throwing knives gets you shunned where you might starve to death. Leaders repeatedly make speeches about how children who get hit by knives are a tragedy, but we’re already doing our best! This is explicitly to ease social guilt and confound the morals of everyone who doesn’t have the luxury of being able to sit down and study the system.
I can’t blame the people in that system for hitting kids with throwing knives. In fact the ones who hit kids are doubly traumatized because they have to live with the consequences of actions they were coerced into performing. This is especially true if they were also hit by a knife as a kid!
I blame the system and the people running it. You should too. It’s deeply childish to assume everyone shares the privilege required for having a proper leftist worldview in a system that literally criminalizes it. Someone is facing 20 years in jail for having a leftist zine with a feminist review of midsommar right now and you expect every parent to have a critical understanding of economic and social coercion???
There is a difference between hate and blame. It’s perfectly reasonable to hate someone for trauma they inflicted in a way they can’t constructively be blamed for. Hatred is a way to create psychological and physical distance so the trauma and accompanying schemas can heal, or at least not be triggered as often. Something has to prevent your love for your parents from getting you in harm’s way time and time again. And expressing hatred can help process it, as you’ve helped me do just now.
Because you’re right, I did muddy that difference in my mind while writing the comment. It’s not that they should have been leftists, but that they should have been leftists.
I would say you don’t even need to hate. If someone hit you with a knife, and is still unrepentant throwing knives and defending knife throwing, then you should rightly get away from that person for your own safety.
Just because they can’t be blamed for participating in the system doesn’t mean you have to accept them as they are or forgive them when they hurt you. It’s like free speech, you can say what you want but I don’t have to stay here and listen.
It’s cool you considered what I said. Most people, often including me, just like to argue. I really enjoyed reading your reply and interpretation.
LadyButterfly she/her
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