When I was little kid, I often wondered why some kids at school and on the school bus were so noble and dignified while others, like my brother and I, were as corrupt as possible. I also wondered why some kids had such crumby manners at the dinner table or elsewhere while we had very good and respectful manners like putting our chairs back under the table and eating quietly or saying “thank you” and “please” at the table. I could see that there were vast differences in us and other kids but had no way to understand it even though I often envied the “decent” kids but usually saw them as pathetic “nerds” because they were never in trouble while we often were.

As I got older and became aware that most people are a little corrupt but either laugh it off or ignore it, I often wondered exactly how adults become: Dirty cops, crooked politicians and industrialists. Why there is so much innocent or horrible corruption that is never seen as a big deal since EVERYONE is doing it. When Nixon was found guilty of political crimes, many people said that his ONLY mistake was in getting caught! And I am still surprised at how many adults found no problem with Bill Clinton’s CHEATING!

But since my therapy and recovery, it has become glaringly obvious to me that my early corruption all began with Parenting. I can now see how every single bad or corrupt thing that my brother and I and all those corrupt kids we knew had started with parenting. The kids who were decent and righteous got it from their parents while those of us who were corrupt got it from our parents! Much is said and written about: genetics, disorders, nature, Karma, bad spirits, peers, etc. to explain the behavior of kids but, thanks to my memory, I know exactly how I was trained and programmed by my parents to become a corrupt kid and how other kids became so GOOD!

Our parents did not ever directly teach us to be thieves & liars or mean and violent, but they very definitely influenced us to become that way in many subtle and indirect ways that most adults don’t even notice. I could fill several pages with all the subtle and intricate ways our parents programmed us to become so corrupt like those politicians, cops and industrialists I mentioned above but it just comes down to day to day, subtle little body language, speech, reactions, behavior and unconscious, automatic actions from any parent to indirectly influence and PROGRAM their kids to be either honorable or corrupt and then pass it on to the next generation in the same, innocent and indirect way.

I wonder how many parents ever realize that both permissive and authoritarian parenting can damage a child and send out into the world a: murdered, school room shooter, arsonist, rapist, terrorist, serial killer, rotten industrialist, crooked GM executive, child molester, pedophile priest, careless oil company CEO, and on and on. For me, it all begins with parenting – the first and most influential system of behavior for any child who is most likely born innocent, honorable and HONEST (like we were) and then miraculously left that way or, as in our case, gradually corrupted by parenting first of all. I don’t even have to read his story to know that Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Bin Laden, those masked ISIS murderers of innocent journalists, the rotten CEOs at GM and the really filthy Politicians in every government all started out as innocent, honorable children and then were CORRUPTED by their own parents from the beginning – just like us kids were corrupted by our parents.

It’s really no mystery at all and anyone can see exactly how it all works UNLESS you are a parent bent on defending your self and finding any excuse possible to cover your tracks. My parents would have found anything possible to hide or deny that they set us boys up to be: liars, thieves, violent, mean, devious, sneaky, out and out bad and ultimately sent my older brother to Prison for armed robbery. I know exactly how it all happened but I just don’t know why so many seemingly intelligent adults still FAIL to see how they are sending such destructive products out into the world or why the other adults in charge of society are FAILING to do something about it besides screaming for more GUN CONTROL!

Parenting is the bottom line issue for most of humanity, not gun control or more therapists, but those who are in charge are them selves part of the problem because they are also parents and feel compelled to minimize or simply DENY that parenting or to be more exact UNREGULATED parenting is the basic problem in our world. Parenting, such as with my parents, is the only unregulated and unmanaged form of production in the world that has no quality controls or over-sights placed on it yet parenting produces both the most destructive and/or beneficial products there are – other human beings.

Society will regulate cows, sheep, birds, insects, plants, etc. BUT NOT parenting! Why not? IMO, unregulated parenting mowed down all those kids at Columbine and unregulated parenting cut the heads off of those journalists in the Middle East. It is a miracle that unregulated parenting did not send us two boys out into the world as murderers or worse even though my brother came close. I could have been a very serious criminal if only I had the guts to do it! I had all of the parental conditioning and influences to be a school shooter or serial killer thanks to the unregulated parenting that I was given.

How about you? Would you like to see parenting brought under the control and oversight of some kind of regulations like any other producer of DANGEROUS products? I would and sorely wish my parents had been controlled and inspected like any other producer of potentially dangerous goods. Fortunately we now have CPS so maybe that’s a step in the right direction to managing the worlds most dangerous business – Parenting.

jim