When I was 11 years old my father beat me with a belt, I don’t recall what crime I’d committed but it would not have been serious for I was essentially a good, honest and polite child. My oldest brother provided a fine example of the consequences of bad behaviour, it was his forte, and he excelled and consequentially suffered the penalties: I learned, at a very tender age that to avoid my father’s wrath you behaved. Without consciously realising, my good behaviour provided a differentiation as a middle child with three male siblings. I was afraid of my father and his tempestuous nature but like him, I was stubborn. That day I remember making a decision not to cry, not to give him the satisfaction of humiliating me: a decision to be strong. It was a mistake: I didn’t cry but this enraged my Dad and he gave me the best whipping I’d ever had. From that time on and through adolescence, I learned not to cry, not to show that I was hurting, to internalise my pain, to try to be a ‘macho man.’
http://jewishsurvivors.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html
Don’t get me wrong, I love my Dad, in many, many ways he is everything a good father should be. In those days violence was regarded as a legitimate form of discipline, even school teachers had the right to met it out: ‘six of the best’ with a strap or cane is excruciating and, depending on the strength of the perpetrator, could leave welts and bruises, but it was all legal and I thought completely normal. I had no idea that other parents chose not to hit their children. Unbeknownst to me our next-door neighbours never hit their brood and I remember an incident when my next older brother who was about 10, whipped one of their kids with a length of cord leaving a welt on her back and creating something of a furore among the local parents: I suspect that even in those days’ parents beating kids was not as common as I assumed.
The problem with violence is where to draw the line: how much is too much? Moreover, who has the right to determine these things? I do not know if it is a reaction to my childhood experiences or a temperament I was born with but I have managed to survive 50 odd years without ever having hit anyone. I can’t imagine intentionally inflicting physical pain on anything (apart from poisonous snakes, spiders and a shark with my arm in its mouth), and yet the psychopath has no such hesitation. From psychopath to pacifist the human spectrums always run the full gamut, for the male of our species, whose customary identity is characterised by his prowess as a hunter, and defender an abandonment of his chemically driven prerogatives is fraught. Generated in the two most primitive parts of our brains, the brain stem and the limbic brain, anger and competitiveness are reactionary impulses that define us as mammals. The neocortex, which provides us with logic and thought, is the seat of processes such as speaking, planning, and writing thus differentiating us as human.
Only overridden by extreme external stimuli, which provide instinctual behaviours such as the ‘flight or fight’ responses, the neocortex provides us with a way of controlling our baser emotions: an ability to modify our animal instincts defines our humanness. The day my father became enraged at my defiance he succumbed to those instincts and yet on other occasions he meted his punishments out in a conscious rational way, “you have done something wrong and this is the consequence”: a thrashing with the belt. It must be a hard decision for a parent to make, to choose to strike their children but the era dictated legitimacy. However, the point is the outcome remained the same: violence. In the final analysis, it is a conscious ethical determination not a choice governed by degrees or morality: either you choose to inflict violence or not.
www.alz.org/brain/overview.asp
I did not intend entering the misinformed hysterical debate currently raging on the issue of smacking children, fanned to fury by the sensation seeking media and the fanatical Christian Right. I have no children and our collective’s tendency to jump on these issues with rampant gusto and ‘do them to death’ until I become inured and sick of hearing about it, usually ensures my taciturn repose. As somewhat of a cynic, I often suspect that once the palaver dies and the media cools, little or no change will occur. However, I watched ‘Campbell Lives’’ broadcast on Monday night, which screened a debate on the subject and, incensed by some of the comments, feel that this is exactly the sort of issue the psychowrecker should tackle.
http://www.tv3.co.nz/News/tabid/67/Default.aspx
Of course, I’m biased: if you hold an opinion on any given subject it is likely (or probable) that someone with an alternative equally biased viewpoint will contest your position, this is politics and human. Thankfully, we have the democratic right to express our beliefs and there is no doubt that this particular subject requires robust and rigorous debate given the horrendous child abuse statistics in this country. We vociferously heard the stereotypical religious agenda from the fanatical Christian Right vehemently espousing the conservative voice with the usual quotes from the Old Testament ironically paired with the Libertine voice, which whined about who was coming into their living room to tell them how to live their lives. They got loud (as fanatics do), and angry and, this is what got me riled, personal. When the basis of your argument is logically flawed, yet you have a need to clutch it fiercely with your fists of faith, the lower orders of your brain engage and, circumvented by the intolerance of reason and rendered useless, the neocortex is then unable to moderate your emotions. For nefarious fun, I engage the religious doorknockers to elicit the same reactions. I am often condemned to hell for my ignorance.
However, the blissfully ignorant faithful fail to realise that much of the Old Testament is a social cultural doctrine whose content, shared with the Torah and Qur’an, contains the conventions for correct social behaviour within these three major monotheistic religions ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotheism ) throughout the millennia. Most of the quotations from the Bible that relate to beating children are from the Old Testament including the oft quoted:
Proverbs 13-24 (King James Version),
“He that spareth his rod hateth his son.”
Bible Bashers are quick to quote these lines to condemn the modern world when it suits. Yet their college cut hair and shaved faces don’t meet the appropriate requirements from the same set of books, they pick and choose to create a false ideologue, which they believe they have the right to insist I adhere to and condemn and judge me if I do not. This, I do believe is ‘hypocrisy’ and is construability used as an insidious vehicle for passing judgement on others and the justification and promulgation of war; for legitimising violence.
www.nls.uk/collections/rarebooks/collections/popup/kjb.html
I could go on but should get back to the point of my annoyance: when your argument is bullshit and you’re up against the wall ATTACK! Get personal! According to our debaters sitting TV stage left but definitely right politically, some of our elected representatives, in particular Sue Bradford (who introduced the Private Members Bill), the kicking, screaming, and biting ex-protester from the 1980s and 90s and our childless (insinuated as lesbian) Prime Minister, Helen Clark are not morally fibrous enough to repeal Section 59 of the Crimes Act. The anti-smacking rhetoric is nonsense, the section to be repealed reads:
Section 59, Crimes Act 1961
"Every parent or person in place of a parent of a child is justified in using force by way of correction towards a child if that force is reasonable in the circumstances."
http://www.primeminister.govt.nz/
This debate is not about “anti-smacking” it is a demonstration of the Political Right’s continued paranoia at what they regard as social engineering by the Labour Government: a belief that their rights as individuals are being eroded.
My advice: GET OVER YOURSELVES!
In my lifetime I have been: stripped of my ‘right’ not to wear a crash helmet on my motor bike, denied my 'right' to smoke cigarettes where ever I want. In addition, I am forced to acquiesce that homosexuals are human and their perverse bedroom antics are not morally reprehensible and repugnant, and forced to acquiesce that abortion is a legitimate form of birth control. Moreover, my poor old great grandfather had to allow his Missus the vote!
Since the division of church and state and the rise of western democracies, part of their governments’ mandate is to legislate an ethical social doctrine that is as equitable as possible for all the individuals under its governance and, as the society evolves, to modify the legislature to correspond with contemporary social norms. Counterpoint to this model are the theocracies, which insist their populations subscribe to a rigid set of archaic, often repressive and repulsive laws i.e. stoning an adulterous woman to death (as a public spectacle) when the implicated male suffers no consequence. I know where I prefer to live: New Zealand!
I LOVE MY COUNTRY. I AM FREE TO SPEAK. I’M PROUD OF OUR GOVERNMENT & ITS SOCIAL CONSCIENCE. OUR SOCIETY, (though not perfect) IS INCLUSIVE & FORWARD THINKING. I LIVE IN A BEAUTIFUL ENVIRONMENT, WHICH I KNOW OUR GOVERNMENT HELPS PROTECT. I WANT TO BE PART OF A COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS WHERE POWER MAD, KID THRASHING BULLIES ARE OUTLAWED & OSTRACISED.
Above: “God of Nations at thy feet in the bonds of LOVE we meet...”
www.teara.govt.nz/NewZealandInBrief/GovernmentAndNation/9/ENZ-Resources/Standard/2/en
See what ‘Save the Children - New Zealand’ thinks and check out the link on their site to the PDF explaining the intention of the bill:
http://www.savethechildren.org.nz/new_zealand/nz_programme/section_59.html
Quote from an article in the New Zealand Herald about violence at an “Anti-Smacking” demonstration:
“Some of those 30 mingled among those in favour of the law staying as it is and there were angry arguments, but they didn't escalate into anything physical, other than when a man at Civic Square referring repeatedly to Jesus grabbed another man on the leg.
The Bible-carrier had taken offence to a comment from the other man, but it turned out both were from the anti-smacking side of the debate. Police quickly intervened.”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10431333
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