I have to admit, I'm a little addicted to Dogshaming. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look it up right now. Go to Dogshaming.com and look. You will laugh. You will cry. You will understand immediately why I have become an addict. And I am totally on board! Cat Shaming, Husband Shaming, Wife Shaming, even Kid Shaming all sound like a good idea to me.
I think this is where we have dropped the ball in America. We have lost our shame. We have let our children lose their shame or, worse yet, raised them to have none! I meet people every day who are very very proud of how stupid they are. Or how lazy they are. Or how good they are at "playing the system" and getting free stuff. Or how they are above the rules so they don't bother to follow them. Proud!
I blame my generation, really. We messed up. When we were kids, one adult was as good as another. If my neighbor told me to stop doing something, I stopped! Why? Because a grown-up told me to! We didn't question, we didn't argue. We didn't analyze the chain of command. We just stopped being brats because we were told to. Why we feel the need to raise our children to behave any differently is beyond me, but we do. Tell a kid now to stop doing something, and what do you hear? "You're not my Mom! I don't have to listen to you!" And along will come a parent to stand protectively behind said brat and agree with them!
I feel sorry for teachers these days. Or anyone who has to work with children and therefore has to deal with parents. I have always said and firmly believe: I love kids, I hate parents. Parents take these innocent little creatures and turn them into self-centered little assholes! You can't discipline my child for acting up in class, I'll complain to the Principal! You can't expect my kid to follow the same rules as all the other kids, I'll go to the School Board! And don't even think about catching my kid doing something wrong! Heads will roll!
"You must have the wrong kid. My perfect little angel would never call his classmate a douche, he doesn't even know what that word means!"
Yeah, have you met your kid? Because I have, and he's a little douche himself! Of course he did it! He taught all the other kids the word, too! Now take off the blinders and teach him shame! What would our parents have said in the same situation? "Not my kid" or "You should be ashamed of yourself!" But we are so focused on raising kids with great self-esteem, we forgot to teach them to be ashamed!
But we sure have taught them to be proud. Just proud of the wrong things. I hear daily "I'm so stupid!" or "Yeah, I got that for free." or "Nobody can tell me what to do!" Uhhh, yeah. Pride in your stupidity? Pride in your ability to work the system? Pride in your refusal to learn? OK. You apparently have a lot to be proud of. Let's make a misspelled sign and share it with the world!
But try to shame them into doing the right thing, and suddenly you're the bad guy! You're ruining your child's self-esteem if you make them tell their friends they aren't allowed on Facebook anymore because they posted a picture of themselves doing something stupid or illegal. They can be proud of that bong they're hitting, but don't you dare make them post that they messed up and are paying for it. That would be humiliating! Oh no! I don't know yet where I stand on the signs. You know, making kids write a sign that says "I'm a stupid, disrespectful, (fill in the blank here) kid that did a horrible deed, so this is my public display." Not that I think it's mean or child abuse or anything like that. I just don't think they feel the shame the signs are supposed to elicit. They proudly hold up their signs, knowing they got away with whatever it is they did without losing their smart-ass phone. You've heard the term "Sarcasm is wasted on the stupid." I think in this case it should be "Shame is wasted on the proud." They just don't get it.
But isn't having some appropriate pride a good thing? Isn't shame an effective teaching tool? Thousands of years of Jewish Mothers can't be so wrong, can they? When did we lose the capacity to feel shame? When did we all decide to flaunt our character flaws, even brag about them, rather than trying to be better people? What happened to being embarrassed enough to never do something again? Yes, we all had our humiliating moments. But I for one learned from them. We are robbing our children of the opportunity to learn from their own humiliation. And in the process, we are creating a generation of proud little douche bags.
So I say, Shame On You! Shame On You, kids who are proud of being a dumb ass! Shame On You, parents who are proud of their dumb ass kids! Shame On You, people proudly flaunting your refusal to earn your own keep! Shame On You, drivers who refuse to follow the rules of the road! Shame On You, line cutters and texting drivers, and bad parents, and poor spellers, and mean people, and anyone else I'm forgetting! Shame! And yes, I am pretty proud of myself right now.
