Hey, it works for Willie Nelson - He crooned a memorable song urging mothers not to let their babies grow up to be cowboys. Certainly, there are fewer cowboys today.
He sings,
“Cowboys ain't easy to love and they're harder to hold.
They'd rather give you a song then diamonds or gold.
Lonestar belt buckles and old faded Levi's and each night begins a new day.
If you don't understand him and he don't die young.
He'll probably just ride away.”
And then it gets worse.
So yes, by Golly, Willie has convinced this old Buckeroo to discourage my son from becoming a cowboy.
(Oh, he’s already a firefighter-paramedic. He’s lost to the world of 9 - 5 easy work.)
But Willie needs to update the lyrics to address a new set of mama’s. Nothing else seems to be working, so maybe a song will dissuade impressionable young parents from smoking methamphetamine and raping young children. (If the subjects too raw, move on. It won’t go away, but if you’re lucky, you’ll only blindly support the issue by paying taxes and bitching about why “somebody won’t do something.”)
There was a newpaper article in the Exponent-Telegram today which quotes my boss as saying we’ve file 75 abuse & neglect child petitions already this year. The county has 17,000 people. Um, sorry you were in Court all day Friday, Thomas. We’re up to 80 - it was a busy day. We need to talk in the morning.)
(One of these days real soon, I’ll tell you how this ol’ gunslinger defense lawyer ended up on the Lone Ranger’s side of the law. I do abuse & neglect and crimes against children. There is plenty to keep me busy. At the end of a case, I look all solemn, but I admit, my heart does a little zippidee-do-dah when the baliff takes into custody a child molester.)
I’m absolutely not fooling when I tell you that half of abuse & neglect cases are based on the parents use of drugs. Around here, it’s usually methamphetamine which it pretty easy to tell - It rots your teeth, covers you with sores like a leper, you lose massive amounts of weight and you forget that you have kids. Oh, we do have the heroin here and pain pills there, together with the “treatment meds,” buphrenorphine, but meth is our big deal now.
Do you remember how your parents watched you every minute and you could get away with anything? And if you were away from the house and smoked a cigarette, a well-intentioned (ho-ho) neighbor ratted you out before you got home?
There’s less of that which goes on now. In the last year, I’ve had 2 year olds go exploring on a farm (including one that had an unprotected farm pond), 4 year olds take their odd assortment of toys in a wagon on a BUSY highway because they were hungry. I’ve seen multiple kids left with drug-addicted babysitters, some of whom appear on the sex-abuser lists. Those are the high points, just some examples.
Well, somebody ought to do something. Harrumph. Harrumph, I say. (Psssst - Hey, Governor - the freeze in state hiring and the across-the-board budget cuts are doing wonders for our work with children. Nice going.)
Oh, and the title mentions having sex with children. Another quarter of our Abuse & Neglect cases are sexual. Oh boy, does it happen. I know that you don’t believe that it happens in your nice neighborhood. After all – A child molester doesn’t bring the kid out on the front steps and abuse him or her or both him and her there. By and large, they are warped, they’re not stupid. And then after the abuse, after the damage is done, they do additional damage by making up all kinds of BAD THINGS that will happen to the kid and the family if he or she tells. Then, the kid sits in a private hell for 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 years before s/he reveals. And then the defenders do what they are supposed to do - cast doubt because it’s not a fresh complaint. If only the children knew that your average child molester (usually a man) is a screwed-up giant pussy who’s afraid of his own shadow.
And the saddest part is, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Mizpah!
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