Just finished laying out the stack of letters to Santa, which we publish each year. Been doing this for more than 20 years now.
I quit reading the letters years ago. It hurts too much.
Mind you, I love the letters, I love reading about the kids and their wishes and how much they genuinely love Santa Claus.
Then.
There are the letters where the kid does not want anything material. He (or she) just wants his momma and daddy to get back together.
It hurts I tellya. A lot. So much, I no longer read letters to Santa.
Kids don't deserve that kinda hurt. No indeed. No way. No how.
When otherwise rational adults can't get along and kids are involved, the kids suffer the most.
Rather than focus on the children, the two parents turn the children into a political and legal football, a leverage by which one parent can force the other parent to do something.
No. That ain't how this is supposed to work.
Myself, I believe parents who treat their children like that are just as guilty of child abuse as a child molester.
Yeah. I said it. Yeah I mean it.
Yeah, I think if you are one of those divorced parents who uses your children as a tool against their other parent your sorry ass needs to be thrown under the jail.
Except that too is not fair to the kids.
There's another kinda letter that hurts too, just slightly less.
The letters from children requesting not toys, CDs, games or such, but asking for new shoes, new clothes. You know these kids are serious. They ask out of need, not want.
Dammit. That hurts.
If it is parents who are genuinely trying but can't, well, that's one thing.
If it's parents who can afford cigarettes, but not new shoes. Yeah. You're a child molester too in my opinion.
There are also parents whose children are beneficiaries of various charities. They kids do get toys and clothes.
Day after Christmas, Mom and/or Dad has all the stuff at the flea market selling it to buy drugs. Calling these parents child molesters is an insult to a child molester. These parents need to be run over, slowly, by very slow moving very heavy vehicles.
Reading those kinda letters makes me want to haul out my Uzi and go hunting The Most Dangerous Game. Except that too won't be fair to the kids.
It ain't right. Kids deserve better.
The views in this blog are not those of people who can't think for themselves and rely on others to think for them. For that matter, the views expressed here may not be those of people who CAN think for themselves, but it comes extremely close.
In NY, the papers would print a few of the Santa letters and ask people to come down and pick one out and be a secret Santa. When living there, I had done it probably 10 years in a row and always grabbed 2 letters from a girl and a boy. You could always tell the ones where an adult wrote it instead of a child. Those people should be ashamed and they are the ones that kill programs like the secret Santa ones out of greed for drug money and crap like that.
ReplyDelete