Absentee Parent(s) Syndrome

In the wake of highly-publicized school shootings such as the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, ideologues more concerned with feeling good themselves than actually doing good for others have once again embarked upon a crusade to ‘save the children’ – either not knowing or not caring that ‘assault weapon’ is merely a euphemism for “gun that looks scary” and that such a ban was enacted in 1994 and was allowed to lapse in 2004 because multiple studies concluded that the ban had ZERO discernible impact on gun crimes.

Such symptomatic treatment is commonly described as “taking the batteries out of the smoke detector rather than looking for a fire”.  But, of course, the ‘social justice’-minded persist in tilting at windmills because the truth means acknowledging that they themselves are the root cause for severe violence – not merely the rise in school shootings, but in every walk of life.

The first part of the equation is evolutionary psychology – while few would contest the notion that our sexually-dimorphic physiologies are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of “survival of the fittest”, the “champions of stupidity” perpetually argue against a similar and concurrent evolution of our equally-dimorphic psychologies.  We know for a fact that girls with Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (causing an overproduction of androgens such as testosterone) follow a male pattern of verbal, spatial, and emotional development while boys with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (partial ‘immunity’ to testosterone) or Hypogonadism (reduced production of testosterone) follow a female development pattern.  Meanwhile tragic cases such as that of David Reimer offer fairly conclusive evidence that gender is a product of biology and by no means a ‘social construct’.

The second part is predicated upon the first.  It is provable fact that women can perceive more and subtler colors than men – similarly, men are far more capable in perceiving changes such as movement than women.  Women possess a far keener sense of smell while men excel at tasks involving spatial cognition.  Women are much better at multitasking while men are more task-focused.  In a competition to guess the titles of classic novels, a team of men and a team of women were equally successful but the men needed 40% fewer words.  Men systemize while women empathize.  In brief, males and females are as dimorphic psychologically as men and women are physiologically – all of which is the result of eons of overcoming challenges which drove all of our evolutionary cousins to extinction.

I said all that in order to say this:

The foundational unit throughout the whole of human evolution has been the family and, as much as hysterical activists try to claim their hypothesis that ‘gender is a social construct‘ as provable fact (which it isn’t), the root cause of many societal ills – in particular, the REAL cause for the escalation of school shootings – is how leftist ideology has dedicated itself to the destruction of the family unit.

First and foremost, allow me to state unequivocally that no part of this is intended as an aspersion against families headed by gays and/or lesbians.  The key issue at hand lies in the fulfillment of particular roles within the family unit rather than the specific individuals who fill those roles.  In my own case, I was raised by my paternal grandparents; some are raised by a single parent with a live-in grandmother; some are raised in bursting multigenerational clusters with cousins as siblings.  The common thread to all of this is that there is at least one dedicated full-time parent capable of fulfilling the roles traditionally ascribed to a full-time mother and homemaker.

The foundation for this is Women’s Intuition – that a majority of gendered female traits interact synergistically to deduce things at a subconscious level.  This has been a key trait to the survival of the human species as much as pareidolia, which allowed us to spot the faces of lurking predators before they had the opportunity to make a meal of our ancestors.  As with many other feminine traits, women are more perceptive of nuance in social situations.  Such perception, of course, is contingent upon familiarity with the status quo – a full-time mother will be far more familiar with her children’s baseline psyche than a career woman whose interactions are far more truncated, or even by an otherwise-inattentive mother or a full-time father.

While women aren’t always accurate in deducing the cause of a behavioral anomaly, most women will sense its presence long before it becomes a substantial issue.

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the perpetrators of the Columbine High School Massacre in Littleton, Colorado, spent a full year plotting their rampage right under the noses of their inattentive mothers – Sue Klebold openly admitting that she only recognized the warning signs in hindsight because she was too preoccupied at the time.  Eric and Dylan were frequently targeted by school bullies, same as Nikolas Cruz of the 2018 Parkland Shooting, and the situations were allowed to fester to the point of tragedies.  Meanwhile, “Tragedy Celebs” like David Hogg(wash) and Emma ‘Bully’ Gonzalez seem determined to distract the public by parroting mindless talking points and rubbing salt in the wounds of the survivors.

As much as many parents have become complacent in relegating their duties to the schools, so too do they systematically deny educators the ability to actually intervene.  Long gone is the infamous “Board of Education”, administrators ignore pleas from teachers and other students for fear of ‘offending’ the troublemaker’s parent(s), and wild accusations of prejudice are salvoed when an educator is driven to intervene in an effort to prevent a tragedy – or even voices concern about the safety of the students in their charge.

“But wait!” I hear you exclaim.  “I thought you said this was about a lack of maternal parenting, but now it sounds like it’s actually being bullied at school which is the root cause.”  But what you fail to take into account is the fact that school bullies and school shooters are two sides of the same coin – both are when kids are driven to lash out when they’re unable to resolve issues which observant parents could spot easily.

I can attest to this personally because I spent my years of secondary education back and forth between my grandparents (and the mother-figure who raised me from birth) and my father (either on his own or with whoever he was with at the time).  Now don’t get me wrong – I admire my father and how hard he fought for me; not only in the custody battle with the ‘mother’ who tried to induce a miscarriage, but often working 100 hours per week (he sent most of his earnings to my grandparents for my care) to ensure I would never suffer materially.  But virtually everything about myself and my experiences made Jekyll and Hyde pale by comparison, depending on where I was living at the time.

Living with my grandparents, they were both extremely perceptive (my grandmother even more so) and would sense something was troubling me even before I realized it myself.  Whichever one they felt I would be more comfortable discussing the matter with was the one who would extend some form of subtle invitation as an opening to talk things through – my grandmother would avail of the time we spent in the kitchen together cooking, while my grandfather would take advantage of the time we spent working on maintenance projects around the house.  While I had the usual allies and arch-nemeses at school, they were manageable and I was admired by my teachers as a model student.

Living with my father was an entirely different story.  As a man, he simply lacked both the perception and the frame of reference to sense what I was going through.  And while he prioritized his relationships to find someone who would be good “mother material” for me, they were equally incapable of the maternal attention I needed as they had never established a ‘baseline’ in order to know which behaviors were normal and which were warning signs.  During these times, I was an absolute wreck at school – my grades were horrible and I likely started as many fights with others as they did with me.  Not only did I seriously contemplate suicide numerous times, but I often thought long and hard about going on a shooting rampage myself.

Yes, you read that correctly.  I have a rather unique perspective on this topic because I came within a hair’s breadth of ‘becoming famous’ myself.  On at least three separate occasions, I took a considerable arsenal to school with me – while I was never into flashy so-called ‘assault weapons’ I had two innocuous-looking hunting rifles that could put AR-15s to shame for spewing lead, two other rifles besides, a revolver, and four semiautomatic pistols of varying calibers.  Nothing cinema-worthy, but enough that I could have blown away half the entire school without reloading.

Behind the plastic smiles, I was screaming – desperate for virtually ANYONE to simply take a moment to even notice me eating lunch in a corner all by myself.  Even a simple acknowledgement by someone else that they were aware of my pain and it mattered to them would have made a world of difference.

But no.

I wanted to take out the dumbass with the jacked-up 4×4 who thought it was his right to ram my car out into the middle of the street so he could take the spot I had parked in.  I wanted to get back at the classmates who took pictures of me in the gym showers and passed them around the entire school for a laugh.  I fantasized about planting a bomb in my school locker to put a stop to the asshats who kept breaking into it and stealing my stuff.  And most of all, I wanted to settle the score with the teachers and administrators who had been told time and again what was going on and they never did a damned thing about it!

The only thing that stopped me was my kid sister.

Well, technically my half-sister – same father, but her mother was my third step-mother.  (A step-mother who decided she wanted nothing more to do with me once she became pregnant with a child of her own.)  With twelve years between us and as often as I cared for her while our parents were out at one social function or another, she was closer to being a daughter than a sibling.  She worshipped the ground I walked on and anytime I came close to pulling the trigger (either suicide or a rampage) the thought of how it would affect her stayed my hand.  I shudder to think what I may have done without her and the bond we shared.

So to all you gun control zealots and nanny state nincompoops out there, take it from someone who has twice come within the twitch of a finger from committing a high school bloodbath.  Blaming guns for school shootings is like blaming a socket wrench for your car breaking down.  The little Honda I drove would have been every bit as deadly, and there were times I’d sit behind the wheel plotting how many of my targets I could take out before they scattered.  The method is immaterial – the madness of trying to sort through teen issues without guidance is not.  The Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory needs an entry worth somewhere around 50-60 points for Junior High and High School – it’s clearly equivalent to changing jobs and sexual difficulties, exacerbated by rampaging hormonal changes and immense peer pressure.

Guns have been an integral part of American culture since its inception (even to the point that rifles and handguns were traditional Christmas presents for the kids and could be ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog without so much as a background check) but the rise in school shootings is a fairly recent phenomenon.  The first step in properly assessing any causal relationship is to factor out what hasn’t changed (in this case, guns) and work towards analyzing what has changed – the proliferation of Marxist mentality which denigrates (even outright demonizes) how important full-time mothers are in guiding kids through the Terrible Teens.

Accompanying this is ideological demonization of men and marriage waging war against the biological impetus for procreation, leading to a massive outbreak of single motherhood throughout America.  Roughly one-third of all white children, half of all hispanic children, and two-thirds of all black children are born to unwed mothers (and this is after a similar rampant trend of using abortion as retroactive birth control)!  While some are fortunate enough to have other family members (grandmothers, aunts, cousins, adult siblings, etc) to provide maternal support, most are condemned to erratic paid child care while their mothers struggle to earn enough to pay for that in addition to providing some semblance of a stable home life.

While I have only my own personal experiences to argue a causal relationship, the trend in school shootings matching the trend in unwed births (offset by 13 to 18 years, naturally) shows conclusive correlation.  The University of Michigan, Center for Disease Control, National Institute of Justice, and other third-party sources are virtually unanimous in attributing youth violence (either directly or indirectly) to the absence of a perceptive adult confidant – the role traditionally served by a full-time mother and homemaker.  It’s hardly surprising that suicide is a close third (as in almost second) among the leading causes of death for teenagers, following a similar trend to that of school shootings and other teen violence.

If we truly want to get serious about putting an end to school shootings, we need to reach beyond the symptoms and target the root cause – the systematic destruction of the family unit.

Twyla Fox

http://Twyla.Rocks

See author's posts