Letter of the Week: My Daughter Weighs In On Hornbeck

If you’ve been participating in this here blog at all, you’ll want to read this. I have perused some of the antagonistic comments here and think there’d be more substance to my response if I didn’t comment about them. Instead, here are my impressions of the Shawn Hornbeck debacle. Straight from the horse’s mouth. The horse being Ilana’s daughter. And I’m not really a horse. I’m a person:

That little shit. That is my reaction; it has little to do with what my mother taught me. This reaction has to do with my mother and how I feel about her.

It is quite a thing, being my mother’s daughter, to read of her impressions of parenthood, and particularly in this article regarding Shawn Hornbeck. Bill-O is generally a man not good for one’s digestion, but I sympathize wholly with his low regard for this kid. And my mother’s, too.

I can see it now. This bathos ridden North American kid, quivering and gesturing at the keyboard. Still full of histrionics, even without an audience. To pen something so sinisterly anonymous to his parents, a simple sentence so torturous because it is coming from the child: “How long will you look for your child?” What kind of awful dramatic shit is that? How many crappy Hollywood flicks has this kid seen? How many books has he read in comparison?

Here’s a basic guide to escaping the torment Shawn suffered through. You email your folks, you tell them where you are and you get your ass home. They’ll come get you; parents are good at that. They generally like to keep kid and kid’s possessions altogether under one roof.

As a child partially schooled at a private elementary and middle school in Cape Town, South Africa, I have seen a different kind of child than the North American specimen. I was shocked to my core when I first stepped into a North American classroom. I was disgusted with and dismayed by my classmates, as they genuinely, unblinkingly quizzed me about the population of lions in my back yard, how come I wasn’t black, and, “Why did you leave a place that had such nice weather.” Not to mention the petulance and total lack of respect for the teacher, the teacher’s lack of discipline with respect to the feet on the desks, the eating in class, the idiotic guffawing and god knows what else I took in within 10 minutes of immersion with my fellow 12-year olds. [I recall you came back crying. You said: “Mom, the children in my class are retarded. Take me out of there.” So I did.] This is the way fellow feelings are nurtured in North American schools and obviously in the homes, too. I couldn’t bring myself to act that way with my peers, even away from home.

I quickly skipped a grade and moved just slightly beyond the level of the stupid and ascended to the heights of mediocrity. That is about as good as it gets in the North American schooling system (sadly it has gone that way now in my place of birth, too).

A combination of my experience in schools here and in South Africa and my home life lead me to this overall impression of Shawn Hornbeck’s behavior. It is mostly a gut reaction, hence the emotion. Yes, I accuse this victim for his total lack of care. If he hated where he was, he would have emailed his parents and told them where he was. If he was feeling the slightest discomfort he could have shuffled over to the computer and told mom and dad he was bored and was ready to come home now. He didn’t. He toyed with them. He cruelly toyed with his parents. How could you live with yourself? If you’re old enough to play a video game (I can’t even get them —they’re not as easy as they look), you’re certainly old enough to give a damn.

Okay. So for a moment I linger on his selfishness. Then I can’t help but think of my mother in place of his parents. It breaks my heart. I can’t even let my imagination wander there without shedding tears. Tears of disgust with myself if I were to do such a thing. When my mom writes about life coming to a stand still for a parent in this kind of situation, I know she ain’t kidding. I’ve seen her concerned for my life and it is an earth-shattering thing to look at. One should feel privileged and fortified for being the object of such emotion. I can say with utter confidence that I would have felt the same way at age eleven or fifteen and will continue to feel that way until I am an old woman.

Shawn could obviously access a computer and other people. That premise alone is evidence enough that that child could have done something. But he did nothing. He prolonged his situation unnecessarily. And why am I not surprised? My old peer group in South Africa understood the value of life and respected their families. No matter how belligerent we all were as teenagers, no matter how much we would push our parent’s patience and write horrid things about them in our diaries, we loved them utterly and would never give them cause to worry for our lives. No way. We acted out within known boundaries. We were grounded, sure. We had to do extra chores. Absolutely. And we had to shed the attitude, definitely. So what? Did it kill us? No. It just made us human with a value for our lives and the lives of others. We don’t require special tuition in order to learn how to give a damn.

And that is my take on things.

Thin gruel, indeed.