Kids

I remember the days when I liked slides and parks. Then I started liking swimming (after overcoming my fear of swimming with no orange thingies). Tom and jerry kicked ass. Pink Panther was the shit. Captain Majed was mesmerizing. Grendizer rocked. And it was all about Mousercising too. Scrabble was awesome. Bingo was awesome. Monopoly was awesome-er. Cluedo was the awesomest of all. All that was followed with Ninja Turtles action figures, GI JOE action figures, Action Man action figures (one of mine had hella-cool war paint lines that appeared under the sun). The Atari was sublime. My Sega Megadrive II was the coolest thing on the planet. Computer games were awesome. Sports in school were awesome. I loved my BMX bike with the backward-pedal brakes that made for some sick-ass skid marks in the garden. The same garden that had my basketball rim, table tennis table, and dart board that looked like swiss cheese when I was through with it. And oh my god let's not even get into the opening of Fun Time Pizza. And the best part of it all was sharing all the above with family and friends.

Ah yes, the sweet old memories of being young and having fun.

What the fuck happened though? It's like the entire concept of being a child morphed into this twisted, unedited scene that you would see if Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Wes Craven, Quentin Tarantino, and Stephen King joined forces to make a movie worthy of being awarded the "fuck-me-I-can't-watch-this-shit" award. I shudder at the mere thought of such a movie. It probably looks a little bit like this:

As old as this may make me sound, I'm talking about "kids these days". What the hell happened? Why are kids these days so, for lack of a better word, fucked up? How do they know so much about things that they shouldn't know about till they hit puberty? I have 3 examples to mention here:

Example 1
A friend of mine was telling me a story of how one day, while visiting Jeddah, she was sitting next to the pool in her compound, tanning and doing her thing, and she was joined by her 11 year old neighbour who looks up to her alot. And so a conversation ensued where the little girl was explaining how she and her bff are no longer bff's. And when my friend asked her why, the response was: "Because she called my other bff a lesbian".

Why does an 11 year old know what a lesbian is? As supportive as I am of girl-on-girl action, I didn't know what it was till I was like 15!

Not this kind of girl-on-girl action though.... This I don't support at all.

Example 2
Another friend of mine was telling me a story of how she was at a friend's place, and she was talking to her friend's brother or something like that who is maybe 12-13 years old, and she asked him how school was, and he said that he doesn't like the school, and when my friend asked him why, the response was: "Because all of them drink and smoke and stuff."

First of all, hats off to his parents / teachers / older siblings that did their job in making him understand that these things are wrong for his age (but I will later be touching on the fact that sometimes, good parenting isn't enough). However, the fact that this even happens is quite fucked up. Now I don't want to sound like a hypocrite, I have to admit that I had my first cigarette when I was 13, and my first drink when I was 15-16. But I was so bloody scared everytime I did it and hid it from everyone because I at least knew what I was doing was wrong at my age, and I just wanted to satisfy a curiosity. That's normal. But what is NOT normal is when it is blatant and a even a habit at that age!

It just makes me wonder, how much of a good idea is it to bring a child into this world? I love kids, and I definitely want to have some. But when I think of the challenges that I'm going to have to face as a parent, challenges that my parents certainly didn't have to face, I have to admit it freaks me out on a level compared to the thought of Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump bumping uglies and having offspring. And I can't imagine why anyone would even want to picture that. But unfortunately, someone did:

Example 3
Around a year ago, I was in Beirut for vacation. It was just me and my younger sister at home. I was sitting watching TV in the living room, and I heard the doorbell. My sister opened the door, and I could hear that it was a friend of hers.

Friend: "Is anyone else home?"
Sister: "No just me and my brother."
Friend: (with enthusiasm) "Really? Your older brother is here?"
Here, I started to feel weird.
Sister: "Yeah he is"
Friend: "Can I meet him?"
I felt even weirder. So a girl walks in, looking like she just came out of Skybar. She was dressed in a black top that showed off a good amount of skin, skin tight jeans, black boots, and full make-up. Had I seen this girl in a club I would have tapped that, because the way she looked I would have assumed she's at least 21/22, but I knew she wasn't since she was my sister's friend. So she comes up to me, and she extends her hand the same way the Queen of England does (her palm facing downwards), and she says in the most seductive voice she could pull off: "Hi, Rasha." I gave her a quick hand shake along with a very cautiously spoken "Hi, Raif". Because on that day I didn't really feel like going to jail for being a pedophile.

Rasha: "It's nice to meet you."
Me: (cautiously) "You too."
Rasha: "So umm, how old are you?"
In my head: "Old enough to be your father you freak!"
Me: (cautiously) "25." (at the time)
Rasha: "Mmmhmm... Well, it's nice to meet you."
And she began to turn around and walk away, but as she did, she gave me a look that's too difficult to describe. But it looked exactly (and I really do mean EXACTLY) like this:

And by the way. I later asked my sister how old slutty Rasha was. She's 16. And that's simply not cool. I'd love it if she gave me a call in 4-5 years though. I'd love it even more if the girl in the picture gave me a call in 4-5 minutes.

So what can we blame this deteriorating sense of innocence on? The internet explosion and the growing ease of accessing mind-corrupting filth that shouldn't be accessed at a young age? Parents becoming more open minded towards how they should raise their kids and what they should and shouldn't be allowed to do? I'm all for partying and doing crazy stuff and going to extremes and messing around and all that, but there's an appropriate age for everything.

Let's side-track a bit. I recently saw a movie called Orphan (2009). This movie is fucked up in every sense of the world. I'm not much of a horror / thriller movie-goer. But this movie was deeply twisted, and I just couldn't stop watching till it was done. It talks about a family that adopts a child called Esther (played by Isabelle Fuhrman who was 12 at the time). For those that have seen it, they know exactly what I'm talking about when I say deeply twisted. (WARNING! The next paragraph ruins the movie, but you should consider reading it anyway).

In the movie, Esther appears to be a 9 year old child, but in fact she's a psychotic 33 year old and just looks that young because of some sort of growth deficiency. Here are a few of the twisted things she does: kills people in front of her step-sister "Max" (played by Aryana Engineer who was 8 at the time, and is by far one of the most adorable kids I have ever seen), threatens to cut her step-brother's dick off, breaks her own arm and makes it look like her step-mother did it, tries to burn her step-brother while he's in his tree-house, kills a woman working in an orphanage, tries to shoot her step-sister and step-mother, tries to stab and drown her step-mother. At one point in the movie, she tries to seduce her step-father. And by seduce, I mean she waits till he's drunk on wine, puts on black dress, a fuckload of makeup, sits next to him, and starts kissing his neck. And when he doesn't respond positively, she ends up stabbing him to death. Now I don't know what's more disturbing. The fact that the parents of a 12 year girl old allowed her to play this role? Or is it the fact that the parents of an 8 year old girl allowed her to co-star in this movie and witness enough horrendous shit to scar her for life? I swear to god, when I watched little Aryana reacting to the things that she saw her step-sister do, it was like watching real emotional trauma in the making. She looked deeply disturbed. And I don't blame her. At 26, even I was deeply disturbed, enough for me to repeatedly say to myself throughout the movie:

And that, dear friends, is a fucking understatement.

However, let's ignore the horror for a while. The concept of the movie itself, as twisted as it may seem, represents the reality that somewhere in the world, there ARE some kids out there that are psychotic killers at heart. And I am a firm believer that every concept portrayed in a film (apart from sci-fi) is a representation of something real and very much possible.

Now picture your child in the same school as Esther................ Yup.

So how do we protect our to-be borns? You don't need research to realize that kids today are subject to the influence of so much more than just you and your wife/husband. If anything, I feel that in this day and age, the influence that kids have on each other has just as much of an impact as their parents have on them, if not more. And if you happen to enroll your kid in a school with Esther-like psychos, that makes for a severe FML situation. Let me pose a few questions to bring this little baby home:

What do you do if you found out your 10 year old kid was offered a cigarette by their friend, and smoked it? And liked it?
What do you do if they were offered a drink, and drank it? And liked it?
What do you do if they were offered any one of a million different drugs, and snorted/smoked/injected them? And liked them?
What do you do if your 15 year old son got a girl pregnant?
What do you do if your 15 year old daughter was impregnated by some overly hormonal fuck in school?
What do you do if you found out your 12 year old daughter was making out with another girl behind the bleachers? And liked it?

These aren't rhetorical questions, I'm seriously looking for answers here. Because I will bet money on the fact that you can be the best parent in the world, and your child might still do all of the above and then some. And that may have nothing to do with you, although you WILL spend the rest of your life blaming yourself and thinking that you have failed as a parent. But in reality, because of the way the world has become, some kids are beyond parental or even professional help.

And to think that people question me and look at me funny when I say that I believe in hitting your kids when needed. Now don't be all like: "that's child abuse!!!!!" Fuck off. Child abuse would be if I put my son in a corner and Mike Tyson his ass to the ER.

I'm talking about a much less severe form of beating. The one that hurts much more emotionally than it does physically. And sometimes, you don't even need to hit, a little scare can do the job. When I was a kid, I remember my dad removing his belt and doing a scary snapping sound with it because I intentionally didn't do my homework. It sounded like an alligator snapping it's teeth at me. It was enough to scare my puberty away. But it worked. He didn't even have to hit me, he just had to convince me that he would.

I know for a fact that I'm going to be a good father. And I also know that there is no way I'd marry a woman that won't make for a great mother. But like I said before, even that, in certain circumstances, may not be enough. I'm praying that my kids never reach that extreme level of insanity. But if they do and all other methods fail, I guess that maybe, for their own sake, we need to dust off those boxing shoes, tighten up those shorts and gloves, and go a few rounds to beat some sense into them. Because the thought of my son / daughter turning out to be a 15 year old sex-crazed and immoral alcoholic druggy regardless of what my wife and I do is the most severe FML situation of them all.