Get the message?
We must stop succumbing to the rod's guile
For, like strong liquor
It quickly stupefies society's child
Lured and procured
While blindly pursuing cultural bile
Growing up insecure
As grown-up hypocrisies pile
Juveniles like manure
Parental violence is in style
But not a viable cure
Dreams whipped into denial
Condemning more and more
To walking their last mile
Dragging betes noires
Torn
flesh dismembered with a smile
If we are to ever
end hate galore
We must stop succumbing to the rod's guile
"They spare the rod and spoil the child." These words were written in 1659 by Ralph Venning in Mysteries and Revelations. There was a time when I would have agreed with Venning, but now, fortunately, I am a little bit wiser. These days, I am inclined toward the ideas of the poem that heads this essay.
I recently listened to a guest on the "Ricki Lake" TV talk show reveal how he slaps his 20-month-old daughter's hand when she does something not to his liking. The picture of the infant hand grasping an adult finger that accompanies this text conveys an important message, one that speaks volumes to anyone willing to listen.
After the hand-slapping father, another father proudly displayed a pair of slender, limber tree limbs; he vigorously defended using them frequently to whip his pre-teen son.
The boy was present also. Asked by the host if he thought that he deserved those whippings, "Sometimes", he said, after glancing fearfully at his father.
The boy's mother appeared, begging the father to stop whipping their son. (I emphasise the word because I noted her quiet despair each time he referred to him as "my son".) The mother stated that the father often lost control of his anger during the whippings, and that the marks left on their son's body sometimes took as long as two weeks to heal.
The father flatly denied having ever lost control of his anger while whipping the boy. As he defended himself, it was clear to everyone in the television studio, as well as me as I watched him from this death row prison cell, that not only was he in the throes of anger — in response to the audience's "boos" — but it had escalated into a rage that was in control of him, not vice versa.
A third man came on and gave his view that God made the palm of each parent's hand a perfect fit for a child's butt!
Father Number Two, who was in instant support of this opinion, interjected one of his own. He had deduced, after visiting several people who were incarcerated, that the reason the nation's prison population is so large is because most prisoners did not get whippings when they were children.
That statement is so thoroughly erroneous that it borders on insult. I can tell you, after 21 years as a prisoner, that the majority of men, women and children prisoners have been victims of childhood whippings.
Some of those whippings were severe indeed. Many prisoners, myself among them, were forced as children, in fear for our very lives, to leave home in order to escape the savagery. More than a few of us have scars on our bodies that will never go away — not to mention the deeper and more numerous scars on the inside.
I find that many parents who inflict violence upon their children do so because they believe that such violence is sanctioned by their god. Often, those same parents will tell you that they were beaten by their parents a lot worse than they beat their own children, and that it is because of those whippings that they turned out to be such fine adults. They conclude any discussion self-righteously, saying, "If it was good enough for my parents, it is good enough for me".
That tired old generational argument is really scary. Have we forgotten that it was only three generations ago that 13-year-old girls were considered to be ready for marriage to 30- and 40-year-old men? Have we forgotten that less than two generations ago in Mississippi people of colour could not vote without fear for their lives? What was considered good for previous generations is not necessarily good for us.
It was under the guise of discipline that violence was first done to me by a guardian. I was seven years old. I remember everything about it very clearly. I learned only two things from that violence: that a big person can whip a small person, and that to do so is all right.
He bellowed, "Get out them clothes, boy! We paid too much money for them clothes to whip them!" Shaking like a leaf on a tree, I undressed. Feeling both terror and shame, I stood before that big person, thinking, "He cares more about these clothes than he does about me".
Using his razor strap, he brutally whipped me all over my trembling nakedness. Fourteen years later, I whipped him with my bare knuckles. Get the message?
BY BRANDON ASTOR JONES
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns (include your name and full return address on the envelope, or prison authorities may refuse to deliver it). He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G3-77, Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA, or email <BrandonAstorJones@hotmail.com>. You can visit the author's web site at .]