Image over discipline

There is currently so much brouhaha about bringing down the criminal liability of children. A little off to the background, there are moves, although a bit half-hearted, to bring back the ROTC program. In case the connection had been missed, there is a common thread that sews up both issues together.

That thread is discipline, or more precisely the lack of it. But what really makes the lack of discipline unsettling is that it was never taken away from our lives forcefully. We willingly gave it away. And for no other reason than that we simply wanted to be politically correct.

I am not going to debate with anyone about children's rights. I was once a child, as everybody was. My kids have all grown but they too were once, well, kids. In other words, it is impossible not to look at children with affection. But it is a fact that it was when we carved into stone and made a law of what comes naturally to all human beings that our problems started.

Before we began tinkering with human nature and started to legally define what children's rights were, it was the parents who directly took charge of disciplining their children. Except in very extreme cases, the state did not interfere in such domestic concerns, perhaps recognizing, quite correctly, that there is no better judge of children's welfare than their own parents.

At a time when parents still had full control of how they chose to discipline their kids, many of them using corporal punishment, children were made to understand that mischief did not pay. Children thus were more disciplined, respectful and responsible. Needless to say, there was little or no juvenile crime then.

But we just had to do what America and the West was doing. We decreed that we cannot even pinch our children for making noise during Mass. The result? Children not only did not stop making noise at Mass, they kept walking at the raising of the flag in the morning. You give an inch in discipline in one thing, you lose an arm in all things.

ROTC. We had to give it up because of isolated incidents of corruption and hazing. Instead of dealing with the corruption and hazing, we scrapped the ROTC altogether, much like burning the house down to get rid of a rat. Never mind that ROTC played a vital role in following up on the discipline that parents gave up as their children grew older.

Before laws scrapped the ROTC and allowed the state to take away from parents their own right to discipline their own kids as they pleased, our world was a much more disciplined, orderly, and peaceful one. We emerged from it not with mangled lives as the politically correct pontificated but as productive citizens now saddened by what that world had become.