Black Hockey DadCentric Reviews: Bad Kids

I am a bad person.

Usually, when someone says such a thing, they're fishing for support. It's a rally call for people to circle around you and say "Naw. You're a good person".

But not me. Like Dostoevsky's Underground protagonist: I am a sick man. I am a wicked man.

This way of conceiving myself springs from my certainty that we, you and me right now, are living in the history of the world's most decadent time. In spite of our cherished notion of perpetual progress, things are worse than they've ever been. The world has never been sicker. The values of our age erect mankind's most malicious behavior. Everything's for sale. The earth is gasping. And it's all bolstered by a worldwide case of smug pride. We've got all the best medicine. High standards of living. iPods. With ear buds in your ears, you can't hear the world crumbling.

Being "good" is being blindly obedient to maintaining the status quo. Being "bad" is fucking shit up. And I'm bad. I'm a bad person.

But flipping values on their heads like this becomes increasingly complicated... when you're a Dad.

To be brief and clear, what I'm saying is that to sit back and be a good person in our current cultural situation is to be, in a more fundamental way, bad. And so bad people, by today's standards, are working toward a better day. And to be insane in our current cultural situation is paving the way to an ultimately saner sanity.

But it's a rash parent indeed who would from day one teach their children to be bad children. That would be cruel and unusual and setting them up for a life in prison. It's a tough spot. It's the single most difficult aspect of my Fatherhood. I need to acculturate my children into sickness. To give them a chance for success in a world where success requires blindness. And cross my fingers that they will, like me, eventually seek subversive ways to be bad people with their eyes on a greater good.

The kids test limits. I enforce them. And what I'm doing is enforcing the limits that keep things steady. Stay out of trouble. Get good grades. Add another brick in the wall.

I suppose the thrust of this review is that I secretly revel in my kids' rebellions at the very same time I discipline them. Their middle fingers are the stuff of vitality, of their unwillingness to accept things the way they are. My little girl steals and lies and I admire her. Then I teach her that she's wrong.

I want to give bad kids 4 stars. I want to give rage 4 stars. I want to give the destruction of limits 4 stars. While scolding self destruction. I'm no master at navigating this conundrum. But I grapple with it. I want my kids to be good citizens who are secretly motherfuckers, aching for a better world that smashes the limits of this one.