This Be the Post

            They fuck you up, your mum and dad

            They may not mean to but they do

            They fill you with the faults they had

            And add some extra just for you

           

Where I work, there’s about eight or nine core employees, all between the ages of 20 and 26. The other day I was in the backroom and someone was telling a story about how one rainy day when he was a kid, he and his friend decided to play home run derby with a wiffle ball in the house. Hitting the ceiling was an out, as was hitting the ground. A point was scored each time the opposite wall was hit, and they each got ten outs per turn. Anyway, to cut a long—needlessly long in my opinion—story short, it all ended with them breaking an antique glass vase. Laughing, he ended the story with something along the lines of “and man my parents smacked me silly”

At this, half of my coworkers started laughing in reminiscence of the stupid shit and deserved smackings they had done and gotten as children. The other four or five employees remained funereally silent. Their eyebrows furrowed and their mouths seem to suck themselves inwards as though he had just told an aborted-fetus-with-cancer-at-the-holocaust joke. Although they weren’t so rude as to interrupt the laughter of the other half of the room, they held their silence imposingly. The laughter died out, and as happens when there are no sounds to relieve the post-laugh awkwardness, a tension ensued.

“Oh lighten up”, Tom said, still smiling.

            “Well,” the girl to my left began in that I’m-going-to-be-polite-in-spite-of-what-an-offensive-fucking-idiot-you’re-being tone “I don’t see how you guys can sit here and laugh about child abuse like it’s no big deal. Those kids are defenseless”

            “And have you seen the way that kids whose parents try to be their friends act?” Another chimed in “They’re fuckin monsters!”

            By this point, voices could barely be distinguished amidst the general bluster.

            “Well there’s an in betw…”

            “Wah-wah-wah, I was talking to my grandfather one time, and he said that when he was six he hit his sister. His dad grabbed him by the throat, threw him up against the wall and said ‘you ever hit a girl again, I’ll fucking kill you’. And he never did.”

            “Well, that’s some really scientific evidence there”

            “I never said it was, but you compare the ten year olds you see bossing their parents around to the one’s from the early 60’s…”

            “What the fuck are you talking about, the early 60’s. How the fuck do you know what kids were like then?”

            “You look at any statistic on childhood delinquency and it’s skyrocketed since then”

            “And there are no other factors that could have influenced that”

            “Clearly it’s the influence of the gay agenda”

            “Shut the fuck up Dan” she said, turning toward him sharply “what I’m saying is that you can’t compare behavior now with 50 years ago without taking in a hundred—shit, a thousand influences and varia…”

            “Like the gays” Dan said, barely containing his laughter

            “I swear to God, if you don’t shut the fuck up…”

            “I think a fine line needs to be drawn beatings and spankings”

            “They’re the same thing!”

            “No, a beating is done out of anger; a spanking is a controlled form of punishment”

            “I have to agree” Connor said loudly, speaking for the first time yet “Spanking, if done appropriately can be a useful form of punishment”

            Alex, his girlfriend, shot her head around. “How could you say that?”

            “I’m not saying it should be a go-to thing or anything, just that it, ya know, it can be… effective”

            “I can’t believe what I’m hearing” she said, with genuine shock and disgust in her eyes

            “Listen, I mean it’s not that big a deal” Connor stammered defensively

            Off in their corner, Connor and Alex had it out with eachother. I looked around the room, and finally realized that there were three distinct sub-arguments going on between separate factions. The only one who wasn’t firmly entrenched in his stance seemed to be Dan, who was busy piling on top of anyone earnest enough to get upset.

            It was then that Stephen, who had started the whole fucking thing with his story, shouted out something. Although it may not have been heard by everyone, his argument quickly rippled through each of the sub-battles being waged. “Well, my parents hit me when I was a kid and I turned out fine,” he yelped.

            Suddenly the arguments took on an even more personal and spiteful tone. I sat back in my chair and shut my mouth. I started listening to each persons sputtering anecdotes and arguments, and it quickly became apparent that everyone who was arguing in favor of spanking had been spanked, themselves, as a child. And everyone who was arguing against it had never been hit as a child.

            And, wouldn’t ya know it, they all turned out fine.

            I wanted to laugh, and suddenly the level of respect I had for Dan skyrocketed. Fine? What does ‘fine’ even mean? Isn’t ‘fine’ the thing that you say when someone asks you how you’re doing? Just who here was “fine”? Just who here wasn’t hopelessly underemployed, wasn’t a boarderline alcoholic, or hadn’t had horribly regrettable sex in this very break-room?

            I sat there and waited desperately for someone to say something like “Well, my parents spanked me when I was a kid, and now I’m needlessly aggressive and need to dominate all of my social interactions, destroying any hope of intimacy I might have” or “My parents didn’t hit me and now I’m hopelessly spoiled and can’t hold down a real job partially because of my utter weakness as a person and inability to maintain eye-contact”

            But not one person did. Every single person in that room was arguing in validation of themselves. Including me. And no matter how earnestly and honestly I held my viewpoint, I couldn’t help but look around the room and see their faces. Honest and earnest, all. Completely convinced of their own rightness so that they might not stumble over themselves. They believed because they had to, because the alternative was too upsetting.

            There were eight minutes left in the break. The voices were still shouting one another down from wall to wall. Shaking free all of the useless arguments in my head, I stood up and stepped out the back door for a cigarette.