My Philosophies on Parenting and Zacarias Moussaoui

When my first daughter was little and I was trying to figure out what was involved with starting her on solid food, almost no one that I asked for advice could remember how to do it. There must be procedures for turning your kid from a milk junkie to someone who enjoys all kinds of foods, but unfortunately this sort of knowledge is lost almost as soon as it’s gained. I could never remember from one kid to the next exactly what I had done, and neither could any of the other mothers that I know. Once you get the kids through the cereals and the jars, and once they have a few teeth and better hand eye coordination, you never know exactly what they’ve got in their mouth because they are always helping themselves to your food, their sibling’s food, and on unfortunate occasions, their pet’s food. I do remember one conversation that I had with my mom about feeding kids, during which she said she was determined not to have food become a power struggle the way it had been in her family when she was a kid. We did not have the “clean plate club” and we were never forced to eat huge mounds of food we hated. We were forced to choke down one asparagus every Easter, but other than that, my mom didn’t bother serving food that she knew no one wanted. I guess we were reasonably diverse, if not particularly adventurous eaters, and none of us developed any nutrition-related diseases, so we must have been eating well enough.

My kids have reputations as picky eaters but I think they are getting a raw deal. They eat a lot of different stuff, it just has to be plain – no condiments, no cheese, no tomato sauce, no seasoning except for salt (as much as they can get away with). Unlike a lot of kids, they will eat almost any vegetable, but I have no idea why. I certainly have no words of wisdom on the matter other than the Gerber advice to keep serving the stuff over and over and eventually they’ll start to like it. The only other reason I can think of is that, like my mom, I never fight with them over their meals. I will threaten that they will not have a treat if they don’t eat enough dinner, but I don’t serve food they hate and then make them eat it. Why don’t I do this? Because I don’t want to hand over huge portions of my life to arguing with them about anything while they are still young enough to view me as a rock star.

All the baby books will tell you that after love, safety, and regular meals kiddies want two things: attention and control, and they will take them any way they can get them. When I have somewhere to go, I always leave early so I don’t have to hurry the kids along. Kids are supposed to stop and look at bugs, pick dandelions, teeter along curbs, and attempt to hop on one foot all the way to the car. If I have to hurry, I have just handed control of my life to three little connivers who at any moment can go limp and drop to the ground or take off and run to the top of the playground. If I yell and take the kids by the arm (gently, of course) passersby may suspect that I am a bad mother. However, if I am really late and need to grab them before they run and wrestle them into the car, passersby may suspect that I am one of those Irish travelers who abuse their kids in the walmart parking lot. Similarly, other than requiring that their attire match the weather and occasion, I let my kids pick their own clothes. Clothes that I find particularly ugly or worn out disappear while the kids are at school and usually the kids will forget about them.

So I guess my parental philosophy is, generally speaking, don’t hand the power over to the kids. A little preemptive action can keep things happier around the house – by serving what they like I avoid a daily argument over what and how much they are going to eat; by leaving early I let the kids control the pace of our comings and goings and avoid having to say “Hurry up please! Hurry up please!;” by removing the bad clothes I let the kids control what they wear without having to fight over what I don’t want to see. And what, any of you who have stuck with me this long may ask, what does any of this all have to do with Zacarias Moussaoui?

Here are a few words to describe Zacarias Moussaoui: coward, moron, failure, dumb ass. Even in the training camps of al qaeda he must be used as an example of all the things you should not be doing when trying to become a bad ass terrorist. He would like to think of himself as a conspirator and stand shoulder to shoulder with the other psychos that managed to complete their disgusting plan, but he is not, he is an idiot. He has not managed to inflict any damage on any one other than himself due to the fact that he is a bumbling, deranged, pathetic loser. Above all else, old Zachy is powerless. He sits in a jail cell with no glorious record of striking against “the great satan.” None of his al qaeda buddies have staged a Robin Hood type rescue for him. Much to his chagrin, he is powerless to prevent his family and his defense lawyers from spending day after day putting forth theories of his troubled childhood and mental illness to demonstrate that even before he bungled his way into jail he was powerless to become a threat to anyone other than himself and I guess anyone who was forced to endure a conversation with him.

So what are we doing? Why are we taking this zero and handing him the power to hurt people? My philosophy on Zachy is, generally speaking, don't hand the power over to the failed terrorist. I know that this is America and everyone gets their day in court, but if we really want to punish him, no one should be attending his days in court. No one should be reporting on his days in court. When he gets up to take the stand, the people in the gallery should hold up newspapers like college basketball fans sometimes do when the other team is introduced. If the media wasn’t there to replay the crap he is spewing, do you really think he’d bother? Osama probably would not have given him another thought once he was arrested, but now he can scream and rant and get daddy’s attention because we have handed control to him. Why are we expecting him to listen thoughtfully to the pain of the poor families who lost their loved ones? The moment that his lawyers asked him what he thought about the destruction of 9/11, he finally had a weapon to swing at the families who have already been victimized once.

I don’t know the reasons that some of the families decided to testify, though I am sure they all had important ones. Maybe some thought they should do anything they could to help get any al qaeda member executed as a measure of vengeance for the ones they love. Maybe some went there to go on record with their pain, to make sure their story and the memory of their loved ones is preserved for the future. But I can’t help but think that some of them went there hoping to see some flicker of remorse, some sign that beneath the façade of this raving wannabee menace is a human being who might feel the smallest bit of relief that he was not involved with the destruction, or the least bit of understanding that the victims of 9/11 were not “the great satan” but regular people who went to work and loved their families. I hope I am wrong, but I’m probably not. Victims and their families speak to criminals all the time, and often the criminal, powerless now even to turn away from what he doesn’t want to hear, will take the weapon he’s given – hope - and use it to bash his victims one last time.

Now that Zachy has caused all of the pain that he can with his big mouth, pain that he was unable to inflict as a human bomb, we should send him off to Supermax with the Unabomber to live out his days in a little cell. However, we will more than likely hand him one more chance to wield power, power that he never could have achieved as a free man left to his own devices. When he is executed, this marginal, malfunctioning, misfit will become a martyr, revered among the fanatics as a great hero of al qaeda. He will inspire more dimwits with no other prospects to take up the cause of Zachy, avenge his murder at the hands of the great satan, and take their places along side him with the 40 virgins and all that other crap they are promised for being mass murderers. I know I am out of step when it comes to the death penalty, and I know that most of America wants him to fry for what he’s done (or meant to do), but I would rather see him come to a unexciting, pathetic end that is more in keeping with his useless life. However, if we must execute him, I believe we should do it with a ham sandwich sitting on his lap, so that at least he won’t get the virgins up there in psycho heaven.