It’s not a particularly satisfying answer if you’re thinking about it as a political problem, but I know there’s a lot of dads who follow me who are probably worrying about their kids constantly, I know I would be, and I hope it makes them feel a little better.
In my head it’s like how the single best thing you can do for your child’s education is to read to them, and yet some parents just don’t do it. The older I get the more shocking it is how easy and pervasive bad parenting is.
Once again - it’s the parents! The parents matter! The fascist shithead who went to my high school who conned a blind veteran into running against a Democrat on the Legal Weed ballot line also had a dad who sucked ass and fantasized about hurting Black people.
Getting a liberal arts BA was arguably not the best financial/career decision, but I firmly believe that I’m a saner/better person because of it.
I was raised pretty conservative and I reject a lot of it
That’s good, but what about the people who didn’t?
Wish I had a better answer than 🤷♂️ It took me until my 30s and getting out into the greater world beyond my hometown. My general guess is people need to experience a broader, wider world than whatever narrowly defined version of it they get from dad
As a now middle aged parent if i see a kid do or say something fucked up I immediately start to suspect their parents. It’s not 100%, but it’s much more hit than miss. I’ve also realized that some of the worst things I internalized when I was young were things I heard my dad “joking” about.