Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2015. The news events cited in the opening were current at the time of writing, in August 2015.
I’m going to think out loud. Not long ago we heard about the (alleged) killer of the two young women from Cuenca, who supposedly murdered them in cold blood and buried them. A few days later we heard about a man who had died trying to save the lives of two girls.
One person takes two lives, while another loses his life saving two people he doesn’t even know.
A woman finds a wallet with €3,000 in cash and tracks down its owner to return it, while other people are in prison (or should be) for taking a lifetime of savings from poor elderly people, and, as it happens, these people are not in any financial need to steal.
In Granada, 15 young people decide to beat up a homeless man who had done nothing to them, while in Madrid there have been several incidents of homophobes who decided to beat up two young men simply for holding hands. Their crime, for which they received such a beating, was being gay. A crime similar to the one committed by the young VOX councillor, just 18 years old, who ran into her two attackers as she left home and ended up in hospital.
Meanwhile, all over the world there are people risking their lives fighting for human rights.
What leads one person to become a hero and others to become the human garbage of society?
Many will think it may be down to the environment, or that these people are simply born sons of b*****s who use their religious, political or ethnic beliefs as an excuse to do evil. Others think it’s due to what television drums into us, or to genetic inheritance, as well as parental influence.
There’s a bit of everything, but the truth is that each person decides for themselves whether to become a normal person or the dregs of society, which in my view are useless and dangerous.
And these kinds of monsters have, in a way, been created little by little, partly because of the rest of us, largely because of society in general. But we’ll see later why I say this.
Beliefs and limitations
I remember that in the book Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins told the true story of a man who decided to become a criminal, a drug addict, an alcoholic and a murderer. And let’s be clear: you are, in the end, the one who decides to end up as a f***ing piece of human garbage, while other people decide to be someone different.
This man, who was sentenced to life imprisonment, had two sons. The first followed in his father’s footsteps and ended up a drug addict who lived off all kinds of robberies, and is currently in prison for attempted murder.
The second son, born 11 months after the first, is a regional manager at a company, has a wife and three children and apparently leads a productive and happy life.
When Tony Robbins asked both of them why they had chosen that path in life, curiously, both brothers gave the same answer:
“What else could I have become, with the father I had?”
In other words, while one uses his father as an excuse to explain why he chose to become social waste, the other used his father’s life to identify patterns he wouldn’t dream of repeating.
(See: 10 things to avoid doing in the first 30 years of your life.)
Knowing what you want to be in life is just as useful as knowing what you’re not willing to be.
It is not the circumstances of our lives that shape us as people, but our beliefs about what those circumstances mean. – Tony Robbins
The same goes for other kinds of mental limitations that have more to do with what you can be or achieve, without simply accepting what others have decided for you.
Robbins also tells of the difference between two women turning 70. One of them already knew her life was nearing its end, and decided that hers was the body of an old woman that was starting to rot and fall apart.
The other woman who turned 70 thought it was time to live her second youth and that she wouldn’t let age hold her back, insisting that age is something psychological. This woman decided to take up mountaineering and spent the next 25 years doing it. That’s right: at 90, this woman was climbing mountains.
Her name was Hulda Crooks, and she became the oldest woman to climb Mount Fuji.
Now it’s your turn, parents
It all starts at home, although I know the environment outside the family can also disrupt a good upbringing in family values. But believe me, if your child becomes a criminal, a drug addict, an alcoholic, a scoundrel… it’s very likely that 80% of the blame lies with the parents, who are often responsible for instilling the wrong values in their children, whether political or xenophobic values or passivity in instilling values at all, because sometimes doing nothing is already doing something very bad.
If a teacher tells you your child is lazy and a scoundrel, don’t attack the teacher, because they’re very likely right and that’s the path your child is on for the future. And if you don’t accept that criticism and don’t reproach your child’s behaviour, besides failing to respect the teachers’ judgement, you’ll be an accomplice in creating one more piece of social waste.
Often, when a teacher meets a child’s parents, they quickly understand why the child is an ill-mannered scoundrel with dreadful values: because the parents are exactly the same.
Children copy family habits
Parents are their children’s first role models. Every time you make a racist, homophobic or sexist comment, you’re creating hatred in your child. Free your child from that burden of hatred, and give them the chance to have a brighter mind than yours. Let them draw their own conclusions, so they don’t turn into a jerk just like their father.
As a parent, look at yourself through your child’s eyes. What does your child see? Probably a father worn out from work who, when he gets home, speaks badly to his wife and slumps on the sofa with a beer in his hand while watching the football match, living every moment of it.
If that’s the role model you want your child to copy in the future, you’re on the right track. Congratulations, Homer Simpson.
A future generation of alcoholics and scoundrels
If we ask most people what the most dangerous and destructive drug is, I’m sure they wouldn’t get it right and would jump to illegal drugs. The truth is that the drug that causes the most harm is alcohol.
It’s so dangerous that nobody even considers it a drug, but rather a widely accepted social habit.
While millions of people today are struggling to overcome their dependence on alcohol, millions of young people are well on their way to becoming alcoholics.
Parents have come to accept their children going to a botellón (street drinking parties common among Spanish teenagers) as the most normal thing in the world. In fact, they don’t think their children are doing anything wrong by associating fun with drinking. Well, the problem goes so far that if a young person can’t enjoy themselves without getting drunk, that young person already has two problems:
- They’re an idiot.
- They’re probably headed for Alcoholics Anonymous.
I always suggest this test to find out whether you’re on your way to becoming an alcoholic: “Try not to drink a single drop of alcohol for at least three months.” Most people will say they can do it, but they won’t. Do you know why? Because they can’t, because they already have the problem.
I often see young people who, once drunk, go around smashing litter bins and car windows, and even being rude to passers-by. At that point they’re not just drunks, but outright scoundrels who use alcohol as an excuse to let out their true self: the idiot inside.
In short, the message is clear: if a 15-year-old kid is already a scoundrel and nobody does anything, over time he’ll become even more of one and will escalate his “offences” as the rest of society stays passive in the face of such behaviour.
In the end, it’s a matter of choices. Choices about everything: we choose what kind of person we want to be, what kind of values we want to have, and which lines we’ll never cross and will never let others cross. We also choose which values we’ll instil in our children.
Remember that nobody is born an alcoholic, nobody is born a drug addict and, except in cases of psychopathy, nobody is born a murderer. Social waste is created by the environments people grow up in and by the values and rules we instil in them.
And so the monster, like the genius, the charming person and the social outcast, starts being made at home.
Is this message harsh, and might it have upset someone? Perfect: that means you have a lot of work ahead of you. The good news is that anyone can change and become a better version of themselves.
Some prisoners used their time in prison to put their social skills to use and get to know other inmates in order to plan more perfect crimes. Others used the same time in prison to acquire different values and earn a degree, clear that they wanted to change their lives and stop being the dregs of society.
Featured image: Don Graham from Redlands, CA, USA – God bless it!, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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