Once upon a time I could leave my house, go out to a restaurant or a movie, and find the experience moderately rewarding. This isn’t to say that there is something wrong with the service industry or the movie industry today, per se, although both of those could be topics for posts unrelated to this one. No, the real problem is children. And by children, I mean their parents.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but it seems to have been sometime between the Boomers and Generation Y. I don’t want to single out Generation X as the source of all the trouble, but let’s posit that there’s a huge amount of overlap. When I was younger, I got to go outside quite a bit. But outside meant in my neighborhood out in the woods or in a neighbor’s back yard so that we could yell, play kickball, fight mock wars and do all the things that kids do when their parents tell them to “take it outside.” And we did get to go out in public with the ‘rents, to public places, like movie theaters, playhouses and restaurants. However, I remember that things were a bit different then.

Were I or my brother perfect children? Not that I recall, but a line seems to have been crossed somewhere. We weren’t allowed to run freely about a busy restaurant while our parents occasionally glanced around wondering where we were or made a lame attempt to reign us in with a barely audible reprimand. We weren’t allowed to go out to a 10:00pm movie, never mind go to one, raise a ruckus and get away with it. And we surely weren’t allowed to talk back to another adult, swear, use all manner of rude gestures, or leave the table with uneaten vegetables.

There is an appalling lack of discipline and personal responsibility in our culture today. At some point it became taboo to paddle a child by way of demonstrating what’s right and what’s wrong. At some point it became OK to sue big businesses and family members for our own negligent or careless behavior. At some point it became the norm to label children with nebulous social disorders and medicate them into submission rather than identify children as children and realize they need structured upbringing and guidance.

There is an undercurrent of fear growing slowly but steadily because we’ve silently given away most of our ability to fend for ourselves. It comes to light rather starkly when you consider events like Columbine or the current state of air traffic security or when third graders conspire to kill a teacher in Georgia. Child-on-child violence is escalating, older kids seem to have no moral compass or fear of death, and parents want to wash their hands of all of it. And I scope all of this as a trend, not as a de facto standard. Are there good parents who are bringing their children up properly? Yes. Are there good children who will go to school and grow up to be doctors, scientists, teachers, laborers and good members of society? Yes. But there’s work to be done.

We have to reclaim our grip on reality. We need to have the freedom to discipline our kids, and we have to use that freedom. Discipline doesn’t mean corporal punishment, necessarily, it simply means impressing upon a child what is right and what is wrong. The method is irrelevant: religion, logic, life lessons, hard knocks, or a combination of all of the above are effective when used judiciously and consistently. Kids need to stay in school and schools need to teach them something. Kids need to be imbued with respect and humility and shown that it’s not a weakness to exhibit both. If we don’t go back to living up to our responsibilities and taking charge of the life courses we provide for our children, fear and violence are going to escalate until it’s uncontrollable and we tie our social fabric into an impossibly complex knot.

From the middle of Friday, January 12th, 2007 through the evening of Sunday, January 14th, 2007 half of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas Missouri and some of northwestern Arkansas were affected by an ice storm that many say was worse than an ice storm in late 1987 that brought down trees and power lines and closed roads for hundreds of miles and left people without heat, light and water for more than two weeks in some cases. Currently, we have been without power since about 7:00pm on the 12th. After the ice fell for three days this time, the temperature has dropped down into the single digits with wind chills sometimes well below zero. That used to be second nature to me, but this is an area where the typical temperature at this time of year is in the mid-40’s.

I am lucky enough to have someplace else to go where there is power, heat and water, but most who live near me do not. Our entire town and surrounding area is without power and the local power company says a conservative estimate is one week for the power to be out. Luckily there are lots of churches, shelters and good people around with plenty of goodwill. Generators are rolling in, along with help from power crews from as far away as St. Louis, south central Arkansas and even Minnesota. With any luck, things will be back to normal sooner than expected.

In the meantime, here are a few images I snapped last night when I went back home to try and hook up a couple of portable generators to keep my house with enough power to save our water lines and food as the temperature continues to fall and the power stays out. Unfortunately, the borrowed generators I had didn’t start so we’re still completely in the dark. Maybe tonight we’ll get lucky and they will or the power will return. Judging by the slew of power lines down across the road, I’m not hopeful.

In order to get from the main road, about two miles away, to where I live you have to go through a maze of ice covered roads strewn with fallen trees. In many places, only a pickup or 4×4 can get through. Where there used to be two-lane county roads, now there are only three-quarter lane ice-filled tracks.

As you drive further up the road, you can see things like this fence which is on the pasture across the street from our farm.

All of the following pictures are of what used to pass for our front yard, including some close-up images so you can see the thickness of the ice covering. Some of these are better seen in a dark room. The flash is trying to pick up a large area and sometimes I used my truck’s headlights because there are no other light sources for many miles.

For a quick sense of scale, the blue shape in the picture below is a full-sized riding lawnmower under a tarp.

If you’d like to see more pictures, you can visit my Gallery2 pictorial. You’ll also find a movie there that we took driving around town. We’re not sure how much you can see because there are no lights anywhere except for one bank that had a large generator brought in. Keep an eye out for the ice covering everything, the downed and low-hanging power lines across the roads and in peoples’ yards, and all of the trees that have fallen, many destroying personal property and town infrastructure.

Good luck to everyone who has been affected by this storm, and I hope the power comes on soon for all of us.