“Violence breeds violence”, has become Cindy Kiro's new mantra as she seeks to defend the recent law banning smacking. She has at her fingertips, no doubt, countless examples and case studies of families where children were thrashed and abused when young. Then, in adulthood, those children subsequently went on to acts of violence, lawlessness, and degenerate behaviour, including violent abuse of their own children.
Kiro is right. We didn't need the sociological evidence or case studies to know that children grow up to walk in the footsteps of their parents. Parents who inflict uncontrolled, enraged violence on their children will produce children who are, either smashed in spirit and will as adults, or are equally lawless and violent as adults in their turn. But ironically this is also why Kiro is also completely wrong—or more to the point, naïve and simplistic.
She is only doing what all bureaucrats are forced into when they administer laws and regulations that are unjust and immoral: focus on superficial externalities that can be controlled and measured and administered. Since governments cannot change hearts and minds they are reduced to play acting with mere externalities. But they do so at at our peril—since the long and ignoble history of such hubris is that the problems only become worse, much worse.
As a result of Kiro's half truths, now institutionalised into the New Zealand legal fabric where smacking a child for the purpose of training and correction has become a crime, expect a torrent of societal violence to pour down in the next thirty years. Of course by that time Kiro will be long forgotten, as will Helen Clark and Sue Bradford, except perhaps for their respective parts in a government to which historians are likely to attach the sobriquet of being the most corrupt and corruptible in New Zealand's history.
But they will have been replaced with other, equally deluded, Athenian idolaters. Socialists all. Humanists all. Destroyers all.
Why am I so confident of this outcome—painful though it is to contemplate? Because Kiro is both right and wrong. She is right about the intergenerational connection with respect to violence (and the intergenerational connection of just about everything else—which is, of course, the way the Living God has made the world of men to operate and so it is and always will be the norm.) However, she is completely simplistic as to her definition of violence. Violence incorporates force of whatever kind—whether physical, verbal, emotional, or psychological.
There are two kinds of family violence—and they are worlds apart. Kiro has failed to discern this, or has deliberately decided to ignore it. The first is where forcible correction is administered to children by parents who are training and correcting their children, for the children's sake, so as to change their hearts, minds, and wills. The second is where parents are disciplining their children for their own (the parents') sake, out of anger, frustration, and selfishness. As stated above, these two are worlds apart. The outward actions may appear the same, but they are as different as water to hydrochloric acid.
In the case of the former—where discipline is for the sake of training the children—the rules and regulations of the home are clearly thought through and articulated to the children. Breaking the rules brings consistent juridical consequences, until the child is trained out of that behaviour. Discipline is never done in anger, annoyance, frustration, impatience, or temper. The voice is never raised. Regardless of the emotional stresses upon the parents, they too regard themselves as under discipline, and so control themselves to administer correction faithfully, fairly, and always for the sake of the child's wellbeing. In this context discipline is never retributive. It is always and only corrective. When the behaviour changes, the discipline ceases—or moves on to other issues.
In this case, violence does most certainly not breed violence. It breeds the very opposite. It produces peace, self-control, respect, and ultimately a productive member of the community.
In the case of the latter, discipline is erratic, mercurial, tempestuous, filled with anger and frustration. One day the parent/adult might ignore a child's actions because they are in a good mood. The next they explode and vent their wrath upon the little one for the self-same actions—because the child has done something to annoy them and they are in a bad, angry mood. In this context the violence is always retributive—it is a lawless act of retribution upon the child for the parent's perception of hurt and damage to them by the child.
People who are particularly uncontrolled and narcissistically self-absorbed will not stop from pouring our physical violence upon their children, regardless of what the law says. Moreover because blood is thicker than water, family groups will always move cover it up. The new law will have the unintended effect of driving the violence underground—so that its very existence in a family will have already placed that family into the orbit of the criminal underworld.
In the case of the less physically violent, emasculated metrosexuals, family violence amongst self-absorbed parents is more likely to take the equally destructive form of parental temper tantrums, screaming, biting and caustic words, sarcasm, ridicule, and bitterness poured out upon the children. While the bruises may not be physical, the home environment will be likely toxic in the extreme, leading to the destruction of the child's spirit. The consequence for the children will be growing up into one of two probable types: either the child will grow up mimicking the parents' lawless, uncontrolled outbursts of selfish petulance returning evil for evil upon the heads of their parents and anyone else who crosses them. Or, beaten and cowed, they will grow up broken and brooding—damaged beyond repair.
Either way, within two generations their line will have assumed a criminal mindset.
Governments and bureaucratic controls always focus upon outward behaviours, the tangible, the things that they believe can be subject to regulation, rules, bans, and controls. While statist governments aspire to the omnicompetence of deity, they lack just a few of the essential attributes. So their self-vaunted pride and vain boasting ends up focusing upon superficial externalities. What they promulgate ends up being naïve and simplistic in the extreme.
How about this for a novel approach. What would happen if Athens stood up and told the truth to its citizens? What would happen if the government admitted that it was utterly powerless and incompetent to control or change family life, and that any attempt to do so would make the problems many times worse? What would happen if the government told its citizens that each and every parent, each and every family had to sort it out and take responsibility for themselves?
We all know what would happen. The citizens would reject that government and vote another in its place. The people would regard acknowledged governmental incompetence and the need for self-accountability and self-responsibility as blasphemous. For both citizens and governments in Athens want a god. They need a god. To the modern man god is where the power is—which means the government.
So, the outlook for modern Athenian society is bleak. Its prescriptions for reformation and holiness within the human heart, mind, and soul are doomed to failure—regardless of the particular policy or government of the day. Its prescriptions will serve to make matters much worse. In the end, the only hope is to turn back to the Living God, Whom they have sneered at, ridiculed, derided, and mocked for many years
And what does God do in response? He laughs at them. Consider carefully the words of this Psalm which describe so clearly the dynamic of what is happening in these days in our nation—and what will be the outcome, in the days to come:
“Why are the nations in an uproar,So, there is an inevitability here. All will be made to bow before God. All mockery, ridicule, and sneering will cease. The only question is how it will cease. Either it will cease as Athenians hear the summons of God to repent and turn back, once again to kiss the feet of His beloved Son, or it will cease as His wrath is poured out upon them and the wretched city they have built.
And the peoples devising a vain thing?
The kings of the earth take their stand,
And the rulers take counsel together
Against the Lord and against His Anointed”
'Let us tear their fetters apart,
And cast away their cords from us!'
“He Who sits in the heavens laughs,
The Lord scoffs at them.
Then He will speak to them in His anger
And terrify them in His fury . . .
“Now, therefore, O kings, show discernment
Take warning, O judges of the earth.
Worship the Lord with reverence,
And rejoice with trembling.
Do homage to the Son, lest He become angry, and you perish in the way,
For His wrath may soon be kindled.
How blessed are all who take refuge in Him.”
Psalm 2
And every day Jerusalem calls to Athenians, urging them to leave the Gomorrah of their vanity and the Sodom of their rebellion, and to enter the wide, cool, wholesome avenues of Jerusalem, where waters flow and fruit trees grow in rich unending abundance. Give up on your false prophets, your Cindy Kiros, and their rules, their regulations, their bans, and their false gods. Their city already lies desolate and barren. Return to God, own Him as your God, and be saved—while it is still today.
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