Demon Seed?
One of my guilty pleasures, I'm shamed to admit, is reading the local police blotter (a vice shared by too many people, alas - police blotters and obituaries are, I've read, the two most popular features of all local papers). Those pages have allowed me to follow the criminal career of one local family now since 1970, when the now-grandfather, then a local punk volunteer fireman, burned down a garage on my street, was arrested and charged with a series of arsons, including the destruction of the Riverside train station. Over the years, I'd see that he'd been caught for one transgression or another and went into and out of jail. He must have put his post-incarceration spells to good use because, after awhile I began noticing that other, much younger people with the same last name and still living in the area of their father were also running afoul of the law: breaking into the Howard Johnson's, drug busts, domestic violence calls, the usual stuff that what some call "the misfortunate" and I call the criminal class get into. In today's paper, a third generation appears.
My question is, why? There's another branch of this same family that is quite respectable, runs a successful business and has done so for at least four generations. What's up with this bunch? No answers here, I just find the phenomenon interesting. I know that alcoholism can run in families and certainly a lot of these reported crimes seem to have been fueled by that or other drugs (or, in the case of car break-ins, the need for drugs). But did some of the children escape? I can't tell, of course, because if they did they wouldn't appear in the police blotter. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that it is not a case, as so many of my former clients claimed, of the police picking on them. I sometimes stir up our local force with some acerbic posts and, in the past, columns yet I've never been arrested or even accused of burglary, drunk driving or petty theft, no doubt because I don't engage in those activities. Most people don't - this family does. Why?
2 years ago
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4 comments:
To my mind, the greatest human tragedy, bar none, is the degree (near a mathematical certainty from what I can tell) to which human beings have an affinity/ability to passing on their worst traits thus condemning the next generation to repeat the same miseries… ad infinitum.
Perhaps Darwin, if he were alive today, would explain this as some sort of human biological need… or maybe it is as simple as misery likes company.
And no, I am not talking about the tendency to over-price real estate… although that is a form of greed… so maybe I am.
Retired IB’er
I agree, pretty much, but I'm blessed that most of my own flaws and character defects seem not to have been passed on to my children (of course, they did choose some of their own, but that's all just part of being human). It's likely that their mother's goodness overwhelmed my stuff but whatever the reason, I'm grateful.
By the way - I haven't posted a couple of comments that guessed at the identity of the family I'm writing about. Not necessarily because they guessed wrong but I don't need a libel suit right now, even if truth is a defense to those. So, as I learned from the Washingtonians, "I can neither confirm nor deny".
There was an article in the GT some time ago about a family (same ethnicity, as it were - if my guess is right - and the upright members of the family [the majority, by far] are great people!). The naming practice was to name the first two boys after the father and grandfather; and so that continued for another generation or two. In the present, you have 5 cousins, about the same age, with the same name. One decides to take the criminal path . . . causing problems for all the upstanding guys. The article stated that this family was not unique in Fairfield County.
I have heard one psychiatrist acknowledge that it seems that one child can seem to inherit more than his share of "bad" DNA, manifesting several of the less desirable traits from both sides of the family tree . . . the DNA does not seem to distribute evenly. The statement came from years of practice/observation; I don't know what kind of science there is behind it.
From a Darwinian perspective, maybe the splitting chromosomes sense some weakness and throw all the junk in one direction. Of course, in our world of social safety nets, etc., competition does not work the way it might in a more "natural" environment. (Not that I would want it to . . . not sure how I would compete myself!)
I suppose it can also come down to where is Mom and Dad - too! This family is a perfect example of what happens when Mom and Dad give up on their children!
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