Her father shot her laptop with a .45 pistol

By now you must have seen the sensational YouTube video of Mr. Tommy Jordan, an IT worker
from North Carolina in the USA.  He is the father of fifteen year old Hannah who was the target of his wrath now seen by over 25 million people worldwide. 

For those who have not seen the video, here is a quick recap of what happens in the eight minutes long piece. Mr. Jordan, upset that his daughter, Hannah, had the gall to publicly rebuke her parents, shot a video of himself responding to his daughter’s insouciant accusations.  Hannah’s offending post on Face book accused her parents of being slave drivers. 

They make her clean the floor, ask her to make coffee for them, and many other onerous tasks that make her life miserable. She added, “I have no idea how I have a life. I’m gonna hate to see the day when you get too old to wipe your a**, and you call me asking for help. I won’t be there.”

Unfortunately for Hannah, her dad found out the post.  And then he decided to respond publicly as well. First, he said into the camera, it was not true that his daughter was being made to do all kinds of work.  The only work she is asked to do on a regular basis is making her bed and occasionally cleaning the dishes. 

Getting ever so worked up, Mr. Jordan further pointed out that he had spent so much money upgrading his daughter’s lap top computer, the very same one she was now using to upload abusive information online.  He was simply fed up he said, and was ready to put an end to the whole shenanigan. 

He then got up, pulled a .45 pistol from his waist and proceeded to pump eight to ten hollow-point bullets into his daughter’s laptop.  Along the way he paused only so momentarily to tell his daughter that not only will she now not have a laptop, but that she will have to pay him back for the cost of each bullet shot into the laptop.  

Mr. Jordan’s thesis is very simple:  Children these days have it easy, riding on the back of their parents’ successes without lifting a finger to do anything for themselves or for someone else for that matter.  These kids are selfish individuals whose only claim to fame is their incessant whining about everything.  They are never grateful for anything.

All the points the irate father outlines, except the shooting of laptop, make sense to me.  I am sure I am not alone telling my two boys, “When I was your age…” It is a line many parents use when trying to impress upon their young brood what it was like growing up in the past.  In my case, it goes something like this. “We worked hard picking cotton with our bare hands, drank scalding hot tea straight out of tin cups, no sugar.” 

“What’s more, we sat quietly while adults discussed matters of great importance.  Kids then, compared to the kids of today, were tough enough to take serious licking of the stick without as much as flinching.”

In essence, I try my best to talk sense into my children.  The idea is to move them into realizing how easy life is for them today compared to the days when I ran ten kilometers just to get to my school in the morning. 

Often, the young fellows were unimpressed with the life I lead ages ago which in their humble opinion had nothing to do with them today.  Maybe I ran ten kilometers, but now life was different and I could not possibly expect them to do the same.  It would be child abuse in any case that could lead me in jail.

Where I disagree with Mr. Jordan is when he blames his daughter Hannah for what she has become without deeper introspection of how he, as a parent, has contributed to his daughter state of being.  In fact, if we as parents see our lot as the long-suffering generation that was raised on a meal a day doing backbreaking work, we should be grateful that our parents raised us with those sense of responsibilities. 

Yet, now that we have our own kids, we have failed miserably to transmit the same work ethics to our children, taking on tasks that our children should do ourselves, either because we think they will do a lousy job or because we think they will mess things up. 

Instead of teaching the younger generation how to get things done, work hard, persevere and so forth, we push them aside.

Yet, we are quick to blame our youth for being damn lazy, ungrateful and so on.  I know this because often I have caught myself shooing my children away from a task they were doing for fear that they would do a shoddy job. 

Indeed, many children today cannot even turn on the oven or the stove because every chance there is to do so is thwarted by a parent scared that they could harm themselves. 

Children cannot walk outside because they might be kidnapped; they cannot have friends because, well, because their friends might have negative influence over them.  No wonder we are raising a whole bunch of neurotic, self centered sybaritic pampered loners.  We deserve the children we raise.

And Mr. Jordan must apologize to his daughter for that long rant that has become a runaway sensation on the internet.

He really should.

Opiyo.oloya@sympatico.ca