Dilbert creator Scott Adams was trending on Wednesday for some rather... unfiltered thoughts.
I love the Dilbert comic series. Before "The Office" showed us the misery of the modern work environment, Dilbert was dodging the pointy-haired boss and the feline incarnations of Satan that oversee our HR departments (never has this been so true than the woke era with "equity" managers).
That being said... you don't murder your son, Scott.
Might there be some theoretical movie script where a father cop has to take out his terrorist son in an active shooting? Sure.
But unless you're engaged in an active firefight, you don't walk up to your kid Jason-Bourne style and pop him in the head.
Scott wasn't done yet. Here's the rest of his thread:
If you think there is a third choice, in which your wisdom and tough love, along with government services, "fixes" that broken young man, you are living in a delusion. There are no other options. You have to either murder your own son or watch him die and maybe kill others.
If one more person hallucinates to me about some "program" where teens are kidnapped and "fixed" and returned to their happy parents, I might explode. No such thing exists. You have two options. Only two. No help is coming. Only death and suffering.
You are probably twisting in your seat and you want to tell me all of your good ideas about how there really are services and ways to deal with such a teen. There are none. You haven't been there. Many parents have looked for such help. I have lots of resources. Doesn't help.
If I were to invent a solution to the dangerous young man problem, I think it would involve putting them all in one place so they could only hurt each other, not necessarily in jail, just away from society. Once they are separated from society (and drugs) maybe help is possible.
It isn't legal to take a young man's bodily autonomy just because he "seems dangerous" but that has to be considered at this point. Otherwise parents have two options. And you get more of what we are getting.
Because I'm the founder of the Reformed Church of Scotland, let's turn to the book that's set the standard for morality the past few thousand years. The Bible has a specific prescription for parents that have a wayward, violent, rebellious son. It's found in Deuteronomy 21:
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.'
Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
The solution is clear: Parents of an undisciplined, criminal son are to bring him before the authorities. Then, with a note that God deals harshly with lies and false witness, the parents are to tell the authorities their son's crimes.
If the authorities find the young man guilty, the entire community was to carry out the death sentence.
The principles, like everything in God's Word, are enduring. Parents of a criminal child are not to put their love for the child above justice and truth. To do so would be to show hatred for their fellow man by allowing the child to take innocent lives. It would violate the command to love God and love your neighbor, upon which hang all the Law and the prophets.
But unlike the semi-nomadic Israelites who had spent 40 years wandering around the desert in the ancient Middle East, we have a society with trillions of dollars of prison infrastructure, a robust common-law legal system, and advanced technology. Perhaps the lesson Scott is reaching for is a call to reform our increasingly squishy prison bureaucracy and remember that justice sometimes means ending a life.
But not in the way he prescribes.
After all, my father always joked that he "brought me into the world" so he "could take me out of it," but there's a line between dad jokes and actual murder.
If even the travesty that is The Last Jedi could teach us that murdering our kids is a bad idea, I think we can call it a bad idea.
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