Real Parents Are Waiting

To the parents of the youngsters wandering around the Virgin Valley High School gymnasium during every basketball game, I’d like you to write down this website address:

www.adoption.org.

If you’re not going to be a parent, then dammit, do the decent and honorable thing and give your kids to someone who will!

Once again, as has been the case all season, youngsters as young as two are permitted to race up and down the bleachers, crawl under the bleachers, throw things, climb over seats and other spectators, and occasionally toddle onto the playing court during the game.

And the murmur that ripples through the crowd at various times is always the same: Where the heck are their parents?

Here’s the answer:

These kids don’t have parents.

Oh, there’s someone in the stands who gave birth or donated a seed, somebody who pays for their food and clothes, and someone who was proud enough to paste their name on the kid’s birth certificate, but that’s about the end of their involvement in actually raising a child.

Aside from the fact that these obnoxious little tykes are interfering with other spectators, are making the most noise possible to distract from the game, and are in general practicing for an adulthood of rude behavior, their parentally challenged guardians are living in a time vacuum, dating back to the 50s when it was actually safe to let your kids roam in a confined building.
This is a new century, filled with pedophiles, child-snatchers, and other kids who get joy out of tormenting smaller, more helpless human beings.

Why would you put your child in harm’s way and allow them to play in places you can’t monitor?

Even worse than those who allow their offspring free rein to annoy and tempt fate are the useless adults who dump their eight-year-olds at the door then go on with whatever it is that they deem to be more important than taking care of their sons and daughters.

Like feral dogs in the wilderness, these mongrels prowl the gym in packs, not showing the least bit of interest in the game while they search desperately for some way to slake their boredom.

I recognize that our little town is woefully deficient in offering day care facilities, but here’s a news flash:A high school basketball game isn’t a day care facility either.

Don’t foist your poorly-trained problems off on the rest of us to raise while you go pull that slot machine handle or hang out with other poor excuses for parenthood.

If your youngster isn’t a student at the high school, he or she should not be “dropped off” at a basketball game, or any other sporting event at the school.

The administrators have enough on their plates just keeping their hormonally-virulent charges in line and out of the dark corners of the campus during a game.

They shouldn’t be expected to do your job, too.

I know you want to get the screeching little monsters out of your hair for a couple of hours (look at how it’s being raised, and it might offer the solution to WHY you are so eager to dump them), but it’s not fair for you to get them out of your hair by tossing them into ours.

And to those “parents” (and I’m using the term loosely here) who think it’s cute to let their little ones race up and down the bleachers and onto the courts, give the website a try.

I promise that there are couples anxiously awaiting a chance to do what you appear to be incapable or unwilling to do:

Be a parent.