A news story about the United Nations and the Roman church’s response to sexual abuse of minors and an article about the Texas teacher who assaulted her students by giving a boy a birthday lapdance.  I read those stories before I sat to write.  Of course I thought of how me and Dawn have been troubled over the ways we will shepherd our son through his natural social disposition toward a more realistic humanity because of the world’s wrongness or, the world’s distortion and because people in the world are wrong and distorted.

When I think about teachers harming students and family members harming students, it makes me shake my head in disgust.  Raising a child, a son in my case, is such an experiment in trust.

I think of those boys and girls who were molested–even if only in a psychological way, although such molestation always joins other kinds–and how their skies have fallen, been severely limited, or turned perpetually bleak.

What I fear is my son’s absolute proximity to children who are hurt, victimized, ignored, unseen, underfed, and unloved.  I fear the unnoticed ways all our children are hindered because of the stupid decisions of a person, a family, an institution, a culture which promotes poor ways of parenting as a society.

There is only so much a parent can do.  There are so many things that a father can’t control about his child’s path.  There is so much trust inherent in bringing home a baby.

I’d love to see my son protected and I will do everything I can to preserve his life, his whole life, his happy life, his enriched humanity.  But I do fear that I will change him and his budding openness to people in general because of the specific people who don’t deserve his beautiful self.