When kids grow into tyrants
Cynicism runs deep in a world of constant Twitter abuse and Facebook persecutions, but I believe their misery and tears because they are in as much crap as it’s humanly possible to be.
What we saw in the mushy, tear-stained puddle of Australian cricket this past week has been an object lesson in consequences, something that has become unfashionable in a world of excuses.
Do shabby things and humiliation will follow.
Inscribe it in poker work as a motto for your bedroom wall, write it on your arm in biro if you must, but accept reality.
What you do out of sight is the measure of you as much as what you do in public. Cheating matters.
Kids won’t always have bullying parents to bully teachers who dare to discipline their behaviour, and nobody cares when you’re grown up if your mother was a drunk.
You are on your own, and Facebook friends you think you can count on are fickle. Why would you matter?
No-one is always deserving of admiration, and you won’t get away with anything for ever, however smart you think you are as you abuse the people around you and breach the trust of people who – however undeservedly – care about you.
Look at Aussie cricketers Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft and learn. Doing the right thing matters.
There would have been many households jeering at the shamed players as they struggled to keep their composure in front of the media. Cynicism runs deep in a world of constant Twitter abuse and Facebook persecutions, but I believe their misery and tears because they are in as much crap as it’s humanly possible to be.
They won’t go to jail for it, but this is much worse.
Jail is a relatively private experience; people lose sight of you after the newspaper reports; but a destroyed reputation is with you for ever, lived wholly in public.
These men’s names will never be mentioned again without reference to their cheating. For their whole lives.
As top cricketers they’ve been the pride of their parents, wives and children as well as their country.
But for the next few weeks none of them will walk quite as confidently into their local dairy, and their kids will cop it too. Their pretty wives won’t be lunching at their favourite haunts with the other pretty wives, and even their parents will silently struggle to stand by them.
I wonder how many parents explained the ball-tampering to bewildered children who’d never seen such a public downfall, or seen an adult male cry.
So many parents seem to bring up their kids to be entitled, to run riot in restaurants, shout and show off at the movies, demand the latest toy and sulk until they get it.
Kids who run their parents have become, in some people’s eyes, kids being brought up right.
They become bullies, inevitably, and rather than deal with them their parents make excuses for them.
They must never be hindered, rebuked, inconvenienced, ignored, and no hand must ever be raised against them, even if they whacked the other kid first. What future tyrants we create through laziness and misguided loyalty, and for lack of an agreed code.
Our confusion is more often seen in politics, in its rise and fall of the players, to whom we apply codes of conduct of mysterious complexity because they are ‘‘accountable’’.
But we are all accountable.
We don’t seem to believe in politicians, or police, who act out our social problems in their work. Ambulance workers are attacked on the job, or have their ambulances trashed.
Young louts who do that have managed to grow up without any respect for human life, least of all their own. Their handiwork is seen, too, in car chases which we refer to as ‘‘police car chases’’ when something goes wrong, not ‘‘louts’ car chases’’.
We’d rather fault police than offenders. We’d rather hold up louts as martyrs. What are we thinking?
Fans tolerate the repulsive art of sledging at the top levels of cricket, though it’s hardly sporting.
There’s probably a depressing number of fans who would accept that ball tampering is OK too.
The idea of what’s cricket and what isn’t was once evident, and would have been to the captain of the Australian team, who should show traces of a more elegant world of tea and cucumber sandwiches, and good manners, which are harmless and easily acquired.
That kind of ethic shifted smartly last weekend to the world of heavyweight boxing, where Anthony Joshua was as gracious in victory as Joseph Parker was in defeat.
All class all round. It can be done.