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Does This Child Beater Need Help Or A Trip To Hell?

It’s a video that fills a parent like me with rage: A judge giving his 16-year-old disabled daughter a vicious beating.

If you watch the video itself, it’s nothing but terrible. The father is pissed because his daughter was apparently grabbing music and videos off the Internet and proceeds to lash her for several minutes. For much of the video, you hear the daughter screaming. The mom is in the video, too, joining in on the beating, though the daughter claims her father forced her mother to do it.

Here are more details (and the video) from CNN:

The graphic video drew international outrage after it was posted by a woman who said she was the victim of the beating seven years ago and that her parents — including her father, Aransas County, Texas, Court-At-Law Judge William Adams — were the ones seen beating and cursing at her in the video.

On Wednesday afternoon, Judge Adams was temporarily relieved of his duties for the next two weeks, and a visiting judge will take over his caseload while the matter is being investigated, according to the office of Aransas County Administrative Judge Burt Mills. No court dates were scheduled this week, Mills’ office said. In an interview with KZTV outside his Rockport, Texas, home Wednesday, Adams confirmed to a reporter that he was the man beating his daughter with a belt and a board on the video, taped in 2004.

“She’s mad because I’ve ordered her to bring the car back, in a nutshell, but yeah, that’s me. I lost my temper,” Adams told the TV station. “Her mother was there, she wasn’t hurt … it was a long time ago … I really don’t want to get into this right now because as you can see my life’s been made very difficult over this child.” Adams continued: “In my mind I have not done anything wrong other than discipline my child when she was caught stealing. I did lose my temper, I’ve apologized. It looks worse than it is.”

Speaking via phone to Texas television station KRIS, a woman who identified herself as Hillary Adams, the daughter in the video, said she posted the video, and criticized her father for “making light of the situation.” “I just can’t believe he would say something like, he doesn’t think it’s a big deal,” she said.

She told KRIS she set up the camera to record the incident seven years ago, but waited for “the right time” to release the video. “Waiting this long to publish it has enabled me to look at it with hindsight and not be so caught up in the passion of the moment,” Hillary Adams said. “I think we do, my mother and I, we do need to try to move on past the anger and just concentrate on getting counseling and help.”

So let’s try to see his side of things…

His daughter appears to be a challenge, the type who drives a parent over the edge. I can relate, because my children can certainly drain me of all patience and sanity. But that’s how most kids get, and I don’t beat my kids over it. When you have children, behavioral challenges is one of the things you sign up for, so to speak.

If you can’t control your rage, maybe the problem has more to do with your ability to be a parent than anything else.

As you can see, I’m having trouble seeing his side of things.

The reason is simple. Most of us lose our patience with our children on a daily basis. We punish them for their transgressions. We even yell when the situation is particularly bad. But most of us keep our hands to ourselves. We don’t smash our children repeatedly in the face.

When I was a kid, my mother took her rage out on us plenty. My sister bore the brunt of the most vicious attacks. Usually the catalyst was over cleaning. My sister was required to do house cleaning every morning before school, and if she missed a spot, she paid for it.

My mother was going through a lot of her own hell back then, and she has admitted more than once that she wished she had acted differently. I forgave her a long time ago. Ours still isn’t a very strong or healthy relationship.

Seven years later, this guy doesn’t think he did anything wrong. No remorse.

Yeah, it’s hard to see his side of things.

I think I speak for all the parents whose kids drive them crazy from time to time; the parents who are driven to the brink but are able to control their fists:

Fuck this guy.

As my friend Joe Yuska said on his Facebook page, “I (and the human race) have no use for someone who beats their kids like this. And to top it off this guy is a judge. Maybe he’ll get locked up with some of the guys he put there.”

OCD Diaries

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Being A Misfit Is Your Saving Grace

We often come undone when we start comparing our quirk-infested selves to so-called normal people. Instead, we should celebrate our insanity and put it to work for us.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:3d8yD2C8kNbs54mL9wboE1]

I used to despise myself for the things I thought were weird and out of place. The windmill hands. The inability to sit up straight in a chair. My big nose and ears. My laughter toward things others would consider serious and even tragic. My tendency to tell stories that are way out of context with the conversation around me. My inability to feel at ease in a room full of people.

In hindsight, I wasted a lot of nights worrying about all these things. I was certain nobody else had the strange behaviors I had and still have.

As I get older, I realize two things:

1. A lot of people have the same strange behaviors as me, including the constant pacing and talking to myself.

2.) People who fail to act out of the ordinary at least once in awhile bore me. Our quirks make us interesting. Our funny dress and way of talking can brighten up someone else’s otherwise ho-hum day.

I didn’t fully appreciate these things until I started working with my current boss, Derek Slater. One of the first things I noticed about him three years ago is that he was different from many of the editors I’ve worked with in the past. Journalism is a career inhabited by a lot of misfits who don’t always know how to walk in step with the rest of the crowd.

I’ve heard editors complain bitterly about how difficult these people were to work with because they were always off step with the newsroom machinery. They tended to ignore deadlines. Their writing wouldn’t conform with standard journalism 101. The people you report on can be infuriating to deal with, pulling tantrums over quotes they give you once they see the absurdity of their words in print.

I used to be one of those editors who couldn’t deal with these people, even though I was every bit the infuriating misfit myself.

The thing I immediately noticed about Derek is that he enjoys all of the above. To him, the folks who don’t behave and wait their turn to speak are simply interesting and entertaining. They help keep the world spinning.

Which is probably why I’ve lasted in this job. Not that I haven’t pissed him off more than a few times. And I don’t think he particularly enjoys it when people ignore deadlines.

I knew a reporter once who was always maligned for his aloofness. He would come in at strange hours, file stories and leave without telling anyone. His stories would just appear in the queue out of nowhere. He wore the same stained pants all the time. One day, he went into a gun shop to take lessons in how to handle the weapon. He pointed the gun at his temple and shot his brains onto the people and things around him. I was not kind to him back when I had the chance.

I sometimes wonder if more compassion for this kid — acceptance of his weirdness — would have made a difference.

My speculation is that not fitting in was too much for him in the end. He wouldn’t be the first person to end it for that reason. He won’t be the last.

I was lucky. I learned to see my misfit ways as a saving grace, the thing that gave me the strength to accept the strange and out-of-place things that have littered my life.

I see it as a gift, really. Like many gifts, it comes with a lot of baggage and can make my life and that of those around me unmanageable at times.

But when properly nurtured and controlled, it can help you make the big differences that make life worth living.

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Throwing Away The Blueprints Saved My Creativity

Like many text-book OCD cases, I’ve been known to put massive effort into planning things before doing them — particularly writing. Somewhere along the way, I got more disorganized and started having more fun.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/5dxEfs6HV1g

I think my earlier affinity for over-planning goes back to childhood. I was a prolific drawer, always working massive amounts of detail onto a page. I think I started doing it because in a world full of chaos (vicious childhood illnesses, parents divorcing, etc.) the page was a world I could control. And control it I did.

As a teenager still reeling from his brother’s death, my drawings took a decidedly more violent turn. I started sketching people dead on the ground with knives protruding from various body parts. A teacher at the Paul Revere School caught me one day and said, “If you are ever assaulted, you will never draw stuff like this again.” I think she was worried that I’d be the one to start assaulting people. I did, verbally.

In high school I went to a vocational school and studied drafting and design for three years. I excelled at it, and loved the order and attention to detail the work required. I also loved the drafting tables we used, which were high enough that you could draw while standing. Being the fidgety type, standing helped me focus much better.

Somewhere in my senior year of high school, I decided I wanted to write instead. My architectural skills served me well in this regard, giving me the attention to detail needed for good writing. My writing still sucked, mind you. I was still too young and inexperienced to know what I was doing.

All through college I pursued writing, specifically journalism, and I was in a band where I wrote all the lyrics. I’ve torn my father’s warehouse apart looking for the notebooks I wrote them in, to no avail.

When I started working as a reporter and editor, I treated each story like an architectural design. I would lose myself in the same story for hours and hours, moving words, sentences and paragraphs around like pieces on a chess board.

It served a purpose, but I wasted so much time doing it this way, mainly because I feared imperfection so much that I was terrified to let a story go to the other editors until it was flawless. The stupidity there is that no story is ever flawless. You could rework a story for days whether it needed the work or not.

In more recent years I’ve been known to draw up elaborate blueprints for stories, specifically series work. One former colleague at TechTarget once told me I was the most organized writer he had ever seen. If he could see me now, he’d be either amused or horrified.

Somewhere in the last four years, I stopped making blueprints for story series and I even stopped keeping a daily list of stories in progress. I’ve become more spontaneous in my writing. I pound the keyboard until everything is out of my head. Then, without giving it a second look, I send it straight to the editors.

The program I use for this blog includes a nifty queue where you can store drafts. I only use it to write down headline ideas so I won’t forget them the next day. I rarely review a piece of writing more than twice now.

Amusingly enough, the stuff I write today is about as clean as it was when I would plan and re-plan. It’s not that the material is perfect. It’s far from it. But in hindsight, the material has always been imperfect.

At some point, more secure in my feelings and abilities after years of treatment for OCD, fear and anxiety, I just stopped worrying about the imperfections. As a result, I’m having a lot more fun and getting more of an emotional release from writing than I ever have before.

Now I can’t let a day go by without writing something. Since I plan less, I write more.

I guess you could say I’ve given up on trying to maintain total control. I’ve learned to trust others — my editors, specifically. Erin reviews most of my posts here before I pull the trigger, but that’s more to share what’s in my head with her before the rest of the world sees it than for copy cleaning.

Of course, she is an editor and does point out things I should clean up. I usually heed her suggestions.

Sometimes I laugh at our differences in style. She sometimes rolls her eyes over my recklessness at the keyboard. But it all seems to work out now.