I wish my parents hadn't beaten me

As we all know, any form of physical pain is unacceptable as a disciplinary tool. I know this from personal experience. Although my parents "spanked" me (when will we realize that this is only a euphemism for "brutally beat me and disfigured my emotional life forever") on only a few occasions, I have been irreparably damaged as a direct result.

On one occasion, I threw a frisbee with remarkable accuracy at one of my playmate's heads, catching him completely off guard and causing him to react with a satisfying combination of squirming and weeping. Following this action, I tried to walk away as though nothing had happened, but was apprehended by the lunch lady. In the process of trying to escape, I let slip my opinion that the lunch lady was a "butthead." Surely this was unacceptable by most standards, and any good parents would have given me a long rational disquisition on why this was not within the parameters of normal ethical behavior, listened as I let them know that I understood their argument and would respond more appropriately in the future, and then taken me out to ice cream in order to show that they still loved me and did not think that I was a "bad person." What did they do instead? First, my mother put me through the unbearable guilt of seeing her cry upon hearing of this totally unprecedented behavior, and then my father spanked me when he arrived at home, applying a total of three blows to my fully clothed buttocks with a yard stick.

My parents clearly passed up a valuable opportunity to teach me true ethical behavior in this instance. Instead of learning that physical violence was wrong, I learned that it is in fact the only way to set things right. I realized that my parents not only regarded me as a dangerous force that could only be reigned in by brute force, but beyond that, that my parents actually hated me and were only taking care of me as a result of some outside physical force of which I was unaware. The only positive result of this experience was to make me anxious for the day when I would be bigger and stronger than my dad, at which point I would apply a yardstick to his buttocks with alacrity and zeal.

On another occasion, I was playing near my grandmother's wood stove, which served as a fireplace in her living room. There was a pot on top of the stove, placed there for decorative purposes, and I thought it would enhance my childish revelry. To prevent me from touching the hot object, my grandma grabbed me and gently slapped my hands. She cried upon doing that, and her cover-up story was that she was tormented by the idea of causing me physical pain. I saw through that immediately, though: she was crying because the farce was over. From that point on, I knew that my grandma hated me and was anxious to find any trivial occasion to cause me physical harm. Only my father's superior strength and his outside compulsion to insure my safety prevented her from indulging in her violent desires more frequently.

Then there were the other violations, such as the one time that my mother washed my mouth out with soap after I told my sister to "shut up." I learned then that my mother feared my powerful voice and that she needed to subject me to intense discomfort in order to reassert her authority in my father's absence. Violence, clearly, was the only answer. Genuine love was impossible, even in the most intimate of relationships. Ever since growing taller than my parents, I have greeted them with a healthy punch in my face; my grandma receives a brutal choking. And they're proud of me!

If the relatively mild physical pain that I endured as a child warped me to such a degree, I can only imagine what happens to those more mischievous children who seem to have experienced spankings with much greater frequency. Only the constant presence of police armed with shotguns and rocket launchers, ready to destroy anyone who disturbs the social order, keep us from becoming a nation of serial killers. The true irony is that I have been so shaped by violence that I will inevitably subject my children to the same horrifying treatment that I endured; indeed, I will enjoy doing so due to my sadistic upbringing. And I can't really blame my parents for what they did, either. It's not like they got to choose how they were raised. They can't help the fact that our every action is determined by our childhood experiences. There's really no one to blame but God.