In Berkeley, the University of California, a public, State funded school, has grown to an almost cult status among certain students and these students' parents will engage in the most bizarre and weird actions to get their children accepted to it, even while that school is minting a reputation for gross student cheating and strange and flawed results in their supposed research studies.

And in San Francisco the envelope is pushed much farther. As a typical example, a married couple with a child divorced and moved next door to each other so that the child could have easy access to both parents. The husband is now gay and living with his male lover, while the mother is now lesbian and living with her female lover.

If that is not beyond incredulity, a local newspaper published the story of The Reengineering of Nancy. She/he was a married man with children who divorced his wife, had a sex change to become a woman, and became a lesbian. A strange and needless route to the same destination from which he came.

Indeed, living in this San Francisco Bay Area is different and full of extremes. As a consequence, one is confronted with what many would never see or ever hope to confront and be able to live with. In the San Francisco Bay Area, abnormality functions as a stabilized mutation that is simply an alternative lifestyle that rationalizes itself as a form of normality that we all live with and are not thrown back by. But in spite of being able to see and live among extremes of the almost unbelievable types, I was still shocked by statements made in a local court last week.

In a local Bay Area courtroom, the prosecutor in a murder case alleged that a father urged his 13-year old son to kill a 12-year old child, after having tortured that 12-year old with two gunshots to his arms. The court records allege this: the 13-year old was being harassed by this particular 12-year old at school. The father took his son and a 15-year old with him; they kidnapped the 12-year old, tied him up, and put him into the trunk of their car; once at a deserted spot, they took the 12-year old out of the trunk and the son shot him in both his arms. While the child pleaded for his life, the father urged his son to kill the child. The father said, "Go on and complete this like a man. Shoot him in the back of the head." And the son did as his father urged him to do.

I thought I had heard and seen just about everything, living in the San Francisco Area as I do. But when a father tells his 13-year son to kill another child with a gun as a man would do, such a proclamation of what a man would do shames me as a man.

This mad man was too testosterone high to see his perverted view, a term we dare not use in this area of the world, as perverted or to say complete is as a foolish, insecure, and deceived man would do. Have we simply watched and believed movie fantasies too long? Indeed, many Americans actually believe what these movies project--we are the greatest, we are the strongest, and we can resolve conflict and difficulty with violence and the gun. This kick-ass mindset that works only in a movie world.

Years ago, I rented a property to a man who did not pay the rents; so I went to court to evict him. The man called me, asking if we could go somewhere and fight this matter out to resolve it. I laughed at his absurdity, asking what would that prove? How would that resolve the situation? He had no answer, but this poor fellow offered physical violence as a resolution to the problem of his living in a rental property and not paying the rent. This type of naive reasoning seen in that situation and the case of the father urging his son to complete the killing of the 12-year old as a man would do is an attempt at conflict resolution with a gun and the teaching of it.

The idea that violence can resolve conflict is, however, a deceptive elixir imbibed through our lingering in the movie houses of our fantasy worlds. It works that way in our movies--but only there--because they are an unreal world in which our frustrations can be resolved quickly and simplistically. The real world cannot afford such reductions to absurdity.

Now the 12-year old is dead, and the father and his son will be in prison for life; maybe they even will share the same California prison together. What this father will tell his son while in prison about manhood is anybody's guess. []
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