My father was a very abusive man, more towards his family than to those on the outside rim of his relationships.  As a result I suffered a lot at his hands.  I was not the only person to grow up poor in Trinidad and Tobago; going to school without shoes for example was a normal part of my world.  I lost my younger brother early in my life, I was ten and he was eight.  A favorite of my father, he tormented me whenever he could with impunity.  I have been stripped and beaten in front of my entire school assembly before I turned ten.   My brother and I went home every day for lunch and a whipping, so my classmates gathered around the house to hear me scream and holla from within our two room shop.  I hated living two doors down from the school more than the daily whipping because by the time I made it back to school, the entire student body knew of my humiliation and was ready to rub it in.

While the physical assaults that my father could launch were devastating, their effect was not nearly as enduring as his verbal missiles.  Skilled with words as I am, he seemed to delight in my mental torture.  When my brother passed away my father blamed me for his passing.  I suppressed the anguish of those early days leading up to and after his burial.   Yet I retained enough to remember its effects on me and the intense pains and burdens I had to eventually take to the cross.  What makes me think of this now is my father’s use of the word, “discretion.” Discretion was one of his chief justifying words which most abusers have.  “You have no discretion” he would often say to cover a wide range of issues for which he deemed a severe beating was merited.  I learned to have discretion in the crucible of immense pain.

There are many of definitions for discretion and they have come to be used in various applications, but what my father meant, and what I am now talking about now is “good judgment.”  One can add moderation, restraint and caution to broaden our discussion a little.  As a ten year old boy who lost his mother to divorce, his younger brother to death, a step-father who could not love him and a mother in survival mode, one can hardly expect good judgment from me.  Yet I strived to attain it then, and to this day a certain level of modesty exists.  So for me watch the lack of discretion with which I observe people living their lives I am not only alarmed but afraid.  There is the celebrated “F” bomb at the Oscar’s, the Charlie sheen meltdown, the Wisconsin political debacle and the list goes on in the public square.  To be  part of a nation that once boasted of the best political and economic system given to man now drowning itself in an ocean of excess is chilling.

 The public's lack of discretion is reflective of the values we hold in our personal lives, the homes and families we are a part of  as well as the failure of the Church to preserve the moral center.  It would seem there is nowhere else left to go.  To wear less clothes is to be naked, to allow more sexual liberty would be allow intimacy with animal, nowhere to go in profanity, nudity, propriety or decency.

"It's Just A Thought"

EF

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