Letter
to Editor - Foster parents may still be
insecure
The On-line Forty-Niner staff editorial
on Wednesday (“Sensitivity Training Unfair”)
demonstrates that, not only should foster
parents be required to take said training
—editorial writers should be required to
take it as well.
Quoth
the writer in his or her wisdom: “Foster
parents better get used to letting the foster
kids run around in drag because if they
choose to adhere to the norms of society
then there will be consequences to pay.”
Well!
One wishes that the writer would let us
in on just what he or she believes to be
the various “norms of society” to which
all foster parents will automatically adhere.
Racism
was and to a great degree still is a norm
of society, along with religious intolerance,
gender-related inequities, pre-determined
orientation expectations, casual destruction
of the environment, and such simple but
good old-fashioned traditional societal
favorites as abuse of the weaker, selfishness,
hypocrisy, lying, and —that familiar family
hearthside friend, as warming as chestnuts
roasting on an open fire — plain old stark
ignorance.
One
hates to break it to the writer, but many
parents look on raising children not as
an opportunity to help a fellow being develop
in accordance with his or her own talents
and characteristics, but rather as being
the human equivalent of training pets—force
the beneficiary of their “love” into acting
precisely the way they want it to act.
Open-minded,
nurturing, and worthy foster-parents—and
there are many—might gain new insights from
the proposed program; but the writer should
take heart in the fact that, even though
possibly legislatively forced to take sensitivity
training and undergo exposure to a fuller
range of opinions, cultures, and options,
any truly ignorant foster-parents, full
of doting love and hewing to “norms of society,”
as they understand norms of society, can
still manage to gain nothing from the experience
and treat their charges as abysmally as
they would have with no training whatsoever.
—Brent
C. Dickerson
CSULB Alumnus
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