There is nothing sadder than a parent or grandparent who has given up on their child or grandchild.
Some years ago a lawyer from San Francisco, James Stillman, introduced me to a term and concept that radically changed the way I look at children or grandchildren who have been branded wayward, difficult or hostile. The term was “Designed Difficult One” of DDO for short.....When I shared the DDO concept with a cultural anthropologist recently she told me that in her experience the DDO is the “voice of the family system” and families benefit greatly from paying attention to their DDOs.
DDOs from wealthy families can be found at large in pup tents Occupying venues otherwise dedicated to bidness as usual. Among the DDOs are tricksters, martyrs, pariahs, artists, the half crazy, those who bear witness. Family systems are what John is talking about. But family verges on the polis as well. And when the families are Dynastic (which is what John is talking about), the black sheep may be trying to save something more than themselves, their family, the family system, the family dynasty, the family spiderwebs of influence and control. More than their own face or their own ass, or money, what they may be trying to save is an artistic, moral, or political tradition in which "we" means all of us as a tribe, nation, or planet.
So many of these family moral physicians who would cure the sick Dynastic family are themselves wounded healers, blind leading the blind. They call sentimentality wisdom. They present sanctimony as discernment. Followers and lackies, they teach leadership. Fawning, they teach moral courage. They would patronize and recover the outcast young, and call the reintegration of the kid to the suffocating family system, mentoring. Their smarminess is contagious and infects an entire class of established and rising hegmons. The healthiest thing about many a thriving family is the sickest and most recalcitrant kid. To reform the sick kid produces and reproduces nothing but the horrowshow of the new normal. What mentor turned G.W. around and made him so normal, moral, vapid, vacuous, lethal, and good, as well as servicable to his class? Normal is disease we fools seek to cure.
Ms. Gary, would you agree? If Ms. Gary is not available, since she is probably making trouble somewhere even as we speak, I will cite Jesus (or maybe Judas) instead, from the Gospel of Judas, the Twin of Jesus, "Bring me the stone the builders rejected, that is the cornerstone."
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