I'm intrigued by the common and immediate assumption that if a grown adult behaves badly, they must have had bad parents. I can understand why someone might believe that about a child--even though all children sometimes misbehave. But while our upbringings do affect us a great deal in adult life, we can consciously choose to be better or worse than how we were raised. The assumption that shitty behavior is always an outgrowth of shitty parents offers a sense of control. It placates us into believing that as long as we are good, we'll raise good people. That line of thinking is interesting if you follow it into a family timeline. According to its internal logic, a person is bad or good because of their parents--and their parents would have learned those habits from their own parents in turn. So nobody is fully accountable for their actions, but they are fully accountable for the actions of others.

Our Creations, Ourselves

What we create is often an extension of ourselves, so destroying a person's work could be seen almost as an act of violence against them. This raises some odd questions, like does it count as a form of symbolic cannibalism to eat a meal that somebody else cooked? (Not that this should ever stop someone from eating. It's just food for thought.) This isn't meant to say that property is on par with life, or that nothing that's been built should ever be dismantled. But where do we end and our creations begin? I think this is worth examining. Some people take the concept too far in viewing their children, the people they've formed, as a part of themselves to a point where they don't want their kids to have free will. Others define their own value completely by what they've made, which can lead them to feel worthless if they're unhappy with a project. There has to be a middle ground in which we value our creations but are able to separate ourselves from them to a certain degree and say, "This may be an extension of me, but it doesn't encompass me." And in turn, we apply the same standards to others.