Ecclesiastes 11:9

AP:

A boy whose parents are accused of making their special-needs adopted children sleep in cages testified Thursday that the couple forced him to live in the bathroom as punishment for bed wetting.

On another occasion, Sharen and Michael Gravelle forced him to stay in his "box" for up to two weeks, the school-age boy said at the Juvenile Court custody hearing.

"I couldn't come out of my room until I wrote the whole book of Deuteronomy," he said. "I was up there for like a month."

The boy said he has grown tired of his box, but was ambivalent when asked whether he preferred being with the Gravelles or in a foster home.

"It doesn't matter," he said. "There's no sense getting comfortable at any place."

Ordinarily I don't do the "Bobo's World" type posts¹, but this caught my eye because my old public school teacher in Perrysburg, OH, punished kids who acted out² by putting them in "the box".  Wasn't long after my parents heard about her practice that they put me in a private school in Toledo.

Anyway, that didn't scar me for life, but then again it wasn't my parents forcing me to stay in the box until I wrote out an entire book of the Bible.  And the boy's statement about "no sense getting comfortable" just kills me--such fatalism and sense of alienation from one so young makes me sad.

Here's a verse his parents should consider:

Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes.

Sigh.

ntodd

1 - An Atriotism that will be going in the official dictionary soon.  Refers to the idealized Red State world of David "Bobo" Brooks.

2 - I, of course, never acted out.  Ever.