Something Else I Don't Understand...

...is parents that swear. I just don't get it. I don't. It's clearly undesirable and unnecessary, not to mention teaching bad habits.

I'll admit it...I used to swear like a sailor...excessively so. I've never smoked, done drugs, never been drunk in my life, so I used to say that I'm entitled to let the language fly. If that's the worst thing I do, there's millions of people that I'm already a leg up on.

All it took was once. The first time my daughter repeated a swear word, as children often repeat any words they hear...a swear word is inevitable, and I quit. Cold turkey...I stopped swearing. There was no way I was going to have my daughter repeating the nasty things I was saying.

To this day, I almost never swear. On the rare occasion I do, it's usually to myself and never when my children are around.

Aside from the occasional "crap" which they get from my wife, the worst thing they say is "stupid". I still don't like them saying that. One day they will be old enough to understand that it's ok to call things stupid, but not people. Now, it just always promotes a 30-second conversation on how they shouldn't say stupid. Admittedly, they mostly hear that during the holidays when they are watching a Charlie Brown show.

I think that the American culture is continually getting worse than the generation before it, and it will continue to do so until either the end of our country or the world. But I don't understand why we can't preserve our culture as much as possible, to delay the inevitable, by at the very least using good language in front of our own children. It's sad that it doesn't happen, and for the life of me, I don't understand why.