I had a facinating conversation this weekend, that I thought might interest y'all.
Unfortunately, we live down the street from a gang hangout. Saturday, I was playing in the front yard with Turkey, and a group of guys were having a loud discussion in front of the gang house. I was tuning them out for the most part, when I heard the phrase,
"gluestick trick". Well, for the millionth time in my life, curiosity killed the cat, and I boxed up my courage and walked across the street. "Hi!" says the little white housewife. "Hey!" say the thugs.
"Hey, can I ask you guys a question?" "Um, sure?" "I heard you talking about a 'gluestick trick' - what do you mean by that?" They all look at each other, hem and haw a little, then one says, "Well, you wanna *mess* somebody up pretty bad, you hit them with your fist, they go to the cops, they're all bruised up, right? You take a gluestick, like for a glue gun, you use that, it *messes* your boy up right, but there's not a mark on them! It's like magic or something, they don't leave a single bruise, but it hurts like a [non-repeatable] and it can tear into the muscle and *stuff*." Another guy at this point asks me why I want to know, "Your man getting rough on you or something?" and laughs - I said no, I knew of people that spanked their kids with them, and that whole group of nine or ten hard-core tattooed thugs who had been laughing and talking while this was going on, went dead silent. I got a whole round of these:
and finally one said, "If my baby's mama ever took a glue stick to him, she would never see him again. That is *messed* up."
Pretty interesting? Perhaps we should enlighten the "glue-stick spankers" that they are using a gang form of abuse and torture - wouldn't that be "conforming to the world"? Interesting that even these boys see something inherently wrong in hitting a child with one.