The Harder Question: Why is it that when a white person speaks against President Obama the automatic assumption is that the person is racist?

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My Question of the Day: For the first time in many years, Ada’s family has all agreed to have their family reunion in her hometown. Because she had been pushing for this for years, she even volunteered to spearhead all the arrangements.

Ada is handling everything for the family reunion without incident, and then her teenage son, Marcus, gets into trouble with the law. While visiting a friend he’s not supposed to be seeing anymore because of trouble in the past, they take a joy ride in the friend’s father’s car, and the boys rear-end a city work truck. Neither boy has a license, or even a permit, to drive. Marcus calls Ada on her cell phone, and she shows up at the scene of the accident relieved that Marcus is fine but livid that he’s gotten himself in such a mess. Instead of causing a scene on the spot, Ada waits until she gets Marcus home and then she lays into him.

On top of dealing with work and the family reunion preparations, Ada is constantly having to deal with Marcus’ bad behavior. It’s one thing after another, and she’s at the end of her rope. She wants to pull out of organizing the family reunion, but the event is close at hand and many people are counting on her to come through for the family.

Marcus knows his mother very, very well, and the one thing he knows she abhors is public scenes that draw attention to her and her troubles with her son. He acts his worse when they’re around other family members, because he knows she won’t yell or fuss at him, and he can get away with his antics until they get behind closed doors.

The weekend of the family reunion comes and everything is set. Friday and Saturday go smoothly, and Ada is surprised that Marcus is so well-behaved and so helpful. She even dances with him a few times at the family formal dinner and hugs and thanks him for behaving so well.

The final event of the reunion weekend is the family cookout on Sunday. It’s a beautiful day, everyone is enjoying themselves, and Ada is breathing easy because the events are almost done, there were no major disasters and everyone has had an awesome time. She leans back in her folding chair and pans the crowd of family with a smile on her face.

As she focuses on the group of people walking up to the gathering from her left, her smile fades to a deep frown. The boy who Marcus isn’t supposed to be hanging around, and two other boys who Ada knows just got back from juvenile detention, are walking towards Marcus, who is walking towards them with a huge grin on his face and fist-bumps to indicate Marcus knew they were going to show up. Ada is livid, but she doesn’t want to cause a scene. She, also, doesn’t want these boys at her family gathering, and she can’t believe Marcus would invite them.

What do you think Ada should do about this?

My 2 Cents: Ada should tell the other boys that they’ll have to go, and then she should deal with her son. She doesn’t have to cause a scene, but she has to be a parent and figure out ways to deal with Marcus’ obvious sabotage.

I’m not saying it would be easy, but I do believe the solution is simple. Ada is going to have to be creative and find a way to get Marcus on the right track. She’s starting very late, but it’s not impossible to help her son. She’s got to find a way, and pretending to everyone else that he’s not misbehaving isn’t the answer.

There has to be a paradigm shift in their relationship where she establishes herself as the person in charge. Right now, he’s running circles around her. Not good.

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The commentary doesn’t have to end!

Please feel free to continue to add your comments below.

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RULES FOR COMMENTS

1. DO NOT include links in your post. There is a place for you to include one link when you’re filling out the Name/Email/Website information. Comments that include links will be deleted.

2. If your post is obviously irrelevant to the question at hand, it will be deleted. This is a tactic spammers use to simply show up on blogs.

3. Please keep your comments respectful. We can agree to disagree without attacking each other.