When Evils Converge a Book Review

Have you ever wondered what’s happened to children?  Seldom do any of them ever use the old “magic” words of please and thank you and they don’t seem to have respect for any of their elders if not betters.

Most people blame this transformation on government schools and schoolteachers.  Now I don’t disagree that many teachers appear only to be babysitters and that the United States is being “dumbed down”, but all the blame can’t be laid at the feet of the teachers and government schools.  Somewhere along the line parents learned not care about their children and the responsibilities to those children, but began to shift the responsibility for their children to the government school system.  Well, at that point some “helpful” school teacher or administrator decided that they would take care of “this one child” because the parent wouldn’t and it’s snowballed from there. One begat two and two begat six, and before you know it the local school system became the parents to our children.

I’ve had this thought germinating in the back of my mind for a some time now and recently it’s been confirmed…at least in part. I recently read a fictional book that is based on a real life family. In that book the author chronicles how one well-to-do family dealt with their only child, (Bobbie Jo), when she became pregnant. The book goes on to cover nearly 30 years of that child’s life and how she dealt with and treated her own children.

The book, “When Evils Converge” by Pat Van Dorn, takes the reader into the twisted mind of Bobbie Jo and shows how little regard she had for anyone other than herself. The “evils”, (if only in my mind), are the parents who couldn’t be bothered with their only daughter, their lack of morals, the total disregard for any human compassion and the drugging of children with alcohol to keep them quiet.

On the back cover of the book the author wrote; “Bobbie Jo, their daughter, cared only about herself, staying thin and her carnal lust – which usually meant having sex with every man she met who had a pulse. In the book “Bobbie Jo” passed her warped ideas about what was important in life to her children who, in turn, twisted those lessons into a strange and subtle abuse of their own children.”

After I finished the book I started to think about how this story related to the many people I’ve encountered in my life, both good and bad. I no longer wonder why the children of the current generation are so different, but I wonder what can be done to alter the path they are on or if we really want to.

Enjoy!