DADWAGON

The Underwear Bomber: father ratted him out

(This is our second run of “The Tantrum,” in which each of our four regulars will address one subject over the course of a week. Previous Tantrum: TV or not TV?)

There were many revelations to come from the curious case of the Underwear Bomber. Yemen is a headache. London makes people want to kill Westerners. The TSA is a mess. Sen. Jim DeMint is more worried about unions than he is about al-Qaeda. The author of Dad’s Exploding Underpants and Other Potty Poems may have been trying to warn the world.

For us at DadWagon, though, we were most interested in the fact that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was ratted out by his dad. And it’s not like the father, one of Africa’s richest bankers, was trying to turn him in to the Sisters of Mercy. He went to the U.S. Government, the people who brought the world orange jumpsuits, force feedings, and infinite extrajudicial imprisonment.

The question for us is, when should you turn your kid in? Where is the line between protecting your child and protecting everyone else?

Okay, so the math changes when your child’s transgression is trying to blow himself (and other people) up. You might actually be saving him by turning him in. And like so much with young Umar’s hamhanded plot, he was incredibly, foolishly transparent with his father:

ABC News’ sources said that during Abdulmutallab’s final call [to his dad], he told his father the call would be his last contact with the family. He said that the people he was with in Yemen were about to destroy his SIM card, rendering his phone unusable.

He robbed his father of the things that usually keeps people from turning their kids in: denial, and any hope that things will just work themselves out. When your radicalized son says he’s in Yemen and won’t be speaking to you anymore, there aren’t many remedies left to you.

Unless part-Jewish part-Asian babies start growing up to be a major militant threat, we at DadWagon will not likely have to face the should-I-turn-in-my-young-suicide-bomber question. But for many of the more mundane instances of law and order, I am going to start the Tantrum off by saying that there are very few situations in which you should rat your kid out. Because once the police get hold of any complaint, you can’t control the consequences.

We’ve had some personal experience with this in the extended family, unfortunately. To protect the guilty, I won’t get into specifics. Let’s just say that someone was a little strung out (I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t me) and was a little menacing to his elders (also not me). The cops were called. The intention might have been to get this hophead to sit in jail for a night, but once the police got involved that was no longer an option. All attempts to drop more serious charges were rebuffed. The end result was a multi-year stay at the lovely race-riot capital of the Central Valley, Corcoran State Prison.

It works the other way, too. One of the best pieces I’ve ever read from Dan Savage, my old boss at the Stranger, was this dissection of a son who turned in his father for growing weed. Bottom line: don’t get the cops involved. It’s not their fault, but they’ve got their own agenda, which rarely matches a parent’s agenda.