Brat Camp 1 (Reflecting on our brat years.)

Last night we watched Brat Camp on ABC TV. (My favourite character was the kid with the Sid Vicious haircut and the Union Jack T-shirt who hated the Government and Capitalism.)

The premise of the show is that a whole lot of out-of-control English teenage brats are sent packing to an American cowboy hardline ranch in Utah.

Our conversation on the show after we’d watched it went something like this;

I told Rob that I thought it was a little extreme, considering that what was ultimately happening was that naughty little English rebels were being taught how to conform without question and with total subservience to a rigid set of applied rules.

Rob, (being the high school teacher that he is,) said “yeah but these kids need some non-negotiable rules in place because their behaviour is so extreme and that’s all they understand, extreme rules for extreme behaviour. These kids want all the rights without any of the responsibilities and they needed to learn that all rights come with a set of responsibilities.”

I shrugged my shoulders, I guess he was right and I could see how the designers of “Turnaround Ranch” had created a program that supported this theory. In one scene, as a distraught teenage girl was crying out, “this isn’t fair!” The bull-headed cowboy/tyrant teacher/ yelled, spittled, back into her face, (not without a level of vehemence,) “nothing in life is fair, understand that now, nothing in this life is fair for anybody!”

So harsh to hear someone saying it out aloud and to a child more or less, but how can you deny the reality of it?

Our conversation turned to something more like this then;

Me telling Rob that I recall being just like one of those naughty little teenagers who was all caught up in myself and my own worries to the point that I couldn’t acknowledge other people’s sufferings and that I was under the delusion that I had it harder than anyone else I knew - the ‘poor me’ syndrome.

And that it took me a damn long time to wake up and grow up and realise that everyone suffered and everyone’s life was hard in one way or another and life wasn’t fair and no one owed me anything. Once I realised that I wasn’t anyone special and I began to look around and saw how other people all had to cope as best as they could in the face of their own adversities, then I began to think that maybe I should just pull my head in and get on with it.


And sometimes, (I told Rob,) life can get so bloody hard that you really have to purge all that extraneous self-pity because there’s just no time for it. You’re too busy surviving, sometimes one second to the next, especially once you have kids and you have to put your own feelings and emotions and needs on the back shelf, then you realise what hardships are really about, and then you discover that long periods of melancholic self-pity are nothing more than complete and utter narcism. They’re a friggin’ luxury! People who have enough time to feel sorry for themselves for silly lengths of time, are people that aren’t suffering enough to be forced to forego they’re perverted ego massaging.

Rob said, “yeah, took me a long time to grow up and realise that too.”

Maybe we were too sheltered or spoilt, or maybe we didn’t have proper tools to help us deal with the transition from childhood to maturity, to help us deal with, and accept the inevitable tragedies that were set aside to be ours.