As a follow-on from the experience of helping out a friend which my son experienced recently (discussed previously), he gave me another example of some very sound and generous decision making last week.
He had been at work on the weekend, pursuing his part time work and when he got home after a long day, announced that he was probably going out with some friends for dinner to celebrate a birthday. He was asked all the usual questions...with whom, where to, when are you meeting and what time will you be home?
It turns out that the group were people he met through a close friend, not direct and personal friends of his, but he had been invited to go along by the close friend and he wanted to go. The promise was to be home by 10pm, which is decently early. As they were going downtown, he didn't take the car but was relying on public transit.
10 pm came and went and after a half hour a call was made to his mobile phone just to check on progress. There was no answer and the anxiety level notched up a little. At 10:45 pm still no sign of him and another call was made. Contact was made and he said that he was on his way home now. 11:30 pm came and there was no sign of him. No call came. I finally managed to get hold of him at 12:30 am on his mobile phone and he was almost at the train station home bound. Buses are hard to find at that time of night so I agreed to pick him up at the station.
Needless to say I had a few things I wanted to say, but I just asked "what happened?" and listened.
They had indeed eaten at the restaurant which had been named, but afterwards these 16/17 year old boys had gone to a Karaoke Bar and taken a private room and started to drink alcohol. Neither my son, nor his friend, who happens to be Moslem, partook of the alcohol, but the rest of the group did and some quickly became badly intoxicated. One wonders at the license holder of the Karaoke Bar, making no effort to check the age of the persons he served excessive amounts of alcohol to. My son's friend became irritated with his friends and didn't wish to be involved with them, suggesting to my son that they leave and head home. My son realised that there was a problem as especially one of the lads was in very poor condition and needed guidance to get safely home. He suggested to his pal that he should go home if that was how he felt and that he would stay and make sure that the drunks were marshalled home.
It turned out that the worst of the drunks did not want to go home and face the wrath of his parents and this left my son with a dilema. He could not leave this lad to stagger around the city, so eventually he discovered that there was an older brother who could be reached by mobile phone. He was at a party and didn't want to leave but offered that if my son could get his sibling to the party location, he would see to getting his drunken little brother home.
So my son took this lad to the party location by public transport, guiding him along, and handed him over to his older brother and then had to make his own way home from an unfamiliar part of the city.
I have to admit that I was impressed by this action, looking after the wellbeing of someone he barely knows because he knew someone had to. However I did have some issues with it all, but at that time of night felt it best he just sleep and it could all be discussed later in the morning.
The conversation next morning opened up with wanting to know why he hadn't called home to let us know that things had gone awry and say that he may be a bit late. Also reviewed was that they had no business going into a licensed premise under-age in the first place, should not have been drinking underage, and all of the implications of that to them and to the owner of the licensed premises. Next was a review of the fact that these kids were friends of his friend and that if his friend had the smarts to realise that the best thing to do was to vacate a bad scene before it became worse, then perhaps he should have followed the example.
However, a mightier cause became evident. He saw a potentially very bad situation which could quickly become a lot worse. Finding himself the only competent person in the group he took the responsibility upon himself to marshal this large number of kids into a safer situation and to personally take the worst case to a place of safety. A lot can be said about not being responsible for the stupidity of others, about not getting dragged into situations like that, but at the end of the day my biggest criticism was that he didn't answer my calls and didn't initiate a call for help.
I always get nervous in this big city when my kid is late home late at night when transit is scarce, if still running, and this conversation has been had enough times to have sunken in by now. I resent the tension and the rising fear when things become very overdrawn and I resent the loss of sleep, but this time I think that the responsibility of my son was exceptionally well met (except for letting us know what was happening) in what was a very irresponsible situation all round, where self responsibility was non existent, brotherly responsibility was not really picked up, leaving my son and eventually us in a supporting role, to sort out the mess irresponsibly created by some other kid's parents. Had that drunken child been left to his own devices, he may well have ended up under the wheels of a car, or beaten up...or worse.
However, the point was made that you cannot save the world from itself, all the time. Its a hard lesson to learn, but an important one. None of us are totally alone on this planet. We have some responsibility to ourselves and to others around us. In this instance he evaluated the circumstances and made the right decisions.
