I’m late getting to this, but I see that members Omaha Police Department posted the other day a video it found on a local thug’s Facebook page, in which adults seen off camera goad and teach a toddler to swear. The child is black, as are the people off-camera; they teach the kid also to say n–ger, and they call the kid a n–ger. Here is the video, but I warn you, it is extremely profane, and completely not safe for work.

The Omaha police union, which subsequently withdrew the video, said it’s a good example of how children so raised become corrupted, and subject to the “cycle of violence and thuggery.” This raised a ruckus, because — wait for it — Racism. Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams indicates that the real villains here are the cops who posted the video, because it gave racists fuel for their fire. No doubt this kind of thing gave white racists fuel for their fire, but the fact that wicked loudmouths are encouraged by it doesn’t take away from the ugly reality of the thing depicted. What we see on that video is an innocent child who is being foully corrupted by the adults around him. Whether or not it was prudent for the Omaha police union to post this clip is a fair question. But it seems to me that some people hate to have had to face the ugly truth about the lives of some kids, as revealed by this video.

What is that truth? This: some kids have to grow up in a culture so perverse and corrupting that, without extraordinary intervention or extraordinary and sustained effort by their parent or parents to help them resist, they are doomed by it. What kind of worldview does a child raised to speak and to think so viciously have? What will they know of gentleness, of kindness, of beauty, of respect for themselves and others? What will they know about how to behave in the world outside the rough precincts of their ghetto culture? The cops are absolutely right: this is one way the cycle of thuggishness perpetuates itself.

The kid’s mother, whose brother recorded and posted the video, doesn’t see what the big deal is: “Kids cuss.” Um, no they don’t. Two year olds don’t. Not two year olds who live in any kind of morally sane environment. The fact that mom, who is all of 16, thinks this kind of shocking thing is normal is precisely the problem. According to CNN, the mother is defending herself:

“He had a clean diaper, the house was clean and like they said, kids curse, every kid does it,” the mother told CNN affiliate KETV in an exclusive interview. CNN does not identify juveniles in such stories. The mother is 16.

“He’s a smart little boy. All that cussing that he did, he doesn’t do that,” she said. “Somebody told him to do that. My son doesn’t do that. I don’t allow it.”

She said a friend of her brother filmed the video while she was in another room.

“He was wrong for doing that … posting the video up and getting us into this situation,” she said. “Everybody that thinks I’m a bad mother, I’m not. I’m a good mother to my son. I teach him a lot. He’s very smart.”

Ah, a clean diaper. What, lady, you want credit for something you’re supposed to do? You want a cookie? To paraphrase the great Chris Rock, “He’s supposed to have a clean diaper, you idiot!”

(And yes, I know the Chris Rock clip from which that line comes is profane. Chris Rock is a grown man and a comedian. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Chris Rock doesn’t talk that way around children, or teach children to talk that way.)

Anyway, this awful clip is a clue as to why we have the problems that we do: because of the perpetuation of a corrupt culture by adults who are failing the next generation, aided and abetted by outsiders who think that pointing out the problem is the greater sin, because somewhere, it’s going to make some redneck think racist (or anti-Semitic, or anti-Catholic, or anti-Muslim, or anti-capitalist, etc.) thoughts. I’ve known whites who talk like that too, and it’s just as ugly. No morally responsible person of whatever race wants to be around people who think and talk like that, and they certainly would rather that their children not go to school with kids who are raised to think and to talk like that. The idea that you can raise your kids that way, and behave that way, and expect to make your way through decent society, is crazy. That kind of language is an outer manifestation of an inner state, and everybody knows it. But not everybody acknowledges it.