Classic Rant #1,163 (March 13, 2014): Spoiled Brat

What the heck is going on in New Jersey lately?

First, we have those two realtors I talked about yesterday, who were using a house they were supposed to be selling as their own pleasure pad.

Now we have the story about a New Jersey honor student who sued her parents to support her after she moved out of their home.

She has now reunited with her parents, and the family is now asking for privacy.

Yeah, right.

This was probably one of the dumbest lawsuits I could ever remember, as the daughter was suing her parents for everything from school tuition to overall child support.

She claimed that her parents were abusive, even having the audacity to force her to take a basketball scholarship.

They also disapproved of her boyfriend, who they thought was a bad influence on her, and didn't like the fact that she was starting to abuse alcohol.

If this all sounds like a typical parent-teenager confrontation, well, it pretty much was.

The only wrinkle to this nonsense was that the girl was living with a family where the husband instigated the lawsuit.

First of all, that lawyer should face some punishment himself for foisting this nonsense on the court. It cluttered up a court system that has too many cases on its dockets to begin with, and he should know better.

Second, if this thing got so out of hand, it should have been handled with mediation, not in a courtroom.

According to the girl's attorney, the notoriety of this case "had damaged the family."

And what about the launching of such a suit? Didn't this idiot lawyer think about that when he filed the suit?

Frankly, this kid sounds like a snooty, snotty spoiled brat that is simply reacting to her parents telling her "no" for probably the first time in her life.

She goes to a snooty private high school, lives in a snooty rich town, and was never taught what the word "no" means.

Well now, I hope that she knows what it means.

Evidently, the girl and her parents have settled this "amicably," a word that I have learned in my personal life to be the phoniest word in the English language.

There is no such thing as an "amicable" disagreement or an "amicable" divorce.

Somebody gets hurt by these things, so how can things be "amicable?"

If things were "amicable," there wouldn't be these types of disagreements and everything would be hunky dory, right?

However, in this particular case, the court system is not immune to being stupid, and I am not going to let them get off the hook.

Why they let this case proceed to the point that it did is beyond me. It should have been thrown out at the earliest instance.

And now, the court has extended this nonsense, as while the judge in the case threw out the girl's claims that her parents not only owed her school tuition but full child support, he is still scheduled an April court date to consider the question about whether her parents are financially obligated to support their adult daughter.

What the court should do is to refer this entire case out of the court setting and to some type of mediator, but even that will bring this case to a level that it should never have been brought to.

The girl is in need of some psychological counseling, and the parents don't exactly sound like winners either. I mean, why were they so indulgent to her throughout her life? Maybe they don't know what the word "no" means, either.

However, let's say my son asks for a new computer, which he actually has done already.

Let's say I tell him no, I can't give it to him.

Can he take me to court?

He is 18, will be 19 in August. In some states, he is already considered an adult.

Happily, in my case, that won't happen, because he knows what the word "no" means.

Funny, such a little word has such a big meaning, and I find it totally incredible that that word, or the complete lack of understanding about its meaning, gets so many people in so much trouble.