Americal Thinker

By Patricia McCarthy

    The unspeakable tragedy that has been visited upon the family of Rob Reiner has likely left all parents in shock.

    Given what has been available to read about Nick Reiner these past several days, since the murder of his parents, it has shed a little light on what that family has endured since their son Nick was eight years old, maybe even before that.

    He was apparently a difficult child long before he became a drug user.

    His parents tried to help him way back then after he disrupted their yoga sessions.

    They hired their trainer to work specifically with Nick, thinking yoga would help him focus and reduce his obvious anxiety.

    It did not work as Alana Zabel, that yoga teacher, has asserted. With the Reiners’ permission, she wrote a children’s book about a child like Nick, A Chair in the Air. She began working with Nick when he was eight.

    Clearly, Nick Riener came with, was perhaps born with, a condition that caused his behavioral problems long before drugs made his behavior worse.

If he suffered a birth injury, no matter how slight, he may have been self-medicating for some mysterious disorder he himself did not understand, and no one had officially diagnosed. Some mild brain damage  Was his birth normal or difficult  Did he suffer any lack of oxygen during birth

    These things happen and are often overlooked as the causes of later problems – everything from a child being on the autism spectrum to cerebral palsy. There may be something that explains Nick Reiner’s early disruptive acting out and persistent anger. I'm guessing the Reiners explored every possible cause and a solution and never found one.

    That the Reiners opted to send their son to eighteen stints in rehab is the classic case of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

    While their intentions were, of course, good, desperate, and born of love, they were likely very grateful that they could afford all those expensive rehabs; they somehow failed to admit – eighteen times – that their preferred solution was to park the boy in yet another rehab facility, even though he swore they were not helping.

    Many of such rehabs are scams, especially those that cater to the uber-wealthy and their uber-privileged kids.  They are places to send troublesome kids by well-meaning parents who can afford that particular luxury.

    Do they succeed in “curing” young people of their addictions   Sometimes, but rarely. Why else would Nick Reiner be sent back eighteen times  That is an astonishing record of failure. And yet his parents kept sending him to rehab, again and again, expecting a different result.

    Whatever his demons, his repeated failed sentences to rehab made him angrier and angrier at his parents for refusing to believe that was not the answer.

    As his father admitted, “they listened to people with diplomas on their walls and did not listen to their son.” And, given the son's increasingly threatening behavior, why would they listen to him  They obviously lived in a circular nightmare. They were eventually afraid of their own child, whom they loved with every fiber of their being but could not save. The murders of his parents are an American tragedy of unspeakable proportions.

    Is there a lesson for us all within this horrific familial catastrophe  Perhaps. As Tolstoy wrote long ago, “All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Reiners so wanted to be a happy family and had all the talent and resources to make that happen, but they could not heal their unhappy boy.

    Another truism is that you are only as happy as your unhappiest child.  Perhaps Rob Reiner channeled his fury at being unable to save his son into his rage against Trump.

    His antipathy for Trump, beginning in 2015, became his raison d’etre. He spent the last ten years doing everything in his power to destroy the man and his presidency. He used his well-earned stardom as a weapon in the most vicious ways imaginable.

    Reiner jumped on the phony Russia hoax with everything he had, along with the odious and corrupt John Brennan and James Clapper.

    Trump’s tweet upon his death was crude, ill-considered, but understandable. Reiner’s ten years of political torture throughout the media probably left a few scars that impaired Trump’s judgment upon his death.

    Most of us who are parents have faced difficult problems and situations, short-term and/or long-term, that have tested us, made us question our parenting, exacerbated our fear for our children’s survival, and threatened the sanctity of our relationship with them. It all comes with the job. It is never easy, and our children are not clones of us but very different people who may or may not inculcate our values.

    Most of us do not believe in “bad seeds,” especially when born to loving parents. Something within Nick Reiner, not of his making, tormented him, his family, and likely everyone who tried to help him over the years. There may never be a satisfactory explanation. Sometimes we must live without answers.