It was a stupid tweet by someone who isn’t stupid.
Meghan McCain criticized the fitness of parents who raise a wayward kid.
She questioned whether the mother, a deputy director at the CIA, should still have a job.
Why?
Because that mother and her husband lost control of their young adult son, who foolishly went to war on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and died on a battlefield fighting Ukraine.
Their boy had an eccentric streak that took him to remote parts of the world promoting environmentalism, feminism, communism and the Palestinian people.
He threw shade at his home country, the United States. He posted a video of an American flag burning and would tell friends he was ashamed to be from here.
He was the antithesis of his parents, who both served their country honorably in the U.S. Navy, as Meghan McCain’s famous father once had.
And McCain blamed the parents.
Meghan McCain blames the parents for their son
Born in 1984, Meghan McCain is a child of the internet.
She is a tweeting machine who understood how to use the platform X that was Twitter before Elon Musk bought it and broke its grip from left-wing censorship.
Her opinions are punchy and irreverent, and she takes a lot of swings at both left and right.
Opinion: Elon Musk called a combat veteran a ‘traitor.’ No American should tolerate it.
Even now, as she is busy raising two small children, she is building Substack and 2Way audiences with her takes on American culture and politics as she stays engaged with the wider world.
Sometimes when you engage the world, however, you reveal too much. And on April 25, McCain showed her own ignorance in a tweet:
“If you can’t even get your own kid not to become an anti-American, pro-Islam communist who joins and fights in the Russian Army against Ukraine, maybe you shouldn’t have a senior job in the CIA…”
When I read that, I laughed.
This is clearly the opinion of someone who has never raised teenagers, I thought.
In due time, she will learn, and she will regret it.
McCain forgot the story of the prodigal son
McCain had keyed in on a new version of an ancient story. Christ told it as the parable of the prodigal son, the child who goes astray.
In the biblical account told in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 15:11-32), a wayward child of a wealthy man goes on a long bender of sin and debauchery, squandering his inherited wealth and eventually sliding to that last rung of the occupational ladder – herding swine.
Meghan McCain, daughter of the late Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, speaks during a memorial service for her father at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, on Sept. 1, 2018.
A more modern version was told on April 25 at iStories about Michael Gloss, a young man who grew up in the leafy suburbs of Washington, DC, the privileged son of parents who dedicated a good part of their adult lives to the defense of America.
Gloss’ mother, Juliane Gallina, is a CIA deputy director for digital innovation.
She graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and became the first woman to serve as a Naval Academy brigade commander in 1991, iStories reports. For 30 years, she has worked in intelligence.
Gloss’ father, Larry Gloss, is also a U.S. Navy veteran and an Iraq War veteran. He was decorated for his service in Operation Desert Storm.
Michael Gloss fought for Putin in Ukraine-Russia war
Last year, the couple learned their son had died. On April 25, they read in the iStories account that their boy, while in Russia, had chosen to enter Putin’s meatgrinder – the invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
On the battlefield he got caught in an artillery barrage and died from “massive blood loss,” The Washington Post reported.
He was among 172,000 Russian troops who have died and 611,000 who were wounded in Putin’s illegal war, the International Institute for Strategic Studies reports.
That a leftist child of American patriots would take up arms for a Russian tyrant is a puzzle. It’s a long distance in both miles and values from the home he grew up in.
The 21-year-old Michael was suffering from mental illness, The Post reports, and had stopped taking medication to treat his illness.
As a little boy, he was different, his father said. “If you knew our son, he was the ultimate antiestablishment, anti-authority young man the minute he came into the world,” Larry Gloss told The Post.
Gloss was drawn to the radical left, despite his parents
He grew up loving The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and he was drawn to the politics of the left and radical left. His muse led him to places like Italy, where, according to his obituary, he learned sustainable agriculture through farm work.
He went to Turkey to help rebuild earthquake-damaged structures.
He journeyed to the former Soviet republic of Georgia to join a counter-cultural movement inspired by Woodstock, The Post reported.
Opinion: Trump has made America a safer place for my daughters. I’m grateful for that.
Eventually, he would go to Russia for what his parents believed was the fulfillment of a dream to help build a water purifier in parts of that country that lacked clean water.
Instead, he died fighting an aggressor’s war.
“I can only attribute it to his mental illness,” his father told The Post. “It clearly defies logic.”
Parents who have raised teenagers can empathize
Any parent who has raised teenagers will instinctively empathize with the Glosses. “Teenage” is the child stage when the parents learn, “Oh, we don’t decide the direction of our children’s futures.”
Our children do.
Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don’t have the app? Download it for free from your app store.
When I was about Meghan McCain’s age, some of my older work colleagues tried to warn me of this.
“One day when your kids are teenagers,” one coworker, who happened to be a superb parent, told me, “they’re going to ask you for your advice.”
Then her face changed. It grew flush with anger. Her eyes flared and her voice rose.
“THEY DON’T WANT YOUR ADVICE! THEY DON’T WANT YOUR ADVICE!”
When she calmed down, she explained, “They only say they want your advice. They never take it.”
Who knows what set that off, but the frustration was real.
One day, McCain will know what we do
I have a sister and brother-in-law who were raising the greatest four girls. Strong values. High ethics. Parents engaged in every aspect of their lives. And everything seemed peachy perfect, until one of those daughters turned into a meth addict.
Hell rained down.
I heard it in the desperate calls from my sister, who tearfully told me her 16-year-old, now emaciated and scarred from self-mutilation, would never make it to age 20.
Opinion: Depression in young men is on the rise. Athletes may be the key to getting help.
Hard work and prayers and an enormous amount of attention were focused on that child. Her clean-living sisters sometimes resented all that attention going to the black sheep.
But that black sheep, that prodigal, finally found herself and started making good decisions. She went on to drug recovery, university, graduation with honors and medical school. Now a physician, she is about to take on a new job at a major West Coast trauma center saving other people’s children.
Today, when my sisters and I get together, we joke that our primary job as parents was to just keep our kids alive.
You have to live that to know it.
Someday Meghan McCain will have teenagers, and she will understand.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic, where this column originally published. You can email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com
You can read diverse opinions from our USA TODAY columnists and other writers on the Opinion front page, on X, formerly Twitter, @usatodayopinion and in our Opinion newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Meghan McCain picks on Michael Gloss. She’ll regret it later | Opinion