people tell me i should respect and love my parents, but that. They're both alcoholics and smoke weed, and honestly they could die homeless on the street and I wouldn't care. They treated both me and my brother horribly, so why should I respect them?
I don't understand why my brother and I are already 10x the people our parents will EVER be, but we're supposed to respect and love them just because they're older?
The assumption is that one's parents are honest-to-God adults in their behavior.
The commandment "Honor thy father and mother" originates in a marginally-civilized society of herdsmen barely out of the hunter-gatherer stage of economic and technological development, one that has little room for personal vice or familial rebellion. Children would have to follow their herding parents or die. Tradition is the only way of teaching semi-literate people the tricks of survival. Not until society becomes more settled is there any room for other ways of making a living. Even then, children are helpless.
If your parents seek that one's children do good things for humanity as a whole and develop their skills to the fullest for their own prosperity and happiness, then the only question may be the suitability of the goals and their applicability to the children. So Mommy and Daddy want their daughter to be a concert violinist, but she is tone-deaf. (By the way, I am convinced that perfect pitch is learned behavior, but that is another story). She might have more vocational success as a registered nurse -- maybe she will go into nursing. But competent parents can recognize such and adapt.
Beyond incompetence is the failure of an adult to accept adult roles in life, something impossible for those who cannot decide at an appropriate time that they can no longer act like children. Adult responsibilities include making a living, managing money, setting good examples for younger people, acting in a way consistent with a family structure, and staying sober. Being a miser or a spendthrift, being an alcoholic or druggie, rebelling against benign authority, criminality, or gross infidelity in a marriage is not adult behavior, and it is not good for one's children. Children have good cause to rebel against parents who do such things just so that they can have a chance at some happiness in life.
There is no commandment for absolute obedience to political leaders and economic bosses. People who take the Bible seriously cannot accept the gangsterism of a Hitler or a Stalin, or perhaps even a Trump, seriously except out of fear of what such leaders can do to them. Concerns of survival force some compromises. Traditional morality has its survival value and allows some preservation of the thread of social cohesion. It may also be a defense of human dignity and decency.
Alcoholics and addicts merit their own subtle resistance and rebellion. Repugnance toward drugs and alcohol as a response to parental alcoholism and addiction is reasonable.
I have seen just as bad, even if I could not place fault. My father was a gentleman until he went senile, after which he became domineering, abusive, and even violent. Abusive parents for a six-year-old child obviously scars a child for life. An abusive parent whose abuse begins when one is sixty? I ended up broke, jobless, and in mental distress. In an economic order that serves only the economic elite and expects others to suffer for their greed, indulgence, and authority (yes, the ethos of Donald Trump and that of the American Hard Right are both Marxist stereotypes of behavior of economic elites in a sick capitalist society or of the critique of bureaucratic exploiters in the critique of Milovan Djilas)... there is little chance for personal recovery from any loss of economic position. Sure, you can win the Super-Duper Megabucks Lottery and solve all your economic problems... but America now has the worst features of both capitalist plutocracy and Marxist bureaucratization, and what a decent leader like Obama resisted a rake like Trump relishes. (I could go on for hours about this, but that is not the direction of the thread).
My father encouraged me to do illegal stuff, like getting him out of the nursing home before I could legally do so. Yes, I had plans for him in the event that he recovered from a broken hip -- I would make unconventional adjustments to his house, as it is a split-level with stairs that create their own hazards. Her would basically sleep in the dining area. I would do everything possible to keep him as active as ever, trying to get him to re-connect to his old affiliations including church, Freemasonry, and his old local connections in a hick community that I have outgrown every way but financially. He and I would live on his pension and his Social Security, and I might get some stipend as a caretaker that includes medical insurance.
People need some modicum of dignity just to find some happiness. Alcoholics and addicts make such difficult for children. They do not foster independence in children except through rejection of their parents' self-destructive ways. But what do you do if your parents have other self-destructive tendencies such as criminality, sexual misconduct, compulsive gambling, or membership in destructive cults?
This is an illustration of the needs of happiness... and the higher that one lives on this pyramid of happiness, the happier one is. This is not an issue of economic attainment; legitimate achievement is never exploitative. Many people have the potential for morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem-solving, rationality, and freedom from bigotry... but get such potential denied out of concerns for self-image, lack of access to intimacy, personal safety, and even an animal level of survival. Kids who have trouble sleeping because they worry that Daddy might not come home from a drunken binge, who find that the house is full of dirty dishes and has an empty pantry because Mommy is strung out on drugs and is distracted from her kids' needs for groceries and a basic level of hygiene are compelled to live very low on this pyramid. Or that meetings with one or both parents is in the dreary setting of a visitor's area in a jail or prison.
If you have transcended such, then congratulations!
