The Village

Had we all been raised as children by one another, our society would be healthier. For what moral person, having taken part in raising children would want to send a child of their own out into a harsh world also of their creation? Wouldn’t everyone work harder to improve the world on a global scale in which they hope to send their young friends off to, the ones they gave their lives to nourish? Does the farmer taint the soil he wants his seeds to grow in?

Sadly, that question will go unanswered for now, because society still derives benefit from the abuse of children. It is an industry after all. Those who were once trusted with guiding a child down the path to maturation and happiness have been cast in the social role of the fiend and the rapist and been done away with--disposed of to make room for the corporations, governments and other impersonal entities to wield undue influence over the personal child, indeed, the new caretakers.

Though buried in endless platitudes, it is all too easy to see how the statement that it takes a village to raise a child has been misapplied. That village constitutes more than the legal guardians of the child, but includes all of society, even as the parent should always remain the child's central peg upon which the rest of society intermittently revolves. This concept is no more relevant in the modern age than it was in the dawn of civilization. When the child becomes everyone's responsibility, the child becomes no one's responsibility.

The parents are legally bound to their relationship, but the child is inevitably shaped by numerous other social entities. Once this is accepted as an inevitability in a world that preaches "the village" and legally enforces much less, therein lies the promise for altering what is a cultural fear of forces "contaminating" the child. Despite how a child is influenced by "the village," none have a larger impact on the child than the individuals for which the child is securely attached to--that is, so long as they are still given a chance to be attached to an individual person.

The CL relationship is essentially that primordial art of loving a child for the preservation of our collective destiny. The love we speak of is that same ancient non-parental method of child rearing reflected into an unreceptive modern world. It is demonized because the village takes no responsibility for the mistakes that necessitate CL. The system wants one thing, to continue being the system, and therefore, individuals are blamed for the mistakes of the village.