Child is Not a Weapon

Children are truly mankind's greatest resource. They are both the artillery hurled at our enemies and the shield we use to protect ourselves from attack. The force that propels dictators to surround themselves with children as a means of deflecting bullets is the same one that propels people to use children's wide eyes and button noses to elect the next one. That force is human sentimentality.

If we ever experience a limitation to the right of free speech, it will come in the guise of protecting children. If we ever experience a limitation to our right to remain innocent until proven guilty, or a full reversal of such under vigilante rule, it will come in the guise of protecting children. Indeed, if we experience tyranny in the future, it will be in part helped along to fruition by the obsessive sentimentality mankind ascribes to the young ones. Preserving the made up substance of innocence in a child robs society of its own. The more worshiped children become, the less stable a society will be.

One might be tempted to think of this as a contradiction. Why, if society is said to be worshiping children, could one believe children are being used as weapons? The answer is more obvious than it may seem. When we idolize something, we cease appreciating it. In the same function that causes mankind to destroy each other over an omnibenevolent God, humanity destroys itself over their "innocent" children.

The Antichrist

For now, an aphorism.

Cyber-vigilantism is an Antichrist. If anything can be said to be an antichrist in this day in age, and the mere labeling of such calls the same immediacy and fear from the populace as the labels it gives it's own well-meaning adversaries, then it makes sense to call a spade a spade. The Antichrist is alive and well, and its name is the anti-pedophile group Perverted Justice. Its name is the vigilante group Absolute Zero.

Come Gather Round (A Song)

I wrote this a few years back. It was published in an ezine in support of the cause. Please feel free to distribute it if it moves you as much as it does me. It's meant to uplift our spirit and resolve in most difficult times.

Come Gather Round

Come gather 'round--you loners and lovers and others
who're beaten in the streets and defeated by mothers
who've been breakin' us and takin' us and not givin' love
to the young cryin' and hidin' and playin' and sayin'...
"You just leave us be!"
They've been sighin' and lyin' and buyin' and tryin'
to trip us and trap us, hit us and slap us for bein' us,
and all but feeling free--

Come gather 'round--while the ink's are pressin'
and court's are messin' round and second guessin'
and tongues' professin' and hate repressin'
and stop confessin' and window dressin'...
Tell them we'll be free!
And that the world is reelin' and you're not stealin'
no child's feelin's or are concealin' no unappealin'
thoughts that make you be--

Come gather 'round--to light your candle and not
the scandal and fight the vandals and not mishandle
the child's will you love, and still be there to fill
and be ye filled and work to build a
better life for you and me!
And make it known that it's you who owns your love
that's real, that all you feel's not made to kneel
for all the world to see--

Come gather 'round--and keep on steady and at
the ready for the gangs and chains and those who fear
and keep out your ear for their lyin' and trashin' and
sighin' and bashin' and repressin' and guessin'...
From fear they won't be free.
And never stop goin' while your soul is slowin' or
age be showin' 'cause children keep growin', and never
stop knowin'...
Our Time is Soon to Be.

Adult is No Standard

Children are often accused of thinking the world revolves around them as if believing this was such a "low" or lesser thing--as if it were a behavior divorced from the adult. Believing one is at the center of something important is as human as human, whether it's believing that all one's friends are spending their time talking about them or believing that extra-terrestrials would have any reason to travel endless light years to us for momentary visits. No. Far from being something divorced from adults, it is the very nature of the human ego to assume itself untouched by behaviors it deems low or lesser than it. By so easily dismissing the child's egoism, adults reveal their own.

Advertisements will even exploit this standard, simultaneously depicting children as rambunctious egoists bent on gratifying their passing fancy along with an adult, normally the mother, in desperation for what she deserves--attention to her plight, attention on her struggles and efforts, only to find that her labors are such that only some godsend product can help dissolve. Advertising is the propaganda of its target audience. When adults are the demographic, the advertising is unquestionably adult-centric. Because adults reserve for themselves the resources of society, they are inevitably the main target audience, thus the majority of advertising is adult propaganda.

Adult-centrism is reinforced by this propaganda. Its main tenet being that whatever constitutes adulthood at any time and place is the standard and pinnacle lifestyle, ideology, perspective, culture, and developmental ability of the human race. Indeed, "adult" is often interpreted as meaning or being synonymous with "human." Childhood and youth is considered unfortunate temporary states of being on the way to becoming adult, which is to say, becoming human.

However, all is subject to interpretation, and all interpretation that prevails is a function of power. Alternative positions, whether adult or child, are simply alternative positions--developmentally defined expressions of humanity. One is no more "superior" by virtue of its power and authority as the other is "inferior" by virtue of it's ignorance. No one is inferior or superior. All expressions of humanity are relative to one another. The only thing maintaining the adult as the standard form of human being and all it's various alternative (child-like) positions as "lesser" or "inferior" states of being, is a function of their power to enforce this perspective. This is done through their propaganda.

The Power of Dissent

A lot is made of consent. Society uses it as a golden criterion upon which to judge an individual as capable or incapable of participating in certain activities if they have not reached the line in the sand. Youth Rights advocates and CLs argue on behalf of it to almost religious extents. And yet, a child's consent is only half of the equation. The argument for maintaining the separation of a child from any activity is usually done on the basis that a child is not mature enough to participate in the activity. The child may consent to an activity all they want, but it has been denied on the basis that the child is not considered mature enough to give that consent. In the eyes of the law, consent is a mature behavior, reserved only for those in the so-called full maturation of their faculties.

The reason a child isn't considered mature enough to even make a stab at certain activities is that their knowledge of the consequences of consent is impaired by their age. In reality the number of times the earth has revolved around the sun during one's lifetime is in no way correlated with one's ability to comprehend. Experience is that which informs our judgments, not our age. Experience is dependent on internal biological and external social circumstances, it is not dependent on the movement of the planet, and certainly not dependent on the Gregorian calendar. If a child is incapable of consenting to an activity, it is because information about the possible consequences of the action has been kept from them by adults who, on their own, have decided that they are not capable of handling the information. Children's vulnerability to the effects of consent is culturally constructed. In this age of information, it is easier than ever for children to "inform" themselves about any topic or subject to a satisfactory degree.

As consent is something normally considered to be "given" to kids, it really has nothing to do with their ability to perform the action, and almost everything to do with the adult's willingness to extend them the authorization. It is often argued that because of this, if children were given certain rights (like the right to consent) that they would be totally free to exploit these rights to their own detriment and the downfall of society. For instance, how often do you hear that if we were to give children the right to consent to sex, that they would all suddenly turn into miniature prostitutes capable of picking up johns on the street? Or that if adults give them the right to drink, all the 5 year olds are going to go out and buy out the liquor stores, hop in their cars (that they have the right to drive) to go pick up prostitutes (that they have the right to have sex with) and max out credit cards (that they have the right to own)--or some other rather fanciful scenario? Are we supposed to take paranoid extremist arguments like this seriously?

What is often forgotten is that extending consent to children doesn't negate anybody's right to dissent to a child's request. In the above scenario, having the right to drive at 5 years old, for instance, wouldn't negate any registry of motor vehicles' right from denying a 5 year old's application because they failed the written test as required of anybody applying for a learner's permit (in the United States at least), or (seeing as a child doesn't have the resources to buy their own car) the parent's denial to let them drive the family car. Likewise, having the right to purchase alcohol at 5 years old wouldn't mean children would even have the mobility or the monetary resources to go "buy out" the store as predicted--the parent still has ability to dissent the child's request if the child isn't capable of buying the product themselves. Likewise, having the right to have sex at 5 years old wouldn't negate anybody's right deny the child's request.

Likewise, having the right to own a credit card doesn't negate a vender's right to create juvenile accounts specifically for children with drastically reduced spending limits or to just deny it to children all together (seeing as children would be horrible credit risks) ...nor the parent's ability to dissent to the child's ability to obtain one. So if children are not able to get a learner's permit to drive a car, or the resources to purchase alcohol themselves, or the attention of an adult for sexual favors (or the money resources in order to prostitute to begin with), or the ability to spend thousands from their credit accounts in single sittings, then we won't have 5 year olds maxing out un-payable credit amounts to drink and drive while picking up hookers.

What a child is incapable of doing is superfluous to keep them from doing. Having a right does not guarantee ability to exercise the right, nor does it mandate that it be utilized. That's true for anybody.

Dissent is a check to the power of consent. By recognizing a child's ability to make informed consent, we also extend them the right of dissent--the right to dissent unwanted sexual attention for instance--and the right of society to dissent to their requests. A child is currently incapable of dissenting to an adult's decisions over their life, whether those decisions are beneficial or harmful, simply because every decision they are faced with implies a legal definition of an automatic dissent or a decline. Because a child is incapable of consenting to actions they enjoy or are in need of, they are incapable of dissenting to actions that may be harmful or exploitative. Children aren't exploited because they consent, they are exploited when they dissent and that dissent isn't recognized. Society doesn't recognize a child's dissent, and thus, they are exploited. The big fish eat the small fish.

To Love Children

It has become more profitable to hate children than it is to love them, at least in the immediate material sense. How often are those who hate children given a carte blanche to spread vitriol by society as those who love children are lumped in with criminals, creeps, and people who want to harm them?

Those who practice love arouse everyone's suspicions as those who practice hate are given the shoulder. Those who practice harm are simply carrying out the deepest fantasies of those who harbor hate without resolve to act on it (which society tolerates), but hate when put into action is criminal. By contrast, those who practice harm are carrying out the antithesis of those who harbor love, whether the lovers are acting on their resolve or not (which society can not tolerate), but love when put into action is called charity.

In short, everyone is suspicious of love by itself--in this case, the love of a child, but when acted upon, only then it becomes divine. By contrast, no one is suspicious of hate by itself--the hate of children, but when acted upon, only then does it become harmful. People who hate children almost seem to have a protective barrier built around themselves that shields them from the suspicion of society. For surely, someone who hates children can not harm children, right?

Someone who loves children can not be given the same vote of confidence, as his mere interest in the benefit of children places him somewhere in the vicinity of the adult's piece of property (the child). And so long as the child remains property, all those who value it's worth can not be trusted even so much as a breathing on it, lest they snatch it up for themselves. Those who hate it, it's obvious, would never want to have it in the first place.

Comparing children to valued goods or pieces of property seems appropriate when attempting to comprehend the reasoning of why our society tolerates the hate of children before the love of children. Those who are not the owners of the property or granted temporary responsibility of it by it's owners--who find themselves simply sharing a view about the property's value with it's owners--simply can never be trustworthy. Those who own gold in their homes would be wise (at least according to popular thinking) to not keep company with strangers who also place a high value on that same gold. Those who detest gold (let's say it is possible) would be expected to be more trustworthy. Of course neither of these perspectives are true, deception is a powerful tool people will not think twice about to get what they want.

It is a function of a child's value as a living commodity for society that trust be assigned on those who should cross paths with it based entirely on how much they value the object. And in the minds of a possessive society, someone's evaluation (love or hate) of the object is inversely proportional to their degree of trustworthiness. In the minds of a paranoid society, those who profess love are only doing so because they are covering up for harmful desire. It doesn't cross anyone's mind that those who profess disinterest or hate could be on to their prejudices, playing their trust, in order to accomplish the same devious ends.

The result is the denial of non-parental love to children.

No Muddied Angels

Nietzsche famously wrote, "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not of truth." Children are no exception. Adults throw an interpretation at childhood, and it becomes a cultural standard by virtue of their power. Adults create the terminology we use to think about the position of childhood in society, and those terms inevitably find their way from the realm of ideas (taken as truth) to practice in real life. The powerful look at the powerless as innately inferior, deserving of their status, even by genetic argument, but also fool around with this notion of the noble savage, whereby those that are powerless, innately inferior, are put on the pedestal of righteousness simply because of their righteousness. This is often referred to as the "white man's burden."

As anyone can see, this ideology is so pervasive it has been enmeshed in the terminology of racism and racial prejudice for centuries, but it also lends its support to the arguments of ageism as it has always done. Nowhere does the adult interpretation of childhood rear it's ugly head as forceful and destructive as it does with the paradigm that childhood exudes natural purity. In the modern age, children have become deified as noble savages. Ignorance is their grace, it's the halo affixed upon their anointed heads, and to do anything to cast away that ignorance is to pull the child down to hell from their hearth upon the clouded realm. Ignorance preserves their subservience, and such is the motivation for maintaining it, for infanillizing their activities and restricting their natural inquisitiveness.

Every breath is sacred, as a byproduct of their angelic grace, when breath is nothing but a bodily function. If we are going to anoint a bodily function simply because it originates from a pure body, there is then no reason to not anoint their other excretions. A hole is a hole. Their anus is as sacred as their mouth, their breaths as gracefully angelic as their farts. Both preserve the organism, after all. Both perform a necessary function to keep the child functioning, but why one is anointed and another ignored, even shunned, has only everything to do with human preference, by interpretation, and serves to exemplify the fickle creation that humans begin to play with when they ascribe purity to human flesh. There are no muddied angels.

Ignorance in relation to the so-called adult standard should not be celebrated, the child's knowledge relative to itself should. Children are not an exception to this game of interpretation either, as their ascriptions and summations of adults are often faulty and inconclusive. A pure mind does not make faulty interpretations of others, and certainly not ones that threaten their relationships with others.

As girls are more prone to make judgments about people, girls invent many interpretations about adults they interact with on a daily basis, and just like adults, some may be perceptive and others may be just as much a product of ignorance as adults. Boys don't tend to make subjective judgments, as they aren't as aware of what they are projecting, never mind contemplating how others are receiving those projections. Girls have considerable power to create interpretations, just as adults, and the reason girl interpretations even prevail as truth has more to do with the degree to which the girl is anointed by adult interpretation (even beyond the boy), and is certainly no matter of truth.

The Minor Trap

Teenagers are caught in a trap. They have the strength and ability to get out of the trap if they want to, but it is illegal for them to do so. So here we have animals caught in a trap that is too small for them, willingly keeping themselves captive to certain extents to appease their overlords. Some manage to broker a deal with their overlords and are granted short little excursions outside the trap, but most simply aren't extended the resources to enable them to take that great leap.

Each and every day they are shuffled through the maze from room to room, sitting here for a while before moving on to sit there fore a while. Some enjoy it, some make the most of it, some don't enjoy it, some can't make the most of it. Those who enjoy life inside the trap are the ones clinging to its sides, ready at the stroke of midnight to rip the veil from their heads and drop their ball and chain. Those who don't enjoy it are the ones who inevitably wear those chains the remainder of their days, whether it is legal or not.

In either case, youth is made to be something to flee from rather than something to enjoy. Youth is a prison for which there are no exits. Even if one were to escape, the mere quality of how many earth revolutions around the sun one has lived to see makes all the difference in how that individual is to be treated in the world of human beings. It has everything to do with whether they are permitted to shake themselves out from under the trap they're born into or whether they are condemned to live inside its boundaries day in and day out, happy or sad, like it or else.

Some teenage animals don't have to be wounded when cornered in the cage, some wound themselves, if only to scare away the overlords trying to corner it, if only to give it some bite. And all this so as to preserve the adult's sentimental idea of children enjoying childhood at all cost to human dignity.

Answering the Question

This was spoken by a moderator at work over at a Sarah's Law forum to someone with subversive words that were immediately handed over to the authorities for no particular reason other than to buy up the law's valuable time (it's only human to feel self-righteous). This statement could be the paradigm argument of most ordinary people on the subject of children, and yet, we will see just how flimsy it is:

I ask this question.... should a child not be left alone so that the innocence of childhood can be enjoyed before the realities of adulthood?

1. Should a child not be left alone? I'm not certain. Let's try to lend this concept of leaving children "alone" to intuition. Obviously, by "alone" this person doesn't mean physically leaving the child on their own, but rather, "not being tampered with" is probably a definition closer to what they have in mind. The primary question becomes, "should a child not be tampered with" or at the very least, deviated from their natural starting point of ignorance, egotism, and intolerance for others? Are the traits of the average four year old worth preserving? Should not children, in some way, be educated? Learning by definition, is simply a change, an alteration in behavior in response to the presence of a stimulus. "Leaving the child alone," for instance, would entail there never being a stimulus with the effect of there never necessitating a response. Unless we believe that children should never be educated, we should not believe that they should be left "un-tampered with." This statement doesn't lend itself to intuition very well.

We could also further take this to be a self-defeating ideology if we understand children (just as human as human) to be naturally equipped for learning and changing over time. To manually enforce that children never change, and thus go against their nature, is to be tampering with them--the very thing this ideology suggests we should be avoiding. Self-defeating ideologies do not lend themselves to intuition at all.

2. ...so that the innocence of childhood can be enjoyed? Young children are naturally ignorant of many things, and one of them is the adult concept of innocence. In order to enjoy anything, understanding the thing being enjoyed is a requirement. The rationale for this is that when a person enjoys something they are not familiar with, they are in fact enjoying the "essence" of the thing being enjoyed, and not the thing itself, because the thing itself is unknown to them. A child can not enjoy a concept that adults have invented, because such a thing is purely a metaphysical thought construct within a given culture. What is normally meant by this statement is that a child should enjoy their time alive while they still qualitatively possess the attributes of being a young human being. This makes sense, but should not the same be true for anyone, young or old? It is a mere platitude when in reference to a particular sect of human being.

3. ...before the realities of adulthood? "The realities of adulthood," in the context of this statement, are supposed to carry a negative, harsh tone in conjunction with the "enjoyment" tone of the previous clause to create the effect that children live in a world without "realities" (or at least, the indication that they should not live a world with realities) and that adults live in a world devoid of "enjoyments." Such is just not intuitive. A child's time alive is in fact one that has it's own set of realities, if by realities, this person means to say "troubles" or "hardships", or even "responsibilities." Firstly, if children, by the sake of being children, were never troubled, never had to face any hardships, or carry any responsibilities, we should never to expect them to cry, or to fight, or to revolt against authority, and yet they do these things. Such is wishful thinking for adults who are the authority, but does not mirror reality. Secondly, implied in this statement is that the adult world is one not to be enjoyed, and if such were true, we should expect adults to never laugh or seek out entertainment, for instance. This statement is made simply to justify adult authority over young people, depicting themselves as selfless missionaries and children as noble savages. Such is wishful thinking for the maintenance of the adult power structure, but does not mirror reality.

This is not even to mention that many child "realities" are imposed on them by the very social systems that use this very ideology as their creed for operation. Children can get themselves into very compromising situations when they step out beyond what adults conceive and have established as their reality. For instance, there are many 5 year old Registered Sex Offenders, playing doctor can carry serious penalties for children in some states (Utah). So again we find ourselves asking, should not children be left alone? It seems adults only have definitive answer for this when it suits their purposes of maintaining control, so the seeming contradiction in motivations bleeds this statement dry of any genuine thirst for justice it might have had.

Taken together, this statement does not define what it means by "children." A child, under the law, is anyone between birth and the age of majority (0 and 18 in the US). The statement looses more credibility depending on what type of "child" it is referring to. For instance, if it is suggesting that 17-year-old US minors are should be "left alone to enjoy the innocence of childhood before the realities of adulthood," then it doesn't lend itself to us intuitively in the least, particularly when considering that those 17-year-old US minors who are supposedly "enjoying the innocence of childhood" are going to be facing those "adult realities" in the coming year. This exercise simply illustrates the faulty reasoning of the majority.

In short form, the answer to the question (taking all the reasoning that made this statement into account) is no.

Harm is Human

Like all people, children need a degree of harm in their lives to sustain them. It is an essential function of living in a physical world that they should fall. It is part of their right to life, if any such thing can be said to exist, and an essential fact of their humanity. Whenever adults intervene to prevent this essential fact of life, they are doing so on the very same faulty intuitions that put the child into harm's way to begin with. A child jumps from a high branch without thinking and breaks a leg upon hitting the ground. An adult speeds his vehicle on the straightaways only to loose control around a sharp bend. If it can be argued that children need to be forcefully withheld from getting themselves into situations that entail risk, then the same could also be argued for adults. That, or we could just accept that harm is a fact of life, prevent it when we see it, but otherwise not let the little things bring so much trouble.

Both children and adults have systems of repression to deter them from harming themselves or others, with one crucial difference. The actions of adults in the world are governed by laws, in this example, speed limits, but the freedom to exceed such limitations still remains with them. Until vehicles are built such that they can not exceed 20 miles per hour, for instance, the ability to step on the gas and place oneself into a situation entailing risk at higher speeds is entirely within the adult's control. And as much as the adult seems to make such accommodations to such freedom on their own behalf, they seem to want to deny children the same. They want to manually enforce that children can not even by force of will place themselves into situations that entail risk, and therefore, induce the ease of knowing their children are safe.

But are they? We all know feeling a child is safe carries more weight than a child's actual physical proximity to safety, but that is a separate issue.

The point being made here is that all interactions between children and adults are governed by a battle of wills, sometimes they cooperate and other times no, but every interaction of either consent or dissent takes place between two separate wills. The adult's will, in this case the caretaker's, expresses itself through the repression of the child's (whether the child's will is legitimate or not) on the excuse that it is doing so for the celhild's wl being--only superficially attempting to justify itself in the terms of the child, entailing repression. The child's will finds self expression through resisting the adult's repression--regardless of whether the repression is legitimate or not. Likewise, it doesn't care to be justified by the laws of adults, entailing jeopardy.

The ambiguity regarding the legitimacy of these opposing worldviews (between jeopardy and repression...both alternate forms of each other) allows for objectivity to reign once the rationales between either perspective have been given time to play themselves out. In this universe, children can not be right all the time, and adults can not be right all the time, just as if we were talking about the relationship between any two people. However intuitively this may lend itself, adults tend to presuppose that their will carries automatic legitimacy on the grounds that it is older, and therefore, anything an adult attempts, in this case, for the purpose of protecting children from harm, inevitably accomplishes its goal. In actuality, the adult exercises its faulty judgment about the care of another human being that has fallen as children for themselves when deciding about which branch to fall from.

All is a function of their natures.

Parent State

This is going to be the beginning of a multi-part post regarding the disintegration of the power of parents in society, what I term "passive" dealings with children, and how they do more harm than good.

There are two societies we are forced to consider. The one that governs its interactions with children passively and the one that governs its interactions with children actively. The passive society governs with a divestment of personal responsibility but not the point of inflicting physical neglect. The basic needs of the child are met but not by the primary caregiver, rather, the community of experts and society at large step in to fill that role. This practice of Parens Patriae was preached, infamously, by sociologist Arthur W. Calhoun in A Social History of the American Family--a critical corpus that students have been drawing lessons from for the last century:

"The new view is that the higher and more obligatory relation is to society rather than to the family; the family goes back to the age of savagery while the state belongs to the age of civilization. The modern individual is a world citizen, served by the world, and home interests can no longer be supreme."

The society he praised is also that advanced by Engels and Marx in the Communist Manifesto, where the family is abolished and the state assumes its essential functions. It is one that could be considered passive because of its shared divested interest, in that it remains a collectively active in caring for children, but on an individual level--the level for which a child is going to be aware and relating with--is a more passive and uninvolved authority. In this way, individuals for which the child is in developmental proximity with can neglect them but still maintain that the child's care is satisfactory provided for on a social level. The society assumes responsibility for the parenting, for which the child can't relate or feel obligated or responsible to, and the parents and other individuals for which the child can naturally relate to divest their personal responsibility to some other invisible entity or device.

Children can not feel responsible to a ghost, a non-physical entity--an idea or conception--whether they be a network of professionals, experts, or state employees working in unison for their support, any more than an idea can be responsible for a child, which IS an entity, a dynamic being. No child under the custody of a state, or sitting in a doctor's office, relates themselves as socialized and attached to this abstract notion of the "State," as such a thing is a non-entity, a conception. It is made up of networked social structures and organizations that have no contact with the child directly but can assume the very direct task of parenthood.

This is the essence of the passive society. A child under the custody of the state, for instance, or in the supervision of an expert, relates themselves socially to their immediate caregivers--who only serve as a representative face for the abstract notion of the state, the corporation, or the daycare, and it is these individuals--the direct caregivers---that the child is natively wired to model, to learn and socialize themselves. This is that natural instinct of childhood, and yet these caregivers don't assume this direct role. They do not participate or feel obligated to take a participatory role in modeling behavior, because that responsibility belongs to the invisible organization or the state.

Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that since the direct caregivers, for which children are wired to respond to, can not have personal responsibility on an individual level for the children they are assigned to, that neither should the child feel responsible for him or herself and for society to which they are assigned. This is what makes the passive society passive, and ultimately ineffective in nurturing positive development in children. Thus the individual children it raises can not be effective in nurturing the positive development of a responsible society in return.

Obviously our society is not a completely passive one, as Engels and Marx may have desired, and the demonstration of this extreme was only intended to provoke the reader's imagination as to why we shouldn't be allowing passivity to overtake action when it comes to raising children. It is true though, that our society has many passive institutions within it--the Medical Industrial Complex, for example, whereby parental regard and discretion is disengaged by the push to diagnose and intervene in the behavior of children only so far as the transgressions can be medicated, not reinforced. Parents surrender their right to parent by dropping their children a pill.

Other passive institutions are the existence of youth curfews, where society relegates the behavior of children to bedroom confinement for their own protection or the supposed good of society. The existence of child leashes, satellite locating devices, and any device that promises to regulate children's behavior by relieving the parent of their often difficult parental duties are all passive practices that are in common use. A child who dangles on the end of a leash is being forcefully controlled, and the parent has no part in enforcing the control other than the light action of holding the strap. In this, behaviors are not being reinforced by the parent, rather, they are being reinforced by the parent surrogate--the harness! And as such, the parent takes a passive role in the raising of their child.

A Portrait of Four Generations

The Boomers were a whiny generation from the get-go. They had major issues with authority to their ultimate slow degeneration. Born out of nuclear conformity and hysteria, they marched upon the earth as a bunch of kicks-seeking go-getters, preached universal love and tree-hugging only to crash and burn in a cocaine blitz and set themselves to work confining, restricting, and finding new ways to control the younger generations to the drum beat of "The War on Drugs", "Zero Tolerance", and "Reviving Ophelia."

As a result, their children grew up in a world full of their parents flexing their demons, never knowing a world where holding a squirt gun in a crowd wouldn't find them in the back of a police car, or where they could walk to school unsupervised without having Child Protective Services stop by for a visit, where they could play football or dodgeball in school, or simply be a "boy". If the Millenials have any failing point, we at least know the culprit.

In the meantime, the intervening generation, the X'ers, blazed a trail of self-absorption that now finds them in the throes of mainstream power, working to sedate the younger generations with their technological gadgetry. Their children are growing up never knowing a world where cellphones don't exist, where the internet doesn't exist, where satisfaction doesn't come instantly fulfilled, where dependence on technology wasn't considered progress.

There's a reason the X'ers have been called, for a long time, the Me Generation, because if it wasn't for being able to hop on the latest techno-trend to satisfy themselves before all else, they'd have to take a long hard look at themselves without the technological extensions of their personality and see just how little control they have, having surrendered themselves to their desires. So there's no question that they've set loose their demons on their own progeny, the kids, the Z's.

What is the fate? The Millenials will embrace new thinking about the social structure of society, such as the ill-conceived Venus Project (which so many of them already do), green technologies, gay rights, and other social causes, but they will ultimately fall short because they were bred without a spine to implement their dreams, and will slip slide into obscurity and confusion and wrest scorn from their progeny. They will be lots of talk and little resolve.

For the kids, the Z's, all one can foresee is absolute and total rebellion. Having grown up totally pacified by the internet and instant gratification of desire, they will begin to yearn for something "more," in fact, they may be termed the "More Generation," trying to break free from their parent's "me-centered" egotistical philosophies, they will perhaps embark on more spiritual-fed paths of communal rebellion (subversion of their parents' internet). Such is a prediction.

Repicturing Minors

Minor is the term used to isolate young human beings apart from humanity. A minor is not human in the eyes of the law. They exist in some designation at the junction of being an animal and a piece of property for which others have specific rights to and are expected to perform specific duties on. A minor is little different than a piece of furniture--the property of it's originates by default, but with the added restriction that, unlike furniture, it can not be completely done with as its owner sees fit. For instance, a piece of worn furniture that no longer serves its usefulness can be taken out back with an axe and be done away with at it's owner's discretion without fear of social reproach. A minor, though still a piece of property, has been granted by society a right to exist and a right to be taught things--but other than this, shares more in common with the piece of furniture than with human beings--at least to the law.

The fact that a minor is technically a human being isn't one wasted on most average people, regardless of what the law has determined. The fact that the time period covered in a young human's life for which they have been set aside from humanity as minors is quite a length of time whereby many alterations in the individual appear as they develop. There are virtually miles separating a five year old and a 15 year old, and yet both are considered to be minors according to the official, legal, so-called agreed-upon definition of their existence. The miles that exist between them developmentally have been compressed back together by the force of law like a spring, so that what once seemed to stretch a 10 year developmental separation by nature, now seems to span a matter of moments.

Kids who exist between the age-determined social cultures, the proverbial 10 year old who no longer finds his preschool fascinations as fascinating but is not granted access to more mature forms of expression, spend years of their lives inevitably stuck in coast. This is what youth rights advocates call "infantilization." There's a constant expectation for kids to act half their age.

All being minors by definition, if they were to fail to distinguish themselves--in other words, fail to socially develop beyond the early childhood stage at least socially so that a 16 year old was still living the typical lifestyle of a seven year old, it wouldn't be hard to imagine society neglecting to notice. Minors, being non-human entities by definition, would not develop the way human beings are expected to. Minors would be infants from birth to the day that society "agrees" they are fit to be counted into the human clan--in most cases their 18th birthday. They are children. It's what's expected of them. And from 0 to 18, the term minor fails to recognize their developing capacity towards maturation as an adult and instead regards them as perpetual infants--helpless and about as removed from the adult as possible.

They are born and they get bigger. At no point does the law recognize that a minor can make even simple decisions for themselves. They need mom to lay out a pair of clothes in the morning and button their shirt, regardless of whether they are toddlers scrambling about on all fours or high school seniors about to assume their role in society.