Unsung Heroes

In my mind, being against child molestation is not enough, nor does it make you a good person by itself. It does a person no good to be against child molestation if they are doing wrong by children in more socially permissible ways, for they would be in good company. Parents who repeatedly assault their young children in the service of discipline are fearful and hateful of child molestation too. Politicians who would (if they could at any instance) send your children out to fight and die to preserve global business interests in unstable regions, also hate and are fearful of child molestation. Even the school officials who would trap up a 9-year-old autistic boy in a duffle bag to discipline him...they too are (most likely) hateful of child molesters. Are you no better than an abusive parent? A corrupt politician? A "well-intentioned" school teacher? One has to wonder if even the child molesters also hate child molestation, for as Christ said, "Do not even the tax collectors do the same?" What good then does it do to hate child molestation?

Surely, the list of who is against child molestation also includes the broad majority of society that also finds these similar acts reprehensible (although not to the mob- mental destructive fervor they reserve for child molestation), but hatred makes strange bedfellows of them nonetheless. Blinding hatred is just that, blinding, because it stops a person from being able to discern what is moral and just, even when guided by one's own intuition. We start to over-sing the psalms of damnation upon one propped-up source of mob-mental aggression, the "child molester," only to ignore other forms of abuse just as objectively destructive. It is as if we've been blinded by the lightning shot which crackles one by the hour, and have forgotten about the billions of raindrops. We'd let our children freeze to death in that rain by the hundreds before we eased our horror that even one may be struck by a random bolt. Truly, there's more to being a good person than simply hating on that which is demonstrably vile (as the vigilantes do).

To be a good person in this sense, you actually have to not cause harm to any child by intention, and if necessary (in some "life or death" situation), only with the pain of regret guiding your hand. This not only includes child molestation, but all those more socially acceptable means adults have invented over the millenia to abuse children into submission. The many who don't routinely abuse children under the guise of discipline, who don't spoil children into dependence, or give the order to put young people into harm's way for someone else's gain--those are the unsung heroes. If society can permit anyone who simply hates on child molestation to claim to title of "hero," and then orchestrate songs of praise for their good intentions, imagine how society ought to treat the broader majority of people who don't just have good intentions but put them into practice for the good of others. If such were the case, these heroes would no longer be unsung. 

However, western culture (Babylon) continues to fetishize the perverse anyways, despite all the good intentions in the world. This is how a man can hold up a convenience store or cause an accident in a high speed chase and gain not only news headlines but even highlights on television clip shows, but the good act of charity that some other man participated in will never be given any spotlight in anyone's mind. If an action is not spotlighted in the mind by culture (whether it's right or wrong), then it is almost always more right, more just, and more decent by its sense of genuine earnestness than any flimsy public moralistic spectacle could ever be. Moral spectacle is merely pretense laying on a bed of perverse fetishism. The more virulently popularized that moralistic spectacle is, the more justified its unsung, unnoticed, cousin act becomes. For example, parents shouldn't consider themselves good people because they hate and fear child molestation, or any other heinous act, as everyone else, but rather, by whether or not they read to their child before telling them to get some sleep. And even if one isn't a parent, one could almost justifiably judge themselves along the same criterion.

Sure, the act of reading to a child is not going to win you an award, nor is it going to bestow on you the mantle of "Protector of Children" (as many of the anti-pedo vigilantes covet), but you will have done right by a child in doing so, in almost all cases. The only song you will ever have played in your life will be sung from the souls of the individuals you nurtured and gave your love and time to. That, to me, is a more justifiable vindication than this more "culturally-accessible fear and hate mongering" will ever be, concerning the worst among us--the very thing that, though so attractive to our sentiments, becomes the most vile thing of all. 

How to Grow Up

I find the science of human development fascinating because we all have our own experience growing up, and understandably have our own ideas about how that happens. What the science of human development does is it shines a light on all the illusions about who we are that we may have convinced ourselves of along the way. It either validates our experience or broadens that highly personal and anecdotal series of fading memories toward a frame of reference beyond ourselves and reflected by humanity.

What it teaches us is not just that we are so unique in how we specifically came to be the person we are from the person we were a relatively short time ago, but also that our experience of that maturation was not all that unique. We are constantly reinventing our own history. With the science of human development, we have to confront the fact that our successes may not have been as special or tied to own abilities as our ego may direct us to think at times, but to circumstances beyond ourselves instead. At the same time, we also have to confront the fact that our circumstance was not always solely responsible for our personal failings, but to our own doings.

The science of human development forces us to concede that there is more to humanity than ourselves, and that we are not merely products of our environment or products of nature's indifference, but that we are products of both to varying degrees that we may not even realize. No other science is as innately personal, perhaps with the exclusion of modern health, and likewise, in no other science does nearly everyone alive consider themselves an expert.

For this reason, adults (parents) are often inaccurate when making assumptions about the behaviors and interests of children living today (often interpreting the worst), for they compare the real actions of their children today with the invention they created around their own childhood, and they understandably don't like what they see. What they don't remember is that children themselves have never changed, just the various hang-ups of the society around them. Human developmental science works to remind us of what changes and what doesn't, so we don't go drugging our children out of existence so as to pair their experience with the perfect or imperfect childhood invention of our memories.

It could be said that we are not truly grown up until we recognize the fact of our existence is a constant maturation, a constant imperceptible development, rather than being confined strictly to the condensation of time behind us. The notion that we are all on a flat-line towards death in the present could be considered implicit immaturity. Maturity, in contrast comes not with age or experience, but with the understanding of the transient nature of our mental state in a constant flux of development.

More Honesty, Less Irony

Irony is the package that truth is delivered in, so that it can be palpable to comprehension. Contrary to what people think, truth is actually pretty simple, but it's impossible to comprehend due to its simplicity, so people invented irony to tease it out. When truth is delivered with naked honesty, it is feared at best and disregarded at worst. So society is full of irony, which is to say, pretense, which is to say, lies in the guise of truth and truth in the guise of lies. Our intuitions are always an honest representation of ourselves, but adults in particular (far more than children) are contented to bury their intuitions under false pretense for the purposes of keeping up appearances. Adult society is built by honest conviction that is delivered and made palpable by lies, self-deprecating humor, sarcasm, and ironic twists of personal judgment to fit in with prevailing cultural standards. If society decides to castigate or lynch a group of people, the individuals within it are more inclined to support that lynching with their love of irony, sarcasm, self-deprecating humor, and misrepresented values, than they are with their honesty and truthful conviction to their gut.

Truthful conviction and honesty tells us that all people deserve respect unless they have personally done something that amounts to a forfeiture of that right by their own discretion alone. For instance, our honest, truthful, "heart of hearts" knows by pro-social evolution that to disrespect an individual on the stereotypes or heuristics of the class, race, sex, or creed they belong to (or are perceived as belonging to) is shameful. Our intuition directs us to value some version of an equality standard for all, and not solely base an individual's inclusion in that standard on the perceived class or "group" that an individual belongs to. For most non-sociopaths capable of shame, it seems unconscionable on the face of it to show disrespect to someone for a reason having nothing to do with that person's own character or actions, but to circumstances totally beyond that person's control. This is not a novel concept to most people, so we have every reason to assume there is at least some truth to it, but let's see how irony will cause a person to break those very same conventions in the name dishonest truth, often for humor's sake.

Irony in the broadest sense is a narrative device where a circumstance exists for which an unexpected result occurs with the property of contradicting or going against the meaning behind the circumstance. It is usually easier to depict than to define, for instance: when a child and an adult are competing, and the inexperienced child outwits the adult, it is an ironic situation because it is not expected that someone of smaller experience would outwit someone of larger experience. Adults find such joy in irony like this because they have more of an experience with social conventions and like to see something that challenges them or contradicts them from unexpected sources. Girls outwitting boys, for instance, is another common trope, even now when we should no longer consider a girl to be an "unexpected source," but such is the backwards way with irony. 

Adults use irony to accomplish the opposite of challenging convention though, and deliver the "unexpected truth" by confirming convention only so much as to kill it with kindness. This forms the basis of most deconstructionist, post-modern philosophy. For instance, by saying something like "children are better than adults by their savagery," there is an attempt to combine "superiority" with "savagery" (an unexpected pairing), and children (traditionally considered to be pure and inferior to adults), with the same, for the purpose of exposing the more intuitive truth that "adults are no better or worse than children." But why all that diversion when one could have just said: "adults are no better or worse than children?" It's because that truth is made more thought-worthy when it comes dressed in a subtle poetic quip involving lots of comparisons. Blatant statements of belief mean nothing to anyone beyond the church pew, but lies that cover up truths seem to really cause people to stop and reconsider their thoughts. That is just how the secular world prefers its truths. But by confirming something that one does not actually support, even with the intention of laying bare some truth about it, one is essentially dressing a truth in a lie, which is to say, lying.

So human beings can get away with making the most ludicrous and crass statements, cast misguided judgement, purposefully misrepresent where their values lie, and get away with it, as I have done at times, by calling it "sarcasm" in the pursuit of a higher truth, or by being humorous. But where do we draw the line before we've totally divorced our honest intuition from our outward dishonest personality? Do we get away with saying that "boys are stupid" so that we may appear ironic for saying it and therefore be "interpreted" as saying anything supportive of girls? "Boys are stupid" will never be a supportive statement for anyone. Do we get away with calling a particular boy "stupid" because of the circumstance of his sex (which he had nothing to do with)? Do we get away with advocating for the lynching of ethnic minorities just so we can feel sarcastic and witty enough to be espousing truth in furtherance of tolerance? "Lynch him in a back alley" will likewise never be a statement endorsing tolerance, no matter how ironic it is perceived to be. 

It is not that sarcasm this hurtful should be outright censored though, just that those who speak it should be regarded shamefully. It is shameful to say something that contradicts one's better judgement, whatever that judgement may be. If we have to assume that no one truth exists, but that each one of us has our own truth, the best we can do is be truthful to ourselves as best we can, and that is called direct honesty. The truth does hurt, which is why we invented irony--to soften it, to make it more palpable, to make it humorous, to add distractions so that we're not forced to accept it as much as we'd like to--but the truth is always the truth and it can't be twisted, even if one doesn't agree with it. As much as the truth hurts though, dishonesty hurts more. When you are being honest by saying "peace on earth," chances are, it was dishonesty that lead the first battle cry.

Saying "equality for all people," is the only way of truthfully conveying the message of "equality for all people," even if it sounds comically vague or naive on the bare surface like that--but that is what the truth is! The truth is naive. It is simple. You can not arrive at "equality for all people" if you're going around, cheekily saying "girls are better than boys," for instance, because you know that statement, when expressed categorically in relation to a whole group of people, is false, and therefore, a comic lie. It is a statement of devaluation toward one group and a superficial support of another (not on the basis of merit, but on the basis of circumstances neither child had any control over) against your better intuition. You know you are lying when you say it, so why don't you feel shameful? If you are saying the opposite of truth--a falsehood---and if you know that it is false, then you are lying.

Adults don't think of irony or sarcasm as lying because they know a deeper truth is attempting to be exposed with its phrasing, but they only arrive at that conclusion because they have adult brain capacities. Ask any child what a lie is, and they will tell you about the time they lied to get away with something they didn't want exposed. In our case, what we don't want exposed is the truth, and instead, favor a pretense of falsehoods, lies, and sarcasm. How does that not describe, in its entirety, all that the sarcastic, ironic, hypocritical, pretense and illusion that the adult social world is built on?

The Public Good

When the public good is pitted against the interests of the private enterprise, the private enterprise has almost never lost. Every one of those battles was waged on the pretense that protecting the private enterprise would serve the interests of the public good, but so few have actually turned out that way. For every bill introduced on behalf of a public need, there are lobbyists standing in the corridors of government with suitcases of money and campaign donations to essentially "influence" it out of existence. Those lobs of funding are a lot more influential than a bunch of disparate constituents back a thousand miles away.

Corporations know about the fickle nature of the voting population, for it has lost all hope in its elected officials. And since private entities are not in the same public spotlight, politicians have more to lose by placing the needs of their constituents before those private interests than they do by signing on and towing the corporate line (and thereby avoid having to air their dirty laundry before the public via the corporate media). After all, in the next election cycle, he or she who made the most corporate friends in their tenure will most likely be reelected-- all constituents do is just put in the physical votes to ensure that the process takes place. Campaigns with the most money have the most resources, staff, and publicity, which is why those campaigns get elected.

This is why there has never been a politician in the last hundred years who has favored constituents over businesses. It turns out that businesses can afford to hire lobbyists. Those lobbyists can court their preferred politicians during all the various formal receptions and private meetings, and thereby gain a rapport with them in a way that constituents will never have the opportunity to do. Those lobbyists then use that special rapport to make the case that whatever is in their best interest is actually also in the public interest, and that it will undoubtedly benefit that politician's constituents should he or she get behind whatever they propose, no matter how far fetched the rationale has to be. The politician is then left to ponder the benefits of "killing two birds with one stone" before they break out the cigars.

That, kids, is the story of how politicians that win usually end up in the pocket of multinational corporations that actually don't give a damn about constituents. That is how the worst outcomes usually follow from the best intentions. That is how democracy gets auctioned off.

Who's Watching the Watchers?

Because of what the adult brain loses as it develops from adolescence, adulthood is not great. It is not qualitatively better or greater than adolescence by experience than adolescence is greater by innocence, or ignorance (as it were). The adolescent brain is simply fighting to express itself in a world governed by unbridled adult expression, for better and worse. By contrast, the adult brain is fighting itself in a world governed by its own self-imposed inhibitions, those learned by experience, and also for better and worse. So where do adults get the idea that they are qualified to judge the young?

The adolescent calculates the why not while the adult simply contents itself with knowing the why not. The adolescent tests its limits while the adult lives comfortably within them. The adolescent strives for a costly adventure as the adult settles for safe and clean complacency. The adolescent seizes life regardless of the consequences while the adult lives in a world of consequences and denies life. The teenage mind defies expectation while the adult mind defines it. When the teen mind defies life to its detriment, the adult mind defines it to the same extent. The adult is superior though for its longevity while the teen is superior for its aspiration--both have what the other lacks.

If you're an adult, and you find this characterization limiting, then you are experiencing the same effects of decadence (which is to say vanity) that limit the youth perspective. Characterizations of people on the basis of age are naturally limiting. The only difference of course is that these characterizations draw a line of equivocation between adults and adolescents (and children), while most adult heuristics in regards to young people do nothing but reinforce the so-called superiority of adults (in the active realms) and children (in the passive ones). All the truth in the world adds up to adults thinking in adult ways and framing non-adult situations with adult-centric perspectives. That's all there is to it. Truth is a function of power, and because adults are in power, their truth prevails. And yet, their truth about humility still applies to everyone.

In the name of humility, the justice system is often considered to be the sociological "parent" for adults. It's supposed to be the high-holy thing that judges adult behavior and punishes indiscretions in the rational world. It is however formed and created by adults, so one is left to wonder, who is watching the watchers? Who is judging adults in the manner in which adults judge the young (other than the young people themselves?)? Adults are given unbridled expression because they exist free of judgement half the time, and when they are being judged, they not only participate in, but create the system for which they are to be judged by. What child has that much authority over the judgement system when he or she is facing the scorn of adults? If only children could set the terms by which they could be judged by, because then they would have the same free terms that adults reserve for themselves. As it stands, adults are policing both themselves and children, so adult judgements go unchallenged in either case. 

It is entirely human for an adult to be taken by the decadence that is bestowed on them by culture, and there isn't one alive that doesn't think, in some way, that they are superior to young people. Adults don't need to be derided for their egotism any more than kids do for theirs, they simply need to be awakened and cut down to size so they may see themselves as the increasingly decrepit apes they are. None are so high and mighty that they should be beyond reproach, whether adults (in active realms) or children (in passive ones). Chances are, in the grandiosity of the cosmos, nothing an adult human says makes any real difference or carries any more universal a truth than the children who were once told "not to speak unless spoken to." Whoever said the adults could talk?

Occupy Wall Street

Say what you will about the much maligned childlovers, but I bet you they could ever be guilty of stealing 4.6 billion from federal teacher training and afterschool programs in order to re-route that tax money so that high-income taxpayers this year can spend 5.2 billion of it to "remove limits on their itemized deductions." So say what you will about childlovers, but they could never be guilty of stealing 7.6 billion dollars in your tax money--which would have gone to fund "supplemental nutrition for children in poverty," and instead spend 6.7 billion of it on "estate planning" so that the wealthiest among them can avoid "paying taxes on their estates."

The truth of the matter, of course, is that Wall Street and high finance doesn't give a damn about the country's young, unless they happen to be the sons and daughters of bankers. That is no surprise, but what is unsettling is that those who orchestrate this extraction of public resources to avoid their civic responsibilities (which would otherwise be benefiting children and schools, in this case), are still allowed to sleep soundly at night.

Better my money goes to help fund an early childhood education program for inner-city kids right here at home than become a subsidy for some CEO's second vacation home in the Dutch Antilles, but those are my priorities. They are not those shared by the "Greed is Good" gangsters running financial institutions, who believe instead that it's better a wealthy man inherits wealth than a poor child inherits food. Here be strange priorities: rich before poor; money before food; slavery before decency. Unbridled capitalism works that way.

High finance and the wealthy in general have siphoned all but the blood from the underling classes for more than thirty years, and have bought the people's government to legislate their selfishness. They mean to extract from the current generation and extort from the future ones, so that they can make out good before things fall apart. The collapse in their wake will fall on the shoulders of every child living today unless we put our society's future ahead of their next tax-exemption loophole. Dare I say, high finance is a bigger threat to more impoverished young people than drugs, gangs, and child molesters ever were.

The American people have seen the power of demonstration in Tahrir Square to overthrow one corrupt regime, and now simply want to bring the same to the one residing on Wall Street.

Men are Not Finished

Female chauvinists Hana Rosin and Dan Abrams were recently able to convince an audience that not only is the status and position of men and boys in relative decline, but that men and boys are "finished."  They represented and posed as the intellectual establishment backing the "For" position over the question "Are men finished?" and were able to win a historic percentage of converts in an Intelligence Squared debate. They carried the debate, based on polling done before and after.

So by contending that "men are finished," these two and their recent converts must either be in favor of blatant and unapologetic sexism, OR are willing to personally foot the bill to give the "weaker" side (men) more special protections and affirmative actions that "stronger" females apparently have no need for (by their own arguments). By contending that "men are finished," these self-avowed "feminists" are either dismantling the house of gender equality which has been decades in the painstaking build, OR they are simply trying to advocate for redistributing resources toward the weaker side (men) in order to achieve equality. By contending that "men are finished," our "intellectual establishment" here is either smugly giving up on boys and condemning them to lives of assured and self-prophetic under-performance and hopelessness, OR they are expressing a need to shift our resources and attention back to the "weaker class" (boys) and away from the class (girls) that doesn't appear to "need" so much attention anymore (by their own statements).

The point being, they can not have it both ways. They can not be in favor of gender equality and profess that men are finished, because to do such either solidifies them as personal advocates for promoting the interests of the "neediest" (boys and men) over that of the "well off" (girls and women), OR it solidifies them as sexist bigots, gleefully cheering on the disenchantment of a whole class of people, including every child born male who under-performs. Either they can try to humanize themselves by saying that the down-and-out men deserve "more" (which is not very feminist), or they can solidify their reputation as female chauvinists and gleefully cheer on the evisceration of all things male. There is no in between.

They may in their own mind believe that either of those positions empowers women, or that all they are doing is expressing an inevitability and simply siding with the winners, but they can also still believe they are decent people too. Neither of their beliefs make either statement true. There is a thousand mile difference between saying there are more women in college, and saying that men are an "endangered species"--whether tongue and cheek or not. Men are not a "species." Homo Sapiens is a species. It would seem people of such intellectual or academic esteem should know that. And yet, there is no surprise that Dan Abrams doesn't.

There is a thousand mile difference between talking about trends, and making bold-faced assertions about a group of people having become "finished." The former is a rational, concerned approach, seeking remedies to a real-world social ill, while the later is merely a contention toward a finality--it is a way of saying that solutions are not needed, because the problem has ceased to be a problem. In real terms, saying "boys and men need help" assumes that challenges need to be met with solutions. Saying "boys and men are finished" denies that the problem is a problem, and in so doing, denies the possibility for there ever being solutions.

One wouldn't say "this patient is finished," when all the patient needs is some active treatment to regain their health. One wouldn't condemn a student with a learning disability by calling him "finished," unless one is callous or cruel, and the same should go for those who use that terminology to talk about the well-being of men and boys. An appropriate argument could be worded "the social place of men is evolving," and be perfectly within the boundaries of reality, but no, they choose to focus on "finished," which means there is no evolution, just a dead end and a hopeless future. But let us cut to the main issue---this term "finished" is not meant to rebuild men, nor empower women, it is simply used to weaken the already weakened social resolve (of both genders), by those who have fetishized male social evisceration and humiliation. In any case, gender equality is as removed from Rosin's and Abram's minds as common decency.

Let them and their followers chase after their personal fetishes and "mother complexes" all they want, but leave the future of our boys to people with a sense of decency, please.

It Gets Better

The boy became a young man. The young man became a cause.
The cause became the hope for the country and its laws.

Too many martyrs and too many dead.
Too many lives, too many empty words were said.
Too many times for too many angry men.
Oh let it never be again.

-Phil Ochs 

"The Ballad of Medgar Evers"

Unworthy Victims

One of the problems with victimology and unwavering victim-worship is that it is unevenly distributed. In western culture we're almost lead to believe, whether by accident or not, that certain people are more deserving of our sympathies than others for matters having nothing to do with the circumstances of their victimization, all things being equal. The "usual suspects" are always our template for villainy, and the "typical victims" are always getting hammered into our sympathetic nerves, time after time. All else who don't fit the narrative need not apply, even if they have been objectively victimized too.

The image of a girl being raped by a shadowy man, even as tragic as it is, has been turned into little more than a thought-stopping cliche. It is indeed the prototypical image in our heads when we think of sexual exploitation, simply because of its incessant repetition in film, television, and the news media. Its depiction no longer makes us think, we merely become anesthetized to it, and we ignore and become incapable of seeing exploitation in other forms perpetrated on less-prototypical human beings. Not only does its repetition rob our emotional minds blind to the real tragedy of it (just because we've seen it a hundred times), but it holds that emotional mind hostage and blocks its rational ends from seeing the travesties committed on those our sympathetic acuity has been blinded to.

One wants to talk about how the predator manufactures the consent of his victim when he exploits her, but what about when culture has done the same to you, and has manufactured your consent to feel one way or another toward or against someone, at its discretion, by repetition? When the mere gender of a person, the age of a person, or social class of a person, has more to do with your outrage, your indignation, your sympathy for them, than the act that they have become victim to or perpetrated, you've already become a victim to the cliche of the media narrative yourself. That is how culture and the propaganda, the "thought-stopping cliches," have molested your will and alienated your compassion from you by their constant mercantile presence. Herman and Chomsky wrote on this phenomenon in like manner:

“Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotions. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.”

—E. S. Herman and N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent

According to culture, men and boys are unworthy victims, so society does not care when they are victimized, abused, and maltreated en mass. Boys may only be sympathized with because they also fit the class of "child," but not because they are boy children. According to culture, teenagers are unworthy victims, so society does not care when they are victimized, abused, and maltreated en mass. So by these two observations alone, we should expect society to feel more sympathy for a six-year-old girl that has been mishandled, than a 15-year-old "young man" who has suffered the same--or even still, has been murdered, or sold into sexual slavery as a bacha bereesh in Afghanistan, even as much attention has been given to the treatment of girls in that country.

That which we assume "en mass" dictates how we respond to individuals within that mass. It would certainly lend an explanation as to why it does, and why male offenders are touted as "beasts" while female offenders of the same crimes are given the "mother of three" treatment. Where do you think your sympathy is "supposed" to go, given the choice between a beast and a mother of three? What if the "beast" had children too? Nobody is given the chance to care, and it is not important anyways.

So while we are all required to feel sympathy toward the typical cases, and hatred toward the "usual suspects," let's not forget those our culture has forgotten to take seriously. The moment you have an image in your mind about a typical case victim, fill her in with her exact opposite, and remember that it happens too, and how nobody cares about it when it does. Nobody's singing the lamentations of a teenage boy who has been violently raped by a woman, no matter how traumatic, just because it doesn't fit the typical schema of "offenders and victims." Nobody's asking for the head of the female rapist either. And when you realize this, you'll see real sexism, real ageism, real classism at work in ways the focus group didn't think would be commercially viable enough to wrest your "unquestionable" sympathy for.

All media is the same story being sold, over and over. Don't buy it.

Trauma by the CPS

There are two kinds of people who have the gall to forcefully take a child out of their home: kidnappers, and CPS workers. In order to do the job, the caseworker has to harness the same guiltless energy that a kidnapper does in order to enter a home and tear a child off their parents. The only difference for the adults is the rationale. The only difference for the child is that the kidnapper does it behind the the parents' back, while the CPS worker does it right in front of their faces.

Kidnappers remove children for personal, selfish reasons, for the worse, while CPS workers remove children in an attempt to provide for their welfare and well-being in ways that aren't properly being served--for better or worse. We shouldn't forget that the primary motivating factor for the kidnapper is kidnapper-focused, while it is child-focused for the CPS worker, but our attention to the "motivations" and "intentions" for the perpetrator or the public servant ought to be secondary to our concern for the child's actual welfare. However, in justifying the knee-jerk removal of a child from an otherwise loving home, for ill-defined reasons, often the caseworker's "motivation" to remove takes precedence in our minds over the child's actual well-being.

When a small child is ripped from their parent's arms by a stranger, does the child care what the "intentions" of the person doing the ripping are? Of course not. It is a traumatic event for a child to be removed from a loving home. This is not to say that such interventions don't have their place--in cases involving extreme abuse and neglect--but perhaps worse than good people failing to do the right thing is good people thinking they are doing the right thing as they do the wrong thing. This happens when children are removed from homes where no abuse or neglect is happening.

The state is slow to reverse their mistakes because admitting to a mistake jeopardizes their public legitimacy. The agency tasked to judge the legitimacy of parents, does not not like to be judged itself. Legitimacy is always more important to the state than the child's welfare. Any parent who has caused the amount of trauma that even the most "well-meaning" caseworker and court is capable of inflicting on children in a single night, wouldn't be allowed to keep the child, even by the state's own standards.

The issue is, are we more concerned about the trauma children in that situation are facing, or are we more concerned for the ill-conceived "good intentions" of the person who has caused that trauma? If we were child-focused, whether they are removed by a kidnapper or removed by a well-meaning but equally traumatic CPS worker, we'd recognize the trauma for the child either way. Instead though, we put the "well-meaning" part ahead of the trauma in the case of the CPS removal, because the caseworker carries with her the cold calculation of unquestionable authority, and the kidnapper carries the absolute opposite. We then regard what the child is feeling there, no matter how traumatic, to be a "necessary" part of their well-being. Trauma is  never necessary though, regardless of who is inflicting it.

The CPS ought to remain in operation, only so long as it can admit to its screw ups in a timely manner.

Burn the Witch

When a woman rapes a young boy, all we get treated to are statistics. They tend to come spewing from the mouths of apologists and feminists. It's as if we're supposed to throw our heads back and suddenly realize that we made a big mistake in criticizing the rape of a young boy (by a woman) simply because it was an unlikely occurrence. It doesn't follow, and it's horribly insensitive. Yes, it is true that "less women do it," but does that mean the pain of molestation stings a little less for the male victim? I thought not. Does that mean anything as to how we ought to regard and treat the offender? Absolutely not. Statistics don't mean anything to anyone who isn't already sold on some agenda. They are a mere prop used to justify the thoughts in one's own head.

Remember all the righteous indignation about how the "law is the law" and how it is "there to protect minors regardless of the consequences?" Does that ring a bell? It ought to, because that's why society wrote it--to supposedly "protect minors,"--not to judge according to whether the perpetrator belongs to a class we feel is getting stigmatized. If men or women are getting stigmatized as offenders, it's because they went into it thinking "regardless of the consequences!"--so I say to them, enjoy the consequences. If you don't enjoy them though when women bare the bunt of them, you also shouldn't enjoy them when men and children are baring the same bunt.

Statistics here are as meaningless as this: "The main reason [for women's shorter sentences] is that their crimes are objectively less vile..." is insulting. Is "less-vile" child rape more acceptable to us than "more-vile" child rape? I would think not. Rape is rape.

I'm trying to make a broader point with how I express the sentiment and the word choice. I'm parodying how the extremists talk when they vilify men offenders--directing the same moral indignation that society shows toward its scapegoat "usual suspects," towards its so-called "sympathetic offenders" instead, to show how wrong-minded moral outrage is to begin with. The fact that society would be willing to sit down and have a civilized discussion on the statistics when it comes to women offenders and totally ignore all rationality when it comes to men offenders, ought to be the new definition of sexism.

No amount of statistics in the world should justify hating one group over another, but no amount should apologize for the crimes of one over another either. Women are the minority offender, yes, but their crimes need no apology, nor do we need to temper our reservations about them, whether they are "less vile" or not. If failing to reserve contempt for someone's crime is a function of sexism, then one shouldn't be justified in failing to reserve contempt for the next adult man who has sex with a 15 year old and is given the "Amy Gail Lilley" sentence (no prison time, just two years of house arrest and 8 years of probation). If you can't see yourself wanting to gouge that fictional man's eyes out while the very real Mrs. Lilley sits back in her house unfazed, then your whole theory about the sexism against women offenders is thrown to the fire--where true criminals belong.

Asking Questions

Somewhere between the sixth and 18th year of life, the mind goes from asking the big questions about nature and the universe, to asking questions about "which facts are important to know for the test." After 12 years of schooling, the brain becomes accustomed to simply "channeling" a wide range of information with no clear context, meaning, or significance, from one piece of paper to another. It becomes adept at spitting back information that has been dictated to it and dumped into it, on request. Children slowly lose their curiosity as "learners" the better they become at being "students."

It is not until college and graduate school that "students" are encouraged to once again revisit the natural curiosity that so captivated them in those early years of life, but by that time so many have chosen to give up on their studies and many don't have the resources to go on in it anyways. They essentially grow never "wondering about things" outside of the context of daily living and survival, and just as well know little about how to go about learning things to begin with even if they wanted to. It surprises me how often children will ask "why is the sky blue," only to get an "I don't know" response from an adult 20-30 years the child's senior. It's as if adults just stop wondering about the basics of the world they live in after a while. "How to learn" was just never taught to them in all those years of being fed facts they soon forgot.

Good teachers know all of this to be true, and work to make it work, even given the enormous constraints placed on them by the prevailing 20th-century industrial methodologies. A few observations from human development can go a long way towards actually tapping into that youth's natural desire to "know things" rather than simply "putting that on hold for 12 years." The first observation would be that children, and people in general, don't learn anything by being taught (or told), they learn by learning (which is doing). The second: that people don't learn by retaining random bits of information, they learn by drawing their own connections between information. The third: that people don't learn from accessing tomes secluded away from daily life, but learn best when information has meaning they can relate to issues and themes in daily life that they care about. The fourth: that people don't learn unless they've been shown how to learn.

The young child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The old child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The "person" learns by asking questions and seeking answers. At no point does a person learn anything by having questions asked of them, unless the question is, "How will you go about solving/learning this?"  or  "What do you think will happen because of this?" Good teachers are asking, but culture isn't.

Two words: Lev Vygotsky.

If you want to learn more about the man and his work, how would you go about finding out? What did you find out when you did that?

Age-Limit Mysticism

Those who rely on age limits to determine the reality of a child's development are like the Popes and mystics of old who believed the earth was the center of creation. Mystics both ancient and modern ignore evidence to the contrary of their assumptions. In the modern world, the earth's revolution around the sun has nothing to do with whether a child can vote or give consent, nor does the mere act of "not dying" during one's first 18 of those revolutions, by itself, bestow these abilities on a young person. And yet, that is the definition and explanation we are dealt. That is how we divide and define human beings by our legal decree, still... in 21st century.

While the law of the land is defined by mysticism, the law of reality is defined by something a bit more practical. Human development, which is another way of saying human character, and the abilities it gives one, is a better predictor of whether a child or youth ought to be dignified with the rights of a human being than the earth's revolution. Unfortunately though, the science of human development has been ignored for the last 200 years concerning how to determine ability, and therefore eligibility for the rights of a natural-born citizen. It turns out that even science is not practical enough, because any system wishing to align eligibility for rights with individual ability, would somehow have to define and test everyone for normative developmental milestones specific to the innumerable variations in individuals. This would be too costly.

So mysticism is assumed to be the best alternative because science is too costly, but in reality--outside of the law and science--capitalism has already made the determination for us. Capitalism often redefines the so-called "fixed position" of things to suit its own agendas, so this is nothing new. It has drawn the line between adult and child along monetary lines. Money and resources mean more to making you human than your developmental position relative to normal adulthood. Take a 6 year old, give him a million dollars, and suddenly the adults care about his opinion, and even the law is willing to bend itself at times for such people. That is how arbitrary these definitions have become--how flimsy and shakable. It is only a matter of time before blind confidence in the "money mystics" is itself blown apart by simple thought.

“Children, who play life, habit everywhere, discern its true law and relations more clearly than with men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.”

--Henry David Thoreau

Not Special Unless Special

Most of the time, the best way to raise a kid is not to raise a kid, it seems, but to raise a person. The child of today is going to spend maybe 10 years being a kid and upwards of 40 years being an adult, God willing. So the question becomes, do you want to raise a big kid, or a person?

When you treat an adult like a kid, it means you're being needlessly suppressive (choosing not to respect them like the people they are). When you treat a kid like a kid, you're being needlessly repressive (choosing not to see them as people to begin with). Treating a kid like a kid is never letting them taste failure. It's excusing their misbehavior, spoiling them into submission by praising their lethargy, and never letting them face rejection--in short, it's about keeping them as far from being human as possible for as long as possible--despite their longings to be. It's about purposely neglecting to preserve or even recognize their dignity because they are supposedly incapable of being dignified. Here they are not being respected for their strengths, they are just having their weaknesses catered to.

On the contrary, treating an adult like a person is how respect is shown, and it should be no different with children. Treating kids like people means recognizing them for the their actual strengths (rather than treating even their weaknesses as if they too were virtues). It's letting them face the real consequences of their own misconduct with discretion (and not just the politically-correct prefabricated ones). It's teaching them how to walk away from rejection without feeling rejected. It's about building them up rather than talking down to them, building them up to be able to respond to the natural ups and downs of living--of personhood. It's a far more healthy way to live one's life.

When you tell a child he's special before he has even done anything worthy or special, you weaken his ability to be anything but average. All he becomes is what he is. Who needs to work to be special if they already are before they even put in the work? If you tell him instead, that he has the ability to one day be special through work, difficulty, and problem solving, and that his actions toward those positive ends are what ensure his being special regardless of the outcome, you strengthen his ability to go beyond himself--to become a better person than he is. Is that not what you want? Is that not what our society demands?

We need not tell a child they are good at something before they have shown themselves to be objectively good at it. We don't do that with adults, so there is no reason to do that with children. On the other hand, we shouldn't then be dismissive of a child's attempts to go beyond themselves, even if they fail in the end. We shouldn't fault a child when they do put in the honest effort and come up short, because that is life, and the same ought to go for adults. Working hard makes you "special." Working hard makes you a person.

The Kids are Alright

The kids are alright. The only threat to children, if one can even call it that, is too much fretting about threats. Most parents understand that there are two directions we can thrust our concern at as to what is harming kids--the immanent (actual) and the potential (possible). When a child is drowning--that is to say, when a child is facing an immanent threat to their state of being--it seems asinine to direct our attention instead toward the potential hazard of them scuffing their foot on a rock at the bottom of the pond. For instance, no one says when a child is drowning, "Save that child, he might scuff his foot on a rock underwater!" That would be misdirected priorities.

That is clearly the case when the immanent threat outweighs the potential threat. One might excuse such misdirected fretting if the immanent harm and potential threat are of equal magnitude of danger though (if that's possible), but not when the child is experiencing no threat outside the imagination of his onlooker. These are not equal terms though. It is clearly unconscionable to think the potential for harm is more deserving of our attention than direct endangerment in here and now. That is to say, the potential for harm does not always necessitate an impulsive response from the adult or peer, but on the other hand, that immanent harm always does. Direct endangerment of a child, be it physical abuse or otherwise, is nearly always more deserving of our attention than potential, social and culturally-based perceived "threats" we have to be reminded to worry about.

This is all very well and good to say, but sometimes it is understandable that deciphering immanent hazards to children from potential ones is difficult and subjective. What is an immanent harm and a potential threat? Ultimately, potential threats are just that, potential, in it either hasn't happened yet, is happening and may just not be causing any damage to the child, or is happening whether we know its effects or not. Chances are, if our children are being bombarded with so-called destructive media messages for example (a potential threat to them), beyond our knowledge as adults, our reserve for panic isn't going to do a bit of difference in assisting us to save them from harm's way--not as it would if the threat was immediate. Children are going to be receiving these messages invariably, whether we remain ignorant of them or are running around trying to sanitize all that their eyes rest on.

The issue is, if a potential harm is causing some so-called threat so minor that parents, even with all their so-lauded "intuition," don't even notice it without having to be reminded to pay attention to it via the news media, then it by no means deserves the shock and worry that we ought to be reserving for actual immanent harms that children, and adults, can find themselves in the middle of, where the effects can be anything but minor. For example, childhood obesity is a much more hazardous threat, and an immediate one in many cases, than the potential for that obese child to be abducted--but which do parents and the media fret over more? Which inspires more legislation, despite fewer deaths? Abduction is sexier than obesity, when it comes to the mainstream culture, evidently.

One of the main differences between potential threats and immanent harms is that specific steps can be taken to respond to immanent harms in a practical, reasoned way. You can take your time with it and find a solution to the issue (proper diet and exercise, in the case of obesity). With "potential hazards," there is only so much preparation one can do because half the damage is manufactured in our minds. The only steps we can take to reduce the potential damage are whatever our minds can dream up ("stranger danger" survival strategies, for instance). It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy though. We might say, "thanks to our best efforts to keep children indoors, we have reduced sun burn--and because it has worked, we can be proud of ourselves," even when other solutions could have been less restrictive (sunblock for instance). Now that example is a bit sarcastic, but it shows exactly the kind of misdirection and self-delusion that preventionists often engage in.

Children are either being harmed or they are not. If they are not suffering in some way emotionally or physically, then they are probably not being threatened by whatever our guilty personal demons can dream up to haunt their developmental trajectories. This is true whether it be violence in video games or satanism in daycares. Often is the question asked "what is X doing to our children", but I want to know, what is X doing to parents? Is your child X's concern or is she yours?

The issue isn't so much about protecting children's innocence, because they won't be innocent forever anyways, no matter what you do to protect that artificial edifice built around them. The issue is about making that inevitable transition from one point of relative ignorance to another go as smoothly as possible in light of learning and exposure. With a potential threat, one has time to sort out solutions in working around it, and children will grow up healthier for having learned how to do that. It's not X that harm's children, it's the lack of an authoritative adult or peer presence there to give X appropriate context. If you want healthy, strong, independent human beings from your children, show them what sex is. Rather than focus on tying up the so-called "profanity apologizers" like perpetrators, we should be focusing on the kid's perception of what the they have set into the world. There are those who take responsibility, and those who assign responsibility, and only the former parenting style produces a strong human being.

When you say that children don't have a right to be harmed by something (something minor that is), you're saying they don't have a right to learn about how to deal with minor threats. Children should be free to learn about anything and everything in the world in all his beauty and ugliness, so long as it is presented to them in a way their ability to reason about it will be able to work around. Most kids grow up alright despite a whole slew of threats both real and imaginary throughout their developing years. This is true for life in general. The only ones who don't probably had no role models, or had their rumps cushioned on every fall.

Hating Kids

It is a fact that some people don't deal well with kids, but do those same people genuinely hate the existence of kids? That is what I hear when someone says they "don't like kids"--that they would rather kids not exist. It is plausible someone could be so scared of kids, (viewing them as fragile beings physically and or emotionally) that they fear contact with them, but that isn't "hating" kids. The phenomenon of hating kids probably just comes from thinking they have no tangible value or worth (to them). Its akin to hating the neighbors obnoxious ugly puppy that just yaps all day.

My general thought is that society divorces harm and safety from love and hate. It's almost like, loving a child puts you in the "potential for harm" category, and hating a child puts you in the "no potential for harm" group. The rationale is that loving kids puts you in their path, and hating kids causes you to stay away. Therefore, it becomes more advisable to make like you hate kids than to express any kind of love for them, because then society views you as too distant from them to be a threat.

Childhood as Disability?

People who would equate children with adults often make the observation that the adult world is full of people who display little qualitative difference from children (such as people with various developmental disabilities). On this basis, they make the case that children shouldn't be guaranteed any special provisions that adults with mental impairments aren't already able to receive, and that furthermore, to enforce these special provisions for children above adults creates its own form of ageism. It is the case made for equivocation between the disabled adult and the growing child.

What this viewpoint ignores is the very real biological differences between children and adults that further differentiate a child from a disabled adult. A child should not be considered disabled because they fail to perform at adult capacity. Children perform to the capacity that their developing physiology determine on the whole. They benefit from a comparison to others of their age group because it assists caretakers in identifying those who are under performing. Equating an adult's capacities to a child's is an inherently unfair comparison. If a comparison is drawn between children and adults, suddenly every child is considered disabled--their under performance is attributed to their "childhood disability" even if they are in fact very gifted for their age, and it takes the importance off those who are having difficulty even keeping up with their own age level.

If childhood were a disability, it would be a very strange one:

• One hundred percent of the population has it at least once in their life (for the first 12 years). In all healthily maturing individuals who have this disability, its chance of complete remittance is extremely high, if not one hundred percent, within specified and fairly predictable time lines (for example: normally developing children usually begin thinking logically during the "concrete-observational stage" of the disability...etc.).

• Its symptoms reveal themselves in almost all areas of functioning, from the physical to the cognitive, from behaviors to personality (for example: magical thinking, egotistical thinking, lack of awareness of mental states, false beliefs, failing conservation tasks, centration in problem solving, lack of numerical thinking, lack of hypothetical reasoning, lack of adequate physical mobility due to small stature, incomplete perceptions of the physical properties of objects, cause and effect, physiological growth factors influencing drug tolerance and susceptibility to disease, incomplete recognition of the self, incomplete understanding of morality...etc.) 

• This "disability" can gather other real disabilities around it to confound a child even more, which can be very common over time but not all at once, (for example: learning disabilities, motor skills disorders, conduct disorders, ADHD, ODD, Autism, Aspergers, Separation Anxiety, pica, tic disorders, elimination disorders, attachment issues, mutism...etc.).

In all seriousness, owing to the widespread and universal nature of "childhood," it seems fairly obvious that it shouldn't be considered a disability in the same way that a physical or mental handicap could, whether the individual is a child or an adult. There are many qualitative and quantitative differences between children and adults that have to be respected and attended to in separate but equal ways. Furthermore, a child needs special provisions in our society so that they can physically and mentally participate in the context of the larger adult-centric environment to an equal degree. Adults with mental deficits need another set of supports to accomplish the same ends.

It is true that adults can have all these conditions ascribed to childhood, and it's my thinking that all adults maintain these impairments into adulthood, reappearing in different forms and contexts relative to their cognitive and physiological spheres in society, but to equate the two seems completely ignorant to their mutual uniqueness.

Adult-centrism is far more ageist than attending to a child's developmental differences.

Under My Thumb

I wasn't cut out to work with kids. I'm no good in the female-dominated world of childcare. It was rather disheartening to see how they treat the kids, but what do I know? They're the professionals, I'm just the caring young man. The children would have eaten me alive.

I'm too nice. I can't yell at kids. That's the personality issue that can not be undone. I am too patient to work with kids, too passive. I can't adequately take out my personal frustrations on a kid. Therefore, I'm no good in that line of work.

Adults thrive on keeping children living under their thumb, which is probably why I was so unsuccessful at passing myself off as an adult.

Flash Mob Generation

The youth street riots in England show us what happens when government flat out ignores the needs of young people for too long. When government no longer seems to work for the people, regardless of age or social class, the people become disillusioned with it, and angry with it, and angry with the society that embraces it. The behavior of the rioters is reprehensible and by no means do I wish to endorse it, as there is no doubt it has nothing to do with legitimate protest. There's been a lot of speculation about the cause though, and a lot of accusations against indirect cultural influences, but no inciting incident or clear motivation can be tagged. This is simply because the uprisings are instead the inevitable product of years and years of pent-up social frustration with a civil society that has continuously sidelined the millennial generation.

It comes with great shame to me, being a member of that generation, that they have resorted to this, but while I can't endorse their unbridled destructiveness, I can at least sympathize with the spark of frustration that caused it. I seem to remember a year or so prior to this unrest, the UK government unequivocally shouting down mass youth protests--legitimate, non-violent protests--against the government's insistence on shutting down student loans and increasing interest rates on them, all while tuition in the UK is set to double by next year, and all while youth unemployment is up to 20% in the UK.

The old guard in government, who rode through college in the age of state-paid, free tuition, effectively see nothing wrong with sending young people out into the world with debts reaching up to six figures--and while that is good news for the same "old guard" special interests (who never have to share any of the fiscal burden), it is bad news for young people who would have to make the sacrifice. So the young people fought, and the government refused to listen, and when the government no longer listens, the young people got frustrated.

And they have a right to be frustrated. They've been given no reason to think the government actually works for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, and it's because it hasn't worked for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, for decades. It hasn't because it has surrendered its duties to the wealthy and the corporations, who have done nothing but pocket the benefits for themselves. With average citizens being unable to affect change against massive special interests who pay their way into politician's pockets, they lose faith in the system, they lose faith in democracy, and they lose faith in civil society. Once that happens, they constitute for themselves a civil disorder--and it may very well be a psychological release of pent-up energies, a joy ride of smashing and looting--but it has its roots with the unresponsiveness of society.

What shames me about the riots is the indiscriminate path of their destructiveness, affecting small business owners and other private property in particular. These local merchants and residents did not deserve being so much as touched, as they had nothing to do with the government being unresponsive to the needs of young people. The young should have been using their social media to a call for non-violent resistance and organize walk-outs and sit down strikes. All they accomplished in pursuing violence was to throw their oppressive government into overdrive. Thousands of arrests have been made, and youth curfews have spread all over the world (Philadelphia for example). Instead of dismantling civil society, young people should stop it from being able to function. The government has to be starved by its disaffected until it realizes why it needs them.

If government no longer works for you, you ought to no longer work for it. It's called the social contract.

Gendered Corruption

If indeed we believe that culture corrupts our kids, why does the biggest, most evil influence always lay at the feet of what we find unacceptable? Would not acceptable things, such as free market consumerism, also be corrupting them? Is corruption only tolerable when a child is corrupted by something we like, or does a child truly cease being corrupted by certain things, and where is that line drawn?

We wonder why the path to manhood is fraught with so much difficulty and lack of assurance. Parents fret about the outcomes for their sons. Surely it wouldn't have anything to do with how men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the standard for manhood, would it? We've left boys of the world at the hands of a commercial culture that would sooner take him by the hand, cut a fart in his face, physically abuse him and verbally demean him and tell him to "tough it," sell him beer and breasts to weaken his resistance and thoroughly derail his ambitions by calling him "simple-minded," teach him to value his life by the number of sperm he can eventually squeeze out of himself, and be there for him to provide an array of products intended only to help him achieve that most carnal goal before he's to slip into domestic "uselessness" to have all his manufactured desires catered to on call. "Men are stupid" indeed.

We wonder why girls are so depressed or sell themselves short despite our best efforts to lift them up. Parents fret about the outcomes for their daughters. Surely it's not because men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the new standard for womanhood, is it? We've all left girls in the hands of a so-called "empowering" commercial culture that would sooner take a girl by the hand, tell her she's smarter and better, inflate her self worth to unattainable heights, starve her of encountering any real adversity to her confidence or resistance, spoil her into submission so that she may become reliant on an array of beauty and "self-care" products to maintain that weakened state, and then tell her a superficial relationship in the service of a carnally-minded "useless man-child" with children in tow is all she needs to be happy. "Am I right fellas?" indeed.

"Why?" is not a good question to ask. "Isn't it obvious?" is a better one. If you wouldn't leave your child in the hands of someone you don't trust, who is only going to preach distortion and trickery, why would you leave your child in the hands of western culture? In twenty years the children we fret about today will be what we consider normal, well adjusted adults, most of them at least--adjusted in the sense that they've just spent their last twenty years being adjusted, by passing through the corruptible influence of culture in all its forms, positive and negative, and normal because they are still breathing at the other end of it.

Life's Not Fair

You may have caught yourself dropping "Life's not fair!" as the final word when it comes to any pronouncement on social injustice, and thought that such is always going to be the final word. But "life's" quality of being unfair does not mean we should be actively trying to make it unfair. There is enough injustice in the world already without needing to justify it with the excuse that that "unfairness exists, therefore, it is justified to be unfair." Life is indeed unfair, but we either choose to respond fairly within it, or we don't. We can't solve injustice as a thing, but we have a choice to rectify all that we cause to be unjust by our own actions and beliefs.

We have a Scorpion and the Frog situation--where a scorpion rides across a river on a frog's back, assuring him that he won't be stung in exchange. Half way across, the frog is fatally stung and asks why the scorpion would go back on his word--why this injustice has been carried out--and the scorpion simply replies, "it's my nature." This condemns both the frog and the scorpion to drowning. No matter how you slice it, this defeatist line of reasoning should not pardon or justify the voluntary action of the scorpion, and neither should the response "Life's not fair!" pardon or justify voluntary, purposeful, unfairness and injustice.

So often this slur is thrown at young people when they complain about unfairness--sometimes they are in the wrong, sometimes their expectations are too high and need to be brought down to a realistic plane--other times though, the slur is overused. When teens and children are unfairly treated due to their age alone, and nothing else, it's the repressive adults that need a crash course in reality.

For instance, youth are recipients of voluntary injustice under the pretext that such age limits and "line in the sand" laws are in place for their own protection. The most notable is the age of consent law, not only because it rewrites the facts of nature and human development (or just flat out ignores them), but because it often criminalizes children and youth for infringing on the sanctity of their own bodies (even natural and non-harmful sexual exploration) while seeking to criminalize external violation.

The juvenile justice system just as often encourages us to look the other way on the unjust sentences between consensual, "close-in-age" children and teens. And those sentences are unjust, because if they weren't, there'd be no such thing as "Romeo and Juliet" exceptions in the first place. Those exceptions in the law for close-in-age sexual conduct exist because it has been determined that the law is unfair in those areas--one can only wait for every other jurisdiction to catch on.

The same reasoning could be applied to the drinking age or age-based curfews in particular. One doesn't have to favor a total rebuild of society to simply voice concerns about laws that just don't do what they are supposed to be doing to protect minors, one only has to stop endorsing such laws. The first step is to stop concluding that just because we feel we have the last word when we inform our youth that "life is unfair," that we, the adult population, have to purposefully make it unfair for them. What we voluntarily give rise to, we can voluntarily starve to death. 

Culture Wars

If it is wrong to use God to justify human conflict, war, discrimination, and other malice, then why is it acceptable to use children to do the same? Is it because children are living entities and are thus seen as more deserving of being the impetus for malice? Surely the effects of conflict on their behalf are more tangible for them than the ones wracked up on God's behalf. That is to say, if we launch our culture wars to save the world for children, is it more justifiable because, unlike God, they exist in the physical world and could thus reap the benefits of a war in the physical world? Does that make sense?

It is reasonable to contend that a war for God's behalf is actually more justifiable than malice carried out for the children's behalf, and it's precisely because children are living entities and God is beyond life. Human shortsightedness allows us to foresee victory when we believe our culture wars are righteous, but what it fails to do is allow us to foresee the inevitable consequences that a culture war brings to the very real and physical entities it was waged to protect. God feels no harm when our holy wars and malice launched in his name inevitably end in human ruin, but children do. Therefore, because the effects of a culture war are more physically present even on those it was waged to protect, the children, it is arguably less justifiable than holy war.

This point though is more about equivocation than pairing one unjustifiable thing against another unjustifiable thing. There can not be an acceptable justification for malice, conflict, war, and discrimination, whether it is carried out for the children, God, or even world peace.

Big Brother

If the twentieth century saw the rise of oppression for the national good, then the twenty-first will no doubt see the reemergence of totalitarianism for the children's good. That is to say, Big Brother used to be interested in regulating and controlling human expression on the pretense of national security, and for a while he was able to sell himself on that, but then the people got wise to it and went so far as to even turn "socialism" into a bad word.

However, Big Brother couldn't be kept down, and with the help of a whole new "social menace of the decade," has found a new avenue to gain back converts. Namely, to protect the children in the 21st century, our human rights to privacy and safeguards from intrusion have to be given up. That is the new deal. That is the new exchange Big Brother's selling us on. Where once, and in many ways still, it was the threat to our country from without intended to scare us into submission, now it is the threat from within, to our children.

I am of course referring to HR 1981, the so-called "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act," which does nothing but make it mandatory for ISPs to do what they already do--collect and retain the personal data and trafficking habits of internet users right down to your name, address, phone numbers, credit card and bank numbers, and all IPs you use. The issue with it is not so much the storage of data, but the fact that storing all your personal information for retrieval by the government at their discretion does nothing to protect children from pornographers--despite the title of the bill it is hiding behind. All it does is makes it easier for the government to spy on the computer use of individuals from a massive database from which they can use for many stated and unstated purposes.

How long will it be tolerated is uncertain, but if the history of all past social menaces is any guide, it will itself eventually be toppled and replaced. Eventually someone will make a menace out of child protectionism itself, and then what will we be left with? A society where protecting children is itself a bad word? This is not so much paranoia as it is hypocrisy that has become legislated because of paranoia. Is it at all possible that for once we could just have balance, or is human nature made too anxious by its children to save itself from destruction?

Stan, on Class Warfare

I didn't create this image, I just gave him a name and a voice.

I felt this was appropriate considering the same US politicians he's talking to are currently playing Russian Roulette with the global economy to advance ideological agendas favored by millionaires to the detriment of everyone else. The stability of the world is "too big to fail." If we don't bail it out, we destine our children to live on a sinking boat. 

So Stan says, bicker later, raise the debt limit now.

A Risky World

Human beings are terrible risk assessors, but parents are the worst at it. Sooner or later if you challenge them on their ability to judge the risks they subject their kids to, you will hear the retort that they are entitled to their instincts, whether correct or incorrect, because evolution created them. They are just carrying out nature's will by expressing righteous indignation against society's usual suspects, and you are in the wrong for even questioning them. Their imperfections are untouchable.

With shrugging shoulders they grudgingly accept the faultiness of their instincts, because every action one can do with a child entails some risk, not just "the usual suspects." Those "usual suspects"--kidnapping for instance--are one in a million occurrences. The silent killers--automobile accidents for instance--happen every day a million times over. Parents who sweat with anxiety over the exceptionally rare ignore the mundane, regardless of the risk. This is not just a parental problem, it's a human problem, and that negligence costs lives. When superstition takes over critical thinking, parental reasoning is no better off than the child's, and both are at its mercy.

For instance, parents have a right to be concerned about their children's access to guns, and whether or not to allow their child entrance to a house where it is known a gun is kept. This is a matter of evolutionary insight. They have a right to be concerned especially if any unsupervised time could result in a bullet wound for their child or someone else's, even despite their best efforts to preach on gun safety. It is a real concern, but to outright bar access to the house for their child on those grounds alone, is more of an expression of anxiety than it is a reasoned approach to a palpable concern.

Assume there's a swimming pool at this aforementioned house. Statistically, the child is many times more likely to drown in that swimming pool than to accidentally shoot himself (988 drownings to 134 firearm fatalities in children between the ages of 1 and 19 in 2010, according to the US CDC). So to bar attendance at the home due to the proximity of a relatively minor risk, at the ignorance of a much more substantial risk, seems foolish, even by these typical "evolutionary/instinct" parental arguments. If one is looking to bar access due to the presence of a risk, it would make more sense to do so because greater risks are involved--the greater the risk, statistically, the more we ought to be concerned. This just goes to show that what gives parents a break in their anxiety has less to do with what is safe, and more to do with what is common--the bottom line being, not every house owns a gun, but swimming pools are everywhere. That which is ubiquitous, gets ignored. That which is rarer, absorbs more attention.

Kids are being barred from walking to school on the fear that they will be kidnapped off the side of the road. It's a rare occurrence that is indeed regrettable, but one wonders if these same districts and parents concern themselves at all with the more present risk of driving a child to school. Once the child enters a moving vehicle, the risk of them becoming injured multiplies significantly (4,044 motor vehicle fatalities in children between the ages of 1 and 9 in 2010, the most prevalent form of unintentional death in children according to the US CDC). Just because the parent or the district is in control of the vehicle and is physically present does not mean risk has been averted. More automobile accidents happen in the 7am rush hour on the way to school than kidnappings. So if we are of the "evolutionary/instinct" parental mindset, that even statistically minute risks should lead to such large-scale sweeping legislation, should we not counter even greater threats (such as children even being allowed to enter vehicles) with even more unbearable legislation?

If not, then we may just have to conclude that every action we take in the world is hazardous, and that we all have lives to live as human beings in a risky world, even kids. If they aren't able to live a respectable life as a human being--a child--then there will be unintended consequences no parent wants. Any parent who prophesies the death of their child every day (who does not have immediate reason to do so) would do well to stop investing in redundant safety mechanisms and instead invest in some therapy to rid them of their anxiety disorder before it does any harm.

The Law is an Ass

The law is an ass because instead of practically applying human conscience, it overrides it. We become disillusioned with our power in society when the laws no longer service reality as we know it, just the prejudices of our great grandfathers. Anything that exists in the law "just because," and not due to any hard fact of nature, particularly when defining status offenses for minors, is typically a service to fantasy over nature.

The law of the king is a decree based upon prejudice. The natural law is one based upon observation. Children grow up in a universe governed by natural laws that drive their development irrespective of jurisdiction, but they are living in an adult society governed by artificial decree and cultural hocus pocus (age-based laws) that limit their expressive potential.

While natural laws by their nature allow children to grow and expand as they mature along the innumerable trajectories that human life finds for itself, the law of the king only confines, restricts, limits, and all but cages them to an artificial magic set of inconsequential circumstances. While natural laws may or may not lead a child to experience the full freedom of their faculties as they develop, the law of the king is unique in that all it does is impose on them for stepping outside its predetermined lines, sometimes harshly.

The law renders minors as brainless objects, differentiated from material possessions only in semantics. For possessions, there are rightful owners. For minors, there are rightful parents or guardians. For possessions, there is conveyance. For minors, there is adoption. For possessions, there is bailment or constructive possession. For minors, there is compulsory schooling and state seizure. For possessions, there is acquired possession without consent. For minors, there is birth.  For possessions, there is a deed or a title. For minors, there is a birth certificate. For possessions, there is a state of being stolen. For minors, there is a state of being kidnapped. For possessions, there is a state of being mislaid or lost. For minors, there is neglect. For possessions, there is a state of being damaged. For minors, there is a state of being abused or mistreated.

There are numerous parallels, but the point is that the law informs itself about what is in a child's best interests based on the same principles one could also ascribe to material possessions. Just like one can ask, "what is in this child's best interests?", one could also ask, "what is in this desk lamp's best interests?" and arrive at the same conclusion for each, differing in semantics only. Fortunately for human dignity, many disagree that children are the same as material possessions. Many would argue that children are actually human beings, with rights of their own-- and that the "m-word" (minor) is make believe.

Justice for Caylee

Way to honor a child's life, with a perpetual shouting match on national television. One wonders if this child hadn't been as cute, as photogenic, whether anyone would have paid her death more than a momentary notice. If she had been instead a ten-year-old black boy on the streets of West Philadelphia having gone missing, no national coverage would have even taken place, never mind a three year headline involving a play-by-play depiction of the trial chased with righteous indignation disguised as commentary. It would have been seen almost as "appropriate" by the very same so-called arbiters of social justice.

No, this is where all their righteous indignation leads, once it is distilled to its main ingredient--if Caylee Anthony wasn't cute, if she wasn't white, if she wasn't three years old--if she wasn't the exploitable tot, the perfect victim that the news media so callously could turn her into, they wouldn't have cared if she got justice or not, and nor would the viewing public. It can be concluded because it happens every day. This story would have ended with the search in the local media, three years ago, and that would have been that, and you know what else? It would have been far more just, and righteous, than the disgusting circus they turned this little girl's death into.

The so-called arbiters of social justice in the media saw this child not as a child, with her own rights and dignity, but as some expensive commodity, a platform from which to pilot their fledgling cults of personality straight into the living rooms of America. The more well-meaning their intentions, the less respect they showed, as Caylee's images were sprayed across the screen when they spoke, as if to repeatedly underscore their moral high ground. In like manner, Caylee's image might be blown up on the screen before cutting to a commercial break, as if to prime the viewing public for that coveted eye time. It was sentimentalism for the sake of gaining eyes, and sensationalism in the service of exploiting them--the propaganda of the consumer culture for the well-intentioned public.

Even overtly, their message was insulting--that child rights only exist to protect these pieces of property from society. Talk of "children's rights" only seems to matter to these people after the kids are injured or killed, and even at that, is only extended to the extent that it renders them lifeless victims which need protection against adult interventions. Such a mindset only serves to perpetuate their lifeless, infantilized victimhood, to stand them out from the crowd and paint a sign on their backs that screams "I am a child, I am a victim! Target me!" whether they have been victimized or not, for which more restrictions are proctored. Victimhood has replaced childhood.

If there ever was going to be justice for Caylee, it ended the moment the story broke on the national scene. From there on, any hope of justice for a little girl was thrown out the window and replaced with endless repetition of the child's inhuman victimhood, or the glorification of her now-sanctified existence--neither of which extreme did a little girl any justice. All it served was to give absolution to adults who would have felt guilty if they didn't join with the cults of personality and the talking heads in singing praise for the existence of this little girl and her tragic end. Adults feel all too guilty for the decadence of their culture, and they find an outlet in the death of children.

A Reckoning

I did not write this, it was something I found many years ago and held onto long after the site containing it passed on. As far as I know, the original author has been lost, but I post it only in good faith. Just absorb it right now. The magisterial world in the eyes of a child is but the minutiae of the adult's daily experience, but there is no reason to deny a child the majesty of the world. Every minute detail of life has to start out as a blinding revelation.

A Reckoning

My name is Jacob. I am the last brother born in my family. I have 3 older brothers, all of which have gone through the reckoning. It is a coming of age tradition that has been in our family for several generations. A test of survival in the 'real world', and it was done at a very early age.

Now it was my turn to carry on the tradition of the Reckoning. I was turning 6 years old today. All of my brothers had turned 6 when that day arrived for each of them. My mother had awakened me early and she fixed me a big breakfast. My father was also downstairs, and upon my arrival, he was sipping on a cup of coffee. For some reason, all my senses were heightened. I could smell the caffeine in my father's cup. I felt the heat from the toaster and I was 10 feet away. The sound of a knife spreading butter on a piece of toast was almost deafening. I could hear my breathing, and my own heart beat.

I sat down at the oaken table and began to eat. Not a word was spoken between the three of us. My mother and father spoke not to each other, but you could see the fear in my mother's eyes. My father was a rock. Unemotional, stone-faced, unflagging.

After breakfast, my mother ushered me up the stairs to my room where I found a brand new suit laid out across my bed. The 2 surviving older brothers, who had gone through this when they were 6 years old had purchased it for me. The reckoning required formality as opposed to normality. As I put on the white shirt and black pants, I started thinking about little things that were said amongst my brothers about the reckoning. Just bits and pieces were picked up from overhearing the conversation, but I was never able to make any real sense of it. The tone was clear, however. It was one of fear and foreboding, and if a conversation ever came up about this tradition, it was never meant for my ears to hear.

Dressed, and down the stairs, my mother and father took me by the hand and led me to our car. I got in the back seat, and father began to drive to the place where IT was. The trip took an agonizing 23 minutes as I saw it on the clock on the dashboard. Each second ticked away to the flash of a colon between the hour and minutes, and I felt each one pass through me. Perhaps counting the last minutes and seconds of my existence on this planet.

The conversation between my mother and father in the car was slow and deliberate. Many words I did not understand, yet the mention of IT was ever present to the point that it made the air thick with dread. Then we arrived at my destiny. My mother and father, again, led me, by the hand through a silver arched entryway into a place I did not recognize. It was dark inside, but soon spots of illumination broke through the blackness. I was too frightened to look around, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see statues of boys dressed in all manner of clothing. I thought that this might have been, in some grotesque way, a remembrance room to those boys who did not survive the Reckoning. Under a single spotlight, directly ahead of me, I saw what my mother had feared and what my father had remembered from his day of reckoning.

It was at least 50 feet high, it's small serrated teeth glistening in the precise light overhead. It's long black arms, stiff and shiny, lay on either side of this unspeakable thing. It was sleeping at the moment, but I knew that this condition would not continue much longer. My mother let go of my hand and stayed behind. A small, oval tear ran down her cheek and she said her silent "goodbye". My father and I continued toward IT. After a few more steps, my father released my other hand and took a couple of steps backward. He looked toward my mother, then looked down over his shoulder at me. His voice was unswerving as he said to me, "Approach it, boy. Hold onto it's arm and stand fast."

It was at that moment that I finally realized my fate. I was to be offered up as a sacrifice to this hideous thing, and if I survived the offering, I will have gone through the Reckoning with honor and dignity. The monster was still in its nocturnal slumber as I silently stepped nearer and nearer. The closer I got, the stronger the fear welled up. It got to the point where I my heart pounded in my chest almost beating to punch free. My breath came in short, heavy heaves as I lifted my hand and touched IT's arm.Then the beast awoke with a tremor and a whine. I clenched its arm even harder as I tried to stand fast as my father had told me. I was slowly being picked up by the thing and lifted into the air. The beginnings of a scream started to form in the pit of my stomach. I had opened my mouth, but even the sound was too terrified to came forth. Higher and higher I was lifted toward an opening near the top. An opening into what, I did not know, perhaps the opening to the end of my short existence. Sweat started sheeting off my forehead stinging my eyes, but I dared not close them for fear of what could happen next. I was breathing so rapidly, that I thought I was going to faint, but I held on with both hands and let out a yell that ripped from my being as a bolt of lightning is ripped from the heavens above. This kept me conscious as I was being pulled up, up, up, into what?!

I glanced over my shoulder and looked down to the ground where my mother and father stood. My mother cried and held out her arms in futile frustration. My father cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled out, "Look ahead, boy. It's almost completed". I broke my gaze with my parents and concentrated on this black opening that lay ahead. I was STILL alive. It was almost over. Suddenly the fear had turned to determination. Determination to last this ordeal. To face the unknown and be able to tell my children about it. In that split second, my mind raced to my future and I vowed I would NEVER put my boys in this situation. EVER. I closed my eyes and wished the ordeal were over and done. This was the moment that I would either survive or the monster would take me quickly. Then, the movement stopped. IT had been silenced for reasons I could not fathom. I had survived the Reckoning. I was alive and my small body was quivering and tingling at the sensation of success. Slowly and carefully, I walked off the escalator.

Tell the Truth

If you are in a line of work that you could not in good conscience explain to a child, to protect their so-called innocence, then there is probably nothing justifiable about what you do for a living. This is to say that if you can't tell a child the truth about what you're doing out of fear that it would poison their perspective, then what business do you have in that line of work? If you have conscience enough to be concerned with the child's moral trajectory, then what is that conscience doing by showing up everyday to perversely violate its own?

If you work to make a check and do not concern yourself with the ramifications of what you are doing, then you ought not to be so concerned about the child finding out about them. You can not serve two masters--one to the projection of moral justification (for the children's sake), and one to soul-depraved ambiguity (for yours). You either do what you do and accept and project it truthfully, even to the young ones, or you are living a lie.