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.
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.
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