One is not always right when he is guided by love, but his passions for the wellbeing of others are genuine. Those passions can either lead him to ruling the situation by expressing concern, or to being ruled by the situation through fear. When one is guided by fear into doing some action, it is normally geared to protect oneself from having to be afraid (by evolution)--the effect it has on others is secondary. On the contrary, love is an action that motivates a human to do something in the best interests of others, whether for better or worse. How easy it is to confuse our fear and love as our primary motivations in doing something. Good intentions are not good enough, whether motivated by love or fear, but those governed by fear alone only jump the gun.
If love is the pleasuring thing itself, fear is the worry over losing that which is loved. In this way, the thing that is loved is not the impetus for destruction, but rather, the fear of losing the thing that is loved. Fear is as well a genuine force of action though, but all it is capable of doing is calling our attention to danger, to rely on it is to fall prey to needless worry. One can express concern without falling prey to worry--worry is nothing but a furrowed brow, an increase in adrenaline, a impetuous impulse--there is no thinking part of worry because to think while one is experiencing fear is what we call "concern."
All this is a means to say why it is perfectly fine to express concern about vigilantes, child molesters, terrorists, and other workers of inequity where our concern is due, so long as we don't fear them. Expressing concern is when you criticize those who bring inequity and inspire others to see the inequity they bring. Worrying about them is when you submit to their inequity without question because you fear their retaliation, or, it is when you go out of your way to be physically responsible for their destruction because you fear their influence. Worrying focuses your mind on how to evade the aggressor, as it has evolved over millions of years (even when fear is the aggressor)--concern, instead, focuses your mind on how to conquer the aggressor.
When the proverbial good man ducks and covers from fear, and in doing so, gives the workers of inequity a pass, he implicates himself in their works and becomes one of them. The good man who criticizes the workers of inequity as good citizens ought to, casts it in a negative light for all rational people to see. One is either part of the solution, or part of the problem, and passivity is part of the problem, choosing not to choose is part of the problem. An act of non-involvement is tacit agreement with child molesters, vigilantes, and other workers of inequity.
As I've articulated many times before though, this does not mean that after you've chosen to be active (whatever that means) in "the solution" (which is unattainable) any course of action is justifiable. In short, it doesn't mean anything is justifiable, it just means that doing nothing never is.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Coming of Age
"In the suburbs I learned to drive, and you told me we'd never survive."
It is only a matter of time before all living things come of age, and it is no different for human civilization itself. Civilization is a living thing played out over the course of generations. Just as an organism is a collection of cells that duplicate, exist, and deteriorate over a course of the organism's lifetime, so too are individuals within civilization. It was only a matter of time then before the same uncertainty of directionless ambition befell civilization as it does to individual human beings, when they become conscious of the need for self preservation in the face of a seeming non-existent reason to be doing such. This is to say that in coming of age, our reason to continue on both as individuals and as a species comes from our own directive, rather than by the guiding intervention of higher authorities.
It is now up to us to go to the doctors when we are sick, go to the movies when we desire entertainment, or go to pray when we desire some direction, and we accepted this new found responsibility with unsteady enthusiasm, slowly learning how to possess it but never truly understanding fully how or why we must. Why must we grow, go to school, go to college, go to work, get married, buy a house, have children, raise children, grow old, and die--always in that order? Where is this cycle of our existence taking us, these technological advances, the growth of cities, the automobile, the spread of suburban sprawl, the instance of communication? Does any adult know where their life is headed? The only inevitability is death. Does the certainty of death mean we need to fill the brevity of life with something rather than nothing in order to make use of time? Is our civilization destined to die too?
The ages of mankind are testaments to the fact that civilizations rise and fall, that there are periods of life and periods of death, where even in death there is life in relative limbo. The only constant over the spans of centuries is change, a change of relative societal place from one time to another with the same human nature dictating our choices. There was no more certainty we were making the right choice all the time, as when it was dictated to us absolutely, so there spread only fear that we were constantly making the wrong one. The 20th century was so ruled by uncertainty that it inspired more visceral demagoguery than any other era. Any study of parenting advice in the media, for instance, would unearth a world where everyone had their own certainties in the absence of one universal one.
The internet has magnified this phenomenon. For evidence, all one needs to do is conduct a simple search for the words "your kids" or "your children," and you'll inevitably find many diverse things preceding those words: how to do X for your kids? how to keep X away from your kids, what does X mean for your kids?, and other abstractions, all reinforcing the notion that all things invariably pertain to your kids just because yours are the ones being addressed all the time, every day. Coming of age in a culture that has itself come of age means accepting enslavement to the will of the consensus. Where certainty creates ignorance, uncertainty produces anxiety. We live in the age of anxiety, and it's a crippling force on civilization.
It is only a matter of time before all living things come of age, and it is no different for human civilization itself. Civilization is a living thing played out over the course of generations. Just as an organism is a collection of cells that duplicate, exist, and deteriorate over a course of the organism's lifetime, so too are individuals within civilization. It was only a matter of time then before the same uncertainty of directionless ambition befell civilization as it does to individual human beings, when they become conscious of the need for self preservation in the face of a seeming non-existent reason to be doing such. This is to say that in coming of age, our reason to continue on both as individuals and as a species comes from our own directive, rather than by the guiding intervention of higher authorities.
It is now up to us to go to the doctors when we are sick, go to the movies when we desire entertainment, or go to pray when we desire some direction, and we accepted this new found responsibility with unsteady enthusiasm, slowly learning how to possess it but never truly understanding fully how or why we must. Why must we grow, go to school, go to college, go to work, get married, buy a house, have children, raise children, grow old, and die--always in that order? Where is this cycle of our existence taking us, these technological advances, the growth of cities, the automobile, the spread of suburban sprawl, the instance of communication? Does any adult know where their life is headed? The only inevitability is death. Does the certainty of death mean we need to fill the brevity of life with something rather than nothing in order to make use of time? Is our civilization destined to die too?
The ages of mankind are testaments to the fact that civilizations rise and fall, that there are periods of life and periods of death, where even in death there is life in relative limbo. The only constant over the spans of centuries is change, a change of relative societal place from one time to another with the same human nature dictating our choices. There was no more certainty we were making the right choice all the time, as when it was dictated to us absolutely, so there spread only fear that we were constantly making the wrong one. The 20th century was so ruled by uncertainty that it inspired more visceral demagoguery than any other era. Any study of parenting advice in the media, for instance, would unearth a world where everyone had their own certainties in the absence of one universal one.
The internet has magnified this phenomenon. For evidence, all one needs to do is conduct a simple search for the words "your kids" or "your children," and you'll inevitably find many diverse things preceding those words: how to do X for your kids? how to keep X away from your kids, what does X mean for your kids?, and other abstractions, all reinforcing the notion that all things invariably pertain to your kids just because yours are the ones being addressed all the time, every day. Coming of age in a culture that has itself come of age means accepting enslavement to the will of the consensus. Where certainty creates ignorance, uncertainty produces anxiety. We live in the age of anxiety, and it's a crippling force on civilization.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Child Pornography
Let's instead examine what really is the cause for concern--is it merely a child being pictured during a stimulating activity? Or is it when that activity is being forced on them? If it's the former, it would be just as wrong to picture a child playing baseball as it is to picture him playing doctor. But that rendition doesn't lend itself to intuition, and it doesn't seem to do justice to the children who are brutalized into performing sexual acts in other, more severe forms of child pornography. It merely trivializes abuse to the "greater sin" of a child simply seeking pleasure before the eyes of an adult. And yet, ironically, that's how most people would prefer we structure our rationales. Simply put, most people believe that a child pleasuring themselves is as bad as a child being brutalized and drugged into performing a heinous act, and don't see that the former trivializes the abuse of the later.
But if sensible people can be in agreement that when force is involved (when children are brutalized, drugged, and manipulated to engage in a sexual activity to produce an image) that an unspeakable evil has occurred, our shock and judgment really only ought to apply to cases where the child is actually being forced, drugged, and brutalized into it, whether sexual or not, and not simply for any child who may accidentally have an erection in a candid photograph outside the photographer's control. If that isn't the case, then we can conclude that society is more afraid of a child's exhibition of natural sexual exploratory behaviors than it is of them being at risk of exploitation. The distortion on this topic is so high that it becomes difficult to know what side of that pendulum our society is on as we create justifications for the exploitation of children in the service of ridding the same.
We have to agree that there are levels of child pornography, and that the real thrust of our attention ought to be on killing the evil perpetuated where children are being forced, drugged, and brutalized, or in some way manipulated into a situation they most likely wouldn't willingly get themselves into had they known all the parameters. Those images and their producers ought to be where we exercise our main law enforcement thrust--where we ought to be going in with the hammer and taking no names. Consequently then, one would think we ought to be placing less emphasis lower "levels," like teens who consensually exchange nude pictures of themselves over their cellphones, or parents with nude pictures of their children in their possession (the horror!). But then it seems almost contradictory when one sees that so few child porn cartels are brought to justice, compared to how many teens are implicated in illegal behavior for possessing nude images of themselves and others, if not arrested and charged and stuck on sex offender registries. Studies have even found that more than third of all "sex crimes against children" are committed by juveniles themselves. How are these "children" being protected by the laws put there to protect them?
Nobody advocates for the rape of children in pictures, least of which those like me who merely criticize the efficacy of our child pornography legislation at reducing child rape, but that is often what critics are accused of doing. Questioning efficacy is like siding with the child molesters to some people, so it becomes better not to question it. And while that silence has been an effective "thought-stopping cliche" waged against those who value efficacy over political expediency by those who value the opposite, it has produced little else but the opposite. The prevailing silence on this issue--the "political expediency"--has turned our teenagers into child pornographers and our sexually active youths into "child rapists," not technology, not culture, and not anything else our adult population likes to blame the trend on. It was the broad brush strokes of the law--the politician running for office on simple-minded sentimental sloganeering, the sensationalist tabloid and drama television special--that caused us to pit children against their own nature and then criminalize or at least pathologize them for it.
The real issue of child pornography is not a dichotomy between siding with rapists or with the justice system, as it has often been made the case. It has to do with whether we treat parents who take a picture of their kids in the bath any different than the perverts who keep runaway children in a cage. It has to do with whether we ought to treat people who are visibly brutalizing children on film the same as those who may draw two crude stick figures of different sizes "doing it." In one instance, physical children are being exploited, and in another, a perceived audience for exploitation is being physically apprehended. In one instance, our focus is on stopping the show, in another, it's on apprehending the audience while the show goes on. The questions of strategy get ignored for the purposes of political expediency--so long as it looks like people are being busted, it makes no difference who gets selected for justice and what they have done to deserve it.
All images featuring children "could be" child pornography. That is how we've let them define it for us. "We know it when we see it," the US Supreme Court has declared. So if you have a picture of a child, it can be pornography in the right context. If you have a drawing of a fictional child, it can also be pornography. And until all those who create any images of children have been painted over with the broad brush strokes of "justice," it seems, our reservations will not rest. The definition of child porn has been de-specified so much that the "swift hammer of justice" is being brought down more against simulated CP possession cases, not because they establish some kind of audience for child porn, but because they are the most cost-effective for law enforcement to bring to justice and give the public what they want, which is "more busts."
Agencies involved in busting possessors are automatically granted the title "saviors of children," and yet they don't even have to do the real "dirty work" of breaking up an actual prostitution ring to receive such a distinction, much less rescue the traumatized kids (who can be such a drag on the psyche). Due to this diversion, law enforcement inevitably invests their interests into busting dad for picturing his child in the bath and then tries to sweep the child porn cartels under the rug as "too difficult" to assess or capture--although there are always "small strides" being made. The public is happy with this narrative, and we move right along to the next bust.
So we fret about at best and arrest at worst those who may carry Caravaggio's "Amor Vincit Omnia" on their computer--a painting of a naked boy of antiquity (Cupid), and on the other hand, for the photographer who intentionally caused actual children to cry in an series of shots for an exhibition, leave without a second look. Apparently, seeing the naked Cupid's genitals could be considered a crime where the infliction of emotional distress onto actual children (by giving them favored toys and forcefully taking them away before the camera), is perfectly acceptable. One has to wonder between these two events where the harm was done, and why it is so disproportional as to where where the justice fell. Have we truly become a society where it is acceptable to cause a child emotional distress on film (so long as it is not sexual), but reprehensible to possess a picture of a happy child, as in the case of Carravaggio's Cupid, simply nude?
Caravaggio, by the standards of his time was no child pornographer, but those who would argue it perhaps have missed the intention behind such a striking image and the eternal message that it teaches: "Amor Vincit Omnia," or "Love Conquers All." Those who attempt to clothe Cupid are themselves the ones possessed by his nudity. They make it the primary detail. They are as the Biblical Adam and Eve who have discovered they are naked--whose sin is in simply acknowledging the guilt of their nakedness. It actually takes a less depraved mind to see Amor Vincit Omnia for what it is: "Love Triumphant." Children are beautiful. Child porn is destructive. Children are naturally sexual. Child porn is exploitation. Beware of those who would disguise evil as good, but just as well beware those who look upon what is good and only see evil.
Causing emotional distress, drugging, brutalizing, and otherwise manipulating children to do things on camera against their will should always be the focus of our attention when prosecuting for the crime of child pornography. However, we are unable to do just that, and effectively rescue actual children from exploitation, if we continue our misguided quest to be the most politically expedient by simply apprehending the audience instead.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Let's Be Friends
Warmer weather makes me positive. It awakens my compassion to see people about in the sunshine after so long stranded to the confines of our homes. Human beings were not meant to be held up in the dwelling, the car, the store, but to be out amid one another. When we are bundled and brisking through the cold air, we become so internally focused and brash with others, but when we are able to fully flex ourselves in the warmth, we become more open, friendlier, and less inhibited--which is a truer and happier expression of our nature.
The cold affects our perspectives, we focus on our antagonizers because we are essentially couped up with them and have no refuge in the cold. The warmth affects us in the opposite way, as we begin to focus more on those who deserve our sympathies, respect, and love, because even in the face of our adversary, we're able to find refuge in the warmth of nature and others. We begin to recognize that none are beyond redemption in our own eyes except those who refuse to be.
Some children do not ask for, want, or need our attention, and therefore, we only do them a disservice by trying to hover around them, even if we have the best intentions. By the same token, adults are the same way. It is our duty as human beings existing in a society to make sure we extend the olive branch of peace, love, tolerance, and respect to as many of our fellow beings--men, women, girls, and boys--as will receive it, and live and let live with everyone else.
There are those who do not think a child, no matter how respectful or indignant, ought to be extended this olive branch of fellowship because they do not regard children worthy of receiving it. They'd wish to reserve all best-wishes and civility towards children for those they deem worthy of giving it. These are the people in the park who have let the grip of stranger-danger pervert their good nature, and one can only hope they could eventually be reasoned with. If a child is being disrespectful and they are with a respectful and dignified parent, to refuse to show compassion toward their parent in a friendly hello is to be placing the child's tantrum above the respect for the parent. Everyone generally believes this is true. When not given, it is why parents feel ashamed when they are in public with disorderly children--they naturally fear judgement, and children are no doubt aware of that.
Just as much though, I say that if the parent of a child is unwilling to receive the good tidings and respect of a stranger, and the child is open towards such cordiality, then to deprive the child of the dignity of a friendly hello is to position the disrespect of the parent over the openness of the child. Children are never off-limits to the well-wishes and respect of an honest stranger just because their parent hasn't deemed him worthy to be dignifying their child with a friendly hello. We can all agree that it is only when the stranger aggressively pursues his momentary acquaintances that he has crossed the line of acceptable conduct, but none of that is implied from the friendly hello on its own, so therefore, there is no reason to deny one being given.
I would rather anger a disrespectful parent with a cordial child in tow by choosing to greet them both with a friendly hello as I pass them on the street, then ignore the dignity of one for the bad behavior of the other. There is no harm in a friendly hello. Such a thing when given freely and genuinely, is an expression of human love--the reinforcement that binds our society from collapse.
The cold affects our perspectives, we focus on our antagonizers because we are essentially couped up with them and have no refuge in the cold. The warmth affects us in the opposite way, as we begin to focus more on those who deserve our sympathies, respect, and love, because even in the face of our adversary, we're able to find refuge in the warmth of nature and others. We begin to recognize that none are beyond redemption in our own eyes except those who refuse to be.
Some children do not ask for, want, or need our attention, and therefore, we only do them a disservice by trying to hover around them, even if we have the best intentions. By the same token, adults are the same way. It is our duty as human beings existing in a society to make sure we extend the olive branch of peace, love, tolerance, and respect to as many of our fellow beings--men, women, girls, and boys--as will receive it, and live and let live with everyone else.
There are those who do not think a child, no matter how respectful or indignant, ought to be extended this olive branch of fellowship because they do not regard children worthy of receiving it. They'd wish to reserve all best-wishes and civility towards children for those they deem worthy of giving it. These are the people in the park who have let the grip of stranger-danger pervert their good nature, and one can only hope they could eventually be reasoned with. If a child is being disrespectful and they are with a respectful and dignified parent, to refuse to show compassion toward their parent in a friendly hello is to be placing the child's tantrum above the respect for the parent. Everyone generally believes this is true. When not given, it is why parents feel ashamed when they are in public with disorderly children--they naturally fear judgement, and children are no doubt aware of that.
Just as much though, I say that if the parent of a child is unwilling to receive the good tidings and respect of a stranger, and the child is open towards such cordiality, then to deprive the child of the dignity of a friendly hello is to position the disrespect of the parent over the openness of the child. Children are never off-limits to the well-wishes and respect of an honest stranger just because their parent hasn't deemed him worthy to be dignifying their child with a friendly hello. We can all agree that it is only when the stranger aggressively pursues his momentary acquaintances that he has crossed the line of acceptable conduct, but none of that is implied from the friendly hello on its own, so therefore, there is no reason to deny one being given.
I would rather anger a disrespectful parent with a cordial child in tow by choosing to greet them both with a friendly hello as I pass them on the street, then ignore the dignity of one for the bad behavior of the other. There is no harm in a friendly hello. Such a thing when given freely and genuinely, is an expression of human love--the reinforcement that binds our society from collapse.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Rub Their Noses in It
Child welfare can either be designed to provide for the common good, or for the individual child's good. Rarely can it do both. One might get away with arguing that the very need for a Child Protective Services proves that parents are unable to manage their families one hundred percent of the time without intervention by the state, but who gets to hold the state accountable when a kid is abused in foster care, or aged out of the system? Indeed, some parents are abusive either because of their emotional temperament, their frustration due to lack of experience, or stress due to circumstance, but what is often forgotten is that the same is also true about state care.
The very need for there to be such a thing as a family proves that the invisible "state" is unable to manage its wards one hundred percent of the time without intervention by families. The state needs families to provide the actual parenting. So while everyone is expected to be clamoring toward the state to be the arbiters of good parenting on behalf of inexperienced mothers and fathers--as the common citizen under investigation is expected to bend over backwards to appease what the state has considered to be a breech of parenting duties--the state on its own is the least capable parent of all. It is nothing more than a set of decrees, lawbooks, and assorted professionals disassociated from the child. It can not do the direct work of parenting a child, but it believes itself to be morally and systematically superior to all those who would try.
It would dictate terms that it itself could not follow to the letter. If you dropped a child off at the doorstep of this invisible authority, "the state," do you think those pretty columnated buildings, stacks of forms, and hives of representatives in large varnished courts could even be able to hold the child's spoon, much less teach her right from wrong? Of course not, and for this reason, the state has decided that human beings are necessary to at least do the direct care work for the child on behalf of the state, to be the arms and legs of the state--to be there to hold the spoon and teach right from wrong. And seeing as human beings generally see the value of consistency in a child's development, the state prefers the child's biological parents over just anyone to do the work it can't do. When it determines that the parents are ill-equipped or unable to do this work, it will find what it determines to be suitable replacements--in this day in age, another family.
The state therefore relies on the family to do the essential work of raising children, and families rely on the state to provide their children with education and securities, for instance. One may be tempted to believe this is a holy symbiosis, but is it truly a viable social contract? The state grants itself powers to judge parent and child relationships according to its internal calculus, but what mechanism allows the family to judge the state when it fails to meet its obligations to the children in the realm of education and securities? While parents face court removal of their children when they are deemed incapable, what does the state face when it could be deemed incapable of holding up its end of this so-called social contract?
Do we get revolution when that happens? Do we get people suing the state? Do the people rise up and take their children out of the public school for a year's time while the state is forced to work out its issues and show its constituents mandatory improvements? The rush to place children in private and charter schools may be indicative of what we could term a slow "termination of state custodial right" if the same charge were being leveled at a family. Do non-abusive parents effectively get to assume custody of foster children when the state fails to protect them? Of course not, the state retains its wards even when it fails to be a proper parent to them--and it's the equivalent of allowing abusive parents to retain custody of their children.
Maybe it's in unknowingly ignoring a child who is being abused in their foster home; maybe it's in aging a child out of a foster home without nurturing them into adulthood; or maybe it's in over-medicating a child who acts out because he misses home--however the abuse and neglect manifests itself, the state is able to get away with retaining custody over wards it has failed to adequately parent because it is working under the pretense of the common good. So long as cases of maltreatment within the system are in the minority, the idea of serving the common good is preserved, and therefore, it becomes easier to overlook the individual cases. Serving the interests of the common good does little to suit the needs of individual children, but serving the dignity and needs of individual children is always in the interests of the common good.
To this end, we should incite the charge that one case of maltreatment while a child is in the custody of the state is one case too many. No majority is large enough that we should ignore the injustice served to the minority.
Just as parents though, the state can not be expected to have a clean record when it comes to its own duties over the education and protection of children it has been entrusted with. This is understandable, seeing as it takes adequate care of the majority of its wards, but though understandable, we can't be lulled to sympathy for it. It expresses no sympathy toward parents who fumble the responsibility, even as the majority of them are also capable. What we should expect from the state is accountability and honesty for when it fails in its task of raising children in its custody, just as it expects from families. They may have the power to be dishonest, and paint a rosy image with the broad strokes of "common good," using statistics to show how much good they are doing, but nothing ought to allow them to hide away each and every case where they have been the ones to drop the ball.
Glory only their successes, but hold their feet to the fire for their failures. It's our duty to rub their noses in it.
The very need for there to be such a thing as a family proves that the invisible "state" is unable to manage its wards one hundred percent of the time without intervention by families. The state needs families to provide the actual parenting. So while everyone is expected to be clamoring toward the state to be the arbiters of good parenting on behalf of inexperienced mothers and fathers--as the common citizen under investigation is expected to bend over backwards to appease what the state has considered to be a breech of parenting duties--the state on its own is the least capable parent of all. It is nothing more than a set of decrees, lawbooks, and assorted professionals disassociated from the child. It can not do the direct work of parenting a child, but it believes itself to be morally and systematically superior to all those who would try.
It would dictate terms that it itself could not follow to the letter. If you dropped a child off at the doorstep of this invisible authority, "the state," do you think those pretty columnated buildings, stacks of forms, and hives of representatives in large varnished courts could even be able to hold the child's spoon, much less teach her right from wrong? Of course not, and for this reason, the state has decided that human beings are necessary to at least do the direct care work for the child on behalf of the state, to be the arms and legs of the state--to be there to hold the spoon and teach right from wrong. And seeing as human beings generally see the value of consistency in a child's development, the state prefers the child's biological parents over just anyone to do the work it can't do. When it determines that the parents are ill-equipped or unable to do this work, it will find what it determines to be suitable replacements--in this day in age, another family.
The state therefore relies on the family to do the essential work of raising children, and families rely on the state to provide their children with education and securities, for instance. One may be tempted to believe this is a holy symbiosis, but is it truly a viable social contract? The state grants itself powers to judge parent and child relationships according to its internal calculus, but what mechanism allows the family to judge the state when it fails to meet its obligations to the children in the realm of education and securities? While parents face court removal of their children when they are deemed incapable, what does the state face when it could be deemed incapable of holding up its end of this so-called social contract?
Do we get revolution when that happens? Do we get people suing the state? Do the people rise up and take their children out of the public school for a year's time while the state is forced to work out its issues and show its constituents mandatory improvements? The rush to place children in private and charter schools may be indicative of what we could term a slow "termination of state custodial right" if the same charge were being leveled at a family. Do non-abusive parents effectively get to assume custody of foster children when the state fails to protect them? Of course not, the state retains its wards even when it fails to be a proper parent to them--and it's the equivalent of allowing abusive parents to retain custody of their children.
Maybe it's in unknowingly ignoring a child who is being abused in their foster home; maybe it's in aging a child out of a foster home without nurturing them into adulthood; or maybe it's in over-medicating a child who acts out because he misses home--however the abuse and neglect manifests itself, the state is able to get away with retaining custody over wards it has failed to adequately parent because it is working under the pretense of the common good. So long as cases of maltreatment within the system are in the minority, the idea of serving the common good is preserved, and therefore, it becomes easier to overlook the individual cases. Serving the interests of the common good does little to suit the needs of individual children, but serving the dignity and needs of individual children is always in the interests of the common good.
To this end, we should incite the charge that one case of maltreatment while a child is in the custody of the state is one case too many. No majority is large enough that we should ignore the injustice served to the minority.
Just as parents though, the state can not be expected to have a clean record when it comes to its own duties over the education and protection of children it has been entrusted with. This is understandable, seeing as it takes adequate care of the majority of its wards, but though understandable, we can't be lulled to sympathy for it. It expresses no sympathy toward parents who fumble the responsibility, even as the majority of them are also capable. What we should expect from the state is accountability and honesty for when it fails in its task of raising children in its custody, just as it expects from families. They may have the power to be dishonest, and paint a rosy image with the broad strokes of "common good," using statistics to show how much good they are doing, but nothing ought to allow them to hide away each and every case where they have been the ones to drop the ball.
Glory only their successes, but hold their feet to the fire for their failures. It's our duty to rub their noses in it.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Public School Originality
Any place that forces kids to salute the flag and say the pledge of allegiance every day, to the point where they can be disciplined for simply, peacefully opting out of it, has thrown all aspirations of inspiring original thinking out the window before the day has even kicked off. The message is loud and clear--the only thinking permitted is whatever permutation one can construe out of the boundaries of that spoken contract of allegiance with government, culture, and society. The kind of thinking that comes with questioning the so-called importance of showy oaths over substance is the stuff that detentions are made out of it--insubordination and sedition where the kid ought to be getting a commendation for thinking freely. Public school is a place where these agendas have confused themselves.
And this is just the most clear example of the ways the school is set up to quench truly original thinking in its student body, and in the grand scheme of things, not anywhere near the most severe one. Such distinction belongs to the methods of profiling students for their potential to commit offenses and restricting them in such manner (such as the Mosaic 2000 program), the archaic scheduling of the school day and the curricula, and the school-to-prison pipeline our glorious Zero Tolerance policy has unleashed on its unsuspecting kindergartners (particularly those of ethnic minority in lower income communities). In truth, if compulsory schooling was not already a prison in how it locks an individual into "minor status" for a time long enough to be exploited, now those who don't come out fabricated to think in prearranged terms may find the school also doubles as a prison in it of itself (even with power to issue satellite monitoring devices for the truant student to wear even when off grounds).
In light of all this, let's consider the Pledge of Allegiance in the United States, and how little its supposed "hand on heart" adherents in the first grade really understand what they are "consenting" to. I could say that when I was little, and expected to be giving my consent to bend my will to the authority of the state by taking this daily pledge, I often confused words in it, as any child would. Does my confusion at seven, or the inability to understand the complex characteristics involved in making an "oath" to one's country in such convoluted language make the oath invalid? Of course not, you say, because it's a wholesome and Christian oath for a child to make, even if they don't understand what they are consenting to, besides, what damage could it do? And while that is true, no damage is done by being forced to take this daily oath (besides perhaps the dignity of the child), I can't help but wonder what is gained by doing it.
I as a child took the oath as thus, "I pledge allegiance...to the flag... of the United States of America... and to the republic," (I had no idea what a "republic" was), "for whichitstands," (whatever "whichitstands" was supposed to mean), "one nation," (with no idea that this was part of the same sentence), "under God," (I happened to believe in God, but what if I didn't?), "indavisibal," (once again, another word completely lost on a 1st grader), "with liberty and justice...for all!" (once again, with no idea this is still part of the same highly recursive sentence). Does my inability to understand the consent I was giving in making this oath make it invalid? Once again, no damage done because this is not a legally binding contractual obligation of allegiance the child is unknowingly taking. But if not a legally binding contract, what purpose does it serve to make even the least politically adept toddlers recite it as if they were knowing adherents of it?
And this is just the most clear example of the ways the school is set up to quench truly original thinking in its student body, and in the grand scheme of things, not anywhere near the most severe one. Such distinction belongs to the methods of profiling students for their potential to commit offenses and restricting them in such manner (such as the Mosaic 2000 program), the archaic scheduling of the school day and the curricula, and the school-to-prison pipeline our glorious Zero Tolerance policy has unleashed on its unsuspecting kindergartners (particularly those of ethnic minority in lower income communities). In truth, if compulsory schooling was not already a prison in how it locks an individual into "minor status" for a time long enough to be exploited, now those who don't come out fabricated to think in prearranged terms may find the school also doubles as a prison in it of itself (even with power to issue satellite monitoring devices for the truant student to wear even when off grounds).
In light of all this, let's consider the Pledge of Allegiance in the United States, and how little its supposed "hand on heart" adherents in the first grade really understand what they are "consenting" to. I could say that when I was little, and expected to be giving my consent to bend my will to the authority of the state by taking this daily pledge, I often confused words in it, as any child would. Does my confusion at seven, or the inability to understand the complex characteristics involved in making an "oath" to one's country in such convoluted language make the oath invalid? Of course not, you say, because it's a wholesome and Christian oath for a child to make, even if they don't understand what they are consenting to, besides, what damage could it do? And while that is true, no damage is done by being forced to take this daily oath (besides perhaps the dignity of the child), I can't help but wonder what is gained by doing it.
I as a child took the oath as thus, "I pledge allegiance...to the flag... of the United States of America... and to the republic," (I had no idea what a "republic" was), "for whichitstands," (whatever "whichitstands" was supposed to mean), "one nation," (with no idea that this was part of the same sentence), "under God," (I happened to believe in God, but what if I didn't?), "indavisibal," (once again, another word completely lost on a 1st grader), "with liberty and justice...for all!" (once again, with no idea this is still part of the same highly recursive sentence). Does my inability to understand the consent I was giving in making this oath make it invalid? Once again, no damage done because this is not a legally binding contractual obligation of allegiance the child is unknowingly taking. But if not a legally binding contract, what purpose does it serve to make even the least politically adept toddlers recite it as if they were knowing adherents of it?
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Running with the Egg
For all the fretting that adults do foretelling the demise of human civilization based on the behaviors and interests of children in the present, what good has it done the human race? There's this error in our reasoning that suggests the way a child is today inevitably predicts with straight line accuracy what the child will be like as an adult. If the child is playing video games or preferring their virtual social life to their surroundings, it's seen as if we're destined to have a future where all are strapped in to a virtual existence from which there is no escape and human civilization is once again doomed. Adults may even take pride in the action of stripping a child of their opportunity to engross themselves in the media of the times, thinking that by doing so they are single handedly saving the future of humanity. What self aggrandizing pride is this?
What human beings typically lack is the ability to foresee a future for humanity no different than the present, not better, not worse (as far as these basic grievances are concerned). There's this thinking that if a boy is allowed to play violent video games today, that the society he grows up to participate in will be one that looks the other way on gun crimes (as they had been exposed to so much of it). They do not factor in the humanity of their own children when forecasting the downfall of human decency. They figure "once a mindless drone, always a mindless drone," when their child was never a drone to begin with, but a person capable of reason.
There's a failure to foresee the likeliest of all possible futures, one where the children of today grow up to become adults who will themselves be fretting over something else the children of that time have been exposed to. Despite this trend happening every generation for hundreds of years, adults seem to think this is the generation that finally breaks the cycle and destroys society. Every generation is the end of the line for us, whether it be caused by rock and roll music, video games, rap music, drug use, internet, cell phones, or anything else adults have had trouble understanding.
Let's not fret over what children are involved in today en mass--individual children we can at least talk to--because en mass they simply are not as fragile as adults think they are. In 50 years time, many of the adults alive today will either be dead or elderly, and the world will be a much different place than it is now. The issues and problems of today will either be long resolved, or will cease to be major problems--the preoccupations of today will not last forever. The children will have grown up into similar versions of the adults that came before them, with all the same fretting, perhaps only about different trends.
In 50 years time, the children of today, who have grown up in a totally different world than the previous generation, will inevitably take the trends of today and expand upon them in the future--and no amount of restricting them now is going to stop this from happening. Children change over time, they don't stay children forever. They grow up and become the next wave of adults doing exactly what the previous wave did, only responding to different wind shifts.
Each generation gets its one shot to move the world and society along on the track before handing what it has created off to the next batch of people to do what they please with it. The passage of the earth from one generation to the next is like the old "running with the egg" race, where one player passes an egg balancing on a spoon off to the next player, who then takes it a ways before passing it off to another. The object is to not crack the egg, which for our illustration represents the earth. The thing is, adults do not trust the player they are handing the egg to continue seeing the value of keeping it intact. What happens though is the next generation always does anyways--as they go off to become that society, while the previous generation becomes too old and too dead to really see how their progeny has defied their expectations, time and time again.
So please, be not troubled, because the first one now will later be last, and the last, first. There is no better or worse, no more depravity or social isolation, or whatever our anxiety makes us imagine--there is only progression through time. Children are going to rule the world someday and move it in directions we can only fathom, and they're going to do it regardless of how much fretting is done about how they've been picking their noses today.
What human beings typically lack is the ability to foresee a future for humanity no different than the present, not better, not worse (as far as these basic grievances are concerned). There's this thinking that if a boy is allowed to play violent video games today, that the society he grows up to participate in will be one that looks the other way on gun crimes (as they had been exposed to so much of it). They do not factor in the humanity of their own children when forecasting the downfall of human decency. They figure "once a mindless drone, always a mindless drone," when their child was never a drone to begin with, but a person capable of reason.
There's a failure to foresee the likeliest of all possible futures, one where the children of today grow up to become adults who will themselves be fretting over something else the children of that time have been exposed to. Despite this trend happening every generation for hundreds of years, adults seem to think this is the generation that finally breaks the cycle and destroys society. Every generation is the end of the line for us, whether it be caused by rock and roll music, video games, rap music, drug use, internet, cell phones, or anything else adults have had trouble understanding.
Let's not fret over what children are involved in today en mass--individual children we can at least talk to--because en mass they simply are not as fragile as adults think they are. In 50 years time, many of the adults alive today will either be dead or elderly, and the world will be a much different place than it is now. The issues and problems of today will either be long resolved, or will cease to be major problems--the preoccupations of today will not last forever. The children will have grown up into similar versions of the adults that came before them, with all the same fretting, perhaps only about different trends.
In 50 years time, the children of today, who have grown up in a totally different world than the previous generation, will inevitably take the trends of today and expand upon them in the future--and no amount of restricting them now is going to stop this from happening. Children change over time, they don't stay children forever. They grow up and become the next wave of adults doing exactly what the previous wave did, only responding to different wind shifts.
Each generation gets its one shot to move the world and society along on the track before handing what it has created off to the next batch of people to do what they please with it. The passage of the earth from one generation to the next is like the old "running with the egg" race, where one player passes an egg balancing on a spoon off to the next player, who then takes it a ways before passing it off to another. The object is to not crack the egg, which for our illustration represents the earth. The thing is, adults do not trust the player they are handing the egg to continue seeing the value of keeping it intact. What happens though is the next generation always does anyways--as they go off to become that society, while the previous generation becomes too old and too dead to really see how their progeny has defied their expectations, time and time again.
So please, be not troubled, because the first one now will later be last, and the last, first. There is no better or worse, no more depravity or social isolation, or whatever our anxiety makes us imagine--there is only progression through time. Children are going to rule the world someday and move it in directions we can only fathom, and they're going to do it regardless of how much fretting is done about how they've been picking their noses today.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Tyranny of the Present
Generational taxation is the enslavement of future generations (made up from the children alive now and soon to be), for all their lives, to the problems created by the evil and the powerful today. This is true taxation without representation, because those forced to bare it have not had the chance to be represented yet, indeed, many of them have yet to be born. It is the tyranny of the present over the freedoms of the future. The economic, ecological, and human rights debts of the present will confound and ultimately limit the freedoms of our posterity, and we (as residents of the present) are solely responsible for creating it. And by we, I mean the we that allowed our civilization to run itself on the whims of psychopathic multinational corporations.
These are the types that have brought you up believing that the greatest risk to your children are communists, terrorists, child molesters, kidnappers, immigrants--anyone but them. So allow me to add one more, one that supersedes all others because unlike the others, it can convince you that it means well even after it has set its poison on your kids. What child molester could accomplish the feat a corporation can after the fact?
Who is the one not batting an eyelash at the incidence of E Coli in the food that parents are unknowingly feeding their children? Who is not batting an eyelash after a four-year-old's hemorrhagic diarrhea because serving him a petri dish of "all natural" microorganisms is more profitable than a safe product? Where is any private corporation's moral high ground then to persuade you against all those other so-called 'risks' to your children? Those I've endeavored to label as antichrists. If they could spray DDT on your children 50 years ago and sell you on it under the name of protection, what makes you think their modern corporate progeny isn't capable of doing the same thing again, just with different chemicals? For the modern equivalent, look no further than the rBGH milk you give to children in their morning bowl of Kix--you'll find Agent Orange producer Monsanto has been sticking their fingers down every glass.
The tyranny of the present means marketers preying on the developmental vulnerability of children like child molesters--the only difference between the two is that the likelihood of a child molester reaching "your" child is phenomenally slim compared to the bombarding certainty of advertising. This is how such a thing as the "nag" factor, where children are expected to nag parents for products they've seen in advertising, is a 12 billion dollar a year industry. The tyranny of the present on the freedoms the future means created wants formed by manufactured consent. Just as a child rapist may manufacture this idea that the victim needed and enjoyed the rape, the child marketer wants to bleed children of this same notion of manufactured consent based around a want they had to instill in the child to begin with. Doesn't this sound familiar? And to think they worked so hard convincing you that the enemy was elsewhere.
These are the ones who never want to talk about what they do unless they can open their mouths with the words "We here at...". Unless they can sell you on their "humanity" just as they sold you on harmful drugs for your toddler, they don't have anything to say. If it can't be prompted, then they decline to comment. Prompted speech is the reflex of a prompted mind. These are entities with an inability to admit guilt to anything ever, or even romanticize the notion that their activities are responsible for the destruction of earth, humanity, and society. They are either in denial, are wracked with guilt, or are psychopaths. If the later, it goes far to explain the corporate entity's complete disdain, disrespect, and inhuman treatment of the lives and dignity of human beings.
Only a psychopath could will such complete control over human beings and glorify it to the extent that corporate interests do. Since the corporations fought to get the representation as individuals and all the rights and benefits thereof, we ought to think of them as such, and see them for the kind of individuals they are (formless, immortal, and unburdened by remorse): certifiable psychopaths. This is why big business is the source of all that is destroying the world. They take no responsibility because they are incapable of feeling responsible. This is the mark of an antichrist.
One letter switch separates "veil" for "evil," and for good reason, as everything that is veiled behind the propaganda machine that is advertisement, is undoubtedly evil. This is not to say that it is an unnecessary evil, for evil makes the world go round, evil puts meals in children's stomachs--but evil is still evil even if it causes one tenth of one percent of good. These corporate persons with which we have increasingly been entrusting the welfare of our children to, are not just soulless and profit-motivated, they are evil. Their shareholders and organizers rise from bed every morning, kiss their children on the forehead, and go off into the world to do evil work--necessary work some could argue, but still evil work (whoever said only good work was necessary?). The work they do ensures one more day of the enslavement of their grandchildren to the unintended consequences of how they are making their living today.
Someone has to pick up the tab for it, and one generation becomes enslaved to the debts of the last--monetarily, socially, ecologically, and spiritually. That is what I call generational taxation, and it is an antichrist.
"Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to a nice person. It means you take a private institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny." -Noam Chomsky, in "The Corporation"
These are the types that have brought you up believing that the greatest risk to your children are communists, terrorists, child molesters, kidnappers, immigrants--anyone but them. So allow me to add one more, one that supersedes all others because unlike the others, it can convince you that it means well even after it has set its poison on your kids. What child molester could accomplish the feat a corporation can after the fact?
Who is the one not batting an eyelash at the incidence of E Coli in the food that parents are unknowingly feeding their children? Who is not batting an eyelash after a four-year-old's hemorrhagic diarrhea because serving him a petri dish of "all natural" microorganisms is more profitable than a safe product? Where is any private corporation's moral high ground then to persuade you against all those other so-called 'risks' to your children? Those I've endeavored to label as antichrists. If they could spray DDT on your children 50 years ago and sell you on it under the name of protection, what makes you think their modern corporate progeny isn't capable of doing the same thing again, just with different chemicals? For the modern equivalent, look no further than the rBGH milk you give to children in their morning bowl of Kix--you'll find Agent Orange producer Monsanto has been sticking their fingers down every glass.
The tyranny of the present means marketers preying on the developmental vulnerability of children like child molesters--the only difference between the two is that the likelihood of a child molester reaching "your" child is phenomenally slim compared to the bombarding certainty of advertising. This is how such a thing as the "nag" factor, where children are expected to nag parents for products they've seen in advertising, is a 12 billion dollar a year industry. The tyranny of the present on the freedoms the future means created wants formed by manufactured consent. Just as a child rapist may manufacture this idea that the victim needed and enjoyed the rape, the child marketer wants to bleed children of this same notion of manufactured consent based around a want they had to instill in the child to begin with. Doesn't this sound familiar? And to think they worked so hard convincing you that the enemy was elsewhere.
These are the ones who never want to talk about what they do unless they can open their mouths with the words "We here at...". Unless they can sell you on their "humanity" just as they sold you on harmful drugs for your toddler, they don't have anything to say. If it can't be prompted, then they decline to comment. Prompted speech is the reflex of a prompted mind. These are entities with an inability to admit guilt to anything ever, or even romanticize the notion that their activities are responsible for the destruction of earth, humanity, and society. They are either in denial, are wracked with guilt, or are psychopaths. If the later, it goes far to explain the corporate entity's complete disdain, disrespect, and inhuman treatment of the lives and dignity of human beings.
Only a psychopath could will such complete control over human beings and glorify it to the extent that corporate interests do. Since the corporations fought to get the representation as individuals and all the rights and benefits thereof, we ought to think of them as such, and see them for the kind of individuals they are (formless, immortal, and unburdened by remorse): certifiable psychopaths. This is why big business is the source of all that is destroying the world. They take no responsibility because they are incapable of feeling responsible. This is the mark of an antichrist.
One letter switch separates "veil" for "evil," and for good reason, as everything that is veiled behind the propaganda machine that is advertisement, is undoubtedly evil. This is not to say that it is an unnecessary evil, for evil makes the world go round, evil puts meals in children's stomachs--but evil is still evil even if it causes one tenth of one percent of good. These corporate persons with which we have increasingly been entrusting the welfare of our children to, are not just soulless and profit-motivated, they are evil. Their shareholders and organizers rise from bed every morning, kiss their children on the forehead, and go off into the world to do evil work--necessary work some could argue, but still evil work (whoever said only good work was necessary?). The work they do ensures one more day of the enslavement of their grandchildren to the unintended consequences of how they are making their living today.
Someone has to pick up the tab for it, and one generation becomes enslaved to the debts of the last--monetarily, socially, ecologically, and spiritually. That is what I call generational taxation, and it is an antichrist.
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