Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Love and Instinct

Are children capable of experiencing romantic love--the voluntary appreciation of someone's existence rather than simply the biologically required deference to caretakers? Most would agree they do, whether superficially in the form of a crush or instinctually as they are required, in the form of the "parent and child bond." The implication is that because the parental bond is accelerated to such high and holy heights, all other romantic inclinations the child may experience must be superficial and ultimately meaningless, even if most believe kids are entitled to their "meaningless and superficial" love interests. The children who are the ones feeling the feelings, understandably, see it differently. What adults declare superficial may be entirely meaningful to children, whether it is expressed toward peers, or more controversially, toward other adults. By this relative standard, we'll assume they do feel genuine romantic love, and determine why their parents are not the typical recipients of it.

It almost becomes superficial to speak of the parent and child bond and shower all the typical high and holy platitudes it absorbs, seeing as it's naturally expected from birth and required in life. It could be likened to any biological attribute children are either born possessing or not, such as hearing, movement, or sight. For those born without sight, we mourn their loss and develop their other abilities to prepare them for life in the world. In much the same way, we mourn the loss and deprivation of a child's connection to his or her birth parents or their separation from that instinctual, biologically required love, and help find suitable replacements. However, unlike the acquisition of sight when a child is born possessing it (which is expected), we actually celebrate and sanctify instinctual parent-to-child "hallowed co-relation" when it is born intact, despite it being simply what it is--a biological bond of necessity developed in most mammals by evolution.

Indeed, contact comfort studies by Harlow showed that parental nurturing and touch is a biological necessity as important as food intake to developing primates, with the conclusion that humans aren't so different, so parental love's biological roots are well established, but this is not what we mean when we think of "romantic love." In romantic love, one is not typically dependent on the other for basic survival purposes (and if they are, it's because they were already previously drawn together by romantic love rather than just biological assignment).This is not meant though to undermine the significance of the parent/child relationship, just to say that it is a relationship required by evolutionary circumstance, and not voluntary romantic love.

It is not so clear in the case of adoptive or custodial parents, and other adult family members. This is because the love between a custodial or adoptive parent is socially required, even if not biologically expected. When the adoptive parent and child relationship turns sour, we don't mourn it as much as we would had the relationship been tied together by birth. If anything, we mourn the breakdown of that relationship as a last lingering pent up sorrow over the greater loss of the original birth parents. This all makes it seem likely that a child who is dependent on a custodial or adoptive parent for basic survival, has less of a biological expectation of love for their caretakers, which makes their fondness for their caretakers when it happens more of a voluntary act, to a certain extent--which makes it closer to true romantic love, which is voluntary.

The less of a biological expectation there is for a child to love someone, the more voluntary their associations become, and therefore, the more genuine, but also, the less they are regarded by society as such. This deceleration of our perception is greater magnified where a child's romantic (voluntary) love is at its highest and most genuine (when the child finds him or herself in love with a benevolent friend for which there is no biological or social requirement lending justification to their feelings). So once again, the simplest form of love, that which is instinctual, is celebrated to such high and holy heights when children are concerned, while their more genuine and voluntary form of love for relative strangers, when it happens, is passed off as superficial and meaningless.

But perhaps I should explain my intentions better. There is a difference between instinctual love (the parent/child bond), and romantic love (the voluntary relationship), and I've used the word 'genuine' to describe that difference--"romantic love is more genuine than instinctual love." What I mean by "genuine" is not that romantic love is necessarily more "felt" than instinctual, just that it is not demanded of the child, and is entered into entirely voluntarily rather than by obligation. It is typically understood that unions entered into voluntarily carry more significance than unions where partners are set up by circumstance.

It is meant as a definitional descriptor rather than a measure of feeling, because, in all fairness, instinctual love is longer lasting and more unconditional, and romantic love is often fleeting or beset by conditions. Instinctual love, when conditional or fleeting, is mourned as the terrible loss that it is (a birth parent's love for their child shouldn't be non-existent or conditional). On the other hand, we may feel sad when romantic love expresses itself as conditional or fleeting, and certainly the child does, but not to the extent we would for the loss of a child's instinctual love bond. We may even feel such losses "come with the territory" in romantic love--that love entered into voluntarily incurs such risks by its nature. Meanwhile, love entered into by birth, as it is thought, should never come to that.

Ideally, romantic love enriches life though, which was nurtured and developed by the instinctual love of a parent figure, and even acts as an extension or manifestation of the biological parent/child bond. To deny children this ability to form intimate relationships with benevolent friends, both peers and adults--and to enter into romantic love relationships mutually beneficially expressed and voluntary by nature--is to deprive them the ability to take their circumstances, the instinctual love that has nurtured them, and extend it outward towards others of their choosing early on in life. It's the denial of an enriching experience, particularly if the child is limited to school or the cover of dark to express it. For the child's safety and the health of the experience, it's better that a child's romantic life does not feel threatened or alienated in the context of their own home, and that parents opt to exercise their judgment rather than just ban such expressions outright.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Bleeding [F]earts

Don't like an adult's opinion on young people? Wait twenty minutes, it will change.  

Don't trust anyone over 30 (because they can't make up their minds), but don't trust anyone under 30 either (because they can).

Sunday, May 29, 2011

Right to Life

Either you believe in the rights of the unborn child, and deny the rights of the woman, or you believe in the rights of the woman and deny the rights of the unborn. There is no way to remain guiltless, regardless of what stance you take. You can believe that a fetus is not a human being, but believing it does not make it so, no matter how effective it is at absolving your guilt. If you believe that, then you're tasked with explaining the science behind what quality of the air causes a fetus to become human once outside the womb. Likewise, you can believe outlawing abortion will prevent abortion, but once again, simply believing it doesn't make it true. Studies indicate that restrictive abortion laws don't reduce abortion rates.

Some seem to choose in favor of the unborn child's health and safety, and right to life, and some seem to choose in favor of the woman's right to make decisions over her reproductive system, as well as her own health and right to life when it is critically jeopardized by pregnancy. Each side makes a choice, and each side chooses to ignore different sets of consequences in furtherance of their beliefs.

Abortion is a natural act--animals do it to purge children they can not support--but that doesn't make it condonable by default. Many things are observed in the natural world that are an affront to our intuitions. Just because it is natural, and because it may be necessary under certain circumstances, it is still no less destructive to a human life. It may save the life of the mother, but that doesn't mean it ought to be given an ethical pass--if anything, the outcome of that scenario ought to be morally neutral (one life ended, one life saved). There is simply no justification to regard abortion, even in the most necessary cases, as anything other than a necessary evil.

We have to stand at this junction and make a choice as to whose rights we respect and value and whose rights we must trample, and then live with the consequences of that choice--if we are allowed to.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

In Love with a Child

We expect and demand of love eternal loyalty to one person, a binding social contract, something so definite, absolute, and flimsy, it's a wonder how anyone is successful at upholding its universal ideal. One man is supposed to devote all his love to one woman every day of his life, and she him, and their legal and social bond is supposed to even outlast time itself once the oath is given in marriage. Yet it can and is so easily all torn asunder the moment either one spreads their love to those outside the dyad. We only expect love to be shared among the human race in pairs, it seems, with eternal bonds of matrimony, and then forget to share the common two-minute kindness needed from us by everyone, every day, which requires no binding legal contract to make it legitimate. We trade real love for showy love.

This is to say that the western world upholds on the most high the hardest and most impossible form of love to maintain, and systematically ignores at best and abhors at worst its simplest and most common expressions. Grand spectacles of symbolic matrimony are performed at great cost to announce a man and woman's love for one another, no matter how genuine it is, but the one simple act of kindness on the street toward one's fellow man, woman, or child, goes unnoticed. And sometimes, particularly when it is extended toward children, it may even be fundamentally shamed.

What civilization loves instead is pomp and circumstance over genuine affection, costly displays of idealized romance over genuine devotion, and contractual obligation over personal loyalty. What civilization loves is the essence of the thing called love, all the fairy tale parts, without having the stomach for the whole fruit. If genuine love was the thing being valued in all this ceremony, then we wouldn't need to limit its expression to pairs of one man and one woman. If true love was the thing being valued, all genuine expressions of it shared between human beings would be celebrated equally. It wouldn't matter if the target of one's affections are men, women, boys, or girls. It wouldn't be so controversial for a man to admit to being in love with another man, or with a child, any more than it currently is if he is in love with a woman.

The question of sexuality in regards to the appropriateness of one's love interests is moot. Sexuality is a biological and social assignment, but even if was a choice, it would still be moot. Sex and love are two, often mutually exclusive, things--there can exist sex without love and love without sex, as John Lennon put it. If the object of your affections is a male human, and you're a male human, there is no reason why you can not be heterosexual at the same time. Likewise, if the object of your affections is a child, and you are an adult, there is no reason why you can not be a teleiophile, and be sexually attracted to other adults. The same formulations can be made for any combination of sexuality and love interest, so long as the affections are genuine. There is no reason then to assume that one's sexuality is determined by the characteristics of whom one chooses to love. Sometimes it is the case, but not all the time.

The act of being in love with a child is given such a negative connotation though in spite of this--even just expressing kindness and affection toward children will bring the word "pedophile" down upon you--as if expressing kindness and affection are to be reserved strictly for adults because children are unworthy of these niceties. Children are not deemed worthy of an adult's love, unless it is also bestowed with such honorific titles of circumstance like "mother's love" and (to a lesser extent these post-feminist days) "father's love." All others who may express or feel genuine love are treated to a private property sign or even mistakenly thought to be pedophiles. This is an arbitrary fence.

Kindness may be ignored and shamed among adults, and romantic love given such high and lofty worship, but the exact opposite is true for what is expected of children. In the same way that adult friends are to withhold their love for the child, so too is the child expected to withhold love for their benevolent friends, mentors, and non-parent associations. Children are taught that they may only express love in the form of deference to some official authority, unless that authority encourages otherwise, and this is more or less seen as a kindness. They are not even expected to express genuine love for anyone of any age for which there is not some biological necessity being fulfilled, but only platitudes of kindness--only what is expected from those "pure, perfect, angelic, little darlings." Adults view the close in age love relationship between two children or teens as they do the adult/child relationship--as threatening to the more hallowed "mother's love" or "father's love," and so they work to suppress it should it blossom beyond a mere crush.

It is true though that what we expect from children is different from love or affection, simply because kindness has its differences from love. Kindness describes a momentary act that is done for someone else's benefit, and this we teach children to strive for. Love describes an on-going appreciation of someone else's existence, similar to being a fan, or a follower. It may or may not drive someone to be kind toward the target individual, and that uncertainty is unbecoming of children. Just as sex and love are not always causally linked, love and kindness may not always be causally linked. As the old expression goes, "you only hurt the ones you love." Therefore, it is possible that the minute expression of love we expect from children and not from adults is indeed a purer form of love after all, as the nature of the romantic so-called "adult love" of celebrated matrimony often proves so fickle.

If that is the case, then why does the adult get the suspicious glare after the fact when he reciprocates a child's kindness? It is but an example of how love expression is indeed shackled to arbitrary social acceptability rather than genuine feeling. I suppose that's nothing we didn't already know.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Kids and Sexual Suggestion

It's not so much a problem that children are exposed to sex early, it's the way they are exposed to it. People seem to prefer exposing sex to kids coyly and comically on a regular, daily basis, rather than honestly and factually in small doses. Society is still hung up about sex, and so (after decades of declining standards over the acceptability of its suggestion) has been going to great lengths to throw sex into everything "suggestively," failing to find suitable any honest and accurate depictions of sex acceptable for viewing by children.

So if we have to be concerned about anything (and I don't think we do anyways), it would be that kids are getting the wrong idea of what sex is, and the real implications of it. A child can watch a commercial where a bikini woman opens a beer bottle with her "parts" while serving it to a leering man, and it is completely acceptable, but it is thought that if that same child saw even just the image of a vagina, or a penis, he or she is going to be traumatized for life. Neither is traumatizing. To view one as more hazardous than the other is mere superstition, and just an indication of how backwards a child's everyday reality is in the 21st century.

Expose them to sex early, sure. Expose a child to sex suggestively, sure, but counter it with exposing them to sex as an uncensored reality as well. If we leave it up to parents to pick the time when their children are "ready" to see an accurate portrayal of sex, the kids have already had 15 or so years of seeing sex as a series of untruthful, amoral, absurd, sexist, and exploitative imagery, and will likely have a misunderstanding about the word. It will all have to be unraveled and untangled before any discussion about sex as a real thing with real implications can be presented.

All the parental controls in the world are not going to stop the abundance of media from seeping into a child's everyday life, so it's best to just confront the issue early on as an inevitability. Show and tell them the honest truth about sex the way one would if asked any other question concerning human biology, and move on--tailoring the lesson to their developmental comprehension. Censorship of reality doesn't work, all it does is turn the illusion into reality.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The Natural Mystic

There's a natural mystic blowing through the air. It's telling me that there's going to be more oppression, more restriction, more isolation. It's informing me of a law in Maine where it is illegal for adults to "look at children" in public places, and saying that there is no way one could misinterpret language that precise. For sure, adults will just have to avert their eyes, including parents, when children are out in public, or risk a felony charge. Don't ask me how I can discern the sign of the times--the natural mystic is floating somewhere in the reddening sky.

Enforcement of such a law is questionable, but its existence paves a way for a society that is founded on distrust, for there is no practical application of this law (no rational person would seek charges against someone simply "looking" at children). It exists so that it may feed into irrational people's anxieties, so only irrational and anxious people will make use of it, and otherwise good people will suffer because of it.

It may be intended to save children from "visual aggression," but it will be cited only by those who are blinded by fear. They'll see a strange man "leering" where a father is merely supervising his kids. They'll fear for the kids and want to call down justice on the man even just for putting such disturbing thoughts in their heads. The real crime is simply infringing on the comfortable sanctity of a weak mind when you commit the act of normal behavior. When we empower the irrational, we should expect them to utilize their newfound power to condemn all that is good and neighborly in the world.

Unfortunately, nothing could be more harmful to our children than inheriting a paranoid world where nobody so much as talks, or in this case "looks," at one another for fear of a weak mind's accusations. Naturally, that is the last thing the paranoid are concerned with. Where there is a wedge drawn between children and adults and all people are isolated, the paranoid are satisfied. Where there is unity, and kindness, and understanding, they are terrified. Where people gather and enjoy themselves in the park with their children, the paranoid are terrified. Where people are locked away and held up in their private homes for fear of shadows, the paranoid are comforted.

So the natural mystic is telling me we will see a day when the punishments we reserve for sex offenders are given out to all members of society equally, the young and old alike. It's telling me that we will do nothing to stop its approach, for we will be demanding it with the continuous outcry of "protect the children." With that demand, we'll see atrocity, we'll see the erosion of human rights. We'll mistake the demon of fear spreading its wings for an angel of mercy.

The mark of an antichrist is emblazoned with the words "visual aggression of children." Don't ask me how I know, a little bird told me not to worry because everything is going to be alright (in the end).

Monday, May 9, 2011

What Is So Hard?

What is so hard about deposing sexism? Why can't we come to a point where men are given the same say and rights and privileges with children as women? Why can't we congratulate the men who bend over backwards for their children, who spend time with them, read to them, help them with their homework, and play catch with them, with the same unconditional devotion we reserve for "moms?" Why can't single fathers get so much as an acknowledgement rather than a lecture on statistics? What is so hard about that?

What is so hard about ending this generational program to make our sons pay the price for the sexism of their great-grandfathers? If it is justifiable that we devalue boys today as retribution for the patriarchy of yesterday, does that mean it will be justifiable to devalue the girls of the future as retribution for this current strain of sexism? Why must we ridicule those hungering for sexual equality for being whiny, petty, or egotistical, only so long as they are male? Can we not accept the sexism of the past for what it was without trying to "make up for it" by turning one against the other in the present?

Why must we let a few bad men dictate how we see all men? Why must our children go devoid of positive male role models because we fear the child molesters in our heads? Doesn't that make as much sense as never going in the water for fear of a shark attack when so few happen to begin with? If statistical outliers like single dads cause us to withhold our sympathy for them, why must other statistical outliers like child molesters cause us to assume so much derision? Is sympathy a harder emotion to feel than derision? What is so hard with praising the men who deserve praise instead of only demonizing those who do wrong? 

Why can't we just treat our sons and daughters and mothers and fathers (single or coupled), as if their biological sex was not a determinant of whether they deserve praise or derision? Why can't we just treat everyone doing well by children with respect and dignity without regard to sex, race, age, or any other permanent or impermanent characteristic? What is so hard about that? 

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Saving Isn't Helping

There's going to be a cultural war between the members of the millennial generation --between those who are rational and skeptical, and those who are influenced by the visceral and sensational. This is to say, it will be waged between those who accept reality and the unshakable flaws and powers of human nature, and those who want to save the world with uncompromising ideology. And how can someone like myself know this outcome with such certainty? It is probably because there is nothing new about it.

There will always be those who want to save the world and those who want to help the world. Those who have endeavored to save the world have failed, and those who have worked to help it, have succeeded only so long as they are permitted to do so by those who are trying to save it. Helping is a selfless act to assist another when it is needed and asked for, whereas saving is a selfish act meant to make one appear like a savior when the assistance is neither required or asked for. Those who help try to accept the failures of human nature and persevere in spite of them. Those who play savior try to eliminate the failings of human nature so that they may supersede it with an ideal. There is nothing new about cult behavior though. We must be weary of it, but not fearful of it or destructive towards it. Ideology seeks out enemies to destroy, and creates new ones by doing so. Rationality speaks truth to power, and finds friends with all those who seek justice without destruction.

The same is true for how we respond to our children. There are those who want to help children and those who want to save the children. Those who help children are able to see their fallible human nature, and find ways to work around it with them. Those who want to save children either want to pretend that children are infallible (Indigo children), or try to eliminate the fallible qualities of a child's human nature completely so that they may match with the cultural standards of children as infallible. The mechanism by which the adult saves children appears to be by subverting their humanity, whereby the mechanism the adult helps children is through recognizing and empowering it (by overcoming faults). What is true for how we raise children, is true for society.

Human nature has a variety of expression, but it is a finite expression that is then malleable by culture and economics. Anyone who attempts to posit that it is entirely a creation of culture and circumstance (the Marxists), or posits that it is entirely innate, is preceding from false assumptions. Anyone who thinks they can invent some ideology to "wake the world up" from its sleepwalk into doomsday by convincing the people that their governments and corporations have created human nature in its entirety, is selling a contradiction. On the one hand, they say human nature is being exploited in order to propagate an ideology, and on the other, that human nature is a mere creation and doesn't exist naturally. How can human beings be as we picture children--mindless drones one minute when in the hands of the group the onlooker despises, and the next, intentional beings once fallen under the spell of that onlooker? The onlooker exploits their human nature by telling them their nature is a creation.

There has become such a thing as an anti-ideology ideology. It proposes that people are becoming sedated by the ideologies they absorb on a daily basis in their information-rich contexts--leaving out of course that the "ideology of ideological sedation" is itself part of that information bombardment. So we have people panicked over how children will grow up with impairments due to exposure to certain ideologies, not realizing that restricting them from ideology is itself an ideology that they are inadvertently exposing their children to. This is not to say that we ought to be anxious that anti-ideologies are still ideologies, falling prey to an endless loop of paranoia about the effects of anti-ideology ideologies--if that is confusing, good, because it's irrational. Instead, what is meant by this is simply that we ought to accept that reality, accept that things we may not like exist and will always exist, and then do our best to recognize them and step around them when we see them.

Children are human beings, they are not lifelong slaves to the ideology they heard when they were three years old. They can break out of the system if we work with them to teach them about the system. They can not break free if we shut them off to that critical information or neglect to teach it in fear that they will "fall prey to it." There is no reason to concern ourselves so much with what is going into them, because when we do that we fail to attend to what is coming out. When we focus our attention on covering their ears so that information we don't like can't seep in, we forget to listen to what is coming out of their mouths. When we spend our time blocking their eyes so that they can't see something, we blind ourselves to what is coming out in their physical movements. For every inch we think we gain on their ability to understand the world, we give up our understanding of them.

Now this should not be a worrisome trend, seeing as what will happen will happen--intervention only stops what we imagine from happening, it doesn't stop what we can't imagine. In all likelihood, what we can't imagine is what is probably going to happen. We have no control over outcomes, just the social devices we choose to get there. Discussion and education is what informs a human being's choices, and a child's outcomes, not mere exposure to certain ideas. What is true for children is true for society.