It Gets Better

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

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

-Phil Ochs 

"The Ballad of Medgar Evers"

Unworthy Victims

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trauma by the CPS

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

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

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

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

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

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

Burn the Witch

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

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

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

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

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

Asking Questions

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

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

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

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

Two words: Lev Vygotsky.

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

Age-Limit Mysticism

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

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

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

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

--Henry David Thoreau

Not Special Unless Special

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

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

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

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

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

The Kids are Alright

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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