The Child In Distress

Parents and professionals who continue to fall prey to cheap tabloid journalism have learned nothing from the childhood tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." In the "child in distress" narrative perpetuated in our culture, children are constantly prey to whatever new scary apparition appears on the horizon, and everything must be sacrificed to keep them safe from the next "flying inevitable". One can scarcely go through ten minutes of media without being bombarded by a child in distress. This repetitive narrative of the child in distress, however, only drives the same psychological niche for adults as the "damsel in distress" once did for the chauvenist culture, and is just as flimsy a vehicle.

Being concerned about the actual hazards a child may immediately encounter is crucial to human survival, but we seem to think being afraid of the foretold but non-existent "wolves in the fold" has something to do with it as well. It doesn't. It's a justification we created for ourselves. In general, those who are in their own minds powerful like to perpetuate fantasies of their own usefulness, stemming from arrogance. It doesn't matter who that powerful source is or whether that usefulness is needed, natural, or man-made. For adults, that fantasy manifests itself when we make ourselves feel useful for slaying the demons in our own heads out to possess our children (which probably don't pose any immediate threat to justify such a reaction), regardless of whether such a crusade is actually useful. 

It is hardly a revelation, as Nietzsche and Rousseau described the arrogant fantasy of the powerful in terms of social class in the 19th century, and Mill and Wollstonecraft in terms of indefensible sexism in the 19th and 18th century respectively. But I equivocate it now toward all adults who still maintain this ideology of superiority over all age groups below them despite hundreds of years of evolution on the "dignity of difference" between class, race, and sex. Why the feminists in particular ignored the similarity between the "child" and "damsel" "distress narratives" when they hurled criticism at the old self-serving male fantasy only speaks volumes about the limits of feminist critique. After all, women are adults too, and are served by the repetition of the "child in distress" narrative just as much as men are, if not more.

Instead, the myth of some "age determinism" of superiority and inferiority continues without reproach, with the justification that children ought to aspire to the adult example and adults ought to aspire to the child's. It is just assumed, by adults first and then by children, that this is a beneficial co-dependence between the age groups and that it is necessary, but it is neither. It's not instinct. It's in fact a self-serving ideology on behalf of those who created it--the powerful, the adults. It is created out of adult-centric culture. 

It's easy to see how superiority theories like this breed only inter-group contempt. While aspiring to the adult example as they are expected, children are taught to despise their childish nature, and while aspiring to the child's "innocence" as they are expected, adults are taught to despise their "adultish" nature. Neither is expected to appreciate who and what they are at either end of the developmental timeline, and they take their induced self-loathing out on the other group, be them perceived as superior or inferior. Sentimental sloganeering is constantly depicting children as "wide eyed" and "innocent," and proposing that if only adults could be like that, all our world dilemmas could be solved. While this is hardly convincing, it is pervasive, because adults and children alike will naturally seek out the positive traits of the other for their own sake, and condemn the negative traits of their opponent for their opponent's sake.

So I don't like to ever say one group is better than another group, because typically the group that assumes it is better is only better because it alone set the standard by which "betterness" is tested. Adults have always been powerful. They've always set the standards by which betterness is tested, so by their might alone, they are superior. And what have they done with their power? They've declared that only they are capable of using the power they've granted to themselves, and they remind themselves of this by reproducing the child in distress narrative.

But does not assuming that children are capable threaten to become an even worse imposition on children than assuming that they are incapable? After all, children and adults are different, you say, and wouldn't imposing the adult world onto children be just as bad as imposing the will of adults over them onto them? That kind of thinking, while overtly condemning ageist imposition, further establishes systemic ageist inequality. It is like dropping a weight down on one of two otherwise "conceptually" equal scales. To justify legitimate differences, the two must be given two different narratives? That only works when you can be sure you're not inadvertently disenfranchising one's differences and advantaging the other's in your distress narrative. 

Educator John Holt, in Escape From Childhood, wrote on how the assumption of capability in children only opens the doors for those who can, and does nothing to impose on those who can't or won't, so long as the initiative is voluntarily entered into. Right now, children are automatically involuntarily entered into the narrative as pawns in the adult's innocence game, and are thus stripped of their dignity as women once were, and rendered involuntarily defenseless despite their abilities. What in the chauvinist narrative, as it existed, advantaged a woman's dignity? And if you can't answer, ask yourself, what in the adult narrative of the "child in distress," as it exists now, advantages children? The answer is nothing at worse, or a negligible advantage at best, as perhaps one could argue that the "child in distress" narrative "motivates" adults to care about children. But the assumption of their inability affects every child through repression by its involuntary imposition still, while the assumption of a child's potential only affects those who rise to the occasion through voluntary inclusion, and in doing such, is not repression.

Because the adult narrative often disenfranchises youth and solely advantages adults (as it exists for their benefit), it shouldn't be tolerated as the sole paradigm. The narrative should only be justified when the inequalities between the age groups, or gender groups, or race groups, don't "consistently" manifest themselves along traditional power differentials. If the child is "always" the disenfranchised one, the meek one, the one being saved, when positioned in the distress narrative, and the adult is always the one in control, always the one doing the saving, then it is unjust inequality being represented. Likewise it would also would be unjust inequality if, all things being equal, it was assumed that only black children did poorly in school and had to be rescued by whites, or if it was assumed that only women become jeopardized and need to be rescued by men.

Unjust inequality is the imbalance between groups that exists due to human assumption rather than natural occurrence. It is one thing for natural inequalities to present themselves--for a black child to do poorly, for a girl to do poorly, or for a child to be controlled by an adult--but if any of those are the only paradigm ever shown, then one group is being unfairly advantaged while another group is being disenfranchised consistently. Individual variation is a good measure of natural inequality. If individuals vary from person to person, then all are equally being served and all are varying in their response. If a whole swath of people aren't being served to begin with, then there is no variation, just one group advantaging while another group is disenfranchised. That is not an acceptable "difference."

But adults have more self control, you say, and better cognitive skills, and superior strength. Should not adults take the initiative to rescue the weaklings? Of course they should, but only because it is intuitive that those who are strong look out for and protect those who are weak, and not simply because they are adults. If a child or young person happens to be strong and capable enough to take the initiative, why deny them only for not being old enough? To continue to misrepresent strong and capable young people as meek and defenseless only implies that one favors infantilizing them, and all the repercussions that causes, over empowering them, and all the benefits of that.

After all, it's not about believing one group is better than another group, it's about recognizing the differences between the two and affording them respective to their individual ability. The weakness of the adult narrative is that it ignores the possibility that capability is a human trait that everyone possesses to some degree, and instead tries to claim "capability" as its own entirely, and therefore the term "humanity" as well. There is nothing wrong with an adult taking initiative for a child in distress, so long as we recognize that there's also nothing wrong with a child taking responsibility for another child in distress, or an adult in distress, if they are capable of doing so, and we should depict all scenarios accordingly.

The question becomes whether or not children benefit from the adult narrative of "the child in distress," or if they are just the recipients of neutral, natural circumstances. Perhaps adults are inspired in some way from the repetition of the narrative to nurture their children, but even still, this isn't a satisfactory motivation. The best display of the adult's weakness is their need to justify their position of unquestionable authority (their so-called "maturity") by fantasizing about distressed and endangered children. If adults were truly matured, they would feel the requirement and responsibility to nurture the young the young people's sake, without having to resort to storytelling cliches that serve only their personal sense of pride, and ego.

Hating Kids is Child Molestation

Think about it. Sexual molestation is an unspeakable evil, and society agrees. They take the obviously unquestionable moral tautology of detesting child sexual abuse, and then feel it justifiable that anything but outright detestation of kids is "unacceptable" on the grounds that "wanting nothing to do with them" reduces the likelihood of their abuse, or something. This means that it's actually preferable now for a man (in particular) to hate kids than to show them any compassion whatsoever, professional or otherwise, related or not, on the grounds that any compassion coming from a man to a child is a sign of inevitable sexual abuse in the works. Truth be told though, how it protects children to encourage the social disregard of them by half the adult population is beyond my reasoning capacity.

It's a weird situation of society wanting to "have its cake and eat it too." Do they want us men to hate kids or do they want us to agree child sexual abuse is wrong? Is not sex abuse predicated on harm, and harm stemming from lack of concern? If we're not supposed to show any compassion toward kids while they are unharmed, why does the presence of harm have to change those expectations? And if we're really supposed to hate kids, wouldn't it make sense that we shouldn't also care about whether they are being abused or not? See, I just get confused about what the standards are, because if it were up to me, I'd prefer to live in a world where I can wholeheartedly be against child sexual abuse and still not be expected to callously disregard that which I don't want to see come to harm.

I'd prefer to live in a world where a child's right to be nurtured by an individual was not dependent on whether society tolerates the sex of that nurturer, but that isn't the world we've allowed thus far. It happens every time the insinuation is made that the relationship of the man to a child is inevitably coercive and harmful, whether it's a professional relationship, family bond, or even a friendship. Every time that insinuation is made, even if in jest, a loving, committed adult man has convinced himself to turn away from a child in need of a role model. This is unfortunate.

Many men will go so far out of their way to prove to society that they absolutely, fundamentally, have no interest in children, that they actually start to sound more like the stereotypical child molester who only thinks about child abuse when he looks at a child. They've been scared into submission and conditioned from the time they were children themselves to withdraw, to fold at the sight of a child, to shirk them off, and now society wonders why so many do exactly that? Men are condemned for "stooping so low" as to be parents. They are harassed by paranoid bypassers when they take their own children out to the park. They are both lauded and chastised for running from their natural responsibilities so consistently and with such venom (to be undervalued when being a proper father and dismissed completely when complying with expectation not to be), that so many do run.

So many want nothing to do with children as a result, and the expectation that men are to keep a distance from every child maintains itself, spreads to the new generation, and society is content with it. They are content with depriving children their positive male role models. Our society delights in it, even if they don't recognize their own delight. They please themselves on the notion that a man can only bring harm to a child, and they seem to think the next generation ought to feel the same. It is the tyranny of the present once again over the future of mankind, and regardless of our intentions now, won't last. Bigotry never does.

Anyone, be them child molester or not, who looks upon a child and can only see the destruction of that child, is the equal of a child molester in sickness, and so is the society that holds such an expectation to begin with. The men who don't run, who don't submit to that sickness, and still do what is right for kids regardless of what anyone expects of them, are among the most commendable human beings on the planet, and unfortunately, the most under-appreciated.

Being a Kid at Heart

I'm going to keep my thoughts succinct this month and perhaps from now on. There is wisdom in "keep it simple, stupid," so here it goes:

Just because marketers and advertisers and other professional experts of divisiveness decide that one object should be marketed to children and another one to adults, doesn't mean it would be wrong or improper for an adult to enjoy something created for children, and children for something made for adults. Otherwise, we are letting marketers and advertisers define our lives and interests, rather than doing it ourselves. It's one thing to subjectively dislike something, but it is quite another thing to do so because someone has told you that to enjoy it would be "immature." What is more immature than letting someone else tell you what "you" are expected enjoy?

Discrediting the validity of what one expects a child to enjoy in the process (as "childish" or immature") demeans children and disqualifies you, and if done to any other group of people, would be called prejudice. Prejudice is an edifice formed by sexism in length, racism in width, and ageism in height. To uphold ageist prejudice over peoples' lifestyles and then be otherwise open-minded, is to be building a structure of prejudice that is very narrow at the base, but still a mile tall. If traditional gender roles are no guideline for individuality, then traditional age boundaries ought to be no guideline either.

There is no shame in being a kid at heart. There are only those who enjoy life and those who don't. You don't need to be "rejuvenated" as an adult to be young, you just need to enjoy life as a child to be truly grown. Age is meaningless.

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.

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

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).

Devil's Advocate (Choices)

Artificial age restrictions hold that a child is incapable of making certain choices. They are a non-refutable "no" plastered across every entryway to maturity. They are oppressive, but then again, as the argument goes, wouldn't letting kids step across into that other world before they are ready be just as oppressive? After all, there's a difference between a child having the right to make an informed choice (which they are not allowed to do no matter how well informed), and a child not having enough information yet in order to properly make the choice and being 'allowed' to choose anyways.

If a child can't make an informed choice due to some arbitrary restriction, that's one thing, but the issue also boils down to the fact that a limited amount of information could infringe on the child's ability to make a choice to the same extent as they would had they that information. This is crucial too, because immaturity itself does not bar someone from being "able" to make an uninformed choice, and through their actions, the chooser could unwittingly incur consequences they hadn't foreseen! The fact that this routinely happens to adults too is of no consequence to the devil's advocate position.

Just as well, for the government to try to figure out when kids have "information enough" (or maturity enough) to legislate when they can naturally make informed choices about every little thing they are prohibited from doing, would just be too much legislating over human developmental milestones. It is also entirely true that children and young people are capable of making perfectly rational arguments as to why certain rights ought to be reserved for adults. And parents rightfully only want their children to have rights that they have decreed for them themselves.

So yes, all this does pose a problem for the liberationist. But I think any system is going to have its drawbacks. If we can agree with that assertion, then the question becomes, are these drawbacks equal to or greater than the drawbacks in the system we already have? If they are relatively equal, then there is no argument for keeping the status quo as a declarative necessity.

We have to come to a conclusion and decide what side we are on, and live with and acknowledge the consequences that stem from our beliefs and choices (as a society). We are either "liberationists," and want to see all rights be put on the table for children and youth to dispose with as they see fit, or we are "ageists" and want the status quo--where youth attain rights at certain artificial benchmarks. To these ends, we'd either be complacent about the damage imposed on youths who would make improper use of their rights, or we are already complacent about the damage imposed on youths by those who make improper use of their rights for them.

Choose your side.

Time and Change

Time is something fleeting. Human beings can only perceive time through movement, and movement is only a series of changes in position and state. We sense that time is unfolding because we can see objects resting in one position one moment and then observe them resting in another position just by moving them, or understand that a child has aged based on observing them being seven years old one moment and eight years the next. The interim between these two moments where a change has been observed is what we call time. If an object could remain stationary and completely unchanged at all so-called "times", we'd have no evidence of time existing around that object.

Because we're unable to fully observe time itself unfolding on an individual, we tend to assume that they are whatever they appear to be in the moment we observe them, and that they will continue to be what they were in that moment for every one thereafter. On the contrary though, we may look at a new car one moment and then watch it run off the road and wreck on a tree, and consider the wrecked car and the new car the same vehicle and focus on the change in its state, but we don't see the child and the adult as one entity at two different times in the same manner. This is to say, there's a disconnect in how we perceive the line between child and adult, we may not see it as a straight line from one to the other.

Rather, we seem to observe children as if they were a race of subhumans coexisting along with adults, and the line connecting them to the human race appears to us to be divergent, mysterious, or just totally heading off into obscurity. Cognitively, of course, we understand that all adults start out at one time being children, and that all children (unless they meet with an unfortunate end or have some other circumstance), eventually mature into adults at another time, but because we can't see it happening, there's a tendency for our minds to assume that it's not happening. This is how a child can "grow up so fast," for instance. In reality, they are not in fact growing up fast, they're growing up normally. It's just that we don't perceive that growth has happened unless we can physically observe it in the space of a much shorter interval.

Due to this inability to perceive natural growth, adults may make inaccurate assumptions about a child's maturation. For instance, the eye can observe a moving image that the brain perceives as a static one, and will judge the image to be static--as in, no change from the time the image began to when it ended--all because the image is moving imperceptibly. If the growth of a child is similarly imperceptible, then adults may often judge the child to be static over a definite amount of time--as in, no change from the time they began seeing the child and when they stopped--when in reality, the child is maturing every day, as are adults in one way or another.

Children also make inaccurate perceptions about adults, and don't perceive their parents' hairs growing grayer, or in general, tend to believe that the way their parents are in the moment is the way they always were and will always be. Children have an unnatural expectation that things will never change, and perhaps only have a fleeting idea of what it may be like to change over time based purely on what they know about the nature of the world. Children who've no doubt experienced a lot of change will be more adept to notice how time impacts all things regardless of how stable everything appears in the moment. But however inaccurate children and young peoples' perceptions of adults may be, only the adults have granted themselves the authority to flex their inaccurate perceptions over a child's development and even punish them for growing up faster than is perceptible--no matter how natural the development is proceeding.

These errors in perception account for the majority of ageist prejudice against adults and children alike, and everything in between. Racial prejudice is a shorthand way of categorizing a person based on characteristics that are permanent (skin color for instance), whereas ageist prejudice is a shorthand way of categorizing a person based on characteristics that are impermanent (short stature in children, or mental capacity for instance). To underestimate or overestimate a person for a characteristic they exhibit temporarily, and assume that because they are exhibiting it now, in the moment, they'll continue to exhibit it forever, is discrimination.

For instance, if a child exhibits a sexual behavior with another child as a purely natural expression of their temporary lack of knowledge on sexual social customs, to criminalize or at least stigmatize that child as a lifelong pervert would be age discrimination. In it, those making the assumption would be choosing to focus on the immediacy of the action's appropriateness, factoring in the child's lack of understanding, and ignoring the temporary nature of the circumstance. It could be that in twenty years time, that child is not the sex beast that their actions at the age of four would have led us to predict, and perhaps even less so because of the abundance of negative attention those actions might receive in the present. In many ways, children are at the mercy of how adults perceive or don't perceive them changing over time.

Due to the fact that we are never fully here or there between being born and being in the full maturation of our faculties, what sense does it make to continue dividing up individuals along artificial categories spread out across time? Can we not just look at a child and think "human being," as we do for adults, and just expect that any differences between them are expressions of being in two different developmental timezones, and that all behaviors and expressions pursuant to one are simply relative to the expressions of the other? For while it may be sunset in one timezone, in another that very moment, it is dawn--and for all the hoopla surrounding their objective difference, the only thing that separates them is their relative distance from one another across time.

The First Flash

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

The first flash of faith, they say, is always the strongest. And the same could be said about the first flash of social awareness. At the first instance when a young mind is coming to know the injustice in the world, when their reception of it is all consuming and most passionate, it is stifled. No, the world is no simple place, and young passion alone doesn't rectify injustice, but neither does the experienced complacency that condemns it on those grounds. Young passion is stigmatized, it is marginalized, because it is inexperienced. The powers that be like to view it as misguided and naive, the result of a sheltered individual just coming to terms with the world around them, feeling one way or the other about the injustice out there, and having no idea how the world actually works or the possible ramifications should their ambitions be realized. It is for this reason that youth passion is shot down.

The powers lay the claim that youth passion is naive, that its solutions to social injustice are uninformed and too simple. As often as this is the case though, youth passion does not have a monopoly on presupposing uninformed simplicity onto a complicated world. Simplicity is in saying things are too complicated to work toward a solution in, simplicity is in ignoring the plight of those obviously wronged by systematic injustice to save face before one's own, simplicity is in "bending the rules" to fit personal interests when one is tasked with serving the will of the people--these are all things "experienced" complacency (apathy) apologists cling to while condemning so-called "youth passion" as simple-minded. They know how the world works, alright, they are experienced in it--it just so happens that in their years of experience, they've learned how to make the system work for themselves, and are unwilling to give it up. That's what's really going on.

Show me a youth who has chosen to exercise his or her passion against such a system in anti-social or naive ways (terrorism, vandalism, violent protest, dramatics...etc.), and I will show you a case of an aged and crooked judge, a dirty cop, a corrupt politician--people who have chosen to exercise their "expertise" with the system in selfish and destructive ways. Who shall we trust more, then? The liberal with no brain or the conservative with no heart?

At least when the passionate youth speaks, they speak from the heart, they speak with passion in their convictions, no matter how naive they may sound, they are speaking what they perceive to be the truth. If they say that love conquers all, it is because they believe it. If they say universal platitudes, "peace must come," it is because they mean it. They say what they mean and mean what they say. The experienced mind has lost its passion because it is necessarily bogged down in the reality of life. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way things work. It does not say what it means or mean what it says because it knows what it is saying is probably untrue.

Why then should we trust it?

Condoning Child Abuse

While society is concerned and paranoid about the sources of abuse from without, and views those who bring harm to children unknown to them as inhuman devils gnashing teeth and dancing on bones, much of society openly advocates the routine abuse of children. Discipline is healthy, and a child spared of discipline could almost be considered handicapped, because no one should get a free ride through life. However, the line between abuse and discipline is a tightrope, and its walkers are often thrown in perilous different directions--either abuse is mistaken for discipline, or discipline mistaken for abuse. In either extreme, children are at the mercy of the overreaction of an adult--either they are deprived of healthy discipline, taken out of healthy homes and placed in traumatizing state care, or routine abuse is seen as "consistent" punishment. As above, the abuse of children is often permitted in society for various reasons.

Irrational people make tirades justifying the abuse of children. It almost seems like the abuse society hates the most is the kind that happens by social rogues in one-child, one-shot affairs, and the abuse society hates least, and even advocates for, is the routine, daily recurring abuse from people society invariably trusts. By the same note, welts and bruises of the same magnitude are examined and understood differently based almost entirely on whether or not society trusts the category of human being they originated from. This is not especially widespread, and most parents usually agree that any "discipline" that leaves physical marks such as bruises or lacerations is in fact abuse, but there are irrational people who will trust that a child has been correctly dealt with so long as those markings were caused by parents, teachers, or people whom society trusts. If dealt by people society hates--rogues, minorities, pervert slugs--only then has a tragedy occurred.

In all objectivity though, markings are markings, regardless of who made them, regardless of whether it's a parent or a child molester, so it makes no sense to treat them differently according to where the perpetrator falls in society's prejudices. A word of caution though ought to be had when determining the course of action stemming from an incident of abuse. It makes no sense to turn one bruise dealt by an otherwise caring parent into a lifetime of systematic, institutional abuse for that child under state care, which can and does happen. It makes no sense to treat parents as potential devils in disguise, as the rouge members of society have been cast. It is hypocrisy on the part of our culture to condone abuse from some sources, almost jokingly, and despise abuse from other sources vigilantly.

In reality, no human being is objectively a "monster" or a "beast," and such characterization (a sick glorification of the abuse) does nothing for the victim of the abuse. They are simply people with various psychological malfunctions, as in the case of child molesters or kidnappers, or they are people who have been culturally force-fed this notion that because children are a subservient class of person, they deserve nothing short of the physical assertion of adult dominance in their daily life to grow healthy. The later group are the aforementioned irrational people, the ageists. People who deal abuse don't have to don horns or sprout wings or dance on bones to abuse a child, sometimes they just have to be a part of the population that western culture doesn't understand. Sometimes they just have to believe in something western culture has understood for centuries--the so-called superiority of the adult. From these two things, all child abuse spews forth.