Forgiveness in the New Year

With a new year comes a new reason to be forgiving of oneself and others. Wrongful deeds can never be forgiven, but people always can. On that note, while we can forgive the scientists, the military brass, the low-level personnel, who participated in doing this:

Declassified picture of an 8-10-year-old MK-ULTRA subject, 1961.

...we can not and should not forgive the program itself, nor the non-human governments, departments, and agencies that authorized it, funded it, and carried it out, nor the paranoid delusions and ignorance that kept it authorized, funded, and carried out. And that also goes for any other experiment or project undertaken for the purpose of finding new ways to wage war on human dignity. Some information about the picture:

"Project MK-ULTRA ran from the early 1950s to at least the late 1960s, using American and Canadian citizens as its test subjects. The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs and other chemicals, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and physical abuse.

The most publicized experiments conducted by MK-ULTRA involved the administration of LSD on unwitting human subjects, including CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public, in order to study their reactions.

However, the scope of MK-ULTRA does not however stop. Experiments involving violent electroshocks, physical and mental torture and abuse were used in a systematic matter on many subjects, including children." [As pictured above.]    -Secret Arcana

The next time you hear a government express a devotional sympathy to protect children, just think about what it is capable of doing to them to "provide for your common defense." Individuals within government have children, the structure itself does not, and therefore has no such sympathy. It has allowed for children's corruption and destruction before, and it will again. The same government that would presume a child's interests are not being met within their home can and does look the other way on its own abuses. It does so because it can without remorse. Minors are second-class citizens to the government--second-class human beings. People though, see them differently.

Gendered Corruption

If indeed we believe that culture corrupts our kids, why does the biggest, most evil influence always lay at the feet of what we find unacceptable? Would not acceptable things, such as free market consumerism, also be corrupting them? Is corruption only tolerable when a child is corrupted by something we like, or does a child truly cease being corrupted by certain things, and where is that line drawn?

We wonder why the path to manhood is fraught with so much difficulty and lack of assurance. Parents fret about the outcomes for their sons. Surely it wouldn't have anything to do with how men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the standard for manhood, would it? We've left boys of the world at the hands of a commercial culture that would sooner take him by the hand, cut a fart in his face, physically abuse him and verbally demean him and tell him to "tough it," sell him beer and breasts to weaken his resistance and thoroughly derail his ambitions by calling him "simple-minded," teach him to value his life by the number of sperm he can eventually squeeze out of himself, and be there for him to provide an array of products intended only to help him achieve that most carnal goal before he's to slip into domestic "uselessness" to have all his manufactured desires catered to on call. "Men are stupid" indeed.

We wonder why girls are so depressed or sell themselves short despite our best efforts to lift them up. Parents fret about the outcomes for their daughters. Surely it's not because men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the new standard for womanhood, is it? We've all left girls in the hands of a so-called "empowering" commercial culture that would sooner take a girl by the hand, tell her she's smarter and better, inflate her self worth to unattainable heights, starve her of encountering any real adversity to her confidence or resistance, spoil her into submission so that she may become reliant on an array of beauty and "self-care" products to maintain that weakened state, and then tell her a superficial relationship in the service of a carnally-minded "useless man-child" with children in tow is all she needs to be happy. "Am I right fellas?" indeed.

"Why?" is not a good question to ask. "Isn't it obvious?" is a better one. If you wouldn't leave your child in the hands of someone you don't trust, who is only going to preach distortion and trickery, why would you leave your child in the hands of western culture? In twenty years the children we fret about today will be what we consider normal, well adjusted adults, most of them at least--adjusted in the sense that they've just spent their last twenty years being adjusted, by passing through the corruptible influence of culture in all its forms, positive and negative, and normal because they are still breathing at the other end of it.

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.

Sexuality Supermarket

Loosening sexual mores allow for tolerance, but also provide impetus for individuals in governments or corporations to create in their future customers or constituents any sexual appetite most fitting with whatever social message or piece of merchandise they wish to peddle. Fetishism is a natural evolutionary function of sexuality that social engineers would love to exploit, and with increasing tolerance for alternative sexual appetites comes unprecedented ability to construct markets out of them. Advertisers know how to play this game, and the motto is as it always was: "get 'em while they're young."

Beyond their consent, like it or not, children are raised and sexualized by the increasingly accessible media. This is not so much a bad thing in and of itself, but at the same time their sexuality is being shaped by the media and other companies, they are not given the sexual nurturing they need because people don't want to be "seen" as en-culturing a child into functional sexuality. It should be no doubt then, where sexual dis-functionality stems. The panic over whether a company is exposing children to a sexual lifestyles before they can comprehend such things is another distraction, because it should be no news that a corporation is not in it for Junior to begin with.

If there should be concern, it rests squarely with the culture that hasn't allowed the people in Junior's life (who are, or should be, the ones "in it" for him) to be the ones to nurture his developing sexuality as they would his ability to read. Time and time again though, that responsibility is taken away from the adults in his life, and given over to the television and the internet by a culture made too squeamish or paranoid about appearing to be "too involved" with kids.

More disturbing is the mechanism where future generations can be made to love the egotism and material servitude it takes to power our economic engine, by influencing their sexual development to correspond to what best suits the interests of those who have a hand in shaping that culture. How many little boys will grow up with a sexually driven inferiority complex to females after spending their formative years sexualized by a media that obviously finds greater value in its female customers? The idea behind this social engineering is to designate what populations buy and what populations don't, take the ones that do and create in them this belief of superiority as instinctive and unstoppable as a biological necessity (like their sexuality). Then take the ones that don't and create the opposite with theirs--an inferiority complex--so they accept their place or at least don't take issue with their depictions and social devaluation in the media for being what it cultured them to be, because they will be so busy getting off on it.

Abominations as such that would never be allowed by a stranger passing a child on the street are permitted and perpetuated on a daily basis by strangers who just so happen to be further away from the kids in question, but wield the same influence. Given the choice between a person who loves your child and a person who wants to make money off your child, the parent will side with the profiteer. So the marketing exec goes to work every day, makes his pay and feeds his family on the idea of stealing children away from their parents. The stranger on the street just wants to model the daily "how do you do?" for your kid, and yet he is made the villain--no doubt by who.

Any media-backed morality is innately immoral, especially if it's presented as "counter-culture." There is no such thing. That which is truly counter-culture, is that which can not be marketed.

Incapable, Yet Culpable

Could it be that the greatest threat to America's children is not the threat of predation, but the threat of incrimination--for innocent sexual games played among themselves-- by a system that deems them incapable, and culpable? I've always considered it worse. For one, the "child abuse industry" (add "entertainment industry" where applicable) affects many more children (whole swaths of the population at a time) than any lone child molester does, and arguably, with the same ferocity and delusional, narrow-minded lack of insight about the effects.

The real difference is that child molesters are outlaw scumbags that society hates, they are easy to ridicule, easy to shame, and therefore, the only recipient whipping boy of society's pent up reservations about the treatment of children. On the other hand, protectionist groups and law enforcement are sponsored scumbags that society regards as heroes.

It would seem that whether the molester has the kid tied up on the floor or the officers have the kid tied up in a cell waiting for a judge to determine against the kid's life on earth over something as trivial as "seeing someone naked" at the age of 10, the child is going to suffer at somebody's hands. It turns out society has no problem with children suffering, only so long as the entity man-handling the minor with its grubby hands is state sponsored. Society has no problem ruining a child's life, so long as its tax dollars go into funding those responsible for doing the deed. After all, the right to life and dignity was never something it granted children to begin with, not so long as they were "minors."

So all this righteous indignation about corrupting children can not and should not be without mention of the juvenile justice system, the system society has entrusted to turn normal children into registered sex offenders.

Who's Providing Services?

The "it takes a village" mentality is simply that, a mentality, rather than a viable alternative. In many ways, children are raised by the village. They spend far more time interacting with teachers, peers, and social media (internet, television...etc) than they do by their parents. Acknowledging the fact that parents only play a small part in the raising of their children doesn't diminish the fact that for institutional purposes, the child requires someone to claim responsibility for them. This purely legal responsibility is then magnified and made sacred by that so-called "hallowed co-relation" (as Marx described it) attributed to parents by our culture, and outside influences such as non-parent mentors and lovers, though numerous, are seen as dangerous to that socially contrived relationship between parent and child.

Responsibility breeds possessive contempt. Being responsible for an object or a human being, makes the person called upon suspicious of outside contamination. If we view "the village" as a collection of individuals for which a child can develop meaningful relationships within society, rather than a faceless "everywhere" ghost parent that can't assume responsibility for its mistakes (as is seen in the case of state care), the village concept lends justification to the ambitions of those with a desire to give of themselves for the benefit of their young friends.

As a concept, rather than a contrived social institution, the village concept for child raising lends justification to CLs to pick up and nurture the children fallen through its own cracks as just one of the collection of individuals. These cracks are formed when that which is invested in an institution "responsible" for raising children does not meet what is demanded of it. Because nobody demands anything of a CL, they are poised to befriend the children dropped by the system that couldn't live up to its expectations.

The village concept works even when it doesn't.

There's obviously a distinction here between providing a service for a child on that contractual, legal, professional basis and providing a service on the basis of pure devotion and charity. Both are required to enhance a child's life for different reasons and an overabundance of one over the other is bound to run a child's developmental trajectory in less appealing ways. Those who are responsible are providing a service, parents are providing a service for society--they are essentially entrusted to be to human beings what farmers are to crops. Farmers do not have control over the rain or the sunlight, but the work to ensure their crops get plenty of both and fill in the gaps when nature fails them. The family is a unit specialized into generating product for society in the form of a fully capable individual ready to perform all essential social functions for itself at its 18th birthday. To assist in doing this, governments have established their own water and sun in the form of compulsory schooling, state care, and other services.

But that's all that is involved in providing a service on the basis of legal requirement. A child who is nurtured in such an environment will not necessarily grow healthy, even if they are provided with schooling or adequate child care. A child is not a sedentary plant that just absorbs whatever goes into it, but an entity capable of making its own impact on its environment. What a child is capable of doing is superfluous to the society providing a contractual service, because to them, all that they require the child to be is something which can sit and receive the service. Thus children are grown like plants, absorbing water and sunlight, when in reality, their mobility alone produces a whole new dimension of care that society simply can not provide. In a system that necessitates their passivity, their activity can not be provided for no matter how much it necessitates it. So there is an impasse between what a child needs and what society needs, and it begins and ends with the child being a human being.

CLs provide a non-contractual service principally invested in allowing for a child's human qualities to expand once their basic legal requirements are provided for by responsible entities. Together, these two sides work together to satisfy a child's needs both as a social being and as a repository for services.

Girls are the Future?

The economic superstructure has a dwindling need for boys. They are a shrinking market, and therefore an economically undervalued group. Besides video games and certain toys, there are increasingly fewer things that are marketed explicitly "for boys," since to do so would be to displace girls who might be interested in those markets. But have the markets reached this conclusion out of shifting attitudes about "girl power," or have they done so for economical reasons? That is to say, in girls marketers have a base that includes what continues to be the traditional girl media (the color pink), but also other varieties of "girl expression," and girls are therefore expected to be more active "buyers" across these multiple markets as a result. Boys have been shown to be a limited, almost niche market, so companies often don't see the reason to put up the money to cater to them specifically. Anything they do market with boys in mind must also consider possible girl buying power.

This is because girls are also both more likely and more encouraged to branch outside the narrow range of media designed for traditional girlhood. Products and companies originally steeped in selling to the traditional boyhood interests are finding that their limited target is vestigial, as they could just as well survive off the varied interests of their counterparts (who they value more due to the socially perceived penchant for materialism). Thus, if girls could be said to be the future, we know what gave them such a distinction -- the free hand of the market has thrown them into the social limelight, despite that cumbersome "stuffy-old" equality standard.

On the contrary to the egalitarian pleas, we routinely observe that it's far more edgy, fun, and (as we shall observe) sexy, to be girl-centric (at least, that's how the market would have it). Girl empowerment these days is a reflection of a newly spawned cultural standard born from an economic landscape that the stewards of culture (advertisers and products) are betting fortunes on. It doesn't really matter whether girls are indeed the future so long as they believe the line enough to dip their hands into whatever market is trying to pep them up for their purchase power. Likewise, if today's boys are to play second-fiddle in the future, such will have been accomplished because pockets were lined from their systematic devaluation today across all media. Why else would children's media extol the benefits of being a "good, clean, fashionable, trendy, diverse, intelligent, sporty, and empowered" girl, over being one of those "lazy, stupid, smelly, disgusting, hyper, non-fashionable, old-fashioned, slimy snip and snail" boys? That is, unless they weren't trying to cater to that sex's ego.

These so-called new gender expectations are not so new after all though. In fact, they represent the same mechanism of thought that has always existed -- that being, coddle the girls, make sure they are greeted with nothing but positivity and encouragement because they can't handle real criticism, and belittle the boys, because doing so makes them strong, and they can just weather any storm. Despite this, the feminist reaction to this social phenomenon has been mixed, with the extremes under the belief that society has finally "arrived" on the route to economically induced "payback" that the new generation should be forced to foot the bill for, and the wide majority taking a more moderate approach -- stressing individual need over coddling anyone, but generally being unconcerned. It is no question where their bias lies, along with their credibility, as whenever girls are being devalued in this culture, we certainly do hear about it and all of its injustice. Then again, there should be no question what side a feminist will take -- it is in their name.

Regardless, research has been on a crusade lately to confirm these new social expectations created by the stewards of culture, and so in the past 30 years, we've learned nothing else except how much more capable our daughters are -- to the point where it can hardly be called noteworthy anymore. Girls are smarter than boys, they get better grades at everything, have faster skill development, mature faster, have better sensory ability, have better life outcomes, go to college at greater frequencies, make for happier parents, work harder, make better friends, and almost any other trait you can imagine. All has been carefully researched, and so there are simply less and less reasons to conclude anything other than the fact that female children are superior creatures to male children. Indeed, parents, teachers, professionals, and ultimately, the market itself, have begun towing this conclusion, encouraging girls to be all they can be knowing of course that they really can be anything. Boys on the other hand can only be "boys." In the war between being anything and being a boy, girls rule.

It has become new, exciting, and sexy to assert girl superlatives as the norm, and relegate boys to the has-been pile. Now society roots for the girl to triumph, yes, but gives her the most praise and accolade when her triumph is seen as an usurpation, the overtaking of the male establishment, which is unfortunate for the "run-of-the-mill" triumphing girl that gets ignored. Society wants to prove to itself, even if it knows it to be wrong, that girls deserve not only to be triumphant, but more "importantly," to lay waste to their increasingly de-humanized and "unnecessary" alternatives. We get off on the spectacle of strong girl, insist she become that spectacle to our own enjoyment, using a boy as little more than a catalyst, a punching bag to pair off her achievements, but then fail to actually support her once she outgrows the bracket. It no longer feels all that sexy once those "meek little kiddies" who might have been swayed by "girl power" have grown up and have minds of their own, so we move on to the next group of offspring. The one thing nobody is willing to admit in all of this, is that everybody is getting off on the same sexual kink. That's all it is.

In the pursuit of this pleasure, we have piped up the girl's self-assurance in childhood to the point of anxiety and burnout by adolescence (they can not remain the perfect, all-important child forever), and sidelined the boy's enthusiasm to be the embarrassing joke it is until we are sure he has internalized it forever. The less important child has an ego to save against the onslaught. But the grand social experiment to degrade boys (and promote girl power on the side) has only succeeded as far as it has been paid for. The science about the sheer multiplicity of girl superlatives remains convincing, but if the goal is having girls on top of the perennial pyramid and truly ruling the world, more work has yet to be done. It feels good so far, but the climax is still coming.

Answering the Question

This was spoken by a moderator at work over at a Sarah's Law forum to someone with subversive words that were immediately handed over to the authorities for no particular reason other than to buy up the law's valuable time (it's only human to feel self-righteous). This statement could be the paradigm argument of most ordinary people on the subject of children, and yet, we will see just how flimsy it is:

I ask this question.... should a child not be left alone so that the innocence of childhood can be enjoyed before the realities of adulthood?

1. Should a child not be left alone? I'm not certain. Let's try to lend this concept of leaving children "alone" to intuition. Obviously, by "alone" this person doesn't mean physically leaving the child on their own, but rather, "not being tampered with" is probably a definition closer to what they have in mind. The primary question becomes, "should a child not be tampered with" or at the very least, deviated from their natural starting point of ignorance, egotism, and intolerance for others? Are the traits of the average four year old worth preserving? Should not children, in some way, be educated? Learning by definition, is simply a change, an alteration in behavior in response to the presence of a stimulus. "Leaving the child alone," for instance, would entail there never being a stimulus with the effect of there never necessitating a response. Unless we believe that children should never be educated, we should not believe that they should be left "un-tampered with." This statement doesn't lend itself to intuition very well.

We could also further take this to be a self-defeating ideology if we understand children (just as human as human) to be naturally equipped for learning and changing over time. To manually enforce that children never change, and thus go against their nature, is to be tampering with them--the very thing this ideology suggests we should be avoiding. Self-defeating ideologies do not lend themselves to intuition at all.

2. ...so that the innocence of childhood can be enjoyed? Young children are naturally ignorant of many things, and one of them is the adult concept of innocence. In order to enjoy anything, understanding the thing being enjoyed is a requirement. The rationale for this is that when a person enjoys something they are not familiar with, they are in fact enjoying the "essence" of the thing being enjoyed, and not the thing itself, because the thing itself is unknown to them. A child can not enjoy a concept that adults have invented, because such a thing is purely a metaphysical thought construct within a given culture. What is normally meant by this statement is that a child should enjoy their time alive while they still qualitatively possess the attributes of being a young human being. This makes sense, but should not the same be true for anyone, young or old? It is a mere platitude when in reference to a particular sect of human being.

3. ...before the realities of adulthood? "The realities of adulthood," in the context of this statement, are supposed to carry a negative, harsh tone in conjunction with the "enjoyment" tone of the previous clause to create the effect that children live in a world without "realities" (or at least, the indication that they should not live a world with realities) and that adults live in a world devoid of "enjoyments." Such is just not intuitive. A child's time alive is in fact one that has it's own set of realities, if by realities, this person means to say "troubles" or "hardships", or even "responsibilities." Firstly, if children, by the sake of being children, were never troubled, never had to face any hardships, or carry any responsibilities, we should never to expect them to cry, or to fight, or to revolt against authority, and yet they do these things. Such is wishful thinking for adults who are the authority, but does not mirror reality. Secondly, implied in this statement is that the adult world is one not to be enjoyed, and if such were true, we should expect adults to never laugh or seek out entertainment, for instance. This statement is made simply to justify adult authority over young people, depicting themselves as selfless missionaries and children as noble savages. Such is wishful thinking for the maintenance of the adult power structure, but does not mirror reality.

This is not even to mention that many child "realities" are imposed on them by the very social systems that use this very ideology as their creed for operation. Children can get themselves into very compromising situations when they step out beyond what adults conceive and have established as their reality. For instance, there are many 5 year old Registered Sex Offenders, playing doctor can carry serious penalties for children in some states (Utah). So again we find ourselves asking, should not children be left alone? It seems adults only have definitive answer for this when it suits their purposes of maintaining control, so the seeming contradiction in motivations bleeds this statement dry of any genuine thirst for justice it might have had.

Taken together, this statement does not define what it means by "children." A child, under the law, is anyone between birth and the age of majority (0 and 18 in the US). The statement looses more credibility depending on what type of "child" it is referring to. For instance, if it is suggesting that 17-year-old US minors are should be "left alone to enjoy the innocence of childhood before the realities of adulthood," then it doesn't lend itself to us intuitively in the least, particularly when considering that those 17-year-old US minors who are supposedly "enjoying the innocence of childhood" are going to be facing those "adult realities" in the coming year. This exercise simply illustrates the faulty reasoning of the majority.

In short form, the answer to the question (taking all the reasoning that made this statement into account) is no.

A Parent's Fickle Trust

Parents can't be blamed. If children can get away with dragging others down by their ignorance, then parents should be afforded the same for doing the same. They're just as destructive a force in society as their kids and twice as easy to manipulate. If it is reasonable that children be taught not to talk to strangers, than it should also be reasonable that parents be taught not to listen to them.

As easy as it is for a parent to see their children manipulated by some predator, it is nearly impossible for them to see themselves manipulated by five o' clock predator scare on the news. And just as blind as they accuse children of being to the consequences of letting that stranger lead them into the backseat, parents are completely blind to the consequences of letting that stranger on TV take them by the hand through the land of paranoia. The consequences of which are the poison that never fails to trickle down to the child's level.

Of course parents don't have as much influence as they think, having surrendered a lot of that direct influence over to other entities--to strangers no less. Trust is a funny thing, because sometimes the only thing that separates a potential predator from a trusted caretaker is a piece of paper--most of the time it's nothing but the judgments in a parent's head. When the protections for children are not strong enough, parents will cut in line to defend a law that makes it illegal for any adult to be within 50 feet of a child, and they will cheer its success, but will they too take that 50 foot step back from their own? If not, then they have to decide, who should be taking that step and who should not?

Just as parents can be manipulated into trusting no one, they can also be manipulated into trusting people who may actually pose a threat. This is because every parent mind comes with a schema of trustworthiness they use to judge an individual. If the individual comes with paperwork, they are trustworthy. If the individual is clean, they are trustworthy. If the individual is friendly, they are trustworthy. However, if an individual breaks any of these criteria, and others like them, then there's no way the kids are safe around them. It's important to note that these judgments are often irrespective of harm. A person who meets the criteria and yet still manages to harm a child is always held in higher esteem than a person who doesn't meet the criteria and yet causes the child no harm.

This is not to say a parent will allow the molestation of their child if the perpetrator is, for instance, young and good looking--just that they'll never see it coming. Sad, but that's the folly of human nature.

Human--All Too Human

Children serve a paradoxical purpose as a repository for adult judgments. They are idolized in the ways that don't pose an immediate threat to adult society and infantilized in the ways that do. Every behavior of theirs that serves to uphold adult authority at the subjection of the minor seems to have it's own holy day by comparison to any behavior that serves to make the child an autonomous entity. Children are both angels when it comes to expressing any traits adults find themselves incapable of possessing, and no better than animals when it comes to expressing traits any way similar to human nature.

Adults crave to regain the what they perceive the child has in abundance--youth, optimism, freedom, contentment, love--and even seek out children like faucets that they may drink from their nourishment and be made fulfilled themselves. No doubt driving themselves to the brink of war and personal tragedy to protect this natural resource within their own. At the same time, they perceive children hazardous--as poison containers for their own projections and evil spirits the world over, such that only by subjecting the so-called innocent can they be protected from the corrupted nature of the adult.

In reality, children are no more super-human and no more sub-human than the average adult. They reveal their natural human weaknesses, fallacious thinking, and fallibility as do their masters, in developmentally relative ways. Every adult who has tried to drain the so-called positive energy tap that the child represents for them into their own has walked away inevitably worse for the ware--either walked over or enmeshed in the fruitless passion of child worship to their own rational destruction. There is no youth to be regained other than in the adult mind. Likewise, every adult who has tied down this small human animal to save them from their influence has done the opposite and inflicted the child with even more of their so-called "evil spirits" than the child would have picked up from the air.

Kids, too, have their own faulted projections of adults--just as human as human.

How Not to Corrupt Children

How often do we hear about the various forces out there corrupting children and then ignore the fact that despite all our fretting very few are ever actually "corrupted"? It's no mistake that people do this--the fear of children being corrupted sticks in our heads better than when they actually are. Imagination takes precedence over sight. In reality, the majority that grow up to be average adults easily pass right through the social cognition of most people and the few that are corrupted by these forces usually don't constitute any real threat to civilization anyways. So why are we spending our time fretting?

Here's an example I stumbled on today. Children's films are often dripping with various political messages or ideologies. When filmmakers decide to make a simple story out of a series of plot devices to push a certain message (such as "save the rainforest"), with a few New Age beliefs mixed in, suddenly you have a lot of angry adults hemming and hawing about the "leftist propaganda" smeared all over children's media and how every child who sees it is going to grow up corrupted by it inevitably. Likewise, mix in some religious elements or conservative ideologies, against homosexuality for instance, and suddenly there's an outcry from the other side about how children will grow up to be intolerant. Either way, it seems children are always "raised" by the adherents and "corrupted" by the opposition--two trajectories defined by adults, not by children.

Each side of the adult divide seems to have it's own ideas about what a vile thing political correctness is, they just can't seem to identify what exactly is politically correct. Have you then ever stopped to wonder about whether or not the kids are actually corrupted by such implicit "propaganda" or "intolerance?" Such a question doesn't normally factor into the binary vision of most adults so long as the other side is seen as the politically correct oppressor and the corrupter of the youth. In reality, the children who are supposedly being fought over to win their hearts and minds either don't care about these implicit messages or don't understand them anyways. This isn't to say kids don't or can't understand these things, it's just to say that these adult perspectives rarely factor into their daily lives as much as they do the lives of adults, who are more personally served by such trivialities.

And even if they did factor in, it's not like children are on some moving platform where ideology is pumped into their open head at one end, stored for a while as they move along, and then emptied into the world when they drop off the other side without any permutation or elaboration by the child themselves in the interim. Lest we forget, it's quite the contrary. Young people are constantly challenging the ideologies they are exposed to. Would we as adults want it any other way? Should they not be exposed to a variety of ideas and given time to hash them out in their own heads? Are we more afraid of corrupting children or of letting them think for themselves?

In this case, the last thing we ought to be worrying about is exposing our children to a certain ideology in fear that they will inevitably follow that ideology without question straight to their dying bed (what an unrealistic expectation, but such is the adult). What we really ought to be afraid of is cheating them out of a good story by filling it up with self-righteous, shoe-horned, one-sided politics, ethics, or other  ideological claptrap. Give them a good story and the morals will always flesh themselves out on their own. Children have the ability to reason. They're not going to become New Agers or homophobic simply because some animated character in a movie they saw when they were six espoused those views. If they are going to get that way, it'll be for other reasons entirely centered around their own will and the social rewards surrounding belief. And most likely, 20 years from now they'll be right along side you calling out the shallow ideology in children's media just as you do, as will their children 40 years from now. Nothing ever changes.

The only corruption that takes place is just how pervasive the protective paranoia over children becomes after the first 30 years of life.