Culture Wars

If it is wrong to use God to justify human conflict, war, discrimination, and other malice, then why is it acceptable to use children to do the same? Is it because children are living entities and are thus seen as more deserving of being the impetus for malice? Surely the effects of conflict on their behalf are more tangible for them than the ones wracked up on God's behalf. That is to say, if we launch our culture wars to save the world for children, is it more justifiable because, unlike God, they exist in the physical world and could thus reap the benefits of a war in the physical world? Does that make sense?

It is reasonable to contend that a war for God's behalf is actually more justifiable than malice carried out for the children's behalf, and it's precisely because children are living entities and God is beyond life. Human shortsightedness allows us to foresee victory when we believe our culture wars are righteous, but what it fails to do is allow us to foresee the inevitable consequences that a culture war brings to the very real and physical entities it was waged to protect. God feels no harm when our holy wars and malice launched in his name inevitably end in human ruin, but children do. Therefore, because the effects of a culture war are more physically present even on those it was waged to protect, the children, it is arguably less justifiable than holy war.

This point though is more about equivocation than pairing one unjustifiable thing against another unjustifiable thing. There can not be an acceptable justification for malice, conflict, war, and discrimination, whether it is carried out for the children, God, or even world peace.

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.

Make it Personal

Unspeakable evil is created by groups, where noteworthy good is created by individuals. In the group, individuals absolve themselves of wrongdoing, they distance themselves from being a part of a problem because they are not fully responsible for it. They may be good people as individuals, and they more than likely are, but once inside the group, they become a cog that spins the gears that may power such unspeakable evil. They may be able to sleep at night knowing that they're decent, honest folk, who are by themselves no more guilty than anyone else, but they still go to work everyday to help perpetuate what is evil at worst, and nonsense at best. If they are honest with themselves they realize this, and the knowledge that they are a cog plagues their conscience night and day. Hopefully it inspires them to do some good in the world on their own terms to make up for it.

Those who create our media, the advertisers who exercise no regard for decency in their fight to insult the buying public, are a perfect example. Consumerism is choking the life out of our love and respect for one another, our kindness, and our generosity, all because such things are of trite importance when the emphasis is on selling to human selfishness. Those who produce these spectacles of poor taste have done nothing but intentionally try to turn us against ourselves, turn man against woman, woman against man, adult against child, child against adult, and so on. They produce a relentless barrage of group favoritism that enforces cliched ignorance and antagonism toward the variety of human expression.

They create characters who are as they'd like to see people in society, loathsome and self obsessed, and then perhaps read their children to sleep at night with fairy tales that preach the opposite. They make their living with the intention of pinning one against another, dividing and conquering (so that all may fall), so that they may hawk their company's products at the very people they can get away with putting down or building up, insulting or devaluing. It's a tactic. If you devalue people, then you can get them to value products. These are the same people who may preach to their children about respect and kindness, but work only to produce the opposite.

Troubling still is how those who make and sell products believe they are justified only because of their desire to make and sell quality products to enhance people's lives. It is the engine that perpetuates our standard of living, after all. Doing this, they never have to fathom the desperate depths they have to sink to in order to hawk their "quality products" at the public, and what psychological toll this warfare has on human relationships. They don't have to feel guilty for perpetuating stereotypes in their advertisements, or just being distasteful, because all they see is profit at the expense of what they see as "dumb consumers" eating it up.

They'll be the first to make the case that they are simply reacting to "repressive" political correctness by choosing to be offensive, and may even believe their material to be thought provoking or challenging. This is not so, because something is only offensive when it causes people to reconsider their cultural standards, it is just abhorrent and meaningless when it perpetuates those standards and still manages to offend for pure shock value. The depiction of men in advertising, of fathers in particular, is not offensive, it is abhorrent and sinister.

They'll be the first to liken themselves truth-sayers for "instilling" what they consider to be "critical thought on an area of sketchy acceptability." If such was the case, why not drag this motivation to its natural conclusion? Why not offer us something new to consider, rather than just heaping on the same old nonsense in worsening depravity? How long will it take before our media depicts human blood being splattered over a sandwich like a condiment? How long before we get to see fathers being ritualistically dismembered and devoured by their wives because they surely have no clue about their children's peanut butter preference? How long before we see children gleefully disemboweling their own parents as a form of torture so that they may ring a video game paid for by the credit card clasped in mom's lifeless hand? How long before we see parents shoot their children in the back with a pistol so that they may enjoy the Margarita mixer in peace and quiet? How long before we see the wife stitching together bedsheets she made from her husband's flesh after she skinned him alive? How much more critical thought could be inspired by these eventualities? Is there no low our consumerist culture will overlook to try to hawk their precious little "quality products" in our faces?

The worst, or best, part of it is, we are all implicated in it, not just those who produce this lifestyle. We are all responsible for setting these abhorrent cultural trends in motion, if not because we sold them, but because we bought into them. I say our implication in it may be for the best because it is all the more reason to take personal responsibility for it. When culture decides that it is fair to do the equivalent of public dismemberment for shock value or some twisted sense of humor, when it feels alright turning boys into slugs, men into idiots, girls into sluts, and women into objects or self-righteous bigots, we ought to feel implicated as if we ourselves had offended our loved ones, our sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, parents or friends. When we buy into some campaign that seeks only to put down a segment of the population, we ought to feel as though we just did some horrible misdeed by our loved ones. We ought to feel as though we put stones in our children's hands when they hungered. We ought to feel as though we put black eyes and broken teeth onto those we care deepest about, all so that we could feel good about ourselves--all so that we could feel like "we're worth it."

If we don't make it personal, if we don't take it to heart, if we can't see the faces of our loved ones on those our consumerist lifestyle wants us to make fun of, despise, and demean, then we have absolved ourselves from any wrongdoing, and we succeed only at buying into nonsense. On another level, we may even succeed at buying into and thus perpetuating unspeakable evil against human life. Freedom comes at the expense of human dignity, it is true, and people should have the freedom to buy into whatever they want just as they have the freedom to sell whatever they want, but they should not get away with not feeling guilty for what they have been directly and indirectly responsibility for.

Freedom from want is a right, freedom from guilt is not.

The Mysterious Stranger

Lucifer the angel was cast out of heaven for possessing the properties of God: omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and a property he thought equal to God's omni-benevolence--its opposite, omni-malevolence. The Satan of Twain's "Mysterious Stranger" appears to us in a physical representation, a young Satan (nephew to the biblical Satan) who is able to court three boys. In dealing with their lives, he displays his power to know all things by telling of foreboding doom, displays his power to do all things by responding to their pleas to avoid it, and just as well displays his destructiveness in averting it only by killing them one by one. Satan's perspective still persists, because it'd be hard to refute that his actions are wrong without resorting to mere preference. You disagree with him out of preference toward good, rather than any quantifiable reason.

That is to say, there is nothing strange or abnormal about Satan's approach, particularly in his way of mystifying children--it all seems to make sense on the surface, and because it seems to make sense, it has to come in the guise of a stranger just so people may begin to treat it as hazardous. Had it come in the guise of a parent, then it would have gone unnoticed. Modern society has turned the face of Satan on everyone who would spend even the most nurturing and wholesome time with children only because it puts its trust over its children solely in the recognizable face. The unrecognized face may as well be Satan's nephew all over again.

But the question inevitably remains, are we really all so different? So too have the child molesters been cast out for possessing all the characteristics of those we'd put trust in: those who would lie to children, those who would treat them with less than human dignity, those who would exploit them for personal gain, those who would justify their abuse--all save for the one quality that separates the trusted from the untrusted:  a recognizable face. We tend to think an evil that looks familiar is more wholesome than an evil that is strange to us. Child molestation is strange to us because we can't figure out who could be so evil as to sexually exploit a child, when at the same time, exploiting children for financial gain seems right at home with us.

In the fear that someone might accidentally harm our children, we have let a physical manifestation of Satan go off his chain. He has convinced us of foreboding doom, and we have begged at his side so that he might release us from the grip of destiny, and he has responded in his own way.

The short of it is, we repeat this narrative because we wish to see evil put in its place, and yet only succeed in giving it further legitimacy. By repeatedly flashing the killer's face on the news for dramatic effect, we build him up to the status of folk hero in the eyes of those who are society's equals in ability and opposites in moral compass. By thinking we can solve child sex abuse by pushing all that which is strange to us off to some island in the pacific ocean, we succeed in being ruled by the mysterious stranger among us--ruled by the terrorists we're trying to eradicate. By banishing Lucifer to hell, God gave him legitimacy in knowledge that good will necessarily triumph over evil. We are not gods though, so we are in no position to make that assumption when we do likewise.

Affectionate Men

This is a culture that honors work over family, so it is no surprise that the struggle to gain women equal standing with men in the workplace and therefore in society in general, has been generally promoted. It is also no surprise that the struggle to gain men equal standing with woman over the family, the children, has never taken root. This work based culture seems to want nothing to do with raising its own children. The majority of men are pushed away from the care of children, and just as many seem more preoccupied with the workforce, with careers. With the arrival of feminism, it was finally declared that women sought the same. For both, having and raising children has become just a side project on a path toward personal fulfillment within the work place--something you have to do just to stay in keeping with social expectations.

These expectations have done nothing to raise us out of the sexist, 1940's culture that permeates family law in the United States. It has even been conveniently overlooked by the feminist movement itself--once again, because it doesn't concern the workplace. Family law arises from the belief that men are breadwinners and women are housewives and child caretakers. This is how a man and woman can divorce, and along with fifty percent of the marriage effects, the woman is typically granted the children, child support, and alimony. Many fathers who have weathered divorce have been brought into extreme poverty and even bankrupcy and homelessness as they've watched the mothers of their children reap the rewards of 1940's sexism in a modern equal opportunity culture. This is especially true if the man was not indeed the true breadwinner.

Regardless, all this stems from a pervasive and destructive cultural belief that men can not and should not be affectionate with children, and certainly are not equipped to be sole caretakers of them. As the old adage goes, we're fast becoming a culture that fears it may never cross a bridge designed by a woman, but couldn't care less if its children are raised by a man. Stereotypes, comedic tropes, and sexist cliches reinforce prejudice and embolden standards. Men who express any affection in public toward children, even fathers toward their own children, are often mistaken to be pedophiles, to be deviants. They are often ridiculed openly and harassed rather than celebrated.

The problem is not feminists, who have conveniently overlooked matters of family law and long ago demeaned and diminished the importance of raising children. The problem is not with men, who have been belittled from birth against showing affection toward anyone, and certainly not toward children, until they accepted this without complaint. The problem is with the underlying culture that does not allow men to complain about their diminished importance within the family, within childcare, as the feminists did about their status in the general workforce. Society looks up to work, it looks down on child raising. If a group of men come out and declare that they want to be taken seriously as child caretakers, it becomes a comedic trope at best rather than a genuine statement of desire. Why should a group of men who are not being discriminated against in the glorious and glamorous workforce want to do something as demeaning in the eyes of the culture as raise and nurture children? Society can not grapple with this concept.

Most men aren't like me. Most men don't place a high value on parenting either, as culture has dictated, so it's only the disaffected men (those who have been spit through family court) that complain. Many men will be reluctant to demand equal rights under family law because doing so makes them appear effeminate. What was a strength among the women's movement--the calculating, un-feeling, career-minded, self-fulfilled, self-dependent ideal woman of the future--becomes the unraveling of the men's movement--the nurturing, loving, reliable, educational, invested, selfless ideal male child caretaker of the future. It's seen as a sign of weakness to devote oneself to the ones society generally demeans anyways. The women's movement goes with the flow of western civilization (self-fulfillment, making money, children as a means to an ends...etc.) while the men's movement resists it (self-fulfillment in the fulfillment of a child's needs, children as a ends in and of themselves). There's no money in staying home and taking care of the kids, so western culture has no use for this new breed of man, and roots for his demise.

Feminists may have overlooked the affectionate man, male chauvinism may have tried to keep them down, culture may be trying to do away with them like shedding a malignancy, but the one group that needs the affection of a man is the only group we care about--the children, the boys and girls. In the end, raising them up is its own vindication where all else has failed them. If society wants nothing to do with the demeaning aspects of raising a child, then it's high time someone steps up to do the most important job of them all. Automation will erode the glorious western workforce, but children are always going to need affection.

Make Love Not War

What people don't like they declare war on. There's a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a war on pornography, a war on violence--there's a war for everything society can't come to accept as a fact of life. It's always a fruitless passion plea to liberate our children from having to grow up in a world full of wars by launching some of our own. War on Drugs? No, War on Peace is more like it. Apparently society thinks it best to force children to live in the midst of a battlefield where the trenches they charge have become the hallways of their schools, and their bedrooms, foxholes. Trip wire snakes the great expanse that surrounds them under the clear blue sky, and though all was set up to keep them safe from the savage society, all it takes is one wrong step beyond that wire for the most unassuming of them to get wrapped up in the No Man's Land of culture's creation.

All is done at the original behest, the love for children, the desire to keep them safe and happy. But make no mistake, the warmongers have suffered a serious perversion, a sexual sickness no less. They are gratified at their power over children and their sway over other adults whom they can trample over in their crusade to save the children from evil. They've suffered a serious perversion of their goals indeed, these who launch wars in society in an effort to keep children safe, as doing such is motivated less by their stated purposes and more by the need to quell the inner demon of fear. They are just as selfish as the monsters they war against--those who spread the message of peace and love, who end up revealing their wars for what they really are. The warmongers become the selfish monsters they hate, exploiting children for their own gratifying gain.

This is why the term "culture war" is accurate. Society deteriorates the moment its preservation is fought for from the heart. If we were using our heads, we'd know society's preservation doesn't need fighting for. Working for, yes. Fighting for, no. Our children's safety is not something we need to fight for (unless a particular child is in immediate danger). Once we begin fighting for something, we cease working towards it, and that's the plain truth. The only thing that can result is a body count from there on out--the second some general idea of children is fought for, individual children slip through the cracks, lost and sacrificed for the cause. The ideology takes precedence over their actual welfare. The tautology keeps the phantom afloat and lets the flesh and bones sink. It turned the so-called War on Drugs into the highly profitable incarceration machine that it is and Zero Tolerance from a push to up the penalties on violence into the lucrative school-to-prison pipeline it has become.

These perversions were inevitable from the start. War has always been bigger business than peace just as lust has always been bigger business than love. The CL preaches a love for children and has the wisdom to take a step back and not declare their own wars on the culture. The happiness of their partners is more important than any social ill enforcing their oppression. No culture war against the forces that harm children could possibly match the ecstacy of seeing a child happy in their eyes.

To love a child is to launch a peace movement against all those who get off launching wars. This is why those who love children are hated by the culture warmongers--those who preach Zero Tolerance or the War on Promiscuity with such fervent passion. They get off on persecuting those who harm children like the MAA gets off on a child's smile. They sweep children up in their hatred, launch their wars against society and then send their children to school in the midst of a battlefield to satisfy their selfish lust, and of course, order the destruction of all those who would speak of love for children.

MAA people simply don't do that, which is why they don't stand a chance outside attaining the affections of their young friends. Nothing else is needed to fill the void left in their heart.

I Do It For Your Love

Forbidden love becomes it's own reward, regardless of the risk. There are things a Childlover (Child Liberationist) will do out of love that they'd never do for a society. He's far more likely to throw caution to the wind to fulfill the needs of a child than put himself in harm's way to drag his own body from the muddy pit. He'll jump the canyon hoping for a soft landing at the behest of his young love and yet sit contemplating the fall at the top if he were doing it for his own excitement.

All this about going to the ends of the earth for love sounds cliched, but consider that one party in this arrangement is the child, the inevitable object of forbidden love. Society sees no sacrifice a great enough one to make for the heart of a child, and neither do those who hunger for that forbidden morsel. Though they both stand from their own pulpits, harboring a desire to burn their opponents' churches to the ground, their battlefields marked on the child's face, each fails to grasp how similar they are. In the end, the child is sacrificed so there can be peace.

The Childlover will go out on that ever-lengthening limb for the sake of their love and criticize the society for setting up civilization such that a child is subject to the pedestal they're placed on. Meanwhile society itself will head out on another ever-lengthening limb for the sake of it's children and criticize the lonely hearts for giving them justification to steal back the child from the clutches of the dragons among them. We do it for their love.