An Open Appeal

An open appeal, an earnest request:

Life & Style, in the process
of harming a child.

For those who advance themselves at the expense of others in any form... for those who seek to own humanity... for those who hold one group of humans to a different standard than another for reasons having nothing to do with just desert or character... for those who lie to themselves in order to justify their own deeds... for those who work to separate humanity from its children... for those who count out a group of people from sympathy because they are "minority case" victims...

For those who peddle fear and paranoia to scapegoat and magnify the "easy targets" while protecting the real oppressors... for those who cause great unintentional harm with the best intentions... for those who devalue a human being (a man, woman, boy, or girl) only when it is socially acceptable to do it... for those who mock and ridicule the weakened man for the glory of the stronger... I see the mark of the beast on your smiling faces. Congratulations!

If you are accomplishing your directive in life by doing any of the above, then congratulations to you, antichrists of the world. Congratulations on your infamy. I laugh in the maw of your glory in our culture, for yours is the resting place of history's hell-mouth. The derision of people like you will forever be rolled across the tongues of your own progeny. Congratulations on your personal alignment with all mankind has determined to be vile and unjust. The fight for human dignity could always use a nemesis like you to make an example.

But if that is not what you desire, you who revel in any of the above, then you must turn and become purified by reason, justice, and the love of human dignity before you can be considered a person. You are not a good person in this world by your own decree, but by your works.

As damnation follows infamy, vindication follows integrity, and the choice is yours.

Men and Children Can Coexist

I reject traditional masculinity and promote child guidance instead, and does it make me virtuous? Does that make me the ideal man? One brimming with patience, sensitivity, kindness, compassion, and love? Not in the eyes of a society where it would be more acceptable and profitable that I should be the man they can best sell to, and though I've done nothing, be kept from even sitting next to children on airplanes based on my sex alone. The sensitive man is not any more profitable than the man who complains about such sexist discrimination, for both are cast with the same suspicion of deviance just for being what they are--men who question social prejudice in one way or another rather than just accept it as men are expected to, and as many do. Where do we fit in as men when it comes to children?

The sensitive men are feared at best, ridiculed, emasculated, and then outright hated at worst. Those who can't understand our lifestyle look at us with a light-hearted condescension at first, jokingly making us surrender to judgment for the crime of heterosexual, and homosexual, male non-conformity. When I refuse to let it get to me, and carry on anyway because the world needs more compassion in it from our side towards children (which the world itself also says is lacking), the fearful among them unleash their ignorance completely--as if offended by their own inability to get under my skin--and amp up their assault not with more "efem" jokes, but with real threats. I could be kicked off an airplane simply because I'm a male sitting next to an unattended child and I refuse to move. Now I want to know what impression it is having on children where, wherever they go, they are to see men scatter, or be beaten back with sticks. That's child abuse in my book.

It seems all those who reject the commercially manufactured beer-swigging, sex-crazed lifestyle of the modern man are subject to termination by not only its benefactors but its hive-minded heterosexual adherents, raised to hate children instead, as if that was preferable to loving them. In the eyes of the world, child guidance is not a suitable interest for the modern man, no matter how necessary it is. Men and children however, can coexist in the same world without someone pressing a panic button, because we have existed in the same world for millions of years, even long before people decided to start putting paranoid sexist discrimination before human dignity. When certain people decided to start separating every man from every child, they separated their humanity from themselves. It's time we separated them from their perches. 

Cynicism is Asking Questions

It occurs to me that what I've been ranting about here could be considered a form of cynicism--that is, the philosophical belief that underestimates or totally devalues the conventional or prevailing valuations of mainstream culture or times, in regards to a particular virtue. Cynics ask questions about why we value the things that we value, and what good it really does us to value them how we do. For instance, is the inflated caricature of adulthood superiority over adolescents due to the fact of its moral superiority, or is it simply due to the fact that adults have always been the ones drawing the lines? Is the inflated caricature of childhood innocence and purity due to the fact of its moral neutrality, or is it once again due to the fact that adults have always been drawing the lines? Is so-called "parental intuition" so unshakable, so natural, so perfect in our minds that we have to ignore its irrational foul-ups? Is the fetishization of male under-performance really any use in ensuring equality between the sexes? There are countless new values that need to be questioned out there, just as wealth, fame, power, and consumerism all have in their turn.

Modern culture all but instructs us not to question, and many people will call you out as an "extremist giving strength to other extremists" for even dignifying their extremism with a response. Many will stop being your friends when you so much as call into question that which they hold so dear, or at least, that which they want to pretend doesn't exist. I say that not dignifying the gleeful, ignorant, or dishonest statements floating around these days is to be giving them greater potency. It's to be letting them off easy. What harm does questioning extremism do when extremism is flawed by default, especially when one questions it with focused and passionate rational resolve? It is like saying that we must not hurl our poison-tipped arrows at some vicious beast, for to do so will "only make him mad." Why put up with the torments of a vicious beast all your life under your inaction, when you can both "make him mad" and swiftly kill him dead with your words this moment? All the victors of history managed to get things done, despite calls from the crowd to let the extremists off easy.

Cynicism is often thought to be a doctrine of pessimism, when in reality it is the opposite. It could be argued that nothing gives someone a clearer perspective about how to value that which actually needs to be valued, and how to toss off that which in the end is a mere construction of society, than it. People have gone to their deaths or have lived vain lives over ideals that are silly and flimsy, and in the modern world, people have managed to carry out all manner of destruction on premises that are just as silly and flimsy when opened up to simple scrutiny (marriage as an institution, for instance). Writer Lenore Skenazy over on the Free Range Kids website writes endlessly about the ways that society has become destructive toward children in its efforts to mediate their every step and breath, and in so doing, does the world a service every time she questions something. She could be yet another "child defender" and preach protective paranoia with smug self assurance, but instead, she prefers to do parents and the world a service simply by questioning our deepest held prejudices and fears over child safety. The act is a literal pealing back of the eyelids from the realm of an illusion to the world of the causal and the physical, and where consequences matter.

It has been my work to take this line of argument even further--to question not just our valuations of protecting children, but our valuations of children and young people themselves. I've gone on record before in questioning whether or not the standard of beauty in culture necessarily relates to what our commercial-driven media apparatus has been convincing us it is. First and foremost, the female body is no longer a dignified subject matter because of it, and has instead become synonymous with hawking products. That doesn't carry a connotation of beauty in my perspective, although many others have been tricked into thinking as such. I could just as easily though make the argument that children are beautiful--and do it not from a purely "parental perspective", but from a similar exploitative beauty standard perspective as we see in commercial media--and I would be no more wrong. Women are not any standard of beauty and children are not any standard of innocence and optimism. Our valuations on human beings and other entities and objects are not correct simply because we think them.  There was a time when men were considered the standard of beauty (ancient Athens), and children were considered "little savages," for instance. Time changes things, and if you don't think it will, wait another three hundred years.

Those who vigorously defend the endless "innocence" of a child are doomed to see nothing but the infantilization of that child instead, once he or she has grown. Everything we think requires re-thinking and questioning, lest we become stuck in a similar cultural rut--a state of societal arrested development. Learning requires accommodating new information. Stagnation only requires needless oath-taking to age old traditions, premises, and other illusions of value.

Indeed, the greatest personal affirmation is achieved when one decides to shirk off all that is superficial and focus on instead what really matters--whatever that may be for each individual. This was the driving principle behind the existentialists. All that is superficial tends to be what we have in common with everyone else. We all believe children are human beings and should be treated with dignity and respect, so to think ourselves righteous simply for upholding that is superficial. What really matters as far as that is concerned, is how we behave around and respond to children in real life, whether we know them personally or not. The same principle goes for all people, animals, and the earth itself. It's not enough to uphold something, one has to question whether simply upholding it is indeed virtuous, and if not, scrap it and focus on realigning one's values with inter-human bonds where virtues are shown, rather than "upheld." You can not get there without being cynical towards the out-dated and counter-productive traditional expectations of what we are to "uphold," and particularly those sentiments we are expected to "uphold on the highest." One could argue that we are expected to uphold nothing higher than our constructions about children, childhood, and their well being, so therefore, nothing is more deserving of our criticism.

Cynicism is the only progressive tool we have, so perhaps even it deserves question. I'm not so sure about its emphasis on the natural world as being particularly virtuous, for instance, because the natural world is in fact no more virtuous than the civilized world. Childhood is no more virtuous than adulthood, and adulthood no more than childhood--so even our valuations of our revaluations can be subject to further questioning... but the point remains still--to question.

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.

Questioning the Amber Alert

You may hear it said that anyone who questions something purported to save children's lives must be in league with whatever band of miscreants don't want children's lives to be saved. But what is a child's life worth to the people who make this broad leap of irrational zeal? Is a child's life a bargaining line against societal betterment? Are children now our excuse for apathy, for maintaining the status quo in a broken system? Does fixing the system's faults mean one is against saving children, and if such is the case, what does that make those who ignore the system's faults? Irrationality over children is the hideous beast that holds children captive if only to make sure no one else gets to set them free first, and it needs to die of a thousand cuts. Here's one cut we can make.

Let's consider Amber Alerts for a moment. Many may be tempted to think that such a dramatic, news-friendly theater narrative system recovers 12 children a day and costs nothing to implement--that its benefits outweigh any possible drawback to such an extent that it's not even worth investigating alternative methods for recovering children from abductions. In reality though, according to their own report for 2009 (the most recent one), out of 207 cases (269 children) nationwide, 45 (59 children) were recovered contingent upon the Amber alert having been posted, at a cost of 25 million dollars per state in federal money (from taxpayers) to pay for implementing the service. The average caseload per state (including three US territories), was about four, an average of one child per state and territory was recovered. So in effect, based on averages, 25 million dollars was spent to rescue about one child in your state in 2009. (Michigan had the highest at 27, but a majority of states had 0 or 1 cases).

The money seems insubstantial though, because if it helped save even one child's life, then it surely must be money well spent? A child's life, a human life, is certainly worth more than any dollar amount. But despite what any politician may say, the money that goes in to setting up the Amber Alert system does not "save children's lives." The Bill itself does not "save children's lives," it simply allocates money for states to set up Amber Alert systems. That 25 million pays for the infrastructure and technology needed to broadcast the Amber alerts--mainly, glowing highway signs, command posts, and emergency alert systems for television and radio. But why should this matter if all that equipment is being used in the service of spreading awareness about children being abducted?

In reality, the effect of these gadgets and special announcements on the police and investigators solving their cases, is minimal. That was the finding in the first independent study on the effectiveness of Amber alerts at the University of Nevada, carried out by a team lead by criminologist Timothy Griffin. Hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2009 were studied, and the finding was that Amber Alerts played little to no role in the recovery of children, despite their glowing reputation in the mainstream media. It was found that the majority of cases deemed successes by the Amber Alert system during those six years were children involved in custody fights between parents where the child was not at risk. In the minority of cases where kidnappers were the perpetrators, Amber Alerts usually failed to save their lives. It would appear that murderous kidnappers are not swayed to spare the child's life when the kid's face and name is plastered on every screen in the county.

Essentially, the Amber Alerts generally help police and investigators recover children from lower risk situations where the child's life is not at least immediately in jeopardy. "The fact is that once someone abducts a child with a murderous intent," Griffin said, "there's really not that much we can do about it."  In 2009, nine children were recovered already deceased, and none were found to be a result of an outside the family kidnapping: 4 children died at the hands of relatives, 5 children died from unknown circumstances. While the Amber Alerts certainly do have the potential to be life saving, to make the assumption that every Amber Alert saves a life, or that Amber Alerts are a life saving operation like the ER, is a gross exaggeration.

One may also contend that Amber alerts in 2009 saved the lives of children at the hands of murderous rapists, kidnappers, and strangers. This is the image glorified in the media, after all. In actuality, of the 170 cases in which the abductor had been identified in 2009, 139 of them were in known relationships with the child, making only 31 cases nationwide where the child had been abducted by some rogue kidnapper. Of those 139 cases, 109 of those known relationships were familial ones. Imagine that, family members are the greatest threat to our nation's children, with 64 being the child's father, and 34 being the child's mother. This means that the number of child abductions in which the offender was the child's own parents vastly outnumbers cases where children were abducted by the rogue slugs that make for such an endearing news hour.

However, none of this is meant to suggest that Amber Alerts be done away with. In fact, one promising thing about Amber Alerts, if not because of the number of children they save, is the speed at which recoveries are made following activation of an alert. Many children with activated alerts on them were recovered within three hours of the alert being posted. In fact, 35 of the 59 children recovered in 2009 were rescued within three hours of the alert being posted, mainly because officers were able to identify the abductor's vehicle as described in the alert. This is encouraging, but once again, when most of the abductors are related to the child, information about the child's parents' vehicle is already determined. While the number of Amber Alerts issued has declined over time, the number of abductions has remained fairly consistent.

How necessary is this measure? One could say society is better off with Amber Alerts than it would be if no such method of alert existed for the recovery of abducted children. But how effective is the measure? Is its efficiency so great that it can not even be questioned--so great that all who criticize it can only be among those "against saving children's lives?" This is hardly an over-statement. I'm more than confident that, seeing how few children are actually recovered (even given that perhaps the numbers have changed since 2009), this is a costly apparatus that could probably be scaled back to something a bit more representative of its effectiveness. All that is made by human endeavor should be questioned, because regardless of whether Amber Alerts ever saved a child's life, ignorance to reality never has.

Thought-Stopping Cliches

Our typical human overhears the cultural media pulpit repetitively spouting thought-stopping cliches about predators day in and out, takes them at face value and then perhaps turns around and criticizes those who practice religion. There is no difference. If religion is said to become anxious at the idea of critical analysis and receives criticism for it, then our media pulpit should be spared no less the same. The only thing that is necessary to say to render null all arguments for justifying our opinions based on reason alone is wrapped up in the confused media-fed jargon of the expression, "predators targeting innocent children." No one can contest paranoia like this without looking like they support the "predators," so it becomes truth regardless of its truth.

"The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis."
(Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism 429)

Childhood innocence is a cultural designation for which there is no evidence--sure children exist inside a different developmental stage from adults, but there is no reason to believe they are any more "innocent," "pure," or "angelic" as a result than your average adult given their own developmental state. Another is the purely cultural detestation for "pedophilia," where ignorance has produced in the mainstream its 1 to 1 correlation with "child molestation." Such a 1 to 1 correlation has no evidence, and even runs counter to evidence suggesting that not all pedophiles necessarily commit the crimes of child molestation and possession of child porn. But put these two words together in the same sentence, "innocent child" and "pedophile," and all analysis stops. If you contest the jargon, you're in support of the perpetrator. In the past, such an ability to think beyond the words would doom your soul to hellfire, these days, it dooms our society to ignorance and illusion servitude.

Ignorance on Display

I found this statement online. How wrong, ignorant, or just plain sexist is it? Shall we count the ways?

And I have to say that maybe if you're a man, you might not quite get the instinctive caution or even revulsion felt when it looks like an adult male is too involved with a child.

The writer is implying that men "may or may not" be capable of feeling empathy for victims of abuse or revulsion towards abusers, or even caution at a child who appears to be slipping into a hazardous situation. Lord help me from slipping into the same trap of sexist ignorance this female commenter has fallen into, and jump to the conclusion that all females are incapable of telling the difference between child abuse and an adult male and child simply spending quality time together. Are not fathers, for instance, supposed to be "involved" with their children? Are they not too "adult males?" Obviously not all females are as ignorant as the ignorant among them imply all "adult males" of being.

And how shall we quantify when an adult male is "too involved" with a child? What precisely is the boundary that causes such revulsion in females who apparently are so adept at deciphering it? If we are talking about real physical, emotional, or any other form of abuse in such a way that there is physical harm, jeopardy, or any kind of marked impairment in the child as a result, then we have something to base our revulsion on for sure--whether or not "feeling revulsion" for the abuser will do any good for the child is another story. If we are talking about a child and an adult male spending a mutually appreciated, non-harmful, parental consented "fun filled" afternoon together, then as the saying goes, "the boredom under peace will spread its own evil" in the popular imagination. Knee-jerked "revulsion" on cue in such a situation will only cause harm, not just to the child, but to everyone involved, and those ripples of negativity will spread throughout society.

Society can either be held together on a platform of trust and responsibility, or it can be held together on one of fear and knee-jerk assumptions. Each of us have to make that choice, and society will either benefit or suffer for it.

And how shall we quantify what is meant by "child," anyway? Are we speaking of a 17 year old, or a 4 year old? What are the circumstances of these encounters? These are all questions that need to be posed and answered before you should be expecting anyone to feel "revulsion" on cue at the mere suggestion of an adult male and a child spending time together. Blanket statements requiring our revulsion toward phantom child molesters and sympathy for phantom child victims do nothing to help real child victims and deter real child molesters. If anything, it hinders our ability to feel empathic or even "cautious" in real life situations, because so much of our emotional fortitude is distracted and divested to feeling "revulsion" or "sympathy" for the shadows in our heads.

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.