Children are Sexual

Puberty is not the beginning. The sexual life of the human being begins in the womb. It is expressed, enjoyed, shared, and felt in childhood. It is then repressed by those who fail to regard its existence. It is punished by those who fail to recognize its humanity. Children are instead fed fabrications about what their sexual feelings mean, and even adults begin to believe what they preach. We are told that child sexuality not only doesn't exist, but that any expression of it is deviance, and any discussion about it is the promotion of child rape. This has not always been the case, as any cursory glance will reveal from such academic works as Loving Boys (1986) by Dr. Edward Brongersma, or Paedophilia: A Factual Report (1985), by Dr. Frits Bernard, or The Sexual Life of Children (1994), by Floyd Martinson, or even The Sexual Life of the Child, from 1912, by Albert Moll, among hundreds of others lost to history.

In decades past, discussion about the sexual life of children was alive and well in fact. It was accepted as repeatedly observable in the wide breadth of scientific inquiry into human development, and discussion about it didn't lead anyone to think that by investigating child sexuality anyone was in fact promoting child rape. Times have changed though, and all progress has not only stalled, but reversed itself. The very fact of a child's sexuality has been run over by the preponderance of research dealing with child sex abuse, and now all child sexuality has become subjugated to the adult fear of child sex abuse first and foremost, rather than remain liberated as the legitimate form of inquiry it is.

The inquiry determining the difference between mental and physical sexual maturation for the purpose of procreation, and the preexisting sexual feelings that children are born with and grow up experiencing and acting upon, has been left behind with the sexual revolution of the 20th century. All other aspects of human sexuality have been greeted with toleration and eventual acceptance (and even many of the earlier sexual "perversions"), but children are not extended such courtesy, and it has everything to do with the maintenance of adult illusions. Having no conception of breathing does not stop an infant from breathing as an act of self-preservation, and neither does having no conception of sexuality stop a young child from masturbating, even at the age of seven months, for boys in particular, no matter what we tell ourselves.

But no amount of adult illusion can change the fact that children are sexual, engage in sex play, feel every bit of sexual tension and pleasure that adults do, and that all of it is denied to their understanding. No amount of telling ourselves it isn't true is going to erase the fact that decades of research has repeatedly shown children engaging in genital stimulation, auto-erotica, and even sexual activities with one another at what we in the twenty-first century have concluded are "unnaturally low" ages. On the contrary, they knew something in the 19th and 20th centuries that seems lost to us now: that the "unnaturally high" ages of sexual activity we promote in our modern "progressive" age are indeed what is more abnormal, if anything. For procreative purposes, the older ages are in fact divorced from nature, rather than any representational paradigm of it. The inability for adults to accept aging out of sexual activity in recent decades has caused them to criminalize and pathologize all youth expression of it instead, despite youth sexuality being the natural paradigm.

So we celebrate the birth of a new century where childhood sexual activity is not only stricken from all public discourse, but so is the very fact of its existence. It has been erased from both the academic landscape as well as popular opinion. Demonstrable facts have been lost and replaced by adult illusions--the illusion of the child as a wholy innocent creature devoid of feeling and depth, who is merely here to be a repository of adult services. This is the "predator panic" illusion that our society calls progress.

There is so much lack of understanding on this issue that actual child sexuality, existing as a fact of nature, has been conflated with pedophilia, and pedophilia with child sexual abuse, done through its constant repetition in research and popular culture to scare our sensitivities away from where they naturally would've been. In this way, all discussion of child sexuality as a part of a child's physical being, manifesting a great deal of their humanity, has been equated inextricably with child sexual abuse instead. "If a child is a sexual being," so goes the popular opinion, "whether sexually active or not, the child is beyond help, and more likely to be raped or sexually exploited." But since every child is sexual by nature, expressing it to varying degrees, and child sex abuse is still a relative rarity by comparison, this is hardly an appropriate conclusion.

Adults attempt to eradicate the existence of a child's sexuality so as to protect them from themselves as well as predators, and make deviant a child's natural sexual exploratory behavior all as the price for protection against those who are truly deviant. So the only image we are fed is that of the child as a porcelain doll who feels not, thinks not, and perhaps only breathes so that in life they may give adults something to protect. In this way, a child's humanity has been taken away every time their human drives are equated with deviance. It seems the western world has no problem with stripping the humanity off a child though, just so long as the boy or girl keeps their clothes on for it. 

On Lying to Children

We teach children not to lie. We teach them that lying is an act of cowardice and an affront to the dignity and respect that others deserve, so of course we feel comfortable lying to children. We actually seem to enjoy holding the truth over them, just out of reach. We invest energy and years into feeding their delusions only because they are willing to accept what is being told to them. This is their nature, as is human nature when sources beyond our direct involvement or understanding (the media, government, laws...etc.) dictate how we are to think. But how much more human potential could be unlocked if we valued the truth as much as we value maintaining a child's delusions?

The child molester lies to his victim to gain access to their trust, but just imagine what that child would do in that situation if the child molester had told the kid the truth upfront. Image if what society told our trusting children was the truth also, and what kind of change that next generation could bring about in the world as a result of knowing the truth. If the truth could save a child from trusting a child molester, then truth could save a child from trusting our kindly police, teachers, parents, and society in general as immediately. Imagine for a second how many children would be saved. Imagine how many could be saved from committing the hypocrisies of adulthood if they were told as children to loathe corporate and political hypocrites as much as they are told to fear "strangers." 

The next time someone respects a child's dignity, it will be because they will be telling them the truth. And while it's true that "the truth hurts," how much pleasure do lies, sarcasm, and delusions bring? How much disillusionment and disengagement could be spared in our young adults if as children they were reared from the start to know how the world is and what it will take to change it? Imagine how many children could be saved from learning the lies of our fast-money, sex-obsessed, violent, materialist, culture of selfishness and sin from all those back-window sources, if we as adults could be there at the front door to greet them with the truth when they asked for it? How many could be spared the draconian sentences of the law for naively exposing themselves to each other if they could be told upfront how the law does more to punish them than it does to protect them? 

Empowerment is the enemy of ignorance, and it is given with the truth. It does no child any good to have the truths of life withheld from them, even the most unfriendly truths. For instance, everyone says "death is a part of life," but no one wants to accept that a child of theirs is ever going to die. People either deny to themselves the fact that children are living entities capable of death, or they deny to themselves and to their children the fact that living things have to die, in order to keep their emotions on the issue intact. They have to lie to themselves to justify stripping the humanity away from a child in the process of protecting that child's delusions. Delusions that keep the child a corporate slave, for instance, do little to nothing to empower them, no matter how much "girl power" or "guns and ammo" you get them drunk on, but the truth will always set them free. 

Every lie to a child is also a lie to the one perpetuating the lie. The one confusing the maintenance of ignorance for the "safeguarding of innocence" is lying to herself. The liar is only safeguarding themselves from their own anxiety. The liar is only safeguarding their authority and control over a child's will born out of their fear of the world. Conversely, the one telling the truth to the child is the only one doing everything the liar has convinced herself she is doing. The one telling the truth is actually the one doing the protecting, respecting, and sparing of the child from grief. If a child is capable of asking a question, they are capable of hearing the truth as assuredly as they are capable of hearing a lie. The air does not discriminate one from another. 

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.

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.

Babylon

What is Babylon? The Mesopotamian city-state once bearing that name has been used as a symbol for human folly, oppression, material worship, corruption, and moral depravity throughout history. It may have been the site of the infamous Tower of Babel, where mankind exercised the height of hubris and was securely humbled, at least according to tradition. The name "Babylon" has thus been appropriated to many lands that have fit these symbolic descriptors, including Rome, Europe, and the Americas--all places assumed at one point to have flown too close to the sun as Icarus only to burn in their own shame instead.

Probably the most severe charge leveled against this mythic pinnacle of human endeavor is that the people who inhabited it were not just morally bankrupt in their deeds, but the deeds and practices partook within its walls were contrary to nature itself. It is for these abominations that Babylon was torn asunder like Sodom and Gomorrah, and Rome in the following epoch, and perhaps our own high flying civilization in the near future. The western world, it could be argued, has decided to run its course contrary to nature in a multitude of ways, in clear defiance brought on by timeless human arrogance, but for the purposes of this dialogue, the most pressing appears to be the way it has decided to raise its children.

We are living in the midst of a new Babylon resurrected in the modern age to reclaim the same historical legacy. Our society has been gripped by an unnatural bureaucratic regime that imposes a skeletal will of its own on how children are to be dealt with in our age. For our purposes, we see this in the rise of "nanny state" politics, public education, and the Child Protective Services, to name a few sources. From these sources we observe widespread alienation in both society and it's children, and between society and children born from the paper trails and false pretenses strewn amok in the world. In this new Babylon a child becomes free to be secured so adults may not have to look at them, and little else, and it has ignored how nature has gifted them two arms and legs to go where they please. Babylon has forbade a child from bruising a knee where nature has equipped them capable of healing. This is an abomination.

From these sources we see how bold-faced corruption at the hands of the trusted few carries no horrified weight in the public heart when compared to the muted love felt by those the system deems superficially undesirable--the non-parents. The irony is that Babylon asserts Childlove is contrary to nature, when everything our society does in the raising of children at the "official" level can scarcely be found in the natural world. If Childlove is unnatural, then where does that leave the Child Protective Services? When was the last time you saw an animal, a mother tigress, have her offspring carried away to be wards of the animal state? In this confusion over what is natural and what isn't, Babylon creates a daily abomination out of what it calls modern childhood, and then goes on the hunt to purge that which is natural (loving adult/child bonds) by singling them out as abominations! To live in Babylon is to be an unwilling or unwitting slave to such illusion. That is an abomination.

We see bold-faced media moral depravity over children as we fret about outside sources of contamination on their so-called weaker minds. We see bold-faced consumerism regard children as personal corporate pawns to extort money from adults, and the constant bombardment of the developing mind with worshipful imagery of "me-first" gratification--an economically necessary self-actualization through material pursuits that has to "take root early" to grow as its planters desire. Within Babylon, children are not considered competent to resist the forces that seek to dominate them, cultivate them, and nurture them to fruition for the dreams of the powerful, so they are expected to be tame, passive, and to define their self worth and the worth of others through material things. Childlove is of nature because it teaches us to use things and love people. Babylon teaches our children to use people and love things. That is an abomination.

But because not all children are tame, they are subjugated where they deviate from what is expected of them from the corrupt culture. Within Babylon, they are expected to be sedated. They are expected to live an "ideal happy childhood" at all cost to their actual living human dignity. They are to be put under arrest for being young at the wrong place and wrong time (the definition of the "status offense" in juvenile law). They are expected to lay low in their bedrooms playing on their computers, buying into what is profitable for someone else, rather than out being human beings themselves, because home is where they can be easily monitored, easily controlled, and easily converted. Babylon is the residence of the downpresser. That is an abomination.

Babylon is wherever the soul has lost its way in its own arrogance and decadence. It is a metaphor for human folly--the slow destruction of the human being and spirit when its true passionate nature has been perverted, distorted, and separated from it. The modern world claims not only its children, but all those who choke up whenever it requires them to, who feel hatred for whom it orders them to feel hatred for, and sympathy for whom it reserves sympathy must be given. The modern Babylon controls its subjects (child and adult alike) through the subtle mind control of sentimentalism, inflated at ten times its natural size, until society can not tell what has been sensationalized from what is truth. In Babylon, phantom children (the idealized ones) take precedence over the real ones with faces and names, and whenever you have a civilization where imaginary child victims take precedence over the less visceral living and breathing ones, we have a civilization that has turned its back on nature.

We can save our society one child at a time, one person at a time, by reinstating the primitive values of personal responsibility, charity, and above all else, human-to-human love bonds--such things Babylon had no use for in its self-absorbed quest to build its towers to God. Who needs to worship children when you can simply respect them as human beings? Who needs a three-story chain link fence to keep our children safe in a world where children and adults were allowed to personally look out for one another? Who needs an all-consuming, expensive tower to God when we can bring Him to earth with just a friendly nod, or a loving embrace?

To get there, Babylon must first devour itself from the inside out, as it has before and will again.

Aphorisms for Hypocrisy

Those who fear the child predator ignore the child marketer. Those who fear the child predator ignore the army recruiter. Those who fear the child predator on the news, the sex offender living down the street, or their child's freedom online...ignore police arrests of 8 year olds, corrupt CPS child removals, and the ethnic, racial, and gender disenfranchisement in many public schools.

Those who feel an innate sense of disgust at one form of child destruction, do not bat an eyelash at the "socially acceptable" forms of it. It doesn't matter if the 8 year old arrest was simply a kid guilty of the crime of walking to school in a predator-panicked district, or if the never-liable CPS worker had no evidence of abuse or neglect in their decision to abduct children for funding, and it certainly doesn't cause anyone to lash out with such displays of righteous indignation (at least not to the "lynch mob" status given to solitary perverts) over what happens to the African American boy in an under-performing school. Where are the bands of concerned citizens gathering to defend him, and why are they rallying to kill the television pervert instead?

Those who believe they have done the children of the world a service by hating on the one teacher caught with child pornography, do not even shutter at the fact that the common airport terminal has been turned into the largest creator of child pornography in the world, and its operators into the biggest collection of child groomers. These same people certainly don't mind sending their children through the chambers to be pictured naked for a trained onlooker, patted down by strangers, or strip searched in public, in order to board a plane--after all, the parents already paid for the ticket.

What is sanctioned by culture is never illegal, no matter how wrong, but what is illegal is sanctioned rarely, no matter how just. Illusion becomes real, and reality becomes ignored. What is true is obliterated, no matter how right, and what is sensational is preserved, no matter how evil. The innocence of children must be preserved as long as it is profitable.

"All this righteous indignation about predators... This whole country is trying to get into your kid's pants, because that's where he keeps his wallet."
--Bill Maher

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.

Political Correctness

What compels a person to see something beautiful and helpless, sleeping beneath the willows by the brook in the spring, delicate and docile, and rape it, destroy it, cut it to pieces and devour it after a slow boil? Calm your heart, because it's the same urge that causes seemingly rational people to swear an allegiance to political correctness. PC is the demon of social decay, the lord of the flies, that feeds off otherwise healthy and passionate human behavior and shits out its prefabricated, soft and grotesque version of reality. Originality, essence, meaning, it's all lost in the transformation, and what is produced is nothing less than the ultimate victim of molestation--the slow decay of our free society.

Children grow up in a prefabricated world simply because the world has already been established before their birth, but adults seem to want to go one step further. Raising a child on a PC version of that world is similar to feeding them food that has already been chewed up and regurgitated by the parent. There is the real world, let's say, the cheese on a cracker, and then there's the PC version of it, the cheese and cracker mush laced with saliva and stomach acids that has been thoroughly chewed and digested by an adult. Both plates contain the essential food product, the only difference is that one contains the real treat and the other is what occurs when adults have to intervene. After that, it becomes difficult to tell what is real, seeing as the regurgitation is sitting right there on the plate and seems real enough, it's just that now we have to begin force feeding to get the child to eat it when they could have just eaten it themselves.

Many "concerned parents" won't think this is an accurate comparison, because in this case the cheese and cracker is obviously more healthy than the pre-digested slop, and in reality, many things that are PC don't inflict all that much damage on the young--at least no more or less damage than exposing the kid to the real world. It is an accurate comparison though, as all adult intervention to censor reality, limit freedom of expression, limit knowledge, or ban outright any part of a child's ability to reach out to the real world around them is dangerous, not only for children but for all of free society. The reality we want our children to eventually live in is the real one, not the fabricated "inoffensive" one called politically correct. They already live in the real world, and one day will possess it, like it or not, and no amount of focus group tampering or "concerned parent" molestation of reality is going to stop them from possessing it.

Diversions and Distractions

What gets society all up in a frenzy and what really matters are two different things. It seems like it was always like this. Society is so caught up in portraying the symbolic gesture of doing the right thing that they seemed to have forgotten completely how to do it. This is to say, society is distracted by the sentimental, sensational nature of heroism and the impulse to frame it inside some kind of digestible narrative, and can no longer (as a whole) just appreciate things or actions for what they are on the surface.

Whether we're caught up in the wrongness of burning the flag while ignoring the less viscerally arresting imagery of corporate imperialism, or caught up in the "sex beast" who looked at a child the wrong way while ignoring how society has been turning a blind eye to the treatment of black boys in education, we're distracted. We're not paying attention to the right things. We're distracted by the glamor of narrative and symbolism, by sensationalist media and sentimental hand-on-heart "oh dear"-isms, and for that it's getting harder to tell what really matters. What really matters is people and the planet, not how this blog or any pundit out there frames the goings on between those two things.

No matter how we feel about our adversaries, whether they be labeled "maggots" or "sex beasts," or "antichrists," it should never distract us from living and loving those around us for whom our allegiance and loyalty should be full. We shouldn't be ignoring the isolated crying child on the bustling city sidewalk to return to our private den that night and redirect our guilt and self-hate for inaction toward some overhyped convicted sex offender on TV caught entering a library. Who among us could possibly argue that this is a better use of those energies? Assist the crying child on the sidewalk, and forget the TV sex offender, and the world will be better for it.

Perhaps this is idealistic, but it's the truth.

Run Down the West

The decadent west has been described as a "vampire" by some critics, sucking children dry of blood. Blood is a life sustaining fluid, and to be robbed of it is to be dead or dying. Here, the west is said to be depriving children of their essential life elements--typically understood as the catchall term for modern affluence. The west stresses individualistic egotism, instant gratification, progress and persuasion over such mundane things as wisdom, guidance, kindness, charity, and patience. Indeed, in the west people seem to be fighting to retain these virtues on a personal scale in an environment that does nothing but encourage the opposite.

Children grow up in this environment, and learn quickly the world does the opposite of what it teaches. The so-called character in their "character education" is actually forged in a fight. It is caught between coming and going, between doing what is right and doing what the market and the media encourage, between valuing humility and respect and climbing to the top of an artificial social edifice to spit in the face of those who lost out. In truth though, virtue is just as important to sustaining an individual as blood. If to be robbed of blood results in a poor health and death, then to be robbed of personality by culture is to be in a state of comatose where one's will is no longer in control of the body just barely kept alive by the external system. Children need individuality like they need blood or air, otherwise they are living a life of a slow drown in the depths of illusion (aka. what the mystics call maya).

However illusion-based the west is though, it is also a free world, and the "big bad media" is simply an organization of individuals producing a product by utilizing that free will. Censorship of the content of the media, or managing culture, should be no entity's sole discretion. The culture simply "is" and nothing can be done about it. It is an engine fueled by a collective perspective shared by hundreds of millions of people, it is not inherently evil or even wrong, it's just ubiquitous and persuasive and limits our resolve to resist it (and therefore utilize our own individual will against it). The only solution to tempering the pervasiveness and destructiveness of western affluence on the minds of younger generations is through direct love and guidance of an adult who is himself also a victim of that "vampire" of affluence. It can hardly be argued that the CL is anything but.

Unlike other sources of guidance who may be entrenched in the will of society, or even be benefactors of the system (such as social workers), the CL is an independent agent. Through their outside charity, their love and guidance, a child is able to truly prosper as an individual. The CL is able to teach children about the grip of the west, to understand what makes it so powerful over human life, and ultimately how to respect that human life more than any product, social system, idea, or even society itself. They learn through their interactions with the non-parent how to swear allegiance to no artificial pillar of culture and only swear allegiance to themselves, how to be self reliant, how to be a person and not a puppet. When a child is given that kind of deep appreciation for life, theirs and others', by observing the works of the person who loves them of their free will, then they grow so much more protective of life. They'd see material things to be temporary pleasures that add to life, and not life itself.

In doing so, the vampire, the Babylon dragon, is rendered tame.