Loving Children

There is nothing wrong with loving a child. Children deserve love because they exist, from anyone willing to give it, and they deserve to be allowed to show love to anyone who will receive it. It is only wrong to deny them love and attention, and only right to give it to them. It is wrong to spurn their attempts to show love, and only right to receive them warmly. Society is wrong when it works to separate adults and children on a pretense of fear, and only right when it allows them to coexist in peace and harmony, guided by pure love and care. Children deserve love even when their parents are unwilling or unable to give it, just as those who give it are deserving of receiving it. Their love is human love, and humans need love like they need air, water, and food. Children are no different from human.

Love doesn't have to be unrealistically selfless and overly simplistic, for discipline, when authoritatively enforced, is a function of love (whether adults are disciplining children or children disciplining adults), it just needs to be felt that way. To deprive someone discipline is to be depriving them of love, just as to neglect is to deprive, and to abuse is to keep depraved--none of these are expressions of love. Children deserve to be loved by society as much as they need to be cared for by it. When a child is loved by an adult, and it is purely expressed, the child will love back. To gain the child's love in return for love: this is the only legitimately hallowed co-relation between adult and child that can exist, and the most noble arrangement a man, woman, boy, or girl can be blessed with. The truth is often plain and usually simple.

There's nothing wrong with a child loving an adult. Adult-to-child love and child-to-adult love is human love, and human love expressed tenderly in private and charitably in public is an expression of God's love. Children are not only capable of receiving their parents' love or solely capable of showing love toward their parents, but are capable of accepting kindness from anyone, young and old, who is willing to give it, and giving it to whoever is willing, young and old, to accept it. This is the meaning of "good will toward all."

The parental responsibility over their children is only there to be the gatekeeper deciding who may enter and who can not, as is their right to keep their child safe, but children deserve love even from their gatekeepers, and even from those incapable of keeping the gate and are still tasked to do so. If they are unable to receive it from their primary gatekeepers (their parents), then they both need someone else to fill that responsibility and extend to them the warm embrace of love and guidance. Parents love their children because they have to, by nature. Childlovers love children because they want to, by choice. True childlovers are never out to replace parents, but to supplement them. They are not there to strip a child off their family, but to be an extension of child's family. They are not there to further suppress the child, or to spoil them into subservience, but to act as role models working through legitimate channels of outreach acceptable to all capable of accepting love.

Childlovers love children as an adult lover might for their own lover, but the love of the childlover is purer, because it is felt almost exclusively out of interpersonal connection, selflessness, and devotion to allowing the child complete freedom. Adult love relationships, by contrast, are often compounded with expectations of monogamy and sex, but such things would be unthinkably selfish, and potentally hazardous, in a childlove relationship. The childlover never seeks to gain the child solely for themselves for "all eternity" as the primarily self-motivated adult relationships often do as an institution (marriage). The childlover instead only seeks to impart to a child the kindness and charity they are deserving of as human beings, and lets the child alone to live their own lives and pay that love forward to whoever they wish. That is the difference that makes all the difference!

The adult should only be someone the child knows personally for one reason or another, someone his or her parents know and trust, and someone from whom the relationship develops naturally and gradually out of friendship and trust. And because true love is never forced, coerced, or manipulated out of someone, whether adult or child, that which is isn't love and doesn't have any legitimate reason for existing. This is as much true for a child's non-parental lovers as it is for their legal guardians. Anyone who can not love a child genuinely (selflessly, harmlessly, charitably) has no business around them. Those who can will prove themselves worthy if their heart is pure. Psalms were written to celebrate such a love as that!

The Child In Distress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Kids are Alright

The kids are alright. The only threat to children, if one can even call it that, is too much fretting about threats. Most parents understand that there are two directions we can thrust our concern at as to what is harming kids--the immanent (actual) and the potential (possible). When a child is drowning--that is to say, when a child is facing an immanent threat to their state of being--it seems asinine to direct our attention instead toward the potential hazard of them scuffing their foot on a rock at the bottom of the pond. For instance, no one says when a child is drowning, "Save that child, he might scuff his foot on a rock underwater!" That would be misdirected priorities.

That is clearly the case when the immanent threat outweighs the potential threat. One might excuse such misdirected fretting if the immanent harm and potential threat are of equal magnitude of danger though (if that's possible), but not when the child is experiencing no threat outside the imagination of his onlooker. These are not equal terms though. It is clearly unconscionable to think the potential for harm is more deserving of our attention than direct endangerment in here and now. That is to say, the potential for harm does not always necessitate an impulsive response from the adult or peer, but on the other hand, that immanent harm always does. Direct endangerment of a child, be it physical abuse or otherwise, is nearly always more deserving of our attention than potential, social and culturally-based perceived "threats" we have to be reminded to worry about.

This is all very well and good to say, but sometimes it is understandable that deciphering immanent hazards to children from potential ones is difficult and subjective. What is an immanent harm and a potential threat? Ultimately, potential threats are just that, potential, in it either hasn't happened yet, is happening and may just not be causing any damage to the child, or is happening whether we know its effects or not. Chances are, if our children are being bombarded with so-called destructive media messages for example (a potential threat to them), beyond our knowledge as adults, our reserve for panic isn't going to do a bit of difference in assisting us to save them from harm's way--not as it would if the threat was immediate. Children are going to be receiving these messages invariably, whether we remain ignorant of them or are running around trying to sanitize all that their eyes rest on.

The issue is, if a potential harm is causing some so-called threat so minor that parents, even with all their so-lauded "intuition," don't even notice it without having to be reminded to pay attention to it via the news media, then it by no means deserves the shock and worry that we ought to be reserving for actual immanent harms that children, and adults, can find themselves in the middle of, where the effects can be anything but minor. For example, childhood obesity is a much more hazardous threat, and an immediate one in many cases, than the potential for that obese child to be abducted--but which do parents and the media fret over more? Which inspires more legislation, despite fewer deaths? Abduction is sexier than obesity, when it comes to the mainstream culture, evidently.

One of the main differences between potential threats and immanent harms is that specific steps can be taken to respond to immanent harms in a practical, reasoned way. You can take your time with it and find a solution to the issue (proper diet and exercise, in the case of obesity). With "potential hazards," there is only so much preparation one can do because half the damage is manufactured in our minds. The only steps we can take to reduce the potential damage are whatever our minds can dream up ("stranger danger" survival strategies, for instance). It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy though. We might say, "thanks to our best efforts to keep children indoors, we have reduced sun burn--and because it has worked, we can be proud of ourselves," even when other solutions could have been less restrictive (sunblock for instance). Now that example is a bit sarcastic, but it shows exactly the kind of misdirection and self-delusion that preventionists often engage in.

Children are either being harmed or they are not. If they are not suffering in some way emotionally or physically, then they are probably not being threatened by whatever our guilty personal demons can dream up to haunt their developmental trajectories. This is true whether it be violence in video games or satanism in daycares. Often is the question asked "what is X doing to our children", but I want to know, what is X doing to parents? Is your child X's concern or is she yours?

The issue isn't so much about protecting children's innocence, because they won't be innocent forever anyways, no matter what you do to protect that artificial edifice built around them. The issue is about making that inevitable transition from one point of relative ignorance to another go as smoothly as possible in light of learning and exposure. With a potential threat, one has time to sort out solutions in working around it, and children will grow up healthier for having learned how to do that. It's not X that harm's children, it's the lack of an authoritative adult or peer presence there to give X appropriate context. If you want healthy, strong, independent human beings from your children, show them what sex is. Rather than focus on tying up the so-called "profanity apologizers" like perpetrators, we should be focusing on the kid's perception of what the they have set into the world. There are those who take responsibility, and those who assign responsibility, and only the former parenting style produces a strong human being.

When you say that children don't have a right to be harmed by something (something minor that is), you're saying they don't have a right to learn about how to deal with minor threats. Children should be free to learn about anything and everything in the world in all his beauty and ugliness, so long as it is presented to them in a way their ability to reason about it will be able to work around. Most kids grow up alright despite a whole slew of threats both real and imaginary throughout their developing years. This is true for life in general. The only ones who don't probably had no role models, or had their rumps cushioned on every fall.

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.

Tyranny of the Present

Generational taxation is the enslavement of future generations (made up from the children alive now and soon to be), for all their lives, to the problems created by the evil and the powerful today. This is true taxation without representation, because those forced to bare it have not had the chance to be represented yet, indeed, many of them have yet to be born. It is the tyranny of the present over the freedoms of the future. The economic, ecological, and human rights debts of the present will confound and ultimately limit the freedoms of our posterity, and we (as residents of the present) are solely responsible for creating it. And by we, I mean the we that allowed our civilization to run itself on the whims of psychopathic multinational corporations.

"Privatization does not mean you take a public institution and give it to a nice person. It means you take a private institution and give it to an unaccountable tyranny." -Noam Chomsky, in "The Corporation"

These are the types that have brought you up believing that the greatest risk to your children are communists, terrorists, child molesters, kidnappers, immigrants--anyone but them. So allow me to add one more, one that supersedes all others because unlike the others, it can convince you that it means well even after it has set its poison on your kids. What child molester could accomplish the feat a corporation can after the fact?

Who is the one not batting an eyelash at the incidence of E Coli in the food that parents are unknowingly feeding their children? Who is not batting an eyelash after a four-year-old's hemorrhagic diarrhea because serving him a petri dish of "all natural" microorganisms is more profitable than a safe product? Where is any private corporation's moral high ground then to persuade you against all those other so-called 'risks' to your children? Those I've endeavored to label as antichrists. If they could spray DDT on your children 50 years ago and sell you on it under the name of protection, what makes you think their modern corporate progeny isn't capable of doing the same thing again, just with different chemicals? For the modern equivalent, look no further than the rBGH milk you give to children in their morning bowl of Kix--you'll find Agent Orange producer Monsanto has been sticking their fingers down every glass.

The tyranny of the present means marketers preying on the developmental vulnerability of children like child molesters--the only difference between the two is that the likelihood of a child molester reaching "your" child is phenomenally slim compared to the bombarding certainty of advertising. This is how such a thing as the "nag" factor, where children are expected to nag parents for products they've seen in advertising, is a 12 billion dollar a year industry. The tyranny of the present on the freedoms the future means created wants formed by manufactured consent. Just as a child rapist may manufacture this idea that the victim needed and enjoyed the rape, the child marketer wants to bleed children of this same notion of manufactured consent based around a want they had to instill in the child to begin with. Doesn't this sound familiar? And to think they worked so hard convincing you that the enemy was elsewhere. 

These are the ones who never want to talk about what they do unless they can open their mouths with the words "We here at...". Unless they can sell you on their "humanity" just as they sold you on harmful drugs for your toddler, they don't have anything to say. If it can't be prompted, then they decline to comment. Prompted speech is the reflex of a prompted mind. These are entities with an inability to admit guilt to anything ever, or even romanticize the notion that their activities are responsible for the destruction of earth, humanity, and society. They are either in denial, are wracked with guilt, or are psychopaths. If the later, it goes far to explain the corporate entity's complete disdain, disrespect, and inhuman treatment of the lives and dignity of human beings.

Only a psychopath could will such complete control over human beings and glorify it to the extent that corporate interests do. Since the corporations fought to get the representation as individuals and all the rights and benefits thereof, we ought to think of them as such, and see them for the kind of individuals they are (formless, immortal, and unburdened by remorse): certifiable psychopaths. This is why big business is the source of all that is destroying the world. They take no responsibility because they are incapable of feeling responsible. This is the mark of an antichrist.

One letter switch separates "veil" for "evil," and for good reason, as everything that is veiled behind the propaganda machine that is advertisement, is undoubtedly evil. This is not to say that it is an unnecessary evil, for evil makes the world go round, evil puts meals in children's stomachs--but evil is still evil even if it causes one tenth of one percent of good. These corporate persons with which we have increasingly been entrusting the welfare of our children to, are not just soulless and profit-motivated, they are evil. Their shareholders and organizers rise from bed every morning, kiss their children on the forehead, and go off into the world to do evil work--necessary work some could argue, but still evil work (whoever said only good work was necessary?). The work they do ensures one more day of the enslavement of their grandchildren to the unintended consequences of how they are making their living today.

Someone has to pick up the tab for it, and one generation becomes enslaved to the debts of the last--monetarily, socially, ecologically, and spiritually. That is what I call generational taxation, and it is an antichrist.

Good Intentions

Good intentions aren't good enough. Those who are granted responsibility always have the best intentions, because they don't need to take responsibility. Professionalism ensures that they never have to put their own neck on the line, it means that so long as they follow the formula for interaction with a child, they can never be held personally accountable, and everything they do for better or worse is with "the best intentions." This is probably most true for social workers, but could also extend to anyone who has been given a role of responsibility over a child. Those who act on good intentions do such because they don't have to act on good works.

The term good intentions, or best intentions, is a meaningless platitude. All it means is that someone intended on doing the right thing regardless of the outcome. If the outcome is that an innocent person is murdered, does it really matter if the culprit, in their own minds, had the best intentions for doing the murder? After a family has been split up by the state in a case where no abuse or neglect has been observed, where only the social worker's personal prejudice is the deciding factor, should their best intentions grant them immunity to the harmful effects they've caused? Should vigilantes be let off the hook for harassing the current occupants of houses that used to be owned by registered sex offenders, just because they had the best intentions?

Someone who decides to love a child openly doesn't get the benefit of the doubt though, nor should they, or anyone else. If an independent agent steps over the line in a child's life and begins to impose, it doesn't matter what their intentions were. A CL's best intentions are not considered by society, nor should they be, only their outcomes, and neither should society's "best intentions" be granted as excuses for its own inadequacies.

The Good Samaritan

How often do we hear that because human nature prevents most people from being truly charitable, selfless, progressive, useful, on their own, that it is the function of bureaucracy, law, government, and other legislation to ensure that a series of incentives or imperatives are in place to govern human behavior on behalf of human beings? It would seem plausible, as the system might be capable of doing what most common people can't. If they can't be the Good Samaritan and help their fellow citizen in jeopardy on the street, then a law must be fashioned to ensure their heroic compliance. Nowhere are these compulsory measures applied more than in our dealings with children and youth. In our society, apathy seems to be an easier path after all, in fact, in many cases involving children, it seems to be actively encouraged.

The problem with the regulation of human behavior in cases regarding the flexing of our better natures is in its initial assumption (even if it's effective at getting the otherwise apathetic to participate in what should be the human race). The idea is that people can't or won't be good citizens on their own and have to be told. But however true this may be in general, doesn't it seem problematic that this initial, fatalistic assumption about human nature actually discredits those who would be Good Samaritans on their own? Legislation then opens the one and only avenue for which those who mean well by children can exercise their good intent, and subsequently closes the pathways that individuals had once chosen on their own.

No one expects an adult now to assist a child (that is not theirs) out of a problem by their own good nature, because such a thing these days seems to require a plethora of forms, permission slips, background checks, and placement services in order to be rendered to specifications pre-established by the organization overseeing that that "good deed" gets done. Not that this really matters, seeing as a good deed is a good deed nonetheless, but the hoops may also actively prevent a person from carrying out the good deed to begin with. The good intent to be proactive with outreach to children that has been turned away due to bureaucratic limitations, is no good for anyone. Society has all the bases covered as far as good deeds are concerned, as it has an army of specially trained agents to make sure those good deeds get done--no assistance is necessary from the likes of those who may simply want to do something good for a child on their own will.

We can't let the apathy of society, accustomed to legislative might enforcing their good will, undermine or even disallow the good works of the average person choosing to do so on their own--whether they be child or adult. We can't let it control our thinking as to who can be the Good Samaritan and who can not.

Spoiled Into Submission

Sometimes you can beat a child into a fury and spoil a child into submission, injure them with kindness and strengthen them with sternness, build resilience by letting them subsist and entitlement by giving them everything they want. Sometimes carefully structuring a child's environment to work exactly to their developmental mindset only weakens their ability to grow beyond it. The point to any interaction between an adult and a child is not to gratify the child's strengths, but to challenge them.

This is hardly revolutionary--Lev Vygotsky wrote on the Zone of Proximal Development and defined it thus:

"...The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygostsky, Mind in Society 86).

Because we can not count on the "line in the sand" age-limit legal definitions, which automatically render all children regardless of maturity or skill incapable and therefore useless, we (you, me, and society at large--parents, teachers, coaches, adult friends, children themselves) have to be that "more capable peer" who dares challenge a child. We all have to take personal responsibility to ensure that children and youth in general are actually prepared for life at the ages the law arbitrarily sets for those milestones.

The line in the sand age limits imposed on minors, if they are never going away, are NOT the time to begin teaching children how to live, they are benchmarks for all progress up to that point--not the first opportunity to teach a youth a thing or two, but the last. The mythology or "magic" that the law bases its reasoning on as to how children develop into adults (based on their date of manufacture alone) certainly isn't going to do it for us.

If we do expect the law to determine how and when we decide to teach children about how to live in the world--that is, if we wait until their 18th birthday before we decide to stop spoiling them with ignorance and politically correct entitlements--how can we expect them to actually be able to do what is their right to do, and have responsibility for the things they are then responsible for? If we give them no adversarial situations, how do we expect them to handle conflict constructively? Childhood is supposed to be a living, challenging time of life, not a paradise, and the more adults try to make it a paradise, the less livable it becomes.

The law can not raise kids for us, it is too busy harming those who didn't develop properly.

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.

Power of Choice

As questionable as any abstract policy, agency, cultural concept, or limitation is, it can be rendered limp with just the choices, the words and actions, of human beings. Individuals--be them adults or children, social workers, teachers, parents, legal guardians, child care workers, independent agents--each and everyone, has the power to overcome the limitations of what society has established collectively. Human passion transcends bureaucratic disenfranchisement, because it existed before it and will continue to exist, it prevails where the system fails.

It is the difference between the life and passion of the warm heart and the paycheck for the cold heart. One has the power to help the world, the other to watch it crumble and run. It's the difference between the active and the passive soul working in a dehumanizing system, the stiff professional downpresser and the warm personal caregiver, the cog and the human--and all it takes to propagate is a loving, caring, and reasonable perspective. When that personal perspective is on the table, one can truly help kids. Without it, one can only do damage.

It may not make you hip or gain you friends, and certainly may put you at odds with the systems of control in the world, the cultural schemes, but you stand a chance of really improving a child's life on the most personal level if you allow a bit of yourself to shine through. Children respond to that, because evolution has produced in them that instinct long before we had things like the CPS around to siphon it away. It is natural for a child to respond well to an adult that actually cares for them, and also completely natural for them to resist those who are only in it for the check.

The choice is out there. We may have these cushy titles and social roles given to us, such as "teacher" or "parent" or "social worker," but it makes little difference if we fail to truly lend the personal touch that allows anyone fulfilling those positions or others like them to make a difference in the lives of the next generation. It's the only power individuals truly manifest. If one wants power, don't go for high titles and recognition, but instead, humble and give of oneself first. The shorter trees let light be shared among the saplings, the tallest ones just block it.

Taking Responsibility

It is better to take responsibility than to have responsibility. This is to say, it's better to act for the best interests of others than it is to simply have the authority to do it. Having the authority to work with children in particular should be of little consequence to the person who dedicates himself to doing it. Having the authority that comes along with being a social worker, a teacher, a parent, or any person elected or hired into a credential based system should be considered secondary to how the person chooses to utilize their authority. Far too often, the kids and mainstream society in general are at the mercy of people who have the authority or the credentials and choose not to take responsibility for their clients, citizens, or offspring, or exercise their authority for beneficial purposes.

Social workers who last in the field are those who are capable of trading in their empathy for human life for the ability to routinely do the job and bring in the results at any cost. They have to become desensitized to the harm in order to function as they are required. Their duties to the state overwhelm their gut feeling as an individual, and they can become just as cold in their private life as the bureaucratic body they are the fists and fingers of in their public dealings. They have responsibilities to perform but can not be held responsible, and for that reason alone, agents of the state in particular fail to properly serve their clients and constituents.

As an independent volunteer, a independent agent, a CL has no public-appointed responsibility over children, but are (and should) be held completely responsible for their mistakes (because mistakes do happen in life). It is for that reason alone that the CL is more trustworthy. When a stranger kidnaps a child, the stranger is brought to justice. When the state kidnaps a child for spurious or ill-formed reasons, the state is beyond reproach even if they loose their case against the family. If a private entity were to behave as the state, they would no doubt loose customers, but the state behaving as the state, is in no danger of loosing citizens. That's the difference between having responsibility and taking it. When you take responsibility, you have to put your neck on the line. CLs do it out of love. When you have responsibility, it's a showy accolade--it will help you win an election.

Those who have to be accountable--the teachers, parents, independent agents, CLs, and private entities in general--are in better standing to adequately serve those they care about. Those who don't have to be accountable, those who will reap federal funding regardless, those who pretend to be the moral arbiters and intrude on family life in attempt to realign responsibility within it, naturally invite criticism from the masses it has imposed on as to its own failings and inadequacies. One can not stand on a hill and ridicule one standing in a valley that he is too low and not expect the low man to accuse him of being too high. There are no moral arbiters except those who are blameless--there are none blameless, true, but there are those who take responsibility for what they can be blamed with, and those who don't. The CPS takes no blame, and therefore, is no moral arbiter for family life and ought to be distrusted.

No agency that is granted authority over human life, such as the Child Protective Services in this case, has an interest in properly serving its constituency in order to maintain its longevity. They just have to appear to be doing such.

Who's Providing Services?

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

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

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

The village concept works even when it doesn't.

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

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

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