Unsung Heroes

In my mind, being against child molestation is not enough, nor does it make you a good person by itself. It does a person no good to be against child molestation if they are doing wrong by children in more socially permissible ways, for they would be in good company. Parents who repeatedly assault their young children in the service of discipline are fearful and hateful of child molestation too. Politicians who would (if they could at any instance) send your children out to fight and die to preserve global business interests in unstable regions, also hate and are fearful of child molestation. Even the school officials who would trap up a 9-year-old autistic boy in a duffle bag to discipline him...they too are (most likely) hateful of child molesters. Are you no better than an abusive parent? A corrupt politician? A "well-intentioned" school teacher? One has to wonder if even the child molesters also hate child molestation, for as Christ said, "Do not even the tax collectors do the same?" What good then does it do to hate child molestation?

Surely, the list of who is against child molestation also includes the broad majority of society that also finds these similar acts reprehensible (although not to the mob- mental destructive fervor they reserve for child molestation), but hatred makes strange bedfellows of them nonetheless. Blinding hatred is just that, blinding, because it stops a person from being able to discern what is moral and just, even when guided by one's own intuition. We start to over-sing the psalms of damnation upon one propped-up source of mob-mental aggression, the "child molester," only to ignore other forms of abuse just as objectively destructive. It is as if we've been blinded by the lightning shot which crackles one by the hour, and have forgotten about the billions of raindrops. We'd let our children freeze to death in that rain by the hundreds before we eased our horror that even one may be struck by a random bolt. Truly, there's more to being a good person than simply hating on that which is demonstrably vile (as the vigilantes do).

To be a good person in this sense, you actually have to not cause harm to any child by intention, and if necessary (in some "life or death" situation), only with the pain of regret guiding your hand. This not only includes child molestation, but all those more socially acceptable means adults have invented over the millenia to abuse children into submission. The many who don't routinely abuse children under the guise of discipline, who don't spoil children into dependence, or give the order to put young people into harm's way for someone else's gain--those are the unsung heroes. If society can permit anyone who simply hates on child molestation to claim to title of "hero," and then orchestrate songs of praise for their good intentions, imagine how society ought to treat the broader majority of people who don't just have good intentions but put them into practice for the good of others. If such were the case, these heroes would no longer be unsung. 

However, western culture (Babylon) continues to fetishize the perverse anyways, despite all the good intentions in the world. This is how a man can hold up a convenience store or cause an accident in a high speed chase and gain not only news headlines but even highlights on television clip shows, but the good act of charity that some other man participated in will never be given any spotlight in anyone's mind. If an action is not spotlighted in the mind by culture (whether it's right or wrong), then it is almost always more right, more just, and more decent by its sense of genuine earnestness than any flimsy public moralistic spectacle could ever be. Moral spectacle is merely pretense laying on a bed of perverse fetishism. The more virulently popularized that moralistic spectacle is, the more justified its unsung, unnoticed, cousin act becomes. For example, parents shouldn't consider themselves good people because they hate and fear child molestation, or any other heinous act, as everyone else, but rather, by whether or not they read to their child before telling them to get some sleep. And even if one isn't a parent, one could almost justifiably judge themselves along the same criterion.

Sure, the act of reading to a child is not going to win you an award, nor is it going to bestow on you the mantle of "Protector of Children" (as many of the anti-pedo vigilantes covet), but you will have done right by a child in doing so, in almost all cases. The only song you will ever have played in your life will be sung from the souls of the individuals you nurtured and gave your love and time to. That, to me, is a more justifiable vindication than this more "culturally-accessible fear and hate mongering" will ever be, concerning the worst among us--the very thing that, though so attractive to our sentiments, becomes the most vile thing of all. 

In Love with a Child

We expect and demand of love eternal loyalty to one person, a binding social contract, something so definite, absolute, and flimsy, it's a wonder how anyone is successful at upholding its universal ideal. One man is supposed to devote all his love to one woman every day of his life, and she him, and their legal and social bond is supposed to even outlast time itself once the oath is given in marriage. Yet it can and is so easily all torn asunder the moment either one spreads their love to those outside the dyad. We only expect love to be shared among the human race in pairs, it seems, with eternal bonds of matrimony, and then forget to share the common two-minute kindness needed from us by everyone, every day, which requires no binding legal contract to make it legitimate. We trade real love for showy love.

This is to say that the western world upholds on the most high the hardest and most impossible form of love to maintain, and systematically ignores at best and abhors at worst its simplest and most common expressions. Grand spectacles of symbolic matrimony are performed at great cost to announce a man and woman's love for one another, no matter how genuine it is, but the one simple act of kindness on the street toward one's fellow man, woman, or child, goes unnoticed. And sometimes, particularly when it is extended toward children, it may even be fundamentally shamed.

What civilization loves instead is pomp and circumstance over genuine affection, costly displays of idealized romance over genuine devotion, and contractual obligation over personal loyalty. What civilization loves is the essence of the thing called love, all the fairy tale parts, without having the stomach for the whole fruit. If genuine love was the thing being valued in all this ceremony, then we wouldn't need to limit its expression to pairs of one man and one woman. If true love was the thing being valued, all genuine expressions of it shared between human beings would be celebrated equally. It wouldn't matter if the target of one's affections are men, women, boys, or girls. It wouldn't be so controversial for a man to admit to being in love with another man, or with a child, any more than it currently is if he is in love with a woman.

The question of sexuality in regards to the appropriateness of one's love interests is moot. Sexuality is a biological and social assignment, but even if was a choice, it would still be moot. Sex and love are two, often mutually exclusive, things--there can exist sex without love and love without sex, as John Lennon put it. If the object of your affections is a male human, and you're a male human, there is no reason why you can not be heterosexual at the same time. Likewise, if the object of your affections is a child, and you are an adult, there is no reason why you can not be a teleiophile, and be sexually attracted to other adults. The same formulations can be made for any combination of sexuality and love interest, so long as the affections are genuine. There is no reason then to assume that one's sexuality is determined by the characteristics of whom one chooses to love. Sometimes it is the case, but not all the time.

The act of being in love with a child is given such a negative connotation though in spite of this--even just expressing kindness and affection toward children will bring the word "pedophile" down upon you--as if expressing kindness and affection are to be reserved strictly for adults because children are unworthy of these niceties. Children are not deemed worthy of an adult's love, unless it is also bestowed with such honorific titles of circumstance like "mother's love" and (to a lesser extent these post-feminist days) "father's love." All others who may express or feel genuine love are treated to a private property sign or even mistakenly thought to be pedophiles. This is an arbitrary fence.

Kindness may be ignored and shamed among adults, and romantic love given such high and lofty worship, but the exact opposite is true for what is expected of children. In the same way that adult friends are to withhold their love for the child, so too is the child expected to withhold love for their benevolent friends, mentors, and non-parent associations. Children are taught that they may only express love in the form of deference to some official authority, unless that authority encourages otherwise, and this is more or less seen as a kindness. They are not even expected to express genuine love for anyone of any age for which there is not some biological necessity being fulfilled, but only platitudes of kindness--only what is expected from those "pure, perfect, angelic, little darlings." Adults view the close in age love relationship between two children or teens as they do the adult/child relationship--as threatening to the more hallowed "mother's love" or "father's love," and so they work to suppress it should it blossom beyond a mere crush.

It is true though that what we expect from children is different from love or affection, simply because kindness has its differences from love. Kindness describes a momentary act that is done for someone else's benefit, and this we teach children to strive for. Love describes an on-going appreciation of someone else's existence, similar to being a fan, or a follower. It may or may not drive someone to be kind toward the target individual, and that uncertainty is unbecoming of children. Just as sex and love are not always causally linked, love and kindness may not always be causally linked. As the old expression goes, "you only hurt the ones you love." Therefore, it is possible that the minute expression of love we expect from children and not from adults is indeed a purer form of love after all, as the nature of the romantic so-called "adult love" of celebrated matrimony often proves so fickle.

If that is the case, then why does the adult get the suspicious glare after the fact when he reciprocates a child's kindness? It is but an example of how love expression is indeed shackled to arbitrary social acceptability rather than genuine feeling. I suppose that's nothing we didn't already know.

Saving Isn't Helping

There's going to be a cultural war between the members of the millennial generation --between those who are rational and skeptical, and those who are influenced by the visceral and sensational. This is to say, it will be waged between those who accept reality and the unshakable flaws and powers of human nature, and those who want to save the world with uncompromising ideology. And how can someone like myself know this outcome with such certainty? It is probably because there is nothing new about it.

There will always be those who want to save the world and those who want to help the world. Those who have endeavored to save the world have failed, and those who have worked to help it, have succeeded only so long as they are permitted to do so by those who are trying to save it. Helping is a selfless act to assist another when it is needed and asked for, whereas saving is a selfish act meant to make one appear like a savior when the assistance is neither required or asked for. Those who help try to accept the failures of human nature and persevere in spite of them. Those who play savior try to eliminate the failings of human nature so that they may supersede it with an ideal. There is nothing new about cult behavior though. We must be weary of it, but not fearful of it or destructive towards it. Ideology seeks out enemies to destroy, and creates new ones by doing so. Rationality speaks truth to power, and finds friends with all those who seek justice without destruction.

The same is true for how we respond to our children. There are those who want to help children and those who want to save the children. Those who help children are able to see their fallible human nature, and find ways to work around it with them. Those who want to save children either want to pretend that children are infallible (Indigo children), or try to eliminate the fallible qualities of a child's human nature completely so that they may match with the cultural standards of children as infallible. The mechanism by which the adult saves children appears to be by subverting their humanity, whereby the mechanism the adult helps children is through recognizing and empowering it (by overcoming faults). What is true for how we raise children, is true for society.

Human nature has a variety of expression, but it is a finite expression that is then malleable by culture and economics. Anyone who attempts to posit that it is entirely a creation of culture and circumstance (the Marxists), or posits that it is entirely innate, is preceding from false assumptions. Anyone who thinks they can invent some ideology to "wake the world up" from its sleepwalk into doomsday by convincing the people that their governments and corporations have created human nature in its entirety, is selling a contradiction. On the one hand, they say human nature is being exploited in order to propagate an ideology, and on the other, that human nature is a mere creation and doesn't exist naturally. How can human beings be as we picture children--mindless drones one minute when in the hands of the group the onlooker despises, and the next, intentional beings once fallen under the spell of that onlooker? The onlooker exploits their human nature by telling them their nature is a creation.

There has become such a thing as an anti-ideology ideology. It proposes that people are becoming sedated by the ideologies they absorb on a daily basis in their information-rich contexts--leaving out of course that the "ideology of ideological sedation" is itself part of that information bombardment. So we have people panicked over how children will grow up with impairments due to exposure to certain ideologies, not realizing that restricting them from ideology is itself an ideology that they are inadvertently exposing their children to. This is not to say that we ought to be anxious that anti-ideologies are still ideologies, falling prey to an endless loop of paranoia about the effects of anti-ideology ideologies--if that is confusing, good, because it's irrational. Instead, what is meant by this is simply that we ought to accept that reality, accept that things we may not like exist and will always exist, and then do our best to recognize them and step around them when we see them.

Children are human beings, they are not lifelong slaves to the ideology they heard when they were three years old. They can break out of the system if we work with them to teach them about the system. They can not break free if we shut them off to that critical information or neglect to teach it in fear that they will "fall prey to it." There is no reason to concern ourselves so much with what is going into them, because when we do that we fail to attend to what is coming out. When we focus our attention on covering their ears so that information we don't like can't seep in, we forget to listen to what is coming out of their mouths. When we spend our time blocking their eyes so that they can't see something, we blind ourselves to what is coming out in their physical movements. For every inch we think we gain on their ability to understand the world, we give up our understanding of them.

Now this should not be a worrisome trend, seeing as what will happen will happen--intervention only stops what we imagine from happening, it doesn't stop what we can't imagine. In all likelihood, what we can't imagine is what is probably going to happen. We have no control over outcomes, just the social devices we choose to get there. Discussion and education is what informs a human being's choices, and a child's outcomes, not mere exposure to certain ideas. What is true for children is true for society.

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.