Passive Resistance

Children break the cultural bodily boundaries on a daily basis. They exert their sexual, physical, gritty nature and the world shames it. Since no exploratory sexual behavior, outburst, nose picking, burp, or fart goes without reprimand for the first six years of life, no matter how much it's encouraged by looser mores, children spend the next six years using each one of those things in pointed attacks of retaliation and resistance against anyone they see as a worthy target. Having absorbed shame for their bodily needs and functions long enough, they stand the message on its head and use them to cast shame on others. It doesn't matter if the target is a sexually active youth's distressed parent, an illness-faking student's easily swayed teacher, or a nation's policy against violence in its schools (as we'll soon see). Children will quite literally hold their breath until they pass out to make a parent bend to their will.

This commentary comes in light of a now-annual phenomenon in news. In the mix of reports regarding the effectiveness of Zero Tolerance in public schools, we're treated to a slice of absurdity disguised as comic relief. It seems something as innocuous as "disturbing class" in the right context, if expressed with enough disdain, is considered violence and can and will result in a kid's arrest. Not even a kid's intestinal gas can be tolerated, so long as he emits it derisively and obnoxiously enough. Disruption like that no longer warrants only disciplinary action, but a police cruiser, handcuffs, a booking, and a police record, because kid farts are weapons now, officially.

Sometimes the only way to lay bare a system's faults is to cause a passive stir like this and force the system to abide by its own rules. And seeing as kids currently have no rights to free speech, what other way do they have to voice dissent than to hurl their bodily needs like weapons at their captors?

The use of the body is resistance expressed through non-violence. It's the willful glorification of self-degradation because the system can't degrade them enough on its own. For certainly, their bodily functions, including sexual impulses, are the one thing a child truly does own. The mind can be bent many different ways, behaviors can be controlled and redirected, but the need to void, the need to shed, to have intake and output, is entirely theirs, and theirs to do with as they please. It's the one thing where if it were controlled, the powers controlling it would cease to have a living child to control, and therefore, cease to be in control. Passive resistance plays with an authority's ability to control in like manner.

So let's reexamine the power of a kid's body. The body is one way our kids express comfort with their peers. They use their body to produce kinesthetic, athletic, and scatological feats, and express early masculine or feminine identification. They use their body and its functions as learning experiences in pro-social behavior, human bonding, manners, and taking ownership for their actions. The body is as much a projection of personality and talent as it is a depiction of their health and well being. It's a source of great pride. More importantly though, a kid's body presents options to them--needs, desires, excretions--that can be delivered decisively anytime and place, command instant attention, and express personal control--the root of all individual sovereignty.

So let the kids be free to be gross.

Cute Power

Adults have power by the position they've granted themselves in society. Children have control though, over themselves and their immediate environments. Even if a child is strapped down, their ability to control the hearts and minds and the weaknesses of adults remains in check, given to them by adults for their lower, demeaning status in society, and taken for themselves in spite of it. Thus, it stands to reason that the adult is constantly at war with the child's ability to flex their control, and the child is at war with the adult's ability to exert their power.

The power of the adult is brought on like an overwhelming force, it exudes from their pores, taking with it all of its purely socially constructed edifice--the "this is how it is" stamped firmly on the ground like a boot print after a stomping. It is something very physical, very absolute, like God's word, and doesn't hold itself up to question. Inversely, the control that children hold over themselves is internal, it comes forth in their cuteness, and like nymphets and faunlets, they use it to their advantage to gain the favors of adults. They take control by disobeying the overwhelming force, if not directly, subtle and meticulously. They are the insurgency.

Children use cuteness as a means to gain access to an adult's weaknesses, just as adults jump on children's weaknesses to exert power over them. And with recent research suggesting the same parts of the brain are activated when responding to something cute as when responding to something sexually appealing, it's becoming very easy to determine what motivates an adult to do such. Dominating a child's cuteness stimulates reward centers in the adult's brain. The feminists are fond of saying that all sex is merely an act of conquest, and if it's true, then we can understand why child abuse is never going away. They're addicted to the drug of power. They'll slay the dragon and then be the ones putting on the claws. By attacking predators and not granting children the ability to control their dignity, they are only pleasuring themselves.

They are taking from the slug perverts what is socially evil, and using it to exert for themselves over children what is socially acceptable, for the very same reason--pleasure.

What we believe is that children should not only understand the amazing control they have over themselves and their destiny, and over other people, just like any other human being, but also find the power connected to being small. Advertisers have known for as long as there have been advertisers that picturing a sweet-looking child can make an adult spend money. Governments know that invoking children, or depicting children in advertisements can influence the passage of almost any legislation or even help in the election of our leaders (see ad "Daisy" 1964). The media knows that depicting a child is a ratings booster, normally if the child is depicted as traditionally helpless.

Despite all this popular usage, if children could be made aware that their cute face can melt the heart of an adult, get them to swoon and smile, get them to lend an organization money or not shoot a dictator when surrounded by the likes of them, then there is power in that face. Power that is given, controls, but control that is taken, is powerful.

No Muddied Angels

Nietzsche famously wrote, "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not of truth." Children are no exception. Adults throw an interpretation at childhood, and it becomes a cultural standard by virtue of their power. Adults create the terminology we use to think about the position of childhood in society, and those terms inevitably find their way from the realm of ideas (taken as truth) to practice in real life. The powerful look at the powerless as innately inferior, deserving of their status, even by genetic argument, but also fool around with this notion of the noble savage, whereby those that are powerless, innately inferior, are put on the pedestal of righteousness simply because of their righteousness. This is often referred to as the "white man's burden."

As anyone can see, this ideology is so pervasive it has been enmeshed in the terminology of racism and racial prejudice for centuries, but it also lends its support to the arguments of ageism as it has always done. Nowhere does the adult interpretation of childhood rear it's ugly head as forceful and destructive as it does with the paradigm that childhood exudes natural purity. In the modern age, children have become deified as noble savages. Ignorance is their grace, it's the halo affixed upon their anointed heads, and to do anything to cast away that ignorance is to pull the child down to hell from their hearth upon the clouded realm. Ignorance preserves their subservience, and such is the motivation for maintaining it, for infanillizing their activities and restricting their natural inquisitiveness.

Every breath is sacred, as a byproduct of their angelic grace, when breath is nothing but a bodily function. If we are going to anoint a bodily function simply because it originates from a pure body, there is then no reason to not anoint their other excretions. A hole is a hole. Their anus is as sacred as their mouth, their breaths as gracefully angelic as their farts. Both preserve the organism, after all. Both perform a necessary function to keep the child functioning, but why one is anointed and another ignored, even shunned, has only everything to do with human preference, by interpretation, and serves to exemplify the fickle creation that humans begin to play with when they ascribe purity to human flesh. There are no muddied angels.

Ignorance in relation to the so-called adult standard should not be celebrated, the child's knowledge relative to itself should. Children are not an exception to this game of interpretation either, as their ascriptions and summations of adults are often faulty and inconclusive. A pure mind does not make faulty interpretations of others, and certainly not ones that threaten their relationships with others.

As girls are more prone to make judgments about people, girls invent many interpretations about adults they interact with on a daily basis, and just like adults, some may be perceptive and others may be just as much a product of ignorance as adults. Boys don't tend to make subjective judgments, as they aren't as aware of what they are projecting, never mind contemplating how others are receiving those projections. Girls have considerable power to create interpretations, just as adults, and the reason girl interpretations even prevail as truth has more to do with the degree to which the girl is anointed by adult interpretation (even beyond the boy), and is certainly no matter of truth.