Restricted Access

We may one day get our wish, and see a society where our public spaces are divided up between the adults and the children. If it comes to that, it will be done to shield kids against all those society believes capable of potentially harming them. We already see prohibited access to adults without children at certain public exhibitions (such as children's museums), and even prohibited access to all adults (parents included) at certain school functions (such as sporting events). Anyone who may say that increasing paranoia only affects children neglects to see the bi-directionality of the freedoms it places limits on--in this case, the freedom to move across generations.

To meet this paranoia over pedophiles being in arm's reach of children with further paranoia about the social wedge being formed between adults and children is like fighting fire with fire, but one can't help but feel this "cure" is worse or just as bad as the disease. If we were to come at this issue from a reasonable perspective, we'd see that for every child harmed by a co-existence with adults in the world as we know it, potentially millions of children would be deprived of adult interaction if we were to become a society that parsed out its adults from its children. If this can be determined wrong at this extreme, why can it be permitted in the routine of reality?

In our effort to create for children some kind of wholesome, fuzzy, cushioned existence, are we seeing the beginnings of a society where we have sealed them off from reality and the adults that inhabit it for some ill-conceived desire to protect children and preserve their ignorance? In denying an adult from participating in certain public events out of the fear that all those who are not parents are pedophiles, we have to be mindful of what message is really being imparted in that "wholesome, fuzzy, cushioned existence." How "wholesome" can it be when we've let the few perverts in our imaginations turn all ordinary people into pedophiles?

To tell you the truth, I'm all for promoting child safety under those terms. If schools (for instance) have a right to ban all adults (including parents) from certain events, then parents have a right to not let their children go to the event. They can all sit home and watch the vacant stadium on TV where the event would have been taking place, and know that "safety" has been maintained for the school's sake. One could even argue that it could promote safety by not even having the events at all. I declare that mission accomplished.

There's this fetishism over the harm that can potentially come upon our children, and an expectation that children are not going to be witness to, much less be harmed by our paranoia. Can one imagine a narrative where the child and adult are bravely holding hands against an onslaught of rigid security trying to pry them apart? Can one imagine a world where adults have their own approved walkways and stairwells and bathrooms, and children have their own respective rooms, walkways, tables in restaurants...etc.--where parents and children are tagged and separated as they are shoved along to their secluded spaces only to be reunited at the close of services? Can one imagine a future where children's only interaction with adults is via screen? If it is unthinkable in the extreme, then why is it permitted in the routine of reality?

How free can a society be where everywhere children are expected to gather, adults are to keep a five-hundred foot distance? How safe can children be in that society? When does trying to protect children from potential harm become mixed up with such ill-gotten ways of attaining personal alleviation for the anxiety of potential harm? Adults and children are residents of the same society, the same Earth, and we are not doing them or us any justice by dividing the "fuzzy reality" from the "grim reality." If adults weren't so obsessed with creating a dreamworld for children, they could spend some time fixing the grim reality, and if they allowed children to exist in that reality with them, they'd see the reason for fixing it.

Boomerang Generation

Boomers had it wrong. We millennials are the ones 'dying before we get old'--or middle aged even. We came out of the helicopter parenting homes of our me-first centered parents, set up with a tolerance for everything and a drive toward nothing in particular, and like all children, have either decided within ourselves to overcome those limitations or succumb to them. Ours is not unlike those of previous eras, both the sedentary and active, and certainly economic circumstances contribute to our attitudes and tendency to "return," but cultural ones also play a part in molding the lackadaisical expectations from life that forced us back to your arms.

Those who have succumbed to perpetual childhood are the creatures like myself, those who were bred with an idea of entitlement, who sat back and absorbed all the information and knowledge possible from trusted adult sources and lived a model "child" lifestyle just to be left with an enormous load of expectations. The generational neuroticism and fetishism over protectionism in the past two decades has not protected us from the pains of growing up. It may have staved off the bug bites and bruises at times, but it hasn't taught us how to treat such inflictions when they happen in the course of normal living, in a manner of speaking. On the contrary, those who have managed to overcome the neuroses of the previous generation are those who will go the farthest to invent their own, but at least they should get credit for being original.

What is particularly absurd is this idea that we are supposed to grow up. Come on now! This is something new for sure. Were other generations expected to grow up at some point? You could have fooled me all those years. Certainly had we been told at any time during our development that eventually one day we'd have to direct our own affairs and live our own lives, I think I would have heard about it. How do you expect us to get out of our basement bedrooms now if that is where you would have had us confined for the first ten years (for the sake of your precious "peace of mind")?--if you never let us play outside lest we hit the poison ivy, or hit our head on the cement, or dash our foot upon a stone, or God forbid, play a touch sport!

Is it no wonder that we have gone off to college and done the required extra lap, the four year extension of high school, only to show our faces again at the end of the conveyor belt that had always been our education? Come now, a quarter of our lives was spent before we were even allowed to live like human beings, and now you expect us to live like adults? Did you not say we were special? Did you not always welcome us with open arms, and provide us all the praise we needed in our screw ups? Did you not say we should come to you and you alone for all our problems? Did you not expect we'd return to you?

Devil's Advocate (Choices)

Artificial age restrictions hold that a child is incapable of making certain choices. They are a non-refutable "no" plastered across every entryway to maturity. They are oppressive, but then again, as the argument goes, wouldn't letting kids step across into that other world before they are ready be just as oppressive? After all, there's a difference between a child having the right to make an informed choice (which they are not allowed to do no matter how well informed), and a child not having enough information yet in order to properly make the choice and being 'allowed' to choose anyways.

If a child can't make an informed choice due to some arbitrary restriction, that's one thing, but the issue also boils down to the fact that a limited amount of information could infringe on the child's ability to make a choice to the same extent as they would had they that information. This is crucial too, because immaturity itself does not bar someone from being "able" to make an uninformed choice, and through their actions, the chooser could unwittingly incur consequences they hadn't foreseen! The fact that this routinely happens to adults too is of no consequence to the devil's advocate position.

Just as well, for the government to try to figure out when kids have "information enough" (or maturity enough) to legislate when they can naturally make informed choices about every little thing they are prohibited from doing, would just be too much legislating over human developmental milestones. It is also entirely true that children and young people are capable of making perfectly rational arguments as to why certain rights ought to be reserved for adults. And parents rightfully only want their children to have rights that they have decreed for them themselves.

So yes, all this does pose a problem for the liberationist. But I think any system is going to have its drawbacks. If we can agree with that assertion, then the question becomes, are these drawbacks equal to or greater than the drawbacks in the system we already have? If they are relatively equal, then there is no argument for keeping the status quo as a declarative necessity.

We have to come to a conclusion and decide what side we are on, and live with and acknowledge the consequences that stem from our beliefs and choices (as a society). We are either "liberationists," and want to see all rights be put on the table for children and youth to dispose with as they see fit, or we are "ageists" and want the status quo--where youth attain rights at certain artificial benchmarks. To these ends, we'd either be complacent about the damage imposed on youths who would make improper use of their rights, or we are already complacent about the damage imposed on youths by those who make improper use of their rights for them.

Choose your side.

Pop Superstition

What is controversial to adults is commonplace to the young. What the adults find amusing about contemporary social awakenings, children living today have been hearing about their entire lives. There is nothing special or even different about the gay lifestyle, for instance, if you have grown up in a world where it is an acceptable part of your culture. What is exotic or abhorrent to one group becomes the new normal in the course of even just one generation's time on earth.

It is totally understandable that human beings are continual prisoners to the customs of their little spot on the globe in the little span of time they have to dwell in it--what is not understandable is why, given this, so many of them seem to think that their unique (regional and temporal) perspective is the be-all end-all truth of existence. Take whatever superstition you have about a social issue, and move that idea half way around the world, or even just 50 years into the future, and suddenly you'll find no more truth in it than the superstitions a half a world away, or from 50 years ago.

There are a few constants over time though--the so-called eternal human condition. These are what may constitute general categories (good and bad...etc.) for assigning temporal phenomena. When I talk of what is evil and what is good, this is what I mean.

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.

The Mysterious Stranger

Lucifer the angel was cast out of heaven for possessing the properties of God: omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and a property he thought equal to God's omni-benevolence--its opposite, omni-malevolence. The Satan of Twain's "Mysterious Stranger" appears to us in a physical representation, a young Satan (nephew to the biblical Satan) who is able to court three boys. In dealing with their lives, he displays his power to know all things by telling of foreboding doom, displays his power to do all things by responding to their pleas to avoid it, and just as well displays his destructiveness in averting it only by killing them one by one. Satan's perspective still persists, because it'd be hard to refute that his actions are wrong without resorting to mere preference. You disagree with him out of preference toward good, rather than any quantifiable reason.

That is to say, there is nothing strange or abnormal about Satan's approach, particularly in his way of mystifying children--it all seems to make sense on the surface, and because it seems to make sense, it has to come in the guise of a stranger just so people may begin to treat it as hazardous. Had it come in the guise of a parent, then it would have gone unnoticed. Modern society has turned the face of Satan on everyone who would spend even the most nurturing and wholesome time with children only because it puts its trust over its children solely in the recognizable face. The unrecognized face may as well be Satan's nephew all over again.

But the question inevitably remains, are we really all so different? So too have the child molesters been cast out for possessing all the characteristics of those we'd put trust in: those who would lie to children, those who would treat them with less than human dignity, those who would exploit them for personal gain, those who would justify their abuse--all save for the one quality that separates the trusted from the untrusted:  a recognizable face. We tend to think an evil that looks familiar is more wholesome than an evil that is strange to us. Child molestation is strange to us because we can't figure out who could be so evil as to sexually exploit a child, when at the same time, exploiting children for financial gain seems right at home with us.

In the fear that someone might accidentally harm our children, we have let a physical manifestation of Satan go off his chain. He has convinced us of foreboding doom, and we have begged at his side so that he might release us from the grip of destiny, and he has responded in his own way.

The short of it is, we repeat this narrative because we wish to see evil put in its place, and yet only succeed in giving it further legitimacy. By repeatedly flashing the killer's face on the news for dramatic effect, we build him up to the status of folk hero in the eyes of those who are society's equals in ability and opposites in moral compass. By thinking we can solve child sex abuse by pushing all that which is strange to us off to some island in the pacific ocean, we succeed in being ruled by the mysterious stranger among us--ruled by the terrorists we're trying to eradicate. By banishing Lucifer to hell, God gave him legitimacy in knowledge that good will necessarily triumph over evil. We are not gods though, so we are in no position to make that assumption when we do likewise.

Concern Yourself

One is not always right when he is guided by love, but his passions for the wellbeing of others are genuine. Those passions can either lead him to ruling the situation by expressing concern, or to being ruled by the situation through fear. When one is guided by fear into doing some action, it is normally geared to protect oneself from having to be afraid (by evolution)--the effect it has on others is secondary. On the contrary, love is an action that motivates a human to do something in the best interests of others, whether for better or worse. How easy it is to confuse our fear and love as our primary motivations in doing something. Good intentions are not good enough, whether motivated by love or fear, but those governed by fear alone only jump the gun.

If love is the pleasuring thing itself, fear is the worry over losing that which is loved. In this way, the thing that is loved is not the impetus for destruction, but rather, the fear of losing the thing that is loved. Fear is as well a genuine force of action though, but all it is capable of doing is calling our attention to danger, to rely on it is to fall prey to needless worry. One can express concern without falling prey to worry--worry is nothing but a furrowed brow, an increase in adrenaline, a impetuous impulse--there is no thinking part of worry because to think while one is experiencing fear is what we call "concern."

All this is a means to say why it is perfectly fine to express concern about vigilantes, child molesters, terrorists, and other workers of inequity where our concern is due, so long as we don't fear them. Expressing concern is when you criticize those who bring inequity and inspire others to see the inequity they bring. Worrying about them is when you submit to their inequity without question because you fear their retaliation, or, it is when you go out of your way to be physically responsible for their destruction because you fear their influence. Worrying focuses your mind on how to evade the aggressor, as it has evolved over millions of years (even when fear is the aggressor)--concern, instead, focuses your mind on how to conquer the aggressor.

When the proverbial good man ducks and covers from fear, and in doing so, gives the workers of inequity a pass, he implicates himself in their works and becomes one of them. The good man who criticizes the workers of inequity as good citizens ought to, casts it in a negative light for all rational people to see. One is either part of the solution, or part of the problem, and passivity is part of the problem, choosing not to choose is part of the problem. An act of non-involvement is tacit agreement with child molesters, vigilantes, and other workers of inequity.

As I've articulated many times before though, this does not mean that after you've chosen to be active (whatever that means) in "the solution" (which is unattainable) any course of action is justifiable. In short, it doesn't mean anything is justifiable, it just means that doing nothing never is.