The Innocence Game, by Crake

Smartest People in the Room

2012-01-19T03:26:00.000-05:00

How much better off does it really make you to be smart enough to know how to create justifications for negative consequences? There are people whose whole job it is to do nothing else, and it's typically called "public relations," but that is only half of the rotten fruit being sold to you as ripe. What good does it do to graduate at the top of your class if that status propels you into a position that only brings out the worst in you? On the whole, it makes little sense to squander one's abilities for any reason. It seems, though, as often as people take the low road and do just that for no reason at all, or even for good reasons, just as many decide to take the even lower road and squander their abilities in the promotion of malicious or devious ends, if only to put their learning to "some" use. It is not because they are "bad people," it's just that they are raised in a learning environment where they are prompted to "give in" more than they are empowered to resist.

I know this firsthand from my own experience with higher education, where I was tempted to undermine my own credibility at times to ensure I made the grade and gave the average response to every question. Staying "in" was more important to me than rising "above," for the potentiality of falling back down. In conversation with fellow students, I observe more "giving in" and "giving up" in institutions of higher learning than anywhere else (and certainly more than in the workforce), and it seems that it's because nowhere else is one's conformity so desirable towards their so-called longevity (outside the military, that is). Just as much as a wasted talent seems a shame to me now, even more so does a talent that has been put to misguided use via people-pleasing conformity. You could say, it is better that you should be a failure who does good work than a success who wallows in their justifications for iniquity.

For instance, what is the value of a higher education when so-called "outside the box" thinking means finding new ways to scam, lie to, or deny people a critical service? The phrase "smartest people in the room" originated to describe the men who ran Enron during the corruption scandals that brought the company down, and is pejoratively used now to describe any group of people who use their brilliance for malevolent ends. Many of those who engineered the economic collapse for their own gain could also be considered among the "smartest people in the room"--those who were smart enough to discover how to push buttons all day and make obscene amounts of money in the process, introducing little to no innovation or development into society. Where does it lead you as a conscionable individual coming out of the college systemwhen the so-called "smartest people in the room" have the least integrity? There are many examples of how unbridled passion without reason can cause the collapse of a person and a society, but it seems equally perilous when self-concerned reason is exercised without regard to an empathic concern for one's fellow human beings. Those who are smart enough to switch off their conscience in the light of some flimsy justification suffer from a lack of integrity.

What good does it do one to be the the most educated and adept person in the room at exploiting loopholes to get away with corruption? What good does it do you to be pushed into pursuing some college-bound path from the time you're born as if it's the only option in existence, where your future is mapped out long before you can even see any concrete routes to take within it-- much less have enough of an identity to know which route to take? And what good would it do you then, being in that situation, to set an uncharted course through that labyrinth with only a fabled "exit" in mind and no concrete idea of how to go about finding it, lining other people's pockets and ensuring your own indentured servitude to debt in the process? Higher education is capable of doing great things for the world, but so are people with vision, passion, and freedom from debt. You can be the smartest person in the room without having to forfeit your personal integrity to acquiesce to some "company line" of whatever institution or organization "accepts you" once you "get out." Education was never meant to be a conveyor belt upon which you just sit and accept whatever people instruct you to think. It ought to be a platform from which you can, as an independent voice, graciously challenge the scams, lies, and conspiracies that are propping up those very same people who do nothing but acquiesce to injustice-- it should give you the tools to refute them rather than become them.

Higher education ought to be about making complicated systems more humane, and more responsive to human beings-- not merely training on how to give a false smile, a firm handshake, and an automatic response that has been programmed into your head to the point you and only you believe it. It doesn't take a smart person to be a public relations slave for a major corporation, for example-- at least, no more than it would for a trained dog drooling on command-- so why one would waste all that time and money to end up the equivalent of a dog in the workplace seems beyond reason. That is, unless one's reason is to simply do anything (no matter the consequences) on the pretense of the Nuremberg defense, or the "need to make a living," or more appropriately, the "need to repay a debt." Only because the drooling corporate slaves out there are not alone responsible for the negatives of the world do they find some absolution from consciences. But why betray your conscience if you don't have to?

In a world where it is still possible to make a living doing positive and pro-social things for the world, choosing to contribute to something that produces more negatives than positives on the justification that it "repays the debt" sounds more like defending one's conscience through excuses. No one, unfortunately, is more skilled at turning off their conscience to become a slave to flimsy justifications than the so-called "smartest people in the room." And ironically, no one appears more well-equipped to combat those "professional justifiers" than those among the smartest minds who happen to still have the virtues of empathy, honesty, and a thirst for social justice intact. It all begins in the home. Empowerment breeds integrity. Conformity creates corruption.

Superficial Rejuvenation

2012-01-10T05:08:00.001-05:00

Who needs the attainment of wisdom at the foot of one's mortality when we have rejuvenation cosmetics? Where once we had faith, now we have so-called rationality, and while one produced simple humility in its adherents, the other produces little but vanity. Mankind no longer goes gently into that dark night, but instead spends the rest of it actively fighting the natural aging process. If life is all there is to this body and soul, it behooves the holder to hold it as long as possible--regardless of whether it's natural or healthy to do so. Where once the aging were encouraged to feel humbled before the infinite, we now have a population vainly empowered by the shorter number days they have left (thus making everything a "limited time offer").

Civilization shirked off this deference to a charismatic authority hell-bent to improve the soul and character of mankind, and in its place, built the establishment of consumerism to cater to their psychological defects instead. Is that the end of the saga? Hundreds of years of rationalism so that we can now have superficiality and vanity in the place of integrity? So that we can have anti-aging lotions, wrinkle creams, and "hair removal" regimen? It's as if we have nothing better to do with the remaining 50 years of our lives than try to make ourselves look like we did in the first two decades. When eternal deference was cut off to the heavens above, it seems like human beings then had no problem turning the same so-called "blissful ignorance of reality" onto themselves instead.

Most children are encouraged to do little else more universally than "get bigger" or "grow up." For children, aging is a prime directive, and the older and more mature one is, the more that simple status is regarded with coveted dignity. As soon as a "child" passes the threshold of adulthood though, all that anticipated growing has come to its final and premature peak, and society expects the young person to then look out on the road ahead and see nothing but a repulsive downward trajectory. How quick are we to really experience life when we are either stuck in an upward current or in a downward spiral? One way or the other, we're made to feel destined to a particular fate, with no acknowledgment of our life in the present--the "right now."

Imagine feeling as though you're on the death bed at the age of 21. Such is how we seem to expect our 21-year-olds to feel. On the contrary though is everyone over that age, who is then expected to want to be that age the rest of their lives! There is no period of human life that our culture has reserved for us to revel in the fact of being a whole individual at one place and time, without either "needing to be older" or "needing to be younger." This is because being whole is not as profitable as needing a hole to be patched. This perversity is revealed through close observation of nearly all commercial media surrounding anti-aging products, and nearly all products in general to a greater or lesser extent. I say perversity because this is a perversity, forged by Babylon itself, and is no less disgusting to my tastes than any other form of perversity.

Reality dictates that we all grow, decay, and eventually die, and yet only the most rational of the so-called later-day rationalists would accept this to be true. They'd rather bust out all their science to fabricate products to profit off the widespread lack of fulfillment that infects so many a person over thirty these days. Most seem to think or have been bred to believe that wasting one's good time is preferable to using it toward constructive ends, but only because nothing profitable for someone else has ever had anything to do with a consumer being constructive. And since those idolized "first 20 years" are the same years that the average human being exists simply to make money for other people, it's no wonder why that same individual would then want a refund after that time has passed and has gained them little. It is all too easy to "grow up" lacking fulfillment only to "live" a mature life in continuous want of a refund.

That "refund" is another way of saying "rejuvenation." Where once the passage into adulthood meant something to the primitive roots of culture, now it is simply the age at which a youth realizes for the first time that he or she has been gypped for the first 15 or so years of life. It is no matter though, for God willing, there is another 50 years left to waste trying to earn back the time that was lost during their so-called "good years." Who needs to be "born again" in the so-called eternal spirit when superficiality and artificiality accomplish the same trick for twenty-seconds at twice the price?

Forgiveness in the New Year

2012-01-01T04:43:00.001-05:00

With a new year comes a new reason to be forgiving of oneself and others. Wrongful deeds can never be forgiven, but people always can. On that note, while we can forgive the scientists, the military brass, the low-level personnel, who participated in doing this:

Declassified picture of an 8-10-year-old MK-ULTRA subject, 1961.

...we can not and should not forgive the program itself, nor the non-human governments, departments, and agencies that authorized it, funded it, and carried it out, nor the paranoid delusions and ignorance that kept it authorized, funded, and carried out. And that also goes for any other experiment or project undertaken for the purpose of finding new ways to wage war on human dignity. Some information about the picture:

"Project MK-ULTRA ran from the early 1950s to at least the late 1960s, using American and Canadian citizens as its test subjects. The published evidence indicates that Project MK-ULTRA involved the use of many methodologies to manipulate individual mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs and other chemicals, sensory deprivation, isolation, and verbal and physical abuse.
The most publicized experiments conducted by MK-ULTRA involved the administration of LSD on unwitting human subjects, including CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public, in order to study their reactions.
However, the scope of MK-ULTRA does not however stop. Experiments involving violent electroshocks, physical and mental torture and abuse were used in a systematic matter on many subjects, including children." [As pictured above.] -Secret Arcana

The next time you hear a government express a devotional sympathy to protect children, just think about what it is capable of doing to them to "provide for your common defense." Individuals within government have children, the structure itself does not, and therefore has no such sympathy. It has allowed for children's corruption and destruction before, and it will again. The same government that would presume a child's interests are not being met within their home can and does look the other way on its own abuses. It does so because it can without remorse. Minors are second-class citizens to the government--second-class human beings. People though, see them differently.

Unsung Heroes

2011-12-27T04:41:00.000-05:00

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? Just as Christ said, "Do not even the tax collectors also love their children?" one has to wonder if even the child molesters also hate child molestation. What good does it do to hate child molestation then?

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 going on 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.

How to Grow Up

2011-12-15T03:05:00.000-05:00

I find the science of human development fascinating because we all have our own experience growing up, and understandably have our own ideas about how that happens. What the science of human development does is it shines a light on all the illusions about who we are that we may have convinced ourselves of along the way. It either validates our experience or broadens that highly personal and anecdotal series of fading memories toward a frame of reference beyond ourselves and reflected by humanity.

What it teaches us is not just that we are so unique in how we specifically came to be the person we are from the person we were a relatively short time ago, but also that our experience of that maturation was not all that unique. We are constantly reinventing our own history. With the science of human development, we have to confront the fact that our successes may not have been as special or tied to own abilities as our ego may direct us to think at times, but to circumstances beyond ourselves instead. At the same time, we also have to confront the fact that our circumstance was not always solely responsible for our personal failings, but to our own doings.

The science of human development forces us to concede that there is more to humanity than ourselves, and that we are not merely products of our environment or products of nature's indifference, but that we are products of both to varying degrees that we may not even realize. No other science is as innately personal, perhaps with the exclusion of modern health, and likewise, in no other science does nearly everyone alive consider themselves an expert.

For this reason, adults (parents) are often inaccurate when making assumptions about the behaviors and interests of children living today (often interpreting the worst), for they compare the real actions of their children today with the invention they created around their own childhood, and they understandably don't like what they see. What they don't remember is that children themselves have never changed, just the various hang-ups of the society around them. Human developmental science works to remind us of what changes and what doesn't, so we don't go drugging our children out of existence so as to pair their experience with the perfect or imperfect childhood invention of our memories.

It could be said that we are not truly grown up until we recognize the fact of our existence is a constant maturation, a constant imperceptible development, rather than being confined strictly to the condensation of time behind us. The notion that we are all on a flat-line towards death in the present could be considered implicit immaturity. Maturity, in contrast comes not with age or experience, but with the understanding of the transient nature of our mental state in a constant flux of development.

More Honesty, Less Irony

2011-12-08T06:16:00.000-05:00

Irony is the package that truth is delivered in, so that it can be palpable to comprehension. Contrary to what people think, truth is actually pretty simple, but it's impossible to comprehend due to its simplicity, so people invented irony to tease it out. When truth is delivered with naked honesty, it is feared at best and disregarded at worst. So society is full of irony, which is to say, pretense, which is to say, lies in the guise of truth and truth in the guise of lies. Our intuitions are always an honest representation of ourselves, but adults in particular (far more than children) are contented to bury their intuitions under false pretense for the purposes of keeping up appearances. Adult society is built by honest conviction that is delivered and made palpable by lies, self-deprecating humor, sarcasm, and ironic twists of personal judgment to fit in with prevailing cultural standards. If society decides to castigate or lynch a group of people, the individuals within it are more inclined to support that lynching with their love of irony, sarcasm, self-deprecating humor, and misrepresented values, than they are with their honesty and truthful conviction to their gut.

Truthful conviction and honesty tells us that all people deserve respect unless they have personally done something that amounts to a forfeiture of that right by their own discretion alone. Our intuition directs us to value some version of an equality standard for all, and not solely base an individual's inclusion in that standard on the perceived class or "group" that an individual belongs to. For instance, our honest, truthful, "heart of hearts" knows by pro-social evolution that to disrespect an individual on the stereotypes or heuristics of the class, race, sex, or creed they belong to (or are perceived as belonging to) is shameful. For most non-sociopaths capable of shame, it seems unconscionable on the face of it to show disrespect to someone for a reason having nothing to do with that person's own character or actions, but to circumstances totally beyond that person's control. This is not a novel concept to most people, so we have every reason to assume there is at least some truth to it, but let's see how irony will cause a person to break those very same conventions in the name dishonest truth, often for humor's sake.

Irony in the broadest sense is a narrative device where a circumstance exists for which an unexpected result occurs with the property of contradicting or going against the meaning behind the circumstance. It is usually easier to depict than to define, for instance: when a child and an adult are competing, and the inexperienced child outwits the adult, it is an ironic situation because it is not expected that someone of smaller experience would outwit someone of larger experience. Adults find such joy in irony like this because they have more of an experience with social conventions and like to see something that challenges them or contradicts them from unexpected sources. Girls outwitting boys, for instance, is another common trope, even now when we should no longer consider a girl to be an "unexpected source," but such is the backwards way with irony.

Adults use irony to accomplish the opposite of challenging convention though, and deliver the "unexpected truth" by confirming convention only so much as to kill it with kindness. This forms the basis of most deconstructionist, post-modern philosophy. For instance, by saying something like "children are better than adults by their savagery," there is an attempt to combine "superiority" with "savagery" (an unexpected pairing), and children (traditionally considered to be pure and inferior to adults), with the same, for the purpose of exposing the more intuitive truth that "adults are no better or worse than children." But why all that diversion when one could have just said: "adults are no better or worse than children?" It's because that truth is made more thought-worthy when it comes dressed in a subtle poetic quip involving lots of comparisons. Blatant statements of belief mean nothing to anyone beyond the church pew, but lies that cover up truths seem to really cause people to stop and reconsider their thoughts. That is just how the secular world prefers its truths. But by confirming something that one does not actually support, even with the intention of laying bare some truth about it, one is essentially dressing a truth in a lie, which is to say, lying.

So human beings can get away with making the most ludicrous and crass statements, cast misguided judgement, purposefully misrepresent where their values lie, and get away with it, as I have done at times, by calling it sarcasm in the pursuit of a higher truth, or by being humorous (as Colbert does). But where do we draw the line before we've totally divorced our honest intuition from our outward dishonest personality? Do we get away with saying that "boys are stupid" so that we may appear ironic for saying it and therefore be "interpreted" as saying anything supportive of girls? "Boys are stupid" will never be a supportive statement for anyone. Do we get away with calling a particular boy "stupid" because of the circumstance of his sex (which he had nothing to do with)? Do we get away with advocating for the lynching of ethnic minorities just so we can feel sarcastic and witty enough to be espousing truth in furtherance of tolerance? "Lynch him in a back alley" will likewise never be a statement endorsing tolerance, no matter how ironic it is perceived to be.

It is not that sarcasm this hurtful should be outright censored, just that those who speak it should be regarded shamefully. It is shameful to say something that contradicts one's better judgement, whatever that judgement may be. If we have to assume that no one truth exists, but that each one of us has our own truth, the best we can do is be truthful to ourselves as best we can, and that is called direct honesty. The truth does hurt, which is why we invented irony--to soften it, to make it more palpable, to make it humorous, to add distractions so that we're not forced to accept it as much as we'd like to--but the truth is always the truth and it can't be twisted, even if one doesn't agree with it. As much as the truth hurts though, dishonesty hurts more. When you are being honest by saying "peace on earth," chances are, it was dishonesty that lead the first battle cry.

Saying "equality for all people," is the only way of truthfully conveying the message of "equality for all people," even if it sounds comically vague or naive on the bare surface like that--but that is what the truth is! The truth is naive. It is simple. You can not arrive at "equality for all people" if you're going around, cheekily saying "girls are better than boys," for instance, because you know that statement, when expressed categorically in relation to a whole group of people, is false, and therefore, a comic lie. It is a statement of devaluation toward one group and a superficial support of another (not on the basis of merit, but on the basis of circumstances neither child had any control over) against your better intuition. You know you are lying when you say it, so why don't you feel shameful? If you are saying the opposite of truth--a falsehood---and if you know that it is false, then you are lying.

Adults don't think of irony or sarcasm as lying because they know a deeper truth is attempting to be exposed with its phrasing, but they only arrive at that conclusion because they have adult brain capacities. Ask any child what a lie is, and they will tell you about the time they lied to get away with something they didn't want exposed. In our case, what we don't want exposed is the truth, and instead, favor a pretense of falsehoods, lies, and sarcasm. How does that not describe, in its entirety, all that the sarcastic, ironic, hypocritical, pretense and illusion that the adult social world is built on?

The Public Good

2011-12-07T02:17:00.001-05:00

When the public good is pitted against the interests of the private enterprise, the private enterprise has almost never lost. Every one of those battles was waged on the pretense that protecting the private enterprise would serve the interests of the public good, but so few have actually turned out that way. For every bill introduced on behalf of a public need, there are lobbyists standing in the corridors of government with suitcases of money and campaign donations to essentially "influence" it out of existence. Those lobs of funding are a lot more influential than a bunch of disparate constituents back a thousand miles away.

Corporations know about the fickle nature of the voting population, for it has lost all hope in its elected officials. And since private entities are not in the same public spotlight, politicians have more to lose by placing the needs of their constituents before those private interests than they do by signing on and towing the corporate line (and thereby avoid having to air their dirty laundry before the public via the corporate media). After all, in the next election cycle, he or she who made the most corporate friends in their tenure will most likely be reelected-- all constituents do is just put in the physical votes to ensure that the process takes place. Campaigns with the most money have the most resources, staff, and publicity, which is why those campaigns get elected.

This is why there has never been a politician in the last hundred years who has favored constituents over businesses. It turns out that businesses can afford to hire lobbyists. Those lobbyists can court their preferred politicians during all the various formal receptions and private meetings, and thereby gain a rapport with them in a way that constituents will never have the opportunity to do. Those lobbyists then use that special rapport to make the case that whatever is in their best interest is actually also in the public interest, and that it will undoubtedly benefit that politician's constituents should he or she get behind whatever they propose, no matter how far fetched the rationale has to be. The politician is then left to ponder the benefits of "killing two birds with one stone" before they break out the cigars.

That, kids, is the story of how politicians that win usually end up in the pocket of multinational corporations that actually don't give a damn about constituents. That is how the worst outcomes usually follow from the best intentions. That is how democracy gets auctioned off.

Who's Watching the Watchers?

2011-11-29T00:45:00.001-05:00

Because of what the adult brain loses as it develops from adolescence, adulthood is not great. It is not qualitatively better or greater than adolescence by experience than adolescence is greater by innocence, or ignorance (as it were). The adolescent brain is simply fighting to express itself in a world governed by unbridled adult expression, for better and worse. By contrast, the adult brain is fighting itself in a world governed by its own self-imposed inhibitions, those learned by experience, and also for better and worse. So where do adults get the idea that they are qualified to judge the young?

The adolescent calculates the why not while the adult simply contents itself with knowing the why not. The adolescent tests its limits while the adult lives comfortably within them. The adolescent strives for a costly adventure as the adult settles for safe and clean complacency. The adolescent seizes life regardless of the consequences while the adult lives in a world of consequences and denies life. The teenage mind defies expectation while the adult mind defines it. When the teen mind defies life to its detriment, the adult mind defines it to the same extent. The adult is superior though for its longevity while the teen is superior for its aspiration--both have what the other lacks.

If you're an adult, and you find this characterization limiting, then you are experiencing the same decadence (which is to say vanity) that limits the youth perspective. Characterizations of people on the basis of age are naturally limiting. The only difference of course is that these characterizations draw a line of equivocation between adults and adolescents (and children), while most adult heuristics in regards to young people do nothing but reinforce the so-called superiority of adults (in the active realms) and children (in the passive ones). All the truth in the world adds up to adults thinking in adult ways and framing non-adult situations with adult-centric perspectives. That's all there is to it. Truth is a function of power, and because adults are in power, their truth prevails. And yet, their truth about humility still applies to everyone.

In the name of humility, the justice system is often considered to be the sociological "parent" for adults. It's supposed to be the high-holy thing that judges adult behavior and punishes indiscretions in the rational world. It is however formed and created by adults, so one is left to wonder, who is watching the watchers? Who is judging adults in the manner in which adults judge the young (other than the young people themselves?)? Adults are given unbridled expression because they exist free of judgement half the time, and when they are being judged, they not only participate in, but create the system for which they are to be judged by. What child has that much authority over the judgement system when he or she is facing the scorn of adults? If only children could set the terms by which they could be judged by, because then they would have the same free terms that adults reserve for themselves. As it stands, are policing both themselves and children, so adult judgements go unchallenged in either case.

It is entirely human for an adult to be taken by the decadence that is bestowed on them by culture, and there isn't one alive that doesn't think, in some way, that they are superior to young people. Adults don't need to be derided for their egotism any more than kids do for theirs, they simply need to be awakened and cut down to size so they may see themselves as the increasingly decrepit apes they are. None are so high and mighty that they should be beyond reproach, whether adults (in active realms) or children (in passive ones). Chances are, in the grandiosity of the cosmos, nothing an adult human says makes any real difference or carries any more universal a truth than the children who were once told "not to speak unless spoken to." Whoever said the adults could talk?

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-06T01:11:00.004-04:00

Say what you will about child liberationists, or even childlovers, but I bet you neither of them could ever be guilty of stealing 4.6 billion from federal teacher training and afterschool programs in order to re-route that tax money so that high-income taxpayers this year can spend 5.2 billion of it to "remove limits on their itemized deductions." So say what you will about CLs, but they could never be guilty of stealing 7.6 billion dollars in your tax money--which would have gone to fund "supplemental nutrition for children in poverty," and instead spend 6.7 billion of it on "estate planning" so that the wealthiest among them can avoid "paying taxes on their estates."

The truth of the matter, of course, is that Wall Street and high finance doesn't give a damn about the country's young, unless they happen to be the sons and daughters of bankers. That is no surprise, but what is unsettling is that those who orchestrate this extraction of public resources to avoid their civic responsibilities (which would otherwise be benefiting children and schools, in this case), are still allowed to sleep soundly at night.

Better my money goes to help fund an early childhood education program for inner-city kids right here at home than become a subsidy for some CEO's second vacation home in the Dutch Antilles, but those are my priorities. They are not those shared by the "Greed is Good" gangsters running financial institutions, who believe instead that it's better a wealthy man inherits wealth than a poor child inherits food. Here be strange priorities: rich before poor; money before food; slavery before decency. Unbridled capitalism works that way.

High finance and the wealthy in general have siphoned all but the blood from the underling classes for more than thirty years, and have bought the people's government to legislate their selfishness. They mean to extract from the current generation and extort from the future ones, so that they can make out good before things fall apart. The collapse in their wake will fall on the shoulders of every child living today unless we put our society's future ahead of their next tax-exemption loophole. Dare I say, high finance is a bigger threat to more impoverished young people than drugs, gangs, and child molesters ever were.

The American people have seen the power of demonstration in Tahrir Square to overthrow one corrupt regime, and now simply want to bring the same to the one residing on Wall Street.

Men are Not Finished

2011-10-03T01:32:00.001-04:00

Female chauvinists Hana Rosin and Dan Abrams were recently able to convince an audience that not only is the status and position of men and boys in relative decline, but that men and boys are "finished." They represented and posed as the intellectual establishment backing the "For" position over the question "Are men finished?" and were able to win a historic percentage of converts in an Intelligence Squared debate. They carried the debate, based on polling done before and after.

So by contending that "men are finished," these two and their recent converts must either be in favor of blatant and unapologetic sexism, OR are willing to personally foot the bill to give the "weaker" side (men) more special protections and affirmative actions that "stronger" females apparently have no need for (by their own arguments). By contending that "men are finished," these self-avowed "feminists" are either dismantling the house of gender equality which has been decades in the painstaking build, OR they are simply trying to advocate for redistributing resources toward the weaker side (men) in order to achieve equality. By contending that "men are finished," our "intellectual establishment" here is either smugly giving up on boys and condemning them to lives of assured and self-prophetic under-performance and hopelessness, OR they are expressing a need to shift our resources and attention back to the "weaker class" (boys) and away from the class (girls) that doesn't appear to "need" so much attention anymore (by their own statements).

The point being, they can not have it both ways. They can not be in favor of gender equality and profess that men are finished, because to do such either solidifies them as personal advocates for promoting the interests of the "neediest" (boys and men) over that of the "well off" (girls and women), OR, if not that, it solidifies them as sexist bigots, gleefully cheering on the disenchantment of a whole class of people, including every child born male who under-performs. Either they can try to humanize themselves by saying that the down-and-out men deserve "more" (which is not very feminist), or they can solidify their reputation as female chauvinists and gleefully cheer on the evisceration of all things male. There is no in between.

They may in their own mind believe that either of those positions empowers women, or that all they are doing is expressing an inevitability and simply siding with the winners, but they can also still believe they are decent people too. Neither of their beliefs make either statement true. There is a thousand mile difference between saying there are more women in college, and saying that men are an "endangered species"--whether tongue and cheek or not. Men are not a "species." Homo Sapiens is a species. It would seem people of such intellectual or academic esteem should know that. And yet, there is no surprise that Dan Abrams doesn't.

There is a thousand mile difference between talking about trends, and making bold-faced assertions about a group of people having become "finished" when there is simply no evidence of that. The former is a rational, concerned approach, seeking remedies to a real-world social ill, while the later is merely a contention toward a finality--it is a way of saying that solutions are not needed, because the problem has ceased to be a problem. In real terms, saying "boys and men need help" assumes that challenges need to be met with solutions. Saying "boys and men are finished" denies that the problem is a problem, and in so doing, denies the possibility for there ever being solutions.

One wouldn't say "this patient is finished," when all the patient needs is some active treatment to regain their health. One wouldn't condemn a student with a learning disability by calling him "finished," unless one is callous or cruel, and the same should go for those who use that terminology to talk about the well-being of men and boys. An appropriate argument could be worded "the social place of men is evolving," and be perfectly within the boundaries of reality, but no, they choose to focus on "finished," which means there is no evolution, just a dead end and a hopeless future. But let us cut to the main issue---this term "finished" is not meant to rebuild men, nor empower women, it is simply used to weaken the already weakened social resolve (of both genders), by those who have fetishized male social evisceration and humiliation. In any case, gender equality is as removed from Rosin's and Abram's minds as common decency.

Let them and their followers chase after their personal fetishes and "mother complexes" all they want, but leave the future of our boys to people with a sense of decency, please.

It Gets Better

2011-09-29T02:22:00.005-04:00

The boy became a young man. The young man became a cause.
The cause became the hope for the country and its laws.

Too many martyrs and too many dead.
Too many lives, too many empty words were said.
Too many times for too many angry men.
Oh let it never be again.

-Phil Ochs
"The Ballad of Medgar Evers"

Unworthy Victims

2011-09-28T06:08:00.017-04:00

One of the problems with victimology and unwavering victim-worship is that it is unevenly distributed. In western culture we're almost lead to believe, whether by accident or not, that certain people are more deserving of our sympathies than others for matters having nothing to do with the circumstances of their victimization, all things being equal. The "usual suspects" are always our template for villainy, and the "typical victims" are always getting hammered into our sympathetic nerves, time after time. All else who don't fit the narrative need not apply, even if they have been objectively victimized too.

The image of a girl being raped by a shadowy man, even as tragic as it is, has been turned into little more than a thought-stopping cliche. It is indeed the prototypical image in our heads when we think of sexual exploitation, simply because of its incessant repetition in film, television, and the news media. Its depiction no longer makes us think, we merely become anesthetized to it, and we ignore and become incapable of seeing exploitation in other forms perpetrated on less-prototypical human beings. Not only does its repetition rob our emotional minds blind to the real tragedy of it (just because we've seen it a hundred times), but it holds that emotional mind hostage and blocks its rational ends from seeing the travesties committed on those our sympathetic acuity has been blinded to.

One wants to talk about how the predator manufactures the consent of his victim when he exploits her, but what about when culture has done the same to you, and has manufactured your consent to feel one way or another toward or against someone, at its discretion, by repetition? When the mere gender of a person, the age of a person, or social class of a person, has more to do with your outrage, your indignation, your sympathy for them, than the act that they have become victim to or perpetrated, you've already become a victim to the cliche of the media narrative yourself. That is how culture and the propaganda, the "thought-stopping cliches," have molested your will and alienated your compassion from you by their constant mercantile presence.

“Our hypothesis is that worthy victims will be featured prominently and dramatically, that they will be humanized, and that their victimization will receive the detail and context in story construction that will generate reader interest and sympathetic emotions. In contrast, unworthy victims will merit only slight detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage.”
—E. S. Herman and N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent

According to culture, men and boys are unworthy victims, so society does not care when they are victimized, abused, and maltreated en mass. According to culture, teenagers are unworthy victims, so society does not care when they are victimized, abused, and maltreated en mass. So by these two observations alone, we should expect society to feel more sympathy for a six-year-old girl that has been mishandled, than a 15-year-old "young man" who has suffered the same--or even still, has been murdered, or sold into sexual slavery as a bacha bereesh in Afghanistan (bet you haven't heard of it). That which we assume "en mass" dictates how we respond to individuals within that mass.

It would certainly lend an explanation as to why it does, and why male offenders are touted as "beasts" while female offenders of the same crimes are give then "mother of three" treatment. Where do you think your sympathy is "supposed" to go, given the choice between a beast and a mother of three? What if the "beast" had children too? Nobody cares, and it is not important anyways.

So while we are all required to feel sympathy toward the typical cases, and hatred toward the "usual suspects," let's not forget those our culture has forgotten to take seriously. The moment you have an image in your mind about a typical case victim, fill her in with her exact opposite, and remember that that does happes too, and how nobody cares about it when it does. Nobody's singing the praises of a teenage boy who has been raped by a woman, no matter how traumatic, just because it doesn't fit the typical schema of offenders and victims. When you realize this, then you'll see real sexism, real ageism, real classism at work in ways the focus group didn't think would be commercially viable enough to wrest your "unquestionable" sympathy for.

All media is the same story being sold, over and over. Don't buy it.

Trauma by the CPS

2011-09-26T01:56:00.001-04:00

There are two kinds of people who have the gall to forcefully take a child out of their home: kidnappers, and CPS workers. In order to do the job, the caseworker has to harness the same guiltless energy that a kidnapper does in order to enter a home and tear a child off their parents. The only difference for the adults is the rationale. The only difference for the child is that the kidnapper does it behind the the parents' back, while the CPS worker does it right in front of their faces.

Kidnappers remove children for personal, selfish reasons, for the worse, while CPS workers remove children in an attempt to provide for their welfare and well-being in ways that aren't properly being served--for better or worse. We shouldn't forget that the primary motivating factor for the kidnapper is kidnapper-focused, while it is child-focused for the CPS worker, but our attention to the "motivations" and "intentions" for the perpetrator or the public servant ought to be secondary to our concern for the child's actual welfare. However, in justifying the knee-jerk removal of a child from an otherwise loving home, for ill-defined reasons, often the caseworker's "motivation" to remove takes precedence in our minds over the child's actual well-being.

When a small child is ripped from their parent's arms by a stranger, does the child care what the "intentions" of the person doing the ripping are? Of course not. It is a traumatic event for a child to be removed from a loving home. This is not to say that such interventions don't have their place--in cases involving extreme abuse and neglect--but perhaps worse than good people failing to the right thing is good people thinking they are doing the right thing while they do the wrong thing. This happens when children are removed from homes where no abuse or neglect is happening.

The state is slow to reverse their mistakes because admitting to a mistake jeopardizes their public legitimacy. The agency tasked to judge the legitimacy of parents, does not not like to be judged itself. Legitimacy is always more important to the state than the child's welfare. Any parent who has caused the amount of trauma that even the most "well-meaning" caseworker and court is capable of inflicting on children in a single night, wouldn't be allowed to keep the child, even by the state's own standards.

The issue is, are we more concerned about the trauma children in that situation are facing, or are we more concerned for the ill-conceived "good intentions" of the person who has caused that trauma? If we were child-focused, whether they are removed by a kidnapper or removed by a well-meaning but equally traumatic CPS worker, we'd recognize the trauma for the child either way. Instead though, we put the "well-meaning" part ahead of the trauma in the case of the CPS removal, because the caseworker carries with her the cold calculation of unquestionable authority, and the kidnapper carries the absolute opposite. We then regard what the child is feeling there, no matter how traumatic, to be a "necessary" part of their well-being. Trauma is never necessary though, regardless of who is inflicting it.

The CPS ought to remain in operation, only so long as it can admit to its screw ups in a timely manner.

Burn the Witch

2011-09-20T05:23:00.060-04:00

Friend: it was an interesting example where a woman rapes boy, instead of a man molesting a boy.
Me: and yet nobody cares.
Me: in fact, the woman is probably going to get glamor shots on the cover of some magazine with the title, "Class in Sexsion: Hot Teacher Scores!" as soon as she's out on probation...
Me: you know, like they usually do with child rape.

When a woman rapes a young boy, all we get treated to are statistics. They tend to come spewing from the mouths of apologists and feminists. It's as if we're supposed to throw our heads back and suddenly realize that we made a big mistake in criticizing the rape of a young boy (by a woman) simply because it was an unlikely occurrence. It doesn't follow, and it's horribly insensitive. Yes, it is true that "less women do it," but does that mean the pain of molestation stings a little less for the male victim? I thought not. Does that mean anything as to how we ought to regard and treat the offender? Absolutely not. Statistics don't mean anything to anyone who isn't already sold on some agenda. They are a mere prop used to justify the thoughts in one's own head.

Remember all the righteous indignation about how the "law is the law" and how it is "there to protect minors regardless of the consequences?" Does that ring a bell? It ought to, because that's why society wrote it--to supposedly "protect minors,"--not to judge according to whether the perpetrator belongs to a class we feel is getting stigmatized. If men or women are getting stigmatized as offenders, it's because they went into it thinking "regardless of the consequences!"--so I say to them, enjoy the consequences. If you don't enjoy them though when women bare the bunt of them, you also shouldn't enjoy them when men and children are baring the same bunt.

Statistics here are as meaningless as this: "The main reason [for women's shorter sentences] is that their crimes are objectively less vile..." is insulting. Is "less-vile" child rape more acceptable to us than "more-vile" child rape? I would think not. Rape is rape.

I'm trying to make a broader point with how I express the sentiment and the word choice. I'm parodying how the extremists talk when they vilify men offenders--directing the same moral indignation that society shows toward its scapegoat "usual suspects," towards its so-called "sympathetic offenders" instead, to show how wrong-minded moral outrage is to begin with. The fact that society would be willing to sit down and have a civilized discussion on the statistics when it comes to women offenders and totally ignore all rationality when it comes to men offenders, ought to be the new definition of sexism.

No amount of statistics in the world should justify hating one group over another, but no amount should apologize for the crimes of one over another either. Women are the minority offender, yes, but their crimes need no apology, nor do we need to temper our reservations about them, whether they are "less vile" or not. If failing to reserve contempt for someone's crime is a function of sexism, then one shouldn't be justified in failing to reserve contempt for the next adult man who has sex with a 15 year old and is given the "Amy Gail Lilley" sentence (no prison time, just two years of house arrest and 8 years of probation). If you can't see yourself wanting to gouge that fictional man's eyes out while the very real Mrs. Lilley sits back in her house unfazed, then your whole theory about the sexism against women offenders is thrown to the fire--where true criminals belong.

Asking Questions

2011-09-19T02:44:00.016-04:00

Somewhere between the sixth and 18th year of life, the mind goes from asking the big questions about nature and the universe, to asking questions about "which facts are important to know for the test" and which aren't. After 12 years of schooling, the brain becomes accustomed to simply "channeling" a wide range of information with no clear context, meaning, or significance, from one piece of paper to another. It becomes adept at spitting back information that has been dictated to it and dumped into it, on request. Children slowly lose their curiosity as "learners" the better they become at being "students."

It is not until college and graduate school that "students" are encouraged to once again revisit the natural curiosity that so captivated them in those early years of life, but by that time so many have chosen to give up on their studies and many don't have the resources to go on in it anyways. They essentially grow never "wondering about things" outside of the context of daily living and survival, and just as well know little about how to go about learning things to begin with even if they wanted to. How to learn was just never taught to them in all those years of being fed facts.

Good teachers know all of this to be true, and work to make it work, even given the enormous constraints placed on them by the prevailing 20th-century industrial methodologies. A few observations from human development can go a long way towards actually tapping into that youth's natural desire to "know things" rather than simply "putting that on hold for 12 years." The first observation would be that children, and people in general, don't learn anything by being taught (or told), they learn by learning (which is doing). The second: that people don't learn by retaining random bits of information, they learn by drawing their own connections between information. The third: that people don't learn from accessing tomes secluded away from daily life, they learn best when information has meaning they can relate to issues and themes in daily life that they care about. The fourth: that people don't learn unless they've been shown how to learn.

The young child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The old child learns by asking questions and seeking answers. The "person" learns by asking questions and seeking answers. At no point does a person learn anything by having questions asked of them, unless the question is, "How will you go about solving/learning this?" or "What do you think will happen because of this?" Good teachers are asking, but culture isn't.

Two words: Lev Vygotsky.

If you want to learn more about the man and his work, how would you go about finding out? What did you find out when you did that?

Age-Limit Mysticism

2011-09-15T01:32:00.011-04:00

Those who rely on age limits to determine the reality of a child's development are like the Popes and mystics of old who believed the earth was the center of creation. Mystics both ancient and modern ignore evidence to the contrary of their assumptions. In the modern world, the earth's revolution around the sun has nothing to do with whether a child can vote or give consent, nor does the mere act of "not dying" during one's first 18 of those revolutions, by itself, bestow these abilities on a young person. And yet, that is the definition and explanation we are dealt. That is how we divide and define human beings, still... in 21st century.

While the law of the land is defined by mysticism, the law of reality is defined by something a bit more practical. Human development, which is another way of saying human character, and the abilities it gives one, is a better predictor of whether a child or youth ought to be dignified with the rights of a human being than the earth's revolution. Unfortunately though, the science of human development has been ignored for the last 200 years concerning how to determine ability, and therefore eligibility for the rights of a natural-born citizen. It turns out that even science is not practical enough, because any system wishing to align eligibility for rights with individual ability, would somehow have to define and test everyone for normative developmental milestones specific to the innumerable variations in individuals. This would be too costly.

So mysticism is assumed to be the best alternative, and science is too costly, but in reality--outside of the law and science--capitalism has already made the determination for us. Capitalism often redefines the so-called "fixed position" of things to suit its own agendas, so this is nothing new. It has drawn the line between adult and child along monetary lines. Money and resources mean more to making you human than your developmental position relative to normal adulthood. Take a 6 year old, give him a million dollars, and suddenly the adults care about his opinion. That is how arbitrary these definitions have become--how flimsy and shakable. It is only a matter of time before blind confidence in the "money mystics" is itself blown apart by simple thought.

“Children, who play life, habiteverywhere, discern its true law and relations more clearly than with men, whofail to live it worthily, but who think they are wiser by experience, that is,by failure.”

--Henry David Thoreau

Not Special Unless Special

2011-09-09T23:34:00.016-04:00

Most of the time, the best way to raise a kid is not to raise a kid, it seems, but to raise a person. The child of today is going to spend maybe 10 years being a kid and upwards of 40 years being an adult, God willing. So the question becomes, do you want to raise a big kid, or a person?

When you treat an adult like a kid, it means you're being needlessly suppressive (choosing not to respect them like the people they are). When you treat a kid like a kid, you're being needlessly repressive (choosing not to see them as people to begin with). Treating a kid like a kid is never letting them taste failure. It's excusing their misbehavior, spoiling them into submission by praising their lethargy, and never letting them face rejection--in short, it's about keeping them as far from being human as possible for as long as possible--despite their longings to be. It's about purposely neglecting to preserve or even recognize their dignity because they are supposedly incapable of being dignified. Here they are not being respected for their strengths, they are just having their weaknesses catered to.

On the contrary, treating an adult like a person is how respect is shown, and it should be no different with children. Treating kids like people means recognizing them for the their actual strengths (rather than treating even their weaknesses as if they too were virtues). It's letting them face the real consequences of their own misconduct with discretion (and not just the politically-correct prefabricated ones). It's teaching them how to walk away from rejection without feeling rejected. It's about building them up rather than talking down to them, building them up to be able to respond to the natural ups and downs of living--of personhood. It's a far more healthy way to live one's life.

When you tell a child he's special before he has even done anything worthy or special, you weaken his ability to be anything but average. All he becomes is what he is. Who needs to work to be special if they already are before they even put in the work? If you tell him instead, that he has the ability to one day be special through work, difficulty, and problem solving, and that his actions toward those positive ends are what ensure his being special regardless of the outcome, you strengthen his ability to go beyond himself--to become a better person than he is. Is that not what you want? Is that not what our society demands?

We need not tell a child they are good at something before they have shown themselves to be objectively good at it. We don't do that with adults, so there is no reason to do that with children. On the other hand, we shouldn't then be dismissive of a child's attempts to go beyond themselves, even if they fail in the end. We shouldn't fault a child when they do put in the honest effort and come up short, because that is life, and the same ought to go for adults. Working hard makes you "special." Working hard makes you a person.

The Kids are Alright

2011-09-07T03:26:00.001-04:00

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.

Hating Kids

2011-08-28T03:02:00.000-04:00

It is a fact that some people don't deal well with kids, but do those same people genuinely not like the existence of kids? That is what I hear when someone says they don't like kids--they would rather kids not exist. It is plausible someone could be so scared of kids, (viewing them as fragile beings physically and or emotionally) that they fear contact with them, but that isn't hating kids, quite the contrary. It probably just comes from thinking kids have no tangible value or worth (to them). I guess its akin to hating the neighbors obnoxious ugly puppy that just yaps all day.

My general thought is that society divorces harm and safety from love and hate. It's almost like, loving a child puts you in the "potential for harm" category, and hating a child puts you in the "no potential for harm" group. The rationale is that loving kids puts you in their path, and hating kids causes you to stay away. Therefore, it becomes more advisable to make like you hate kids than to express any kind of love for them, because then society views you as too distant from them to be a threat.

Childhood as Disability?

2011-08-25T01:21:00.001-04:00

People who would equate children with adults often make the observation that the adult world is full of people who display little qualitative difference from children (such as people with various developmental disabilities). On this basis, they make the case that children shouldn't be guaranteed any special provisions that adults with mental impairments aren't already able to receive, and that furthermore, to enforce these special provisions for children above adults creates its own form of ageism. It is the case made for equivocation between the disabled adult and the growing child.

What this viewpoint ignores is the very real biological differences between children and adults that further differentiate a child from a disabled adult. A child should not be considered disabled because they fail to perform at adult capacity. Children perform to the capacity that their developing physiology determine on the whole. They benefit from a comparison to others of their age group because it assists caretakers in identifying those who are under performing. Equating an adult's capacities to a child's is an inherently unfair comparison. If a comparison is drawn between children and adults, suddenly every child is considered disabled--their under performance is attributed to their "childhood disability" even if they are in fact very gifted for their age, and it takes the importance off those who are having difficulty even keeping up with their own age level.

If childhood were a disability, it would be a very strange one:

One hundred percent of the population has it at least once in their life (for the first 12 years). In all healthily maturing individuals who have this disability, its chance of complete remittance is extremely high, if not one hundred percent, within specified and fairly predictable time lines (for example, normally developing children usually begin thinking logically during the concrete observational stage of the disability).

Its symptoms reveal themselves in almost all areas of functioning, from the physical to the cognitive, from the behavioral to the personality expression (for example, magical thinking, egotistical thinking, lack of awareness of mental states, false beliefs, failing conservation tasks, centration in problem solving, lack of numerical thinking, lack of hypothetical reasoning, lack of adequate physical mobility due to small stature, incomplete perceptions of the physical properties of objects--cause and effect, physiological growth factors influencing drug tolerance and susceptibility to disease, incomplete recognition of the self, incomplete understanding of morality...etc.)

This "disability" can gather other real disabilities around it to confound a child even more so which can be very common over time but not all at once, (for example, learning disabilities, motor skills disorders, conduct disorders, ADHD, ODD, Autism, Aspergers, Separation Anxiety, pica, tic disorders, elimination disorders, attachment issues, mutism...etc.)...etc.

In all seriousness, it seems fairly obvious that childhood shouldn't be considered a disability in the same way that a physical or mental handicap could, whether the individual is a child or an adult. There are many qualitative and quantitative differences between children and adults that have to be respected and attended to in separate but equal ways. Furthermore, a child needs special provisions in our society so that they can physically and mentally participate in the context of the larger adult-centric environment to an equal degree.

It is true that adults can have all these conditions ascribed to childhood, and it's my thinking that all adults maintain these impairments into adulthood, reappearing in different forms and contexts relative to their cognitive and physiological spheres in society, but to equate the two seems completely ignorant to their mutual uniqueness.

Adult-centrism is far more ageist than attending to a child's developmental differences.

Under My Thumb

2011-08-20T00:58:00.001-04:00

I wasn't cut out to work with kids. I'm no good in the female-dominated world of childcare. It was rather disheartening to see how they treat the kids, but what do I know? They're the professionals, I'm just the caring young man. The children would have eaten me alive.

I'm too nice. I can't yell at kids. That's the personality issue that can not be undone. I am too patient to work with kids, too passive. I can't adequately take out my personal frustrations on a kid. Therefore, I'm no good in that line of work.

Adults thrive on keeping children living under their thumb, which is probably why I was so unsuccessful at passing myself off as an adult.

Flash Mob Generation

2011-08-14T03:59:00.018-04:00

The youth street riots in England show us what happens when government flat out ignores the needs of young people for too long. When government no longer seems to work for the people, regardless of age or social class, the people become disillusioned with it, and angry with it, and angry with the society that embraces it. The behavior of the rioters is reprehensible and by no means do I wish to endorse it, as there is no doubt it has nothing to do with legitimate protest. There's been a lot of speculation about the cause though, and a lot of accusations against indirect cultural influences, but no inciting incident or clear motivation can be tagged. This is simply because the uprisings are instead the inevitable product of years and years of pent-up social frustration with a civil society that has continuously sidelined the millennial generation.

It comes with great shame to me, being a member of that generation, that they have resorted to this, but while I can't endorse their unbridled destructiveness, I can at least sympathize with the spark of frustration that caused it. I seem to remember a year or so prior to this unrest, the UK government unequivocally shouting down mass youth protests--legitimate, non-violent protests--against the government's insistence on shutting down student loans and increasing interest rates on them, all while tuition in the UK is set to double by next year, and all while youth unemployment is up to 20% in the UK.

The old guard in government, who rode through college in the age of state-paid, free tuition, effectively see nothing wrong with sending young people out into the world with debts reaching up to six figures--and while that is good news for the same "old guard" special interests (who never have to share any of the fiscal burden), it is bad news for young people who would have to make the sacrifice. So the young people fought, and the government refused to listen, and when the government no longer listens, the young people got frustrated.

And they have a right to be frustrated. They've been given no reason to think the government actually works for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, and it's because it hasn't worked for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, for decades. It hasn't because it has surrendered its duties to the wealthy and the corporations, who have done nothing but pocket the benefits for themselves. With average citizens being unable to affect change against massive special interests who pay their way into politician's pockets, they lose faith in the system, they lose faith in democracy, and they lose faith in civil society. Once that happens, they constitute for themselves a civil disorder--and it may very well be a psychological release of pent-up energies, a joy ride of smashing and looting--but it has its roots with the unresponsiveness of society.

What shames me about the riots is the indiscriminate path of their destructiveness, affecting small business owners and other private property in particular. These local merchants and residents did not deserve being so much as touched, as they had nothing to do with the government being unresponsive to the needs of young people. The young should have been using their social media to a call for non-violent resistance and organize walk-outs and sit down strikes. All they accomplished in pursuing violence was to throw their oppressive government into overdrive. Thousands of arrests have been made, and youth curfews have spread all over the world (Philadelphia for example). Instead of dismantling civil society, young people should stop it from being able to function. The government has to be starved by its disaffected until it realizes why it needs them.

If government no longer works for you, you ought to no longer work for it. It's called the social contract.

Gendered Corruption

2011-08-12T03:59:00.011-04:00

We wonder why the path to manhood is fraught with so much difficulty and lack of assurance. Parents fret about the outcomes for their sons. Surely it wouldn't have anything to do with how men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the standard for manhood, would it? We've left boys of the world at the hands of a commercial culture that would sooner take him by the hand, cut a fart in his face, sell him beer and breasts to weaken his resistance and passionate resolve and thoroughly derail his ambitions by calling him "simple-minded," teach him to value his life by the number of sperm he can eventually squeeze out of himself, and be there for him to provide an array of products intended only to help him achieve that most carnal goal.

We wonder why girls are so depressed or sell themselves short despite our best efforts to lift them up. Parents fret about the outcomes for their daughters. Surely it's not because men and women, as a society, have let a commercially-driven media culture set the new standard for womanhood, is it? We've all left girls in the hands of a so-called "empowering" commercial culture that would sooner take a girl by the hand, tell her she's smarter and better, inflate her self worth to unattainable heights, starve her of encountering any real adversity to her confidence or resistance, spoil her into submission so that she may become reliant on an array of beauty and "self-care" products to maintain that weakened state, and then tell her a slutty relationship with a carnal man is all she needs to finally be "empowered."

"Why?" is not a good question to ask, rather, "Isn't it obvious?" If you wouldn't leave your child in the hands of someone you don't trust, who is only going to preach distortion and trickery, why would you leave your child in the hands of western culture? In twenty years the children we fret about today will be what we consider normal, well adjusted adults, most of them at least--adjusted in the sense that they've just spent their last twenty years being adjusted, by passing through the corruptible influence of culture, and normal only because they are still breathing at the other end of it.

Life's Not Fair

2011-08-10T05:05:00.012-04:00

You might have thought that "Life's not fair!" is always going to be the final word when it comes to any pronouncement on social injustice. However, "life's" being unfair does not mean we should be actively trying to make it unfair. There is enough injustice in the world already without needing to ever justify it with the excuse that that "unfairness exists, therefore, it is justified to be unfair." Life is indeed unfair, but we either choose to respond fairly within it, or we don't. We can't solve injustice as a thing, but we have a choice to rectify all that we cause to be unjust by our own actions and beliefs.

We have a Scorpion and the Frog situation--where a scorpion rides across a river on a frog's back, assuring him that he won't be stung in exchange. Half way across, the frog is fatally stung and asks why the scorpion would go back on his word--why this injustice has been carried out--and the scorpion simply replies, "it is my nature." No matter how you slice it, this line of reasoning should not pardon or justify the voluntary action of the scorpion, and neither should the response "Life's not fair!" pardon or justify voluntary--purposeful--unfairness and injustice.

So often this slur is thrown at young people when they complain about unfairness--sometimes they are in the wrong, sometimes their expectations are too high and need to be brought down to a realistic plane--other times though, the slur is overused. When teens and children are unfairly treated due to their age alone, and nothing else, it's the repressive adults that need a crash course in reality.

For instance, youth are recipients of voluntary injustice under the pretext that such age limits and "line in the sand" laws are in place for their own protection. The most notable is the age of consent law, not only because it rewrites the facts of nature and human development (or just flat out ignores them), but because it often criminalizes children and youth for infringing on the sanctity of their own bodies (even natural and non-harmful sexual exploration) while seeking to criminalize external violation.

The juvenile justice system just as often encourages us to look the other way on the unjust sentences between consensual, "close-in-age" children and teens. And those sentences are unjust, because if they weren't, there'd be no such thing as "Romeo and Juliet" exceptions in the first place. Those exceptions in the law for close-in-age sexual conduct exist because it has been determined that the law is unfair in those areas--one can only wait for every other jurisdiction to catch on.

The same reasoning could be applied to the drinking age or age-based curfews in particular. One doesn't have to favor a total rebuild of society to simply voice concerns about laws that just don't do what they are supposed to be doing to protect minors, one only has to stop endorsing such laws. The first step is to stop concluding that just because we feel we have the last word when we inform our youth that "life is unfair," that we, the adult population, have to purposefully make it unfair for them. What we voluntarily set in motion, we can voluntarily starve to death.

Culture Wars

2011-07-31T02:42:00.000-04:00

If it is wrong to use God to justify human conflict, war, discrimination, and other malice, then why is it acceptable to use children to do the same? Is it because children are living entities and are thus seen as more deserving of being the impetus for malice? Surely the effects of conflict on their behalf are more tangible for them than the ones wracked up on God's behalf. That is to say, if we launch our culture wars to save the world for children, is it more justifiable because, unlike God, they exist in the physical world and could thus reap the benefits of a war in the physical world? Does that make sense?

It is reasonable to contend that a war for God's behalf is actually more justifiable than malice carried out for the children's behalf, and it's precisely because children are living entities and God is not. Human shortsightedness allows us to foresee victory when we believe our culture wars are righteous, but what it fails to do is allow us to foresee the inevitable consequences that a culture war brings to the very real and physical entities it was waged to protect. God feels no harm when our holy wars and malice launched in his name inevitably end in human ruin, but children do. Therefore, because the effects of a culture war are more physically present even on those it was waged to protect, the children, it is arguably less justifiable than holy war.

This point though is more about equivocation than pairing one unjustifiable thing against another unjustifiable thing. There can not be an acceptable justification for malice, conflict, war, and discrimination, whether it is carried out for the children, God, or even world peace.

Big Brother

2011-07-29T18:42:00.006-04:00

If the twentieth century saw the rise of oppression for the national good, then the twenty-first will no doubt see the reemergence of totalitarianism for the children's good. That is to say, Big Brother used to be interested in regulating and controlling human expression on the pretense of national security, and for a while he was able to sell himself on that, but then the people got wise to it and went so far as to even turn "socialism" into a bad word.

However, Big Brother couldn't be kept down, and just had to find a new way to reach into the hearts of and heads of the mankind, and with the help of a whole new "social menace of the decade," has found it. To protect the children in the 21st century, our human rights to privacy and safeguards from intrusion have to be given up. That is the new deal. That is the new exchange Big Brother's selling us on. Where once, and in many ways still, it was the threat to our country from without intended to scare us into submission, now it is the threat from within, to our children.

I am of course referring to HR 1981, the so-called "Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act," which does nothing but make it mandatory for ISPs to do what they already do--collect and retain the personal data and trafficking habits of internet users right down to your name, address, phone numbers, credit card and bank numbers, and all IPs you use. The issue with it is not so much the storage of data, but the fact that storing all your personal information for retrieval by the government at their discretion does nothing to protect children from pornographers--despite the title of the bill it is hiding behind. All it does is makes it easier for the government to spy on the computer use of individuals from a massive database from which they can use for many stated and unstated purposes.

How long will it be tolerated is uncertain, but if the history of all past social menaces is any guide, it will itself eventually be toppled and replaced. Eventually someone will make a menace out of child protectionism itself, and then what will we be left with? A society where protecting children is itself a bad word? This is not so much paranoia as it is hypocrisy that has become legislated because of paranoia. Is it at all possible that for once we could just have balance, or is human nature made too anxious by its children to save itself from destruction?

Stan, on Class Warfare

2011-07-28T07:41:00.017-04:00

Meet "Stan." He's generally opinionated, but only because it's his future we hold in our hands. I didn't create this image, I just gave him a name and a voice.

I felt this was appropriate considering the same US politicians he's talking to are currently playing Russian Roulette with the global economy to advance ideological agendas favored by millionaires to the detriment of everyone else. The stability of the world is "too big to fail." If we don't bail it out, we destine our children to live on a sinking boat.

So Stan says, bicker later, raise the debt limit now.

A Risky World

2011-07-25T03:47:00.008-04:00

Human beings are terrible risk assessors, but parents are the worst at it. Sooner or later if you challenge them on their ability to judge the risks they subject their kids to, you will hear the retort that they are entitled to their instincts, whether correct or incorrect, because evolution created them. They are just carrying out nature's will by expressing righteous indignation against society's usual suspects, and you are in the wrong for even questioning them. Their imperfections are untouchable.

With shrugging shoulders they grudgingly accept the faultiness of their instincts, because every action one can do with a child entails some risk, not just "the usual suspects." Those "usual suspects"--kidnapping for instance--are one in a million occurrences. The silent killers--automobile accidents for instance--happen every day a million times over. Parents who sweat with anxiety over the exceptionally rare ignore the mundane, regardless of the risk. This is not just a parental problem, it's a human problem, and that negligence costs lives. When superstition takes over critical thinking, parental reasoning is no better off than the child's, and both are at its mercy.

For instance, parents have a right to be concerned about their children's access to guns, and whether or not to allow their child entrance to a house where it is known a gun is kept. This is a matter of evolutionary insight. They have a right to be concerned especially if any unsupervised time could result in a bullet wound for their child or someone else's, even despite their best efforts to preach on gun safety. It is a real concern, but to outright bar access to the house for their child on those grounds alone, is more of an expression of anxiety than it is a reasoned approach to a palpable concern.

Assume there's a swimming pool at this aforementioned house. Statistically, the child is many times more likely to drown in that swimming pool than to accidentally shoot himself. So to bar attendance at the home due to the proximity of a minor risk, at the ignorance of a much more substantial risk, seems foolish, even by these typical "evolutionary/instinct" parental arguments. If one is looking to bar access due to the presence of a risk, it would make more sense to do so because greater risks are involved--the greater the risk, statistically, the more we ought to be concerned. This just goes to show that what gives parents a break in their anxiety has less to do with what is safe, and more to do with what is common--the bottom line being, not every house owns a gun, but swimming pools are everywhere. That which is ubiquitous, gets ignored. That which is rare, absorbs all attention.

Kids are being barred from walking to school on the fear that they will be kidnapped off the side of the road. It's a rare occurrence that is indeed regrettable, but one wonders if these same districts and parents concern themselves at all with the more present risk of driving a child to school. Once the child enters a moving vehicle, the risk of them becoming injured multiplies significantly. Just because the parent or the district is in control of the vehicle and is physically present does not mean risk has been averted. More automobile accidents happen in the 7am rush hour on the way to school than kidnappings. So if we are of the "evolutionary/instinct" parental mindset, that even statistically minute risks should lead to such large-scale sweeping legislation, should we not counter even greater threats (such as children even being allowed to enter vehicles) with even more unbearable legislation?

If not, then we may just have to conclude that every action we take in the world is hazardous, and that we all have lives to live as human beings in a risky world, even kids. If they aren't able to live a respectable life as a human being--a child--then there will be unintended consequences no parent wants. Any parent who prophesies the death of their child every day (who does not have immediate reason to do so) would do well to stop investing in redundant safety mechanisms and instead invest in some therapy to rid them of their anxiety disorder before it does any harm.

The Law of the King

2011-07-21T06:18:00.004-04:00

The law is an ass because it overrides the human conscience rather than acting as an extension of it. We become disillusioned with our power in society when the laws no longer service reality as we know it, just the prejudices of our great grandfathers. Anything that exists in the law "just because," and not due to any hard fact of nature, particularly when defining status offenses for minors, is typically a service to fantasy over nature.

The law of the king is a decree based upon prejudice. The natural law is one based upon observation. Children grow up in a universe governed by natural laws that drive their development irrespective of jurisdiction, but they are living in an adult society governed by artificial decree and cultural hocus pocus (age-based laws) that limit their expressive potential.

While natural laws by their nature allow children to grow and expand as they mature along the innumerable trajectories that human life finds for itself, the law of the king only confines, restricts, limits, and all but cages them to an artificial magic set of inconsequential circumstances. While natural laws may or may not lead a child to experience the full freedom of their faculties as they develop, the law of the king only imprisons them for stepping outside its predetermined lines.

The law renders minors as brainless objects, differentiated from material possessions in semantics only. For possessions, there are rightful owners. For minors, there are rightful parents or guardians. For possessions, there is conveyance. For minors, there is adoption. For possessions, there is bailment or constructive possession. For minors, there is compulsory schooling and state seizure. For possessions, there is acquired possession without consent. For minors, there is birth. For possessions, there is a deed or a title. For minors, there is a birth certificate. For possessions, there is a state of being stolen. For minors, there is a state of being kidnapped. For possessions, there is a state of being mislaid or lost. For minors, there is neglect. For possessions, there is a state of being damaged. For minors, there is a state of being abused or mistreated.

There are numerous parallels, but the point is that the law informs itself about what is in a child's best interests based on the same principles one could also ascribe to material possessions. Just like one can ask, "what is in this child's best interests?", one could also ask, "what is in this desk lamp's best interests?" and arrive at the same conclusion for each, differing in semantics only. Fortunately for human dignity, many disagree that children are the same as material possessions. Many would argue that children are actually human beings, with rights of their own--that the "m-word" (minor) is make believe.

Justice for Caylee

2011-07-14T17:06:00.007-04:00

Way to honor a child's life, with a perpetual shouting match on national television. One wonders if this child hadn't been as cute, as photogenic, whether anyone would have paid her death more than a momentary notice. If she had been instead a ten-year-old black boy on the streets of West Philadelphia having gone missing, no national coverage would have even taken place, never mind a three year headline involving a play-by-play depiction of the trial chased with righteous indignation disguised as commentary. It would have been seen almost as "appropriate" by the very same so-called arbiters of social justice.

No, this is where all their righteous indignation leads, once it is distilled to its main ingredient--if Caylee Anthony wasn't cute, if she wasn't white, if she wasn't three years old--if she wasn't the exploitable tot, the perfect victim that the news media so callously could turn her into, they wouldn't have cared if she got justice or not, and nor would the viewing public. It can be concluded because it happens every day. This story would have ended with the search in the local media, three years ago, and that would have been that, and you know what else? It would have been far more just, and righteous, than the disgusting circus they turned this little girl's death into.

The so-called arbiters of social justice in the media saw this child not as a child, with her own rights and dignity, but as some expensive commodity, a platform from which to pilot their fledgling cults of personality straight into the living rooms of America. The more well-meaning their intentions, the less respect they showed, as Caylee's images were sprayed across the screen when they spoke, as if to repeatedly underscore their moral high ground. In like manner, Caylee's image might be blown up on the screen before cutting to a commercial break, as if to prime the viewing public for that coveted eye time. It was sentimentalism for the sake of gaining eyes, and sensationalism in the service of exploiting them--the propaganda of the consumer culture for the well-intentioned public.

Even overtly, their message was insulting--that child rights only exist to protect these pieces of property from society. Talk of "children's rights" only seems to matter to these people after the kids are injured or killed, and even at that, is only extended to the extent that it renders them lifeless victims which need protection against adult interventions. Such a mindset only serves to perpetuate their lifeless, infantilized victimhood, to stand them out from the crowd and paint a sign on their backs that screams "I am a child, I am a victim! Target me!" whether they have been victimized or not, for which more restrictions are proctored. Victimhood has replaced childhood.

If there ever was going to be justice for Caylee, it ended the moment the story broke on the national scene. From there on, any hope of justice for a little girl was thrown out the window and replaced with endless repetition of the child's inhuman victimhood, or the glorification of her now-sanctified existence--neither of which extreme did a little girl any justice. All it served was to give absolution to adults who would have felt guilty if they didn't join with the cults of personality and the talking heads in singing praise for the existence of this little girl and her tragic end. Adults feel all too guilty for the decadence of their culture, and they find an outlet in the death of children.

A Reckoning

2011-07-10T03:24:00.005-04:00

I did not write this, it was something I found many years ago and held onto long after the site containing it passed on. As far as I know, the original author has been lost, but I post it only in good faith. Just absorb it right now. The magisterial world in the eyes of a child is but the minutiae of the adult's daily experience, but there is no reason to deny a child the majesty of the world. Every minute detail of life has to start out as a blinding revelation.

A Reckoning

My name is Jacob. I am the last brother born in my family. I have 3 older brothers, all of which have gone through the reckoning. It is a coming of age tradition that has been in our family for several generations. A test of survival in the 'real world', and it was done at a very early age.

Now it was my turn to carry on the tradition of the Reckoning. I was turning 6 years old today. All of my brothers had turned 6 when that day arrived for each of them. My mother had awakened me early and she fixed me a big breakfast. My father was also downstairs, and upon my arrival, he was sipping on a cup of coffee. For some reason, all my senses were heightened. I could smell the caffeine in my father's cup. I felt the heat from the toaster and I was 10 feet away. The sound of a knife spreading butter on a piece of toast was almost deafening. I could hear my breathing, and my own heart beat.

I sat down at the oaken table and began to eat. Not a word was spoken between the three of us. My mother and father spoke not to each other, but you could see the fear in my mother's eyes. My father was a rock. Unemotional, stone-faced, unflagging.

After breakfast, my mother ushered me up the stairs to my room where I found a brand new suit laid out across my bed. The 2 surviving older brothers, who had gone through this when they were 6 years old had purchased it for me. The reckoning required formality as opposed to normality. As I put on the white shirt and black pants, I started thinking about little things that were said amongst my brothers about the reckoning. Just bits and pieces were picked up from overhearing the conversation, but I was never able to make any real sense of it. The tone was clear, however. It was one of fear and foreboding, and if a conversation ever came up about this tradition, it was never meant for my ears to hear.

Dressed, and down the stairs, my mother and father took me by the hand and led me to our car. I got in the back seat, and father began to drive to the place where IT was. The trip took an agonizing 23 minutes as I saw it on the clock on the dashboard. Each second ticked away to the flash of a colon between the hour and minutes, and I felt each one pass through me. Perhaps counting the last minutes and seconds of my existence on this planet.

The conversation between my mother and father in the car was slow and deliberate. Many words I did not understand, yet the mention of IT was ever present to the point that it made the air thick with dread. Then we arrived at my destiny. My mother and father, again, led me, by the hand through a silver arched entryway into a place I did not recognize. It was dark inside, but soon spots of illumination broke through the blackness. I was too frightened to look around, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see statues of boys dressed in all manner of clothing. I thought that this might have been, in some grotesque way, a remembrance room to those boys who did not survive the Reckoning. Under a single spotlight, directly ahead of me, I saw what my mother had feared and what my father had remembered from his day of reckoning.

It was at least 50 feet high, it's small serrated teeth glistening in the precise light overhead. It's long black arms, stiff and shiny, lay on either side of this unspeakable thing. It was sleeping at the moment, but I knew that this condition would not continue much longer. My mother let go of my hand and stayed behind. A small, oval tear ran down her cheek and she said her silent "goodbye". My father and I continued toward IT. After a few more steps, my father released my other hand and took a couple of steps backward. He looked toward my mother, then looked down over his shoulder at me. His voice was unswerving as he said to me, "Approach it, boy. Hold onto it's arm and stand fast."

It was at that moment that I finally realized my fate. I was to be offered up as a sacrifice to this hideous thing, and if I survived the offering, I will have gone through the Reckoning with honor and dignity. The monster was still in its nocturnal slumber as I silently stepped nearer and nearer. The closer I got, the stronger the fear welled up. It got to the point where I my heart pounded in my chest almost beating to punch free. My breath came in short, heavy heaves as I lifted my hand and touched IT's arm.Then the beast awoke with a tremor and a whine. I clenched its arm even harder as I tried to stand fast as my father had told me. I was slowly being picked up by the thing and lifted into the air. The beginnings of a scream started to form in the pit of my stomach. I had opened my mouth, but even the sound was too terrified to came forth. Higher and higher I was lifted toward an opening near the top. An opening into what, I did not know, perhaps the opening to the end of my short existence. Sweat started sheeting off my forehead stinging my eyes, but I dared not close them for fear of what could happen next. I was breathing so rapidly, that I thought I was going to faint, but I held on with both hands and let out a yell that ripped from my being as a bolt of lightning is ripped from the heavens above. This kept me conscious as I was being pulled up, up, up, into what?!

I glanced over my shoulder and looked down to the ground where my mother and father stood. My mother cried and held out her arms in futile frustration. My father cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled out, "Look ahead, boy. It's almost completed". I broke my gaze with my parents and concentrated on this black opening that lay ahead. I was STILL alive. It was almost over. Suddenly the fear had turned to determination. Determination to last this ordeal. To face the unknown and be able to tell my children about it. In that split second, my mind raced to my future and I vowed I would NEVER put my boys in this situation. EVER. I closed my eyes and wished the ordeal were over and done. This was the moment that I would either survive or the monster would take me quickly. Then, the movement stopped. IT had been silenced for reasons I could not fathom. I had survived the Reckoning. I was alive and my small body was quivering and tingling at the sensation of success. Slowly and carefully, I walked off the escalator.

Tell the Truth

2011-07-04T02:21:00.005-04:00

If you are in a line of work that you could not in good conscience explain to a child, to protect their so-called innocence, then there is probably nothing justifiable about what you do for a living. This is to say that if you can't tell a child the truth about what you're doing out of fear that it would poison their perspective, then what business do you have in that line of work? If you have conscience enough to be concerned with the child's moral trajectory, then what is that conscience doing by showing up everyday to perversely violate its own?

If you work to make a check and do not concern yourself with the ramifications of what you are doing, then you ought not to be so concerned about the child finding out about them. You can not serve two masters--one to the projection of moral justification (for the children's sake), and one to soul-depraved ambiguity (for yours). You either do what you do and accept and project it truthfully, even to the young ones, or you are living a lie.

So-Called Adulthood

2011-06-27T01:57:00.003-04:00

We don't become adults out of biological inevitability, but on the basis of social expectation. In order to get around in society, we're expected to assume the qualities and characteristics of adulthood--the seriousness, the possessions, the decadence, the so-called sophistication. I say "so-called" because everything in adulthood can be prefaced by "so-called," as there is no law of biology stating that because one has become sexually mature, one must adopt an air of "sophistication" and suddenly be standing around at cocktail parties and sipping liquor out of tiny glasses, or whatever adults consider to be fun. Just like childhood, "adult" is a heuristic invented by adults, a product of culture that is informed by culture.

Adults exist so that they can parade around their excesses and decadence as they desire. For instance, why should an adult prefer to stand around drinking liquor out of a tiny glass at a party? What purpose does it serve? It's not going to get them drunk, nor refresh them, nor even taste good. They are only drinking it so they can prop it at certain angles in their hands, feel the "ting ting" of the smooth glass (something so fragile in such capable adult hands, no less), and sip it so elegantly for something known to be so bitter (adults love irony like that), and all to project the image of some hallowed "experience." The projection of "life experience" accounts for nearly everything an adult does in the world, from the miniscule reflexes such as this to the creation of life itself. This projection becomes decadent when done in self-aggrandizing revelry beside a child, who is meant to be deprived of it.

To picture an adult expressing their self-aggrandizing decadence before a child is to see the non-verbal expression of the childish--particularly the taunt, the old "I know something you don't know!" or "I can do what you can't do!" It is when an adult gets an ego boost or a feeling of superiority simply for being as nature made them to be, so that they may engage in certain behaviors to show off their superiority. During their self-aggrandizing revelry, they begin feeling superlative simply for being older--not for any particular reason (such as a special accomplishment), but simply for the fact of being older than someone else, as if that were its own accomplishment. There is no such thing as emotional maturity, simply larger means of expressing the same old childish "one-up" behaviors.

Adults implicitly know this, or are at some level cognizant that they present the same behaviors as children, just with increasing intricacy. This is taken as granted, considering the writer of this piece is an adult, and these conclusions have been reached. Much of art and philosophy is an expression of mankind from a larger and more transcendental vantage, and the conclusion drawn most often is that mankind's own hallowed perspective is merely childish in comparison to this universe and the laws that fill it, or don't fill it. If adults are cognizant of the fallibility of their reasoning, on some level, and adult thoughts and behaviors are merely "larger" representations of childhood ones, then we should expect that children are also cognizant about their own fallibility to a certain degree appropriate to their developmental capability. Nevertheless, both children and adults, including this one, fall prey to making inaccurate assumptions about this universe as if they were universal truths.

Just as a child may create and maintain fanciful scenarios to describe the workings of nature even as they are schooled in the sciences, that superstitious behavior does not stop at the artificial threshold of childhood. One inaccurate assumption is that adulthood is superior to childhood due to its experience, and childhood is superior to adulthood due to its innocence.

Father's Day

2011-06-20T00:36:00.004-04:00

Being a father or father figure, and being there for and taking care of a child, is the most important thing a man can do of his own free will. Absolutely nothing else comes close. Children need guidance and care, and they need men to provide this for them. In exchange, men need justification and purpose, to give of themselves for the benefit of our collective destiny, and children provide this for them. Paternal resolve is trivialized where maternal instinct is celebrated, but as with instinct comes mere biological necessity, with resolve comes human vindication.

Thus, we celebrate the strength of that personal resolve where it is most needed and cherished, in the form of fatherly love, in the will of the male role model, as do the children themselves.

Molestation Fixation

2011-06-17T17:07:00.008-04:00

What good reason is there for the news to report on an incident such as molestation or bullying, involving a child, toss around speculation and rumor and tie in every major thought-stopping social issue and cliche whether related or not, for twenty paragraphs, and then not post a followup? What reasonable purpose does it serve to whip a community of readers and watchers into a frenzy over an isolated incident involving a child during a time when there are no answers (preceding a trial for instance), and then not report on the outcome or result of the events?

Are we to believe that the first mention of "Man facing rape charges" or "Area teen arrested for bullying" is the definitive statement on the event? What if the charges are thrown out? What if there is insufficient evidence? What if evidence was obtained illegally? These things don't seem to matter as much as the initial speculation, the unfounded rumor, and the redundant "reactions from locals" on those speculations and rumors, which the news media revels in with such lack of insight. Of course there is no reason, it is simply a ploy to sell news media to the public.

The inevitable outcome of this is that, particularly in cases where children are involved, the news media is able to get whole communities riled up about something, have them coming away believing that the whole world has gone to hell or that their children are in imminent jeopardy (as if they weren't prior to the broadcast) or that the kids have all gone crazy, and then not be there to inform them when justice is served and when all has been rectified. If there is no reason for people to be concerned, no reason to fear, no reason to pass unqualified judgment or dispersion, then the news media isn't interested in telling the story.

In reality it is not the world going to hell, it's not the system failing itself, it's not the kids going crazy, it's the adults who have made money selling insanity about otherwise sane institutions, sane kids, and sane sets of circumstances. We live in a world where things happen and then they are resolved, some issues persist and some don't, some gain in intensity over time and some lose relevance. That is all there is, but in order to make it worth the public's while, these isolated events have to be turned into catastrophes, outrages, and emotional pits where we are expected to dump our personal burdens and frustrations. The outrage is presented and then we move on, and nothing is gained. If it was meant to be genuine, we'd hear the followup.

There is a fascination with child molestation in particular that is grotesque in its own revelry. It is pornographic. Adults don't want to see healthy, happy children living healthily and happily, they want to see stories involving healthy, happy children getting raped and abused. If they didn't, then it wouldn't sell as well as it does. News media knows this fact about human nature, and it's time the viewing public becomes honest about it as well.

We're all against child molestation and bullying, but all the expressed concern about child safety we're required to feel after the fact (once we're reminded to worry about it) isn't doing anything to prevent it from happening before the fact. Perhaps if we weren't so fascinated with the harm and destruction of children after the fact, we'd put more consideration into how we deal with situations before the fact. We're all for children living as happy and healthy as possible, but that doesn't mean we have to get ourselves off to the stories, speculations, and rumors of children who have been violated and victimized on (and by) the 6 o' clock news.

Children get abused every day in every community, and nobody ever hears about it. Does every parent who loses a child (by state intervention) due to abuse or neglect or any other reason become vilified on the news? Of course not. Only the easy targets get vilified: the bullies and the child molesters. That which doesn't land on the news is that which has become so customary we don't even pay attention to it anymore. Those who are being abused, the children, see it differently. And just as child molestation was once something just as swept under the rug, the "routine abuse" of children that so bores modern America will one day be as vilified as molestation.

It's a sane world with insane people living in it, so justice prevails, no matter what anyone thinks.

The Forbidden Toy

2011-06-15T05:29:00.000-04:00

In the last post I made the argument about the fallibility of adult cognition in both the extreme (cults) and the everyday, which should not be such a watershed. By the same extension, the same behaviors can be seen in children, but once again reproduced and expressed through "smaller means." Exactly what is meant by "larger" and "smaller" is a relative question pertaining to the existential, psychological, and biological differences we associate (via imperfect "adult-centric" cognitive schema) between childhood and adulthood.

One way the action of cognitive dissonance has been observed in children is characterized by an experiment carried out by Aronson and Carlsmith (1963), where children were asked to rank a selection of toys from the ones they found the most tempting to play with to the least. After they were ranked, the experimenter would take a toy the child liked and leave the child alone with it in a room. Half the child subjects were told that they would be severely punished if they played with the toy and the other half were told the punishment would be temperate.

Obviously they weren't going to punish the children. Later the experimenter would remove the punishment, saying that there would be no repercussions from playing with the toy, and the children in the moderate punishment condition were less likely to play with the toy, even though they now understood there'd be no punishment. On the other hand, the severe punishment group were more likely to play with the toy once the punishment was lifted. When asked why, the children in the moderate condition expressed more disinterest in the toy, even though at one time they had ranked it as one of the most interesting to them. The children in the severe punishment condition expressed even higher interest in the toy than initially.

The conclusion from this study represents a concept called overjustification. The children in the severe condition had what is called a good "external reason" for not playing with the toy, because they believed they'd be punished severely if the did, even though they still found the toy as desirable. When the punishment was lifted they were more likely to play with it. The children in the non-severe condition had an "insufficient external reason" for not playing with the toy, so they had to make up their own justifications against playing with it. They had to convince themselves to find the toy less desirable, and therefore resort to not playing with it. Either way, children's internal feelings towards a toy were influenced based on how their beliefs about what the ramifications would be of playing with it, and once those beliefs turned out to be false, they had to resort to justification in order to suppress the effects of the disconfirmation. The stronger the effects of disconfirmation, the more justification is needed.

This overjustification for the children in the moderate condition when observed in childhood appears to result in a child's forced compliance (usually with an adult), and when observed in adulthood, results in the more extreme forms of social cohesion, shared social schemas, adult compliance (as seen in the Milgram studies), and all sorts of applications in social psychology from hierarchial structures like the military and government, to how adults formulate their laws and regulations, or whether resort to obeying them, and in the most extreme cases, where psychosis is involved, the formation of cults and shared delusions (Festinger et al. 1956).

All this goes to show how children react in situations when prophesy fails. As is seen in adults, the stronger their personal conviction, the more they'll seek to justify their conviction retroactively when it doesn't pan out the way their beliefs where structured initially. Any attempt to label children as cognitively handicapped in comparison to an adult is ignoring the similar expressions of the very same falibilities adults express.

When Prophecy Fails

2011-06-13T02:50:00.006-04:00

It's 1956. A story in the local Chicago news reports: "Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood." Apparently a housewife came to the conclusion that she had received a message from the planet "Clarion" about how the world was to end due to a massive flood and that on December 21st all of human civilization would be wiped out.

In the analysis of the apparent similarities between childhood behavior and adult behavior, invariably the subject of prophecy comes up, and likewise, what happens to individuals when their beliefs about the world and their activities are incongruent. This tale of the housewife and her message from Clarion became the subject of a landmark study headed by Leon Festinger on the topic.

This housewife was successful in amassing a close-knit collection of believers from the community and surrounding areas, and they founded an encampment, where through their various stages of shedding selfishness (giving up jobs, families, all their money and possessions) would be deemed worthy and be spared the devastation by the interception of a flying saucer. All of this was revealed through the "automatic" writings of the housewife, Mrs. Marion Keech.

More skeptical minds saw this event as an opportunity to gain some anecdotal insight into how human beings adjust when their beliefs about the world and their behaviors come into conflict, for surely the the scientific community assumed the prophecy would fail. The idea, as carried out in Festinger et al. (1956) was for a team of social psychologists to infiltrate the group as prospective members and record the happenings as they observed them, the justifications, rationalizations, and social dynamic of the group. It was known that each member of the group had invested heavily in the belief that they would be saved from a great flood through their actions. Festinger hypothesized that following any disconfirmation of their belief the group would proselytize in order to lessen the negative effects of the disconfirmation.

The research team was so successful in presenting themselves as believers that one of them was thought to be an alien messenger in disguise, and soon the night of December 20th was drawing to a close. When midnight struck and no saucer appeared, the group wasn't devastated, and insisted that it wasn't technically midnight yet because another clock in the room was slow 5 minutes. By 4:00 am, with no visitors yet, another automatic writing session produced a new response from Clarion--that the God of Earth had spared the planet due to their actions. There was to be no devastation.

"The little group, sitting all night long, had spread so much light that God had saved the world from destruction" (Festinger et al. 1956).

The term cognitive dissonance refers to the "uncomfortable feeling from having two conflicting thoughts at the same time, or from engaging in behavior that conflicts with one's beliefs, or from experiencing apparently conflicting phenomena." The theory put forth by Festinger based on his observations, as well as other more experimentally designed studies, is that when a human being is placed in a state of cognitive dissonance, they will engage in some thought or behavior that will sooth the discomfort--they'll warp their beliefs to fit their behaviors, or just ignore information that does not support their beliefs.

My first comment in regards to this episode is that young children could not have constructed such a belief as elaborate as these individuals did in 1956. This is due to a number of factors: that children normally have little knowledge of extra-terrestrial bodies, extra-terrestrial intelligence, and the phenomenon of automatic writing, and that children don't physically own anything, and therefore investment in any one particular belief can not be measured in terms of what the child has "financially invested," (but it can be measured, my next post will be about this). Often if children do seem to have inordinate amounts of knowledge about such things, less skeptical adults see them as "Indigos," "Star Children," and other such entities, and more skeptical adults are right to point out the proliferation of children's educational media for the early appearance of such leaps of cognitive reasoning. It takes a lot for a young child to recognize the permanence of the Earth, once a child is capable of doing that, they will broaden their cognitive sphere to that of the cosmos, as this adult cult was capable of doing.

The point is, often when adults make conclusions about a child's "fantastical beliefs" it is usually to belittle the child's grasp on "reality" and reaffirm the adult in their ability to "perceive the optimal." Clearly though, with the number of unverifiable beliefs that adults hold at any one time, adults are no better perceivers of the optimal than children, it's just adults have a larger "sphere" in which they can draw resources from when perceiving and practicing meta-cognition. To be fair though, to both developmental stages (and all those in between), the beliefs described above about the cult represent only a small fraction, a fringe in a larger majority. The majority of individuals do not believe such radical beliefs, but they experience conflicting beliefs nonetheless. One does not need to be a fringe, a cultist, or mentally disturbed to hold beliefs that could be termed "irrational beliefs," and one does not need to be less cognitively mature to experience cognitive dissonance over those beliefs when they fail to be confirmed in reality.

Beliefs lead to the amazing diversity of the human imagination, much of human culture, lore, and myth. The human race would not be as socially cohesive without these shared traditions. The point is not to diminish the importance of irrational beliefs but to understand the difference between what is fact and what is fiction, and the larger gray area in between that the human mind, for all it's abilities, has not been able to perceive yet. Most importantly, this notion of adults having the ability to perceive the optimum should be dismissed. It is simple arrogance on the part of one adult over another, and one adult over a child. Instead, human cognitive development should be interpreted as a summation of the resources physically and mentally available to the individual at each stage of development, along the lines of a continuum, the likes of which Piaget only hinted at: that the adult is in fact not a sage of "cognitive competence," but like children, simply display a relative degree of functioning.

If this is so then adults couldn't design a test to verify whether or not adults are cognitively competent, because to do so would require knowledge about the universe and higher functions of the mind that human beings have not accessed yet. It would be the equivalent of children testing themselves on knowledge and cognitive functioning that only their respective biological and psychological development has access to, and then declaring that result definitive. If this is true, than it poses a problem scientifically, and must be taken on its own terms.

Is CL Pedophilia?

2011-06-10T03:42:00.008-04:00

No.

Nobody is ever going to relate to a pedophile's perspective because nobody but the pedophile is a pedophile. It's kind of like a guy who has been blind since birth, trying to tell a room full of sighted people what the room looks like. They know what the room looks like, so anything he says isn't going to convince them to un-see what is right before their eyes. In the case at hand, what is right before our eyes is that any advocacy for pedophiles is superfluous and meaningless to the treatment of children in society, and therefore, it is a perilous distraction.

Advocates for that particular group continue on under this blindfold, attempting to dictate to a world full of non-pedophiles the shape of that world without ever having seen it first hand. They mangle sighted science to fit their blinded perspective. They distort sighted opinion to fit into their blinded schema of oppression. They do not do this consciously though, as society may think. They genuinely believe that they are better apt to see a sighted world with their blinded set of eyes than the sighted are--to see children better under their own eye than society does under its eye.

Neither eye is all that partial, and both seem exploitative. To society, children are garden plants which just absorb services from the environment like plants, and have to be cultivated like plants for proper harvest. To pedophile advocates, that "garden plant" perspective is just an obstacle in the path of their agenda for personal self-fulfillment in a world that hates them, to be fought against for their own sake, or stepped around. Children have nothing to do with either perspective, which is why pedophilia and CL are not the same thing and can never be the same thing.

The CL does not love a child because an aspect of his biology (for example, his sexuality) compels him or her to, he or she does it because to not do it would result in two deprived souls--one a child, and another an adult, who would otherwise be crying out for love, attention, and guidance. Intercourse never amounts to something this intimately deep or strengthens the human bond on its own (without love being present), and therefore, should not be prescribed for children or adults in the manner that the pedophile advocates do (as good "in and of itself"). Nothing is good in and of itself, not even sex.

Coming Off the Community

2011-06-05T05:42:00.007-04:00

The thrust of everything I do is not to distance the CL from society, but to invite society into his world. I wish to compromise the extremism in the fringe group that is CL and instead appeal to the combined better nature of humanity with the better nature of this movement. I want to help redirect the undeserved resentment for either side of the divide into something that we can all work together on for society's own benefit. I don't want to be a part of any agenda that seeks only to separate mainstream people from the CL, and the CL from the mainstream of society, society from the child, and the child from society, but I will support any agenda that wishes to find common ground among all members.

The fringe groups bound up in this want nothing more than to alienate society with their "outsider behavior" just as society has alienated them. There is however no chemical on the skin, no mutant formation, nothing to distinguish them apart from society on the face alone, and even still, they prefer to alienate the society which may have never personally alienated them. They complain of how "their kind" is treated, and then do nothing on the "personal" level to rise above the treatment of "their kind" as an individual.

Keep in mind, they assigned themselves the category of "outsider," not society. Society can't tell the difference between someone who has declared himself an "outsider" and someone who has not. It can only judge them by their works. And because, on the whole, they have no works to speak of, they can only be judged on their words. And because their words only revel in their own self-mockery and ironic stabs at being clever, there is nothing to judge them by, and must simply be left to their own disintegration.

Those who assign themselves "outsider" put so little value on the clarity of their face, which appears no different than anyone else's, and instead put such a large value on the obscurity of the community they assigned themselves. They place so much value on being supported by that community, and so little value on supporting themselves so that they may learn and grow by their own initiative. They don't teach themselves to walk. They maintain their communities because they're comforted enough by them to keep crawling back.

Love and Instinct

2011-05-31T05:08:00.000-04:00

Are children capable of experiencing romantic love--the voluntary appreciation of someone's existence rather than simply the biologically required deference to caretakers? Most would agree they do, whether superficially in the form of a crush or instinctually as they are required, in the form of the "parent and child bond." The implication is that because the parental bond is accelerated to such high and holy heights, all other romantic inclinations the child may experience must be superficial and ultimately meaningless, even if most believe kids are entitled to their "meaningless and superficial" love interests. The children who are the ones feeling the feelings, understandably, see it differently. What adults declare superficial may be entirely meaningful to children, whether it is expressed toward peers, or more controversially, toward other adults. By this relative standard, we'll assume they do feel genuine romantic love, and determine why their parents are not the typical recipients of it.

It almost becomes superficial to speak of the parent and child bond and shower all the typical high and holy platitudes it absorbs, seeing as it's naturally expected from birth and required in life. It could be likened to any biological attribute children are either born possessing or not, such as hearing, movement, or sight. For those born without sight, we mourn their loss and develop their other abilities to prepare them for life in the world. In much the same way, we mourn the loss and deprivation of a child's connection to his or her birth parents or their separation from that instinctual, biologically required love, and help find suitable replacements. However, unlike the acquisition of sight when a child is born possessing it, we actually celebrate and sanctify instinctual love's hallowed co-relation when it is born intact, despite it being simply what it is--a biological bond of necessity developed in most mammals by evolution.

Indeed, contact comfort studies by Harlow showed that parental nurturing and touch is a biological necessity as important as food intake to developing primates, including humans, so parental love's biological roots are well established, but this is not what we mean when we think of "romantic love." In romantic love, one is not typically dependent on the other for basic survival purposes (and if they are, it's because they were already previously drawn together by romantic love rather than just biological assignment).This is not meant though to undermine the significance of the parent/child relationship, just to say that it is a relationship required by evolutionary circumstance, and not voluntary romantic love.

It is not so clear in the case of adoptive or custodial parents, and other adult family members. This is because the love between a custodial or adoptive parent is socially required, but not biologically expected. When the adoptive parent and child relationship turns sour, we don't mourn it as much as we would had the relationship been tied together by birth. If anything, we mourn the breakdown of that relationship as a last lingering pent up sorrow over the greater loss of the original birth parents. This all makes it seem likely that a child who is dependent on a custodial or adoptive parent for basic survival, has less of a biological expectation of love for their caretakers, which makes their fondness for their caretakers when it happens more of a voluntary act, to a certain extent--which makes it closer to true romantic love.

The less biological expectation there is for a child to love someone, the more voluntary their associations become, and therefore, the more genuine, but also, the less they are regarded by society as such. This deceleration of our perception is greater magnified where a child's romantic (voluntary) love is at its highest and most genuine (when the child finds him or herself in love with a benevolent friend for which there is no biological or social requirement lending justification to their feelings). So once again, the simplest form of love, that which is instinctual, is celebrated to such high and holy heights when children are concerned, while their more genuine and voluntary form of love for relative strangers, when it happens, is passed off as superficial and meaningless.

But perhaps I should explain my intentions better. There is a difference between instinctual love (the parent/child bond), and romantic love (the voluntary relationship), and I've used the word 'genuine' to describe that difference--romantic love is more genuine than instinctual love. What I mean by genuine is not that romantic love is necessarily more "felt" than instinctual, just that it is not demanded of the child, and is entered into entirely voluntarily rather than by obligation. It is typically understood that unions entered into voluntarily carry more significance than unions whereby partners are set up by circumstance.

It is meant as a definitional descriptor rather than a measure of feeling, because, in all fairness, instinctual love is longer lasting and unconditional, and romantic love is often fleeting or beset by conditions. Instinctual love, when conditional or fleeting, is mourned as the terrible loss that it is (a birth parent's love for their child shouldn't be non-existent or conditional). On the other hand, we may feel sad when romantic love expresses itself as conditional or fleeting, and certainly the child does, but not to the extent we would for the loss of a child's instinctual love bond. We may even feel such losses come with the territory in romantic love--that love entered into voluntarily incurs such risks by its nature. Meanwhile, love entered into by birth, as it is thought, should never come to that.

Ideally, romantic love enriches life though, which was nurtured and developed by the instinctual love of a parent figure, and even acts as an extension or manifestation of the biological parent/child bond. To deny children this ability to form intimate relationships with benevolent friends, both peers and adults--to enter into romantic love relationships mutually beneficially expressed and voluntary by nature--is to deprive them the ability to take their circumstances, the instinctual love that has nurtured them, and extend it outward towards others of their choosing early on in life. It's the denial of an enriching experience, particularly if the child is limited to school or the cover of dark to express it. For the child's safety and the health of the experience, it's better that a child's romantic life does not feel threatened or alienated in the context of their own home, and that parents opt to exercise their judgment rather than just ban such expressions outright.

Bleeding [F]earts

2011-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Don't like an adult's opinion on young people? Wait twenty minutes, it will change.

Don't trust anyone over 30 (because they can't make up their minds), but don't trust anyone under 30 either (because they can).

Right to Life

2011-05-29T00:38:00.001-04:00

Either you believe in the rights of the unborn child, and deny the rights of the woman, or you believe in the rights of the woman and deny the rights of the unborn. There is no way to remain guiltless, regardless of what stance you take. You can believe that a fetus is not a human being, but believing it does not make it so, no matter how effective it is at absolving your guilt. If you believe that, then you're tasked with explaining the science behind what quality of the air causes a fetus to become human once outside the womb. Likewise, you can believe outlawing abortion will prevent abortion, but once again, simply believing it doesn't make it true.

Some seem to choose in favor of the unborn child's health and safety, and right to life, and some seem to choose in favor of the woman's right to make decisions over her reproductive system, as well as her own health and right to life when it is critically jeopardized by pregnancy. Each side makes a choice, and each side chooses to ignore different sets of consequences in furtherance of their beliefs.

Abortion is a natural act--animals do it to purge children they can not support--but that doesn't make it condonable by default. Many things are observed in the natural world that are an affront to our intuitions. Just because it is natural, and because it may be necessary under certain circumstances, it is still no less destructive to a human life. It may save the life of the mother, but that doesn't mean it ought to be given an ethical pass--if anything, the outcome of that scenario ought to be morally neutral (one life ended, one life saved). There is simply no justification to regard abortion, even in the most necessary cases, as anything other than a necessary evil. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

We have to stand at this junction and make a choice as to whose rights we respect and value and whose rights we must trample, and then live with the consequences of that choice--if we are allowed to.

In Love with a Child

2011-05-28T02:29:00.002-04:00

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.

Kids and Sexual Suggestion

2011-05-26T03:09:00.015-04:00

It's not so much a problem that children are exposed to sex early, it's the way they are exposed to it. People seem to prefer exposing sex to kids coyly and comically on a regular, daily basis, rather than honestly and factually in small doses. Society is still hung up about sex, and so (after decades of declining standards over the acceptability of its suggestion) has been going to great lengths to throw sex into everything "suggestively," failing to find suitable any honest and accurate depictions of sex acceptable for viewing by children.

So if we have to be concerned about anything (and I don't think we do anyways), it would be that kids are getting the wrong idea of what sex is, and the real implications of it. A child can watch a commercial where a bikini woman opens a beer bottle with her "parts" while serving it to a leering man, and it is completely acceptable, but it is thought that if that same child saw even just the image of a vagina, or a penis, he or she is going to be traumatized for life. Neither is traumatizing. To view one as more hazardous than the other is mere superstition, and just an indication of how backwards a child's everyday reality is in the 21st century.

Expose them to sex early, sure. Expose a child to sex suggestively, sure, but counter it with exposing them to sex as an uncensored reality as well. If we leave it up to parents to pick the time when their children are "ready" to see an accurate portrayal of sex, the kids have already had 15 or so years of seeing sex as a series of untruthful, amoral, absurd, sexist, and exploitative imagery, and will likely have a misunderstanding about the word. It will all have to be unraveled and untangled before any discussion about sex as a real thing with real implications can be presented.

All the parental controls in the world are not going to stop the abundance of media from seeping into a child's everyday life, so it's best to just confront the issue early on as an inevitability. Show and tell them the honest truth about sex the way one would if asked any other question concerning human biology, and move on--tailoring the lesson to their developmental comprehension. Censorship of reality doesn't work, all it does is turn the illusion into reality.

The Natural Mystic

2011-05-10T04:16:00.014-04:00

There's a natural mystic blowing through the air. It's telling me that there's going to be more oppression, more restriction, more isolation. It's informing me of a law in Maine where it is illegal for adults to "look at children" in public places, and saying that there is no way one could misinterpret language that precise. For sure, adults will just have to avert their eyes, including parents, when children are out in public, or risk a felony charge. Don't ask me how I can discern the sign of the times--the natural mystic is floating somewhere in the reddening sky.

Enforcement of such a law is questionable, but its existence paves a way for a society that is founded on distrust, for there is no practical application of this law (no rational person would seek charges against someone simply "looking" at children). It exists so that it may feed into irrational people's anxieties, so only irrational and anxious people will make use of it, and otherwise good people will suffer because of it.

It may be intended to save children from "visual aggression," but it will be cited only by those who are blinded by fear. They'll see a strange man "leering" where a father is merely supervising his kids. They'll fear for the kids and want to call down justice on the man even just for putting such disturbing thoughts in their heads. The real crime is simply infringing on the comfortable sanctity of a weak mind when you commit the act of normal behavior. When we empower the irrational, we should expect them to utilize their newfound power to condemn all that is good and neighborly in the world.

Unfortunately, nothing could be more harmful to our children than inheriting a paranoid world where nobody so much as talks, or in this case "looks," at one another for fear of a weak mind's accusations. Naturally, that is the last thing the paranoid are concerned with. Where there is a wedge drawn between children and adults and all people are isolated, the paranoid are satisfied. Where there is unity, and kindness, and understanding, they are terrified. Where people gather and enjoy themselves in the park with their children, the paranoid are terrified. Where people are locked away and held up in their private homes for fear of shadows, the paranoid are comforted.

So the natural mystic is telling me we will see a day when the punishments we reserve for sex offenders are given out to all members of society equally, the young and old alike. It's telling me that we will do nothing to stop its approach, for we will be demanding it with the continuous outcry of "protect the children." With that demand, we'll see atrocity, we'll see the erosion of human rights. We'll mistake the demon of fear spreading its wings for an angel of mercy.

The mark of an antichrist is emblazoned with the words "visual aggression of children." Don't ask me how I know, a little bird told me not to worry because everything is going to be alright (in the end).

What Is So Hard?

2011-05-09T03:01:00.001-04:00

What is so hard about deposing sexism? Why can't we come to a point where men are given the same say and rights and privileges with children as women? Why can't we congratulate the men who bend over backwards for their children, who spend time with them, read to them, help them with their homework, and play catch with them, with the same unconditional devotion we reserve for "moms?" Why can't single fathers get so much as an acknowledgement rather than a lecture on statistics? What is so hard about that?

What is so hard about ending this generational program to make our sons pay the price for the sexism of their great-grandfathers? If it is justifiable that we devalue boys today as retribution for the patriarchy of yesterday, does that mean it will be justifiable to devalue the girls of the future as retribution for this current strain of sexism? Why must we ridicule those hungering for sexual equality for being whiny, petty, or egotistical? Can we not accept the sexism of the past for what it was without trying to "make up for it" by turning one against the other in the present?

Why must we let a few bad men dictate how we see all men? Why must our children go devoid of positive male role models because we fear the child molesters in our heads? Doesn't that make as much sense as never going in the water for fear of a shark attack when so few happen to begin with? If statistical outliers like single dads cause us to withhold our sympathy for them, why must other statistical outliers like child molesters cause us to assume so much derision? Is sympathy a harder emotion to feel than derision? What is so hard with praising the men who deserve praise instead of only demonizing those who do wrong?

Why can't we just treat our sons and daughters and mothers and fathers (single or coupled), as if their biological sex was not a determinant of whether they deserve praise or derision? Why can't we just treat everyone doing well by children with respect and dignity without regard to sex, race, age, or any other permanent or impermanent characteristic? What is so hard about that?

Saving Isn't Helping

2011-05-08T04:57:00.010-04:00

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 (the Venus Project..etc.). 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 it 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.

Is this Love?

2011-04-27T04:51:00.004-04:00

And I Shall Be New Baptized

Call me but love my lover in the country--

When you were seven and full of sunshine

we went down to the still pond pool

and soaked in the cool of the summer splash 'till nine.

You swam to the surface and I came up beside

and held you like a babe in arms intertwined,

And you were weightless in the water

awaiting your love's patience as I was judging mine.

And as the night winds heaved and lapsed

on the shadowed pines and wind chimes,

In a whirlwind you were dried of the deep

and set to sleep in my arms like a babe out of time.

circa 2007.

The Zeitgeist Cult

2011-04-26T04:44:00.007-04:00

The Zeitgeist films and the Venus Project have captivated the children of the information age. They have played right into a demographic who has been reared on the internet and knows little else but. They have attempted to claim science without the benefit of hindsight, for every movement that has ever attempted to claim science has led to atrocity. They have toured too long in the foreign land of history without the benefit of a guidebook and have lost themselves to fitting together its disparate themes into neat and orderly conspiracies. They worship the guru they see in Jacques Fresco, rather than apply the principles of evidential argumentation to his bold-faced assertions. They have become drunk on their own propaganda of flying cars and futuristic city plans and have yet to sober up to the oppression inherent in the technocratic, totalitarian globalist, machine-driven superstructure they envision with utopian simplicity.

Given all this, every cult has its kernels of truth. The Zeitgeist films are best described as propaganda vehicles to assert a political agenda that is anti-free market, anti-democracy (as we know it), anti-human nature, and anti-freedom of religion. They fabricate the lore and mythology of human antiquity to fit their schema for the baselessness of religious ideas, and build upon those outright fabrications intricate truths about the state of the planet and humanity. We are lead to believe these various pathways and narratives are somehow related when they are not--the Egyptian god Horus was never considered to be a Christ figure, and even if he were, it would have nothing to do with how consumerism is destroying our global ecology. The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line, and that's the only line the filmmakers wish to present, because it's the only line they want their audience to know about. In Nietzsche's terms, these are but castles built on spider webs.

We are, once again, led against scientific rigor. There is a contempt for science which is all too predictable in movements that stress absolute certainty--perhaps it is because science stresses no such certainty, merely, beliefs based on evidence. It is not as if the claims being made are of the same degree of fabrication as was the case with their historical narratives, it's just that in their presentation of genetics and behavior, of environmental science, of sociology..etc., they present information as if they alone are the ones busting the lid off this information--as if none of what they say hasn't already been the main argument of researchers in the scientific realms for decades. They then use that presentation to make it seem like they alone are telling the truth while suggesting that all of science is make believe consumer-driven hocus-pocus.

When the scientific community is invoked, we see images of outdated 19th century dioramas with the implication that they are still accepted beliefs, and then when they bring up what 21st century science has uncovered, it is always in the context of their movement (once again, as if they are responsible for the progress science has made in the past 50 years). It is effective propaganda for the masses, but unconvincing for those who know how propaganda works. For instance, they would be hard pressed to find a developmental psychologist who disagrees with their supposed "claim" that nature vs. nurture is a simplistic view of development, but that doesn't stop them from touting it as if they've just stumbled onto this discovery for the first time, and that they'd be decried heretics for even suggesting it.

This is not to say that science is not corrupted, or that corporations are not corrupted, or that governments are not corrupted. They make these points and they are valid points, but what they desire to do is utterly destroy our current civilization and rebuild it along their own half-baked principles (vehemently opposing all perspectives and evidence that is contrary to their assumptions). Just as the Marxists, just as the Bolsheviks, they believe that only after society has been dismantled and reconstituted to match with their ideal, that we might finally see Utopia--that all the disparate people of the earth will somehow unite around their vision and we'll finally all be free from the grip of [whatever we distrust in the present]. These are fantasies, illusions, flights of incomprehensible naïveté no matter how genuine they may be felt.

It is not freedom, or even the rights of human beings they are after though, for they treat human beings as secondary to their technological and environmental pursuits--and one can only imagine the atrocities that would be rendered if their contempt for human vice were brought to full-scale fruition. One has only look at the history of uncompromising extremism to see where this thinking leads ('extermination' always factors in). There is absolutely nothing new about any claim or statement made in the Zeitgeist films, they are simply dressed up to look as if they are presenting a new ideology. One could even argue that another term for the political ideology being espoused in these films is a technological National Socialism, only on a global scale rather than within a country, where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the "world citizens." It seeks to subjugate human interest and channel those energies toward perpetuating the utopian vision, carried out by machine-driven enforcement. The individual comes second to the centralized global state. The undesirables (those who might disagree to living under this system and lash out at it) would naturally have to be eliminated.

It's a cult because it fails to subject itself to the same standards of critique it reserves for society. Instead of working to create solutions out of the system, it diverts attention towards formulating some grandioise vision for a utopia where no one is allowed to work, no one is allowed to practice faith, no one is allowed to be evil, or good, or even human. This is a sad distraction, but such seems to be the case with the information age--the age of distraction--which is why solutions are so tough to come by to begin with. Progress can only come from that which allows all things, and promises little. The Venus Project and its propaganda is a cult because it allows so little, and promises everything.

Restricted Access

2011-04-25T04:16:00.012-04:00

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

2011-04-22T04:53:00.013-04:00

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)

2011-04-19T03:52:00.004-04:00

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

2011-04-13T04:20:00.005-04:00

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

2011-04-10T04:48:00.026-04:00

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

2011-04-07T14:05:00.007-04:00

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

2011-03-31T23:58:00.019-04:00

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.

Coming of Age

2011-03-27T01:28:00.004-04:00

"In the suburbs I learned to drive, and you told me we'd never survive."

It is only a matter of time before all living things come of age, and it is no different for human civilization itself. Civilization is a living thing played out over the course of generations. Just as an organism is a collection of cells that duplicate, exist, and deteriorate over a course of the organism's lifetime, so too are individuals within civilization. It was only a matter of time then before the same uncertainty of directionless ambition befell civilization as it does to individual human beings, when they become conscious of the need for self preservation in the face of a seeming non-existent reason to be doing such. This is to say that in coming of age, our reason to continue on both as individuals and as a species comes from our own directive, rather than by the guiding intervention of higher authorities.

It is now up to us to go to the doctors when we are sick, go to the movies when we desire entertainment, or go to pray when we desire some direction, and we accepted this new found responsibility with unsteady enthusiasm, slowly learning how to possess it but never truly understanding fully how or why we must. Why must we grow, go to school, go to college, go to work, get married, buy a house, have children, raise children, grow old, and die--always in that order? Where is this cycle of our existence taking us, these technological advances, the growth of cities, the automobile, the spread of suburban sprawl, the instance of communication? Does any adult know where their life is headed? The only inevitability is death. Does the certainty of death mean we need to fill the brevity of life with something rather than nothing in order to make use of time? Is our civilization destined to die too?

The ages of mankind are testaments to the fact that civilizations rise and fall, that there are periods of life and periods of death, where even in death there is life in relative limbo. The only constant over the spans of centuries is change, a change of relative societal place from one time to another with the same human nature dictating our choices. There was no more certainty we were making the right choice all the time, as when it was dictated to us absolutely, so there spread only fear that we were constantly making the wrong one. The 20th century was so ruled by uncertainty that it inspired more visceral demagoguery than any other era. Any study of parenting advice in the media, for instance, would unearth a world where everyone had their own certainties in the absence of one universal one.

The internet has magnified this phenomenon. For evidence, all one needs to do is conduct a simple search for the words "your kids" or "your children," and you'll inevitably find many diverse things preceding those words: how to do X for your kids? how to keep X away from your kids, what does X mean for your kids?, and other abstractions, all reinforcing the notion that all things invariably pertain to your kids just because yours are the ones being addressed all the time, every day. Coming of age in a culture that has itself come of age means accepting enslavement to the will of the consensus. Where certainty creates ignorance, uncertainty produces anxiety. We live in the age of anxiety, and it's a crippling force on civilization.

Child Pornography

2011-03-23T03:51:00.024-04:00

Let's not mince words or wax poetic on child pornography as it manifests itself in the public imagination and how it exploits children. It is a scourge on society and casts a specter of confusion on all those who hear the term, not to mention the harm it causes to children living under that spell of society's confusion.

Let's instead examine what really is the cause for concern--is it when a child is pictured during a stimulating activity, or is it when that activity is being forced on them? If the former, the same could be said about any picture of a child enjoying themselves, and it would be just as wrong to picture a child playing baseball as it is to picture him "playing doctor." But that rendition not only doesn't lend itself to intuition, it also doesn't seem to do justice to the scores of children who are brutalized into performing sexual acts in other forms of child pornography. It merely trivializes abuse to the "greater sin" of a child seeking pleasure before the eyes of an adults. And yet, ironically, that's how most people would prefer we structure our rationales.

If we agree then that when force is involved (when children are brutalized, drugged, and manipulated to engage in a sexual activity to produce an image) that an unspeakable evil has occurred, then our shock and judgment really only ought to apply to cases where the child is actually being forced, drugged, and brutalized into doing the activity, whether it's sexual or not, and not simply for any child who may accidentally have an erection in a candid family photograph. If it is the other way around--and it is--then one could conclude that society is more afraid of children's exhibition of sexual behaviors than it is of them being at risk of exploitation (whether for sex or not). The distortion on this topic is so convoluted that it becomes difficult to know what side of that pendulum our society is on as we create justifications for the exploitation of children in the service of ridding the same.

We have to agree that there are levels of child pornography, and that the real thrust of our attention ought to be on killing the evil perpetuated where children are being forced, drugged, and brutalized, or in some way manipulated into a situation they most likely wouldn't willingly get themselves into had they known all the parameters. Those images and their producers ought to be where we exercise our main law enforcement thrust--where we ought to be going in with the hammer and taking no names. Consequently then, one would think we ought to be placing less emphasis lower "levels," like teens who consensually exchange nude pictures of themselves over their cellphones, or parents with nude pictures of their children. But then it seems almost contradictory when one sees that so few child porn cartels are brought to justice, and so many 15 year olds are on sex offender registries for possessing nude images of themselves, or for sending them to girlfriends or boyfriends. How are these "children" being protected?

Nobody is advocating for the rape of children in pictures. However, anyone questioning the efficacy of our attention to child pornography cases is often criticized of that. It has been an effective "thought-stopping cliche" waged against those who value efficacy over political expediency by those who value the opposite, so it has produced little else but the opposite. "Political expediency" has turned our teenagers into child pornographers and "child rapists"--not technology, not culture, and not anything else our adult population likes to blame the trend on. It was the broad brush strokes of the law--the politician running for office on simple-minded sentimental sloganeering, the sensationalist tabloid and drama television special--that caused us to pit children against their own nature and criminalize them for it.

The real issue of child pornography is not a dichotomy between siding with rapists or with the justice system, as it has often been made the case, it has to do with whether to treat parents who take a picture of their kids in the bath any different from the perverts who keep runaway children in a cage. It has to do with whether we ought to treat people who are visibly brutalizing children on film the same as those who may draw two crude stick figures of different sizes "doing it." In one instance, physical children are being exploited, and in another, a perceived audience for exploitation is being physically apprehended. In one instance, our focus is on stopping the show, in another, it's on apprehending the audience. The questions of strategy get ignored for the purposes of political expediency--so long as it looks like people are being busted, it makes no difference who gets selected for justice and what they have done to deserve it. Either way though, the show goes on.

All images featuring children are child pornography, that is how we've let them define it for us. "We know it when we see it," the US Supreme Court has declared. So if you have a picture of a child, it can be pornography. If you have a drawing of a make-believe child, it can be pornography. Until all those who create images of children have been painted over with the broad brush strokes of "justice," it seems, our reservations will not rest. Part of the issue here is that the definition of child porn has been de-specified so much that the "swift hammer of justice" is being brought down more against simulated CP possession cases, not because they establish some kind of audience for child porn, but because they are the most cost-effective for law enforcement to bring to justice and give the public what they want.

Agencies involved in the busting of possessors are automatically granted the title "saviors of children," and they didn't even have to do the real "dirty work" of breaking up an actual prostitution ring, much less rescuing the traumatized kids (who can be such a drag on the psyche). Due to this diversion, law enforcement inevitably invests their interests into busting dad for picturing his child in the bath, and then tries to sweep the rapists and child porn cartels under the rug as "too difficult" to assess or capture--although there are always "small strides" being made. The public is happy with this narrative, and we move right along to the next bust.

So we fret about at best and arrest at worst those who may carry Caravaggio's "Amor Vincit Omnia" on their computer--a painting of a naked boy of antiquity (Cupid), and on the other hand, for the photographer who intentionally caused actual children to cry in an series of shots for an exhibition, leave without a second look. Apparently, seeing the naked Cupid's genitals could be considered a crime where the infliction of emotional distress onto actual children (by giving them favored toys and forcefully taking them away before the camera), is perfectly acceptable. One has to wonder between these two events where the harm was done, and why it is so disproportional to where the justice fell. Have we truly become a society where it is acceptable to cause a child emotional distress on film (so long as it is not sexual), but reprehensible to possess a picture of a happy child, as in the case of Carravaggio's Cupid, simply nude?

Caravaggio, by the standards of his time was no child pornographer, but those who would argue it perhaps have missed the intention behind such a striking image and the eternal message that it teaches: "Amor Vincit Omnia," or "Love Conquers All." Those who attempt to clothe Cupid are themselves the ones possessed by his nudity. They make it the primary detail. They are as the Biblical Adam and Eve who have discovered they are naked--whose sin is in simply acknowledging the guilt of their nakedness. It actually takes a less depraved mind to see Amor Vincit Omnia for what it is: "Love Triumphant." Children are beautiful. Child porn is destructive. Children are naturally sexual. Child porn is exploitation. Beware of those who would disguise evil as good, but just as well beware those who look upon what is good and only see evil.

Causing emotional distress, drugging, brutalizing, and otherwise manipulating children to do things on camera against their will should always be the focus of our attention when prosecuting for the crime of child pornography. However, we are unable to do just that, and effectively rescue actual children from exploitation, if we continue our misguided quest to be the most politically expedient by clothing Cupid.

Let's Be Friends

2011-03-18T20:36:00.007-04:00

Warmer weather makes me positive. It awakens my compassion to see people about in the sunshine after so long stranded to the confines of our homes. Human beings were not meant to be held up in the dwelling, the car, the store, but to be out amid one another. When we are bundled and brisking through the cold air, we become so internally focused and brash with others, but when we are able to fully flex ourselves in the warmth, we become more open, friendlier, and less inhibited--which is a truer and happier expression of our nature.

The cold affects our perspectives, we focus on our antagonizers because we are essentially couped up with them and have no refuge in the cold. In the same way, the warmth affects us, as we begin to focus more on those who deserve our sympathies, respect, and love, because even in the face of our adversary, we're able to find refuge in the warmth of nature and others. We begin to recognize that none are beyond redemption in our own eyes except those who refuse to be.

Some children do not ask for, want, or need our attention, and therefore, we only do them a disservice by trying to hover around them, even if we have the best intentions. By the same token, adults are the same way. It is our duty as human beings existing in a society to make sure we extend the olive branch of peace, love, tolerance, and respect to as many of our fellow beings--men, women, girls, and boys--as will receive it, and live and let live with everyone else.

There are those who do not think a child, no matter how respectful or indignant, ought to be extended this olive branch of fellowship because they do not regard children worthy of receiving it. They'd wish to reserve all best-wishes and civility towards children for those they deem worthy of giving it. These are the people in the park who have let the grip of stranger-danger pervert their good nature, and one can only hope they could eventually be reasoned with. If a child is being disrespectful and they are with a respectful and dignified parent, to refuse to show compassion toward their parent in a friendly hello is to be placing the child's tantrum above the respect for the parent. Everyone generally believes this is true. When not given, it is why parents feel ashamed when they are in public with disorderly children--they naturally fear judgement, and children are no doubt aware of that.

Just as much though, I say that if the parent of a child is unwilling to receive the good tidings and respect of a stranger, and the child is open towards such cordiality, then to deprive the child of the dignity of a friendly hello is to position the disrespect of the parent over the openness of the child. Children are never off-limits to the well-wishes and respect of an honest stranger just because their parent hasn't deemed him worthy to be dignifying their child with a friendly hello. We can all agree that it is only when the stranger aggressively pursues his momentary acquaintances that he has crossed the line of acceptable conduct, but none of that is implied from the friendly hello on its own, so therefore, there is no reason to deny one being given.

I would rather anger a disrespectful parent with a cordial child in tow by choosing to greet them both with a friendly hello as I pass them on the street, then ignore the dignity of one for the bad behavior of the other. There is no harm in a friendly hello. Such a thing when given freely and genuinely, is an expression of human love--the reinforcement that binds our society from collapse.

Rub Their Noses in It

2011-03-11T04:49:00.016-05:00

Child welfare can either be designed to provide for the common good, or for the individual child's good. Rarely can it do both. One might get away with arguing that the very need for a Child Protective Services proves that parents are unable to manage their families one hundred percent of the time without intervention by the state, but who gets to hold the state accountable when a kid is abused in foster care, or aged out of the system? Indeed, some parents are abusive either because of their emotional temperament, their frustration due to lack of experience, or stress due to circumstance. What is often forgotten though is that the reverse is also true.

The very need for there to such a thing as a family proves that the invisible "state" is unable to manage its wards one hundred percent of the time without intervention by families. The state needs families to provide the actual parenting. So while everyone is expected to be clamoring toward the state to be the arbiters of good parenting on behalf of inexperienced mothers and fathers--as the common citizen under investigation is expected to bend over backwards to appease what the state has considered to be a breech of parenting duties--the state on its own is the least capable parent of all. It is nothing more than a set of decrees, lawbooks, and assorted professionals disassociated from the child. It can not do the direct work of parenting a child, but it believes itself to be morally and systematically superior to all those who would try.

It would dictate terms that it itself could not follow to the letter. If you dropped a child off at the doorstep of this invisible authority, "the state," do you think those pretty columnated buildings, stacks of forms, and hives of representatives in large varnished courts could even be able to hold the child's spoon, much less teach her right from wrong? Of course not, and for this reason, the state has decided that human beings are necessary to at least do the direct care work for the child on behalf of the state, to be the arms and legs of the state--to be there to hold the spoon and teach right from wrong. And seeing as human beings generally see the value of consistency in a child's development, the state prefers the child's biological parents over just anyone to do the work it can't do. When it determines that the parents are ill-equipped or unable to do this work, it will find what it determines to be suitable replacements--in this day in age, another family.

The state therefore relies on the family to do the essential work of raising children, and families rely on the state to provide their children with education and securities, for instance. One may be tempted to believe this is a holy symbiosis, but is it truly a viable social contract? The state grants itself powers to judge parent and child relationships according to its internal calculus, but what mechanism allows the family to judge the state when it fails to meet its obligations to the children in the realm of education and securities? While parents face court removal of their children when they are deemed incapable, what does the state face when it could be deemed incapable of holding up its end of this so-called social contract?

Do we get revolution when that happens? Do we get people suing the state? Do the people rise up and take their children out of the public school for a year's time while the state is forced to work out its issues and show its constituents mandatory improvements? The rush to place children in private and charter schools may be indicative of what we could term a slow "termination of state custodial right" if the same charge were being leveled at a family. Do non-abusive parents effectively get to assume custody of foster children when the state fails to protect them? Of course not, the state retains its wards even when it fails to be a proper parent to them--and it's the equivalent of allowing abusive parents to retain custody of their children.

Maybe it's in unknowingly ignoring a child who is being abused in their foster home; maybe it's in aging a child out of a foster home without nurturing them into adulthood; or maybe it's in over-medicating a child who acts out because he misses home--however the abuse and neglect manifests itself, the state is able to get away with retaining custody over wards it has failed to adequately parent because it is working under the pretense of the common good. So long as cases of maltreatment within the system are in the minority, the idea of serving the common good is preserved, and therefore, it becomes easier to overlook the individual cases. Serving the interests of the common good does little to suit the needs of individual children, but serving the dignity and needs of individual children is always in the interests of the common good.

To this end, we should incite the charge that one case of maltreatment while a child is in the custody of the state is one case too many. No majority is large enough that we should ignore the injustice served to the minority.

Just as parents though, the state can not be expected to have a clean record when it comes to its own duties over the education and protection of children it has been entrusted with. This is understandable, seeing as it takes adequate care of the majority of its wards, but though understandable, we can't be lulled to sympathy for it. It expresses no sympathy toward parents who fumble the responsibility, even as the majority of them are also capable. What we should expect from the state is accountability and honesty for when it fails in its task of raising children in its custody, just as it expects from families. They may have the power to be dishonest, and paint a rosy image with the broad strokes of "common good," using statistics to show how much good they are doing, but nothing ought to allow them to hide away each and every case where they have been the ones to drop the ball.

Glory only their successes, but hold their feet to the fire for their failures. It's our duty to rub their noses in it.

Public School Originality

2011-03-09T01:58:00.013-05:00

Any place that forces kids to salute the flag and say the pledge of allegiance every day, to the point where they can be disciplined for simply, peacefully opting out of it, has thrown all aspirations of inspiring original thinking out the window before the day has even kicked off. The message is loud and clear--the only thinking permitted is whatever permutation one can construe out of the boundaries of that spoken contract of allegiance with government, culture, and society. The kind of thinking that comes with questioning the so-called importance of showy oaths over substance is the stuff that detentions are made out of it--insubordination and sedition where the kid ought to be getting a commendation for thinking freely. Public school is a place where these agendas have confused themselves.

And this is just the most clear example of the ways the school is set up to quench truly original thinking in its student body, and in the grand scheme of things, not anywhere near the most severe one. Such distinction belongs to the methods of profiling students for their potential to commit offenses and restricting them in such manner (such as the Mosaic 2000 program), the archaic scheduling of the school day and the curricula, and the school-to-prison pipeline our glorious Zero Tolerance policy has unleashed on its unsuspecting kindergartners (particularly those of ethnic minority in lower income communities). In truth, if compulsory schooling was not already a prison in how it locks an individual into "minor status" for a time long enough to be exploited, now those who don't come out fabricated to think in prearranged terms may find the school also doubles as a prison in it of itself (even with power to issue satellite monitoring devices for the truant student to wear even when off grounds).

In light of all this, let's consider the Pledge of Allegiance in the United States, and how little its supposed "hand on heart" adherents in the first grade really understand what they are "consenting" to. I could say that when I was little, and expected to be giving my consent to bend my will to the authority of the state by taking this daily pledge, I often confused words in it, as any child would. Does my confusion at seven, or the inability to understand the complex characteristics involved in making an "oath" to one's country in such convoluted language make the oath invalid? Of course not, you say, because it's a wholesome and Christian oath for a child to make, even if they don't understand what they are consenting to, besides, what damage could it do? And while that is true, no damage is done by being forced to take this daily oath (besides perhaps the dignity of the child), I can't help but wonder what is gained by doing it.

I as a child took the oath as thus, "I pledge allegiance...to the flag... of the United States of America... and to the republic," (I had no idea what a "republic" was), "for whichitstands," (whatever "whichitstands" was supposed to mean), "one nation," (with no idea that this was part of the same sentence), "under God," (I happened to believe in God, but what if I didn't?), "indavisibal," (once again, another word completely lost on a 1st grader), "with liberty and justice...for all!" (once again, with no idea this is still part of the same highly recursive sentence). Does my inability to understand the consent I was giving in making this oath make it invalid? Once again, no damage done because this is not a legally binding contractual obligation of allegiance the child is unknowingly taking. But if not a legally binding contract, what purpose does it serve to make even the least politically adept toddlers recite it as if they were knowing adherents of it?

Running with the Egg

2011-03-06T05:21:00.007-05:00

For all the fretting that adults do foretelling the demise of human civilization based on the behaviors and interests of children in the present, what good has it done the human race? There's this error in our reasoning that suggests the way a child is today inevitably predicts with straight line accuracy what the child will be like as an adult. If the child is playing video games or preferring their virtual social life to their surroundings, it's seen as if we're destined to have a future where all are strapped in to a virtual existence from which there is no escape and human civilization is once again doomed. Adults may even take pride in the action of stripping a child of their opportunity to engross themselves in the media of the times, thinking that by doing so they are single handedly saving the future of humanity. What self aggrandizing pride is this?

What human beings typically lack is the ability to foresee a future for humanity no different than the present, not better, not worse (as far as these basic grievances are concerned). There's this thinking that if a boy is allowed to play violent video games today, that the society he grows up to participate in will be one that looks the other way on gun crimes (as they had been exposed to so much of it). They do not factor in the humanity of their own children when forecasting the downfall of human decency. They figure "once a mindless drone, always a mindless drone," when their child was never a drone to begin with, but a person capable of reason.

There's a failure to foresee the likeliest of all possible futures, one where the children of today grow up to become adults who will themselves be fretting over something else the children of that time have been exposed to. Despite this trend happening every generation for hundreds of years, adults seem to think this is the generation that finally breaks the cycle and destroys society. Every generation is the end of the line for us, whether it be caused by rock and roll music, video games, rap music, drug use, internet, cell phones, or anything else adults have had trouble understanding.

Let's not fret over what children are involved in today en mass--individual children we can at least talk to--because en mass they simply are not as fragile as adults think they are. In 50 years time, many of the adults alive today will either be dead or elderly, and the world will be a much different place than it is now. The issues and problems of today will either be long resolved, or will cease to be major problems--the preoccupations of today will not last forever. The children will have grown up into similar versions of the adults that came before them, with all the same fretting, perhaps only about different trends.

In 50 years time, the children of today, who have grown up in a totally different world than the previous generation, will inevitably take the trends of today and expand upon them in the future--and no amount of restricting them now is going to stop this from happening. Children change over time, they don't stay children forever. They grow up and become the next wave of adults doing exactly what the previous wave did, only responding to different wind shifts.

Each generation gets its one shot to move the world and society along on the track before handing what it has created off to the next batch of people to do what they please with it. The passage of the earth from one generation to the next is like the old "running with the egg" race, where one player passes an egg balancing on a spoon off to the next player, who then takes it a ways before passing it off to another. The object is to not crack the egg, which for our illustration represents the earth. The thing is, adults do not trust the player they are handing the egg to continue seeing the value of keeping it intact. What happens though is the next generation always does anyways--as they go off to become that society, while the previous generation becomes too old and too dead to really see how their progeny has defied their expectations, time and time again.

So please, be not troubled, because the first one now will later be last, and the last, first. There is no better or worse, no more depravity or social isolation, or whatever our anxiety makes us imagine--there is only progression through time. Children are going to rule the world someday and move it in directions we can only fathom, and they're going to do it regardless of how much fretting is done about how they've been picking their noses today.

Tyranny of the Present

2011-03-01T05:38:00.013-05:00

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

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.

Time and Change

2011-02-28T03:33:00.003-05:00

Time is something fleeting. Human beings can only perceive time through movement, and movement is only a series of changes in position and state. We sense that time is unfolding because we can see objects resting in one position one moment and then observe them resting in another position just by moving them, or understand that a child has aged based on observing them being seven years old one moment and eight years the next. The interim between these two moments where a change has been observed is what we call time. If an object could remain stationary and completely unchanged at all so-called "times", we'd have no evidence of time existing around that object.

Because we're unable to fully observe time itself unfolding on an individual, we tend to assume that they are whatever they appear to be in the moment we observe them, and that they will continue to be what they were in that moment for every one thereafter. On the contrary though, we may look at a new car one moment and then watch it run off the road and wreck on a tree, and consider the wrecked car and the new car the same vehicle and focus on the change in its state, but we don't see the child and the adult as one entity at two different times in the same manner. This is to say, there's a disconnect in how we perceive the line between child and adult, we may not see it as a straight line from one to the other.

Rather, we seem to observe children as if they were a race of subhumans coexisting along with adults, and the line connecting them to the human race appears to us to be divergent, mysterious, or just totally heading off into obscurity. Cognitively, of course, we understand that all adults start out at one time being children, and that all children (unless they meet with an unfortunate end or have some other circumstance), eventually mature into adults at another time, but because we can't see it happening, there's a tendency for our minds to assume that it's not happening. This is how a child can "grow up so fast," for instance. In reality, they are not in fact growing up fast, they're growing up normally. It's just that we don't perceive that growth has happened unless we can physically observe it in the space of a much shorter interval.

Due to this inability to perceive natural growth, adults may make inaccurate assumptions about a child's maturation. For instance, the eye can observe a moving image that the brain perceives as a static one, and will judge the image to be static--as in, no change from the time the image began to when it ended--all because the image is moving imperceptibly. If the growth of a child is similarly imperceptible, then adults may often judge the child to be static over a definite amount of time--as in, no change from the time they began seeing the child and when they stopped--when in reality, the child is maturing every day, as are adults in one way or another.

Children also make inaccurate perceptions about adults, and don't perceive their parents' hairs growing grayer, or in general, tend to believe that the way their parents are in the moment is the way they always were and will always be. Children have an unnatural expectation that things will never change, and perhaps only have a fleeting idea of what it may be like to change over time based purely on what they know about the nature of the world. Children who've no doubt experienced a lot of change will be more adept to notice how time impacts all things regardless of how stable everything appears in the moment. But however inaccurate children and young peoples' perceptions of adults may be, only the adults have granted themselves the authority to flex their inaccurate perceptions over a child's development and even punish them for growing up faster than is perceptible--no matter how natural the development is proceeding.

These errors in perception account for the majority of ageist prejudice against adults and children alike, and everything in between. Racial prejudice is a shorthand way of categorizing a person based on characteristics that are permanent (skin color for instance), whereas ageist prejudice is a shorthand way of categorizing a person based on characteristics that are impermanent (short stature in children, or mental capacity for instance). To underestimate or overestimate a person for a characteristic they exhibit temporarily, and assume that because they are exhibiting it now, in the moment, they'll continue to exhibit it forever, is discrimination.

For instance, if a child exhibits a sexual behavior with another child as a purely natural expression of their temporary lack of knowledge on sexual social customs, to criminalize or at least stigmatize that child as a lifelong pervert would be age discrimination. In it, those making the assumption would be choosing to focus on the immediacy of the action's appropriateness, factoring in the child's lack of understanding, and ignoring the temporary nature of the circumstance. It could be that in twenty years time, that child is not the sex beast that their actions at the age of four would have led us to predict. In many ways, children are at the mercy of how adults perceive or don't perceive them changing over time.

Due to the fact that we are never fully here or there between being born and being in the full maturation of our faculties, what sense does it make to continue dividing up individuals along artificial categories spread out across time? Can we not just look at a child and think "human being," as we do for adults, and just expect that any differences between them are expressions of being in two different developmental timezones, and that all behaviors and expressions pursuant to one are simply relative to the expressions of the other? For while it may be sunset in one timezone, in another that very moment, it is dawn--and for all the hoopla surrounding their objective difference, the only thing that separates them is their relative distance from one another across time.

A Small Noise

2011-02-27T03:28:00.010-05:00

I've been thinking about aphorisms of empowerment geared for kids, to get them thinking about non-destructive ways they can influence their own destiny and those around them, and this one I just can't seem to shake. Tell a kid you know to go in easy but leave a big impression--to be a small noise but leave a big stink. You could say, it's contrary to being 'loud and proud.'

It is better to disorient one's oppressors in a creeping blaze of controversy than to open fire in a physical gunshot that can be easily deflected and get the bigger guns brought in. The mightier opponent doesn't have to know they've been marked until they are consumed in it. It's like allowing the fire in a young heart to spread on its own without calling attention to oneself as the arsonist, or the "shooter."

There will always be some who adore the attention that comes with being 'loud and proud', but in the end, the small noise from the undetected rebel always stirs the largest influence. It is what the adults will call subversion. It is control taken where power is given.

Tell a kid they got to be silent but deadly before they can be loud and proud, and they'll understand and appreciate it--the ready ones

Adult Sitcom Tropes

2011-02-23T02:36:00.005-05:00

Adults use children in drama as props, sensitive props upon which to pair off the so-called complexities of adult affairs. How many tender scenes depicting two adults engaged in so-called painful dialogue are intercepted by some child of theirs, seemingly catapulted out of nowhere and who's arrival signals the complete closure of the "dirty" "dark" "depressing" adult-talk? Suddenly the adults in these fictionalized portrayals decide to go all-smiles at the sight of the child with the subtlety of a painted clown face. What's worse is how the child is to remain oblivious to the crying clowns--which is what these adults are--and skip along merrily as if to fulfill every wish an adult could have about a child.

Children are perceptive. They are not as perceptive as they are often made out to be when adults wish to showcase their perceptiveness, but they are not the "runaround dunces" they are commonly depicted as in the sitcom world of adult wish fulfillment. As perceptive as they are capable of being, even adults eventually have to concede that as they grow, children do develop more direct ways to express their ability to decode the so-called "sophistication" of adult affairs. These are called "teenagers" in this same sitcom universe, and because adults have to accept that teenagers are no longer runaround dunces and have powers of perception, they choose to recast them as the enemy.

Runaround dunces are no threat to the adult's self-inflated perception of their importance, so they are more or less depicted as inconvenient playthings. However, teenagers, being also under the adults' power but capable of usurping them, are rendered as the enemy. The teenager has to be shown as an impetuous brat willing to call insurrection without warning if the adults so much as suggest anything to them. They must put themselves in jeopardy (they can never be depicted as right), and the adults must swoop on in and heroically rescue them from their own undoing. They usually finish out with a talk as if the teen has learned some valuable lesson in self-reliance. Such a thing is there to please the adult's conscience--it's really just a cover for the fact that the teen has come full circle and is now in complete deference to the adult's authority. The curtain closes. This is the only way these events can unfold on television, never in reverse.

Watching adult-centered fictional television is literally like watching one age group's self-serving skewed view of reality. All the other perspectives--the perspective of the runaround dunces and the perspective of the impetuous no-nothing brats are not considered. At the end of the day, only the adults must be satisfied, and the children, just satisfied that the adults are satisfied.

It is similar to the old television trope where each character is called upon to give an account of something, and we get to see each character's skewed recollection of events that cast them as the heroes and everyone else as the villains. In this case, adults love to cast themselves as the heroes, even as misunderstood heroes, and everyone younger than them (or older as the case may be) as the "enemy." Adult television, and all of it's assorted tropes, are propaganda for the 25 to 50-year-old demographic, and more importantly, their inflated opinion of themselves. To be egotistical is to be human. Adults just have the means to televise theirs non-stop, 24/7.

Washing Out the Sand Lines

2011-02-20T05:10:00.010-05:00

I can only imagine the typical conversation between a defender of artificial age limits and a liberationist ending one way--with an enlightened ageist. Those who defend artificial age limits do so because their imagination hasn't evolved past 19th century assumption. As an experiment, if you just present them with this statement by educator and advocate John Holt, you're guaranteed to hear a particular nuanced set of responses and be able to test the limits of their reasoning.

"I propose...that the rights, privileges, duties of adult citizens be made available to any young person, of whatever age, who wants to make use of them." -John C. Holt, "Escape from Childhood"

They will remark that children shouldn't have the right to vote, for example, because they lack the mental capacity for it. This wouldn't be such a bad argument if they were referring to the potential ways adults could scam children out of their votes, but this is not how they mean it. They mean it in the most simplistic way possible--that children shouldn't vote because they don't understand politics. The same goes for sex--children shouldn't have sex because they don't understand sexuality.

The liberationist will chide back with the rebuttal: what about a 17 year old one minute before midnight on the day of their 18th birthday (the year a child can vote in the United States)? Are they incapable of understanding politics right up to midnight on their 18th birthday? What causes them to be suddenly blessed with the ability and knowledge to vote? The same argument gets even more confusing with age of consent laws, where there is not just one, but hundreds of different age limits, where suddenly children are capable of having sex in one area, but a mile away across the border, the very similar children there are incapable. What manner of science could explain this phenomenon?

It will cause the ageist to scratch their head, possibly never having concluded that there's a difference between 2 year old children and 17 year old children that the law might have missed. In any case, the ageist will retort that they understand the confusion over the exactness and absolute nature of the "one minute before midnight" scenario, but will usually respond by saying, "it's not an exact science, but there has to be an age limit somewhere even if it doesn't match when a child is capable of voting." One should note that this already flies in the face of their previous rationale.

The liberationist will chide in immediately with an obvious rebuttal. If what the ageist said is true, that there in fact needs to be a set age even if it doesn't correspond to ability (contrary to the reason the ageist had given in the first case), then why does the age have to be 18? Why not move the age of majority in the US up to 20? Or how about 30, or 40? If we understand that the age limit is arbitrary, but also understand that it must exist anyways, why do we settle on 18 definitively?

The ageist will then come back with how 18 is closer to when a person is capable of understanding politics than 40, and will then normally pretend they agree with the liberationist by recalling particular teenagers who are far more politically astute than their own adult colleagues. They usually do this to show that they are not bigoted about young people, but it does nothing but add to the case the liberationist is making. It's simply the point in the argument when the ageist has run out of explanations, just before settling on the "it is the way it is" rationale, unknowingly forfeiting all their earlier assumptions.

Age limitations have nothing to do with human aptitude. They do not legislate human aptitude. They are merely artificial limitations invented by humans to keep other humans from participating in areas of learning and experience they'd rather reserve for themselves. Lifting age limits on children would not impose the weight of the adult world onto them, and thus become its own form of oppression as critics may suggest. Children who do not have the means, the mind, the capability, the maturity, or the motivation, to make use of the rights newly bestowed on them, such as the right to vote, simply would not vote--just as adults do when they have neither the means, mind, capability, maturity, or motivation to vote. Society has already made it such that adults who are deemed incompetent for any reason are not permitted to bare the burdens and responsibilities that would come with competence--there is no reason to believe that the liberated five year old would be treated any differently than the incompetent adult when it comes to running their own affairs.

In fact, what society fears is not that incapable children would be dumped with the pressures and responsibilities that come with human rights beyond their ability, it's that in granting them such rights, many more than previously expected may be found more capable than the adult world ever imagined could be. Adults would be in a real state of cognitive dissonance over their assumptions. While five year olds would be sure to fail a required driving permit written test, for instance, we may just find that fifteen year olds, rather than just sixteen year olds, are competent enough to pass it. Such a thing would be sure to send shock waves of fear through the hearts of adults who would like to maintain the millennia-old belief that they, modern men and women, are special among all living things. It would force them to conclude that they are not special just because they've reach some magic age of human fellowship, and that they spent a good many years squandering their ability in pursuit of a magic number.

Affectionate Men

2011-02-15T04:12:00.007-05:00

This is a culture that honors work over family, so it is no surprise that the struggle to gain women equal standing with men in the workplace and therefore in society in general, has been generally promoted. It is also no surprise that the struggle to gain men equal standing with woman over the family, the children, has never taken root. This work based culture seems to want nothing to do with raising its own children. The majority of men are pushed away from the care of children, and just as many seem more preoccupied with the workforce, with careers. With the arrival of feminism, it was finally declared that women sought the same. For both, having and raising children has become just a side project on a path toward personal fulfillment within the work place--something you have to do just to stay in keeping with social expectations.

These expectations have done nothing to raise us out of the sexist, 1940's culture that permeates family law in the United States. It has even been conveniently overlooked by the feminist movement itself--once again, because it doesn't concern the workplace. Family law arises from the belief that men are breadwinners and women are housewives and child caretakers. This is how a man and woman can divorce, and along with fifty percent of the marriage effects, the woman is typically granted the children, child support, and alimony. Many fathers who have weathered divorce have been brought into extreme poverty and even bankrupcy and homelessness as they've watched the mothers of their children reap the rewards of 1940's sexism in a modern equal opportunity culture. This is especially true if the man was not indeed the true breadwinner.

Regardless, all this stems from a pervasive and destructive cultural belief that men can not and should not be affectionate with children, and certainly are not equipped to be sole caretakers of them. As the old adage goes, we're fast becoming a culture that fears it may never cross a bridge designed by a woman, but couldn't care less if its children are raised by a man. Stereotypes, comedic tropes, and sexist cliches reinforce prejudice and embolden standards. Men who express any affection in public toward children, even fathers toward their own children, are often mistaken to be pedophiles, to be deviants. They are often ridiculed openly and harassed rather than celebrated.

The problem is not feminists, who have conveniently overlooked matters of family law and long ago demeaned and diminished the importance of raising children. The problem is not with men, who have been belittled from birth against showing affection toward anyone, and certainly not toward children, until they accepted this without complaint. The problem is with the underlying culture that does not allow men to complain about their diminished importance within the family, within childcare, as the feminists did about their status in the general workforce. Society looks up to work, it looks down on child raising. If a group of men come out and declare that they want to be taken seriously as child caretakers, it becomes a comedic trope at best rather than a genuine statement of desire. Why should a group of men who are not being discriminated against in the glorious and glamorous workforce want to do something as demeaning in the eyes of the culture as raise and nurture children? Society can not grapple with this concept.

Most men aren't like me. Most men don't place a high value on parenting either, as culture has dictated, so it's only the disaffected men (those who have been spit through family court) that complain. Many men will be reluctant to demand equal rights under family law because doing so makes them appear effeminate. What was a strength among the women's movement--the calculating, un-feeling, career-minded, self-fulfilled, self-dependent ideal woman of the future--becomes the unraveling of the men's movement--the nurturing, loving, reliable, educational, invested, selfless ideal male child caretaker of the future. It's seen as a sign of weakness to devote oneself to the ones society generally demeans anyways. The women's movement goes with the flow of western civilization (self-fulfillment, making money, children as a means to an ends...etc.) while the men's movement resists it (self-fulfillment in the fulfillment of a child's needs, children as a ends in and of themselves). There's no money in staying home and taking care of the kids, so western culture has no use for this new breed of man, and roots for his demise.

Feminists may have overlooked the affectionate man, male chauvinism may have tried to keep them down, culture may be trying to do away with them like shedding a malignancy, but the one group that needs the affection of a man is the only group we care about--the children, the boys and girls. In the end, raising them up is its own vindication where all else has failed them. If society wants nothing to do with the demeaning aspects of raising a child, then it's high time someone steps up to do the most important job of them all. Automation will erode the glorious western workforce, but children are always going to need affection.

Good Intentions

2011-02-14T04:08:00.001-05:00

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.

Bullying

2011-02-04T18:12:00.008-05:00

Impinging on a child's right and ability to defend him or herself is the greatest way adults have concocted to ensure their dependence and empower their aggressors. If you want to weaken a child's resistance, teach them that all their squabbles should be arbitrated by an adult, give the bullies reason to believe in their own physical superiority over their victims, and better yet, punish victims for fighting back. This is a "tell an adult" culture, and in teaching our children to swear to never lift a finger in their own defense, we not only empower bullies, but we victimize children who could have otherwise handled the situation easily without becoming a victim.

Violence and self defense are two different things. This has been known since time immemorial, and yet, it appears the ancient warrior codes and chivalric honor is completely lost on modern civilization when it comes to children. In the old world, a bully could be subdued and rightfully punished. The resisting victim would be encouraged to go on resisting, standing up for him or herself. A victim that lay on the floor and received his beating would be encouraged to put his foot down should his aggressor come back with another round. In the new world, the victim is expected to lay there and absorb the beating, waiting desperately for an adult to intervene, and only then is the bully "attended to." His needs are equally considered. If the victim doesn't resist, they are praised. If they fight back, they are punished too. Both are considered victims.

This new scheme has all the best intentions. It seeks to sympathize with the bully's plight (the very thing that should not be reinforced). It seeks to be a neutral overseer in the dispute, but drives itself even more partisan with its insistence that every act of aggression has a definitive victim and abuser. In this way, a child may be harassed by another student for weeks and months, only to be dealt the swift hand of justice the moment he or she retaliates--only because they refused to bring their problem to the ear of an adult who was just going to refuse to do anything about it anyways. Is a "stern talking to" really going to set a bully straight? The bully's actions are not considered acceptable, but they are "surely" the work of a traumatized soul, and that has to be pampered and provided "attention" so that it may somehow find alternative means to express itself, or so goes the theory. The so-called neutral overseers then coddle that soul rather than educate it, with the effect of only emboldening it.

This scheme rigidly applies the theory that children are utterly morally perfect and pure, and that their transgressions are solely a result of contamination from an outside aggressor. Therefore, even the victim isn't off the hook. To keep the victim from being "contaminated" by the bully, he or she must also be reprogrammed. They are given non-violent alternatives that basically amount to non-defensive alternatives (society having totally lost grasp of the difference): submit to an adult's intervention, or submit to the bully. To a kid, there is very little to distinguish one from the other.

The victims need to know that the adults are in their sparring corner, and if the child comes to an adult requesting assistance to deal with a bully, then that request ought to be honored and non-violent solutions hashed out. Ultimately though, unless the situation is absolutely too hazardous, the child should be encouraged to be the one carrying out the solution, whatever is appropriate. We can all agree that children should not be taught to throw weight around and act out violently without provocation, and that in all possible circumstances, they should find the least violent path possible, but there are one or two occasions where a child seems more than entitled to give another kid a good punch in the mouth.

If all non-violent options fail, and the bully is still persistent, the victim really ought to be granted carte blanche to defend themselves, knowing of course, that such action will cause them disciplinary action too. If that's the price for finally subduing the bully (standing up for themselves), then it's well worth it. They ought to be encouraged to greet their disciplinary action with their head held high. Someone ought to shake their hand as they are banished to their room, to a detention hall, or wherever they are going. If, as the theory goes, the bully is simply acting out an inner sense of inferiority by choosing to dominate others, wouldn't it be wise not to give him submissive bodies in order to dominate? Empower the victims, even as they step up to receive their own discipline. The moment a bully lashes out at another student is the last point in time when they ought to be "attended to," such an action should have probably happened before it reached that point.

And speaking of ignoring bullies until they lash out, let us not forget that girls are just as vicious, just as aggressive, if not always physically, but verbally. Boys bare the bunt of the adult attention when it comes to bullying because physical violence is always more visceral (and adults have a hard-on for all things viscerally arresting at an ignorance of all else), but girls who are relentlessly harassing other children don't deserve to be ignored just because what they do may not result in bloody noses and black eyes.

What we shouldn't be agreeing to is that violence can be eradicated in children if we all just join hands, victim and abuser alike, under the guidance of an adult, declare peace and assume that all is settled. Such claptrap is born out of the adult's shortsightedness, their ego, their feelings of superiority over kids (as if they are in any way the ultimate arbiters of morality that all children must just beg at the feet of), and their desire to be useful. It is nurtured by inaccurate ideas concerning the inhuman "purity" of children and their general shock that children can be just as destructive and downright evil as they themselves are. Bullies are nature's way of holding a mirror up to the adult world and reflecting its image onto a "manageable" size. When an adult sees themselves in a child, more often then not, it's because the child is a bully.

Aphorisms on Child Sexuality

2011-02-04T03:17:00.003-05:00

And now for a few observations, shared between myself and a like-minded friend, NG:

Sex between consenting adults is one of the most ugly things on the face of this planet.

Since molestation is primarily a deprivation of sexual liberties, it seems reasonable to assume that some victims of molestation would grow up to be militant defenders of childrens' sexual freedoms.

Child victims who grow up with a vendetta to clamp down on childrens' sexual expression are the ones society likes. Child victims who grow up and move on with their lives are tossed to the ash bin.

Child abuse must be all-consuming on the victim. If they ever recover and grow from it, they are seen as "justifying" the abuse.

Society has taken the concept of child sexuality and equated it with satanic rituals. This is abhorrent, heinous and unforgivable.

For the law to call mutually consenting loving relationships rape, is an atrocity in keeping with rape itself.

Society's ignorance of the sexuality of children under 18 has made them totally oblivious to the term "sexual development".

Don't Stone the Abstinent

2011-01-30T02:14:00.004-05:00

I've been asked about my sexuality and it seems that because I require more than your average one or two words to explain it, it means I am abnormal. I am abnormal because I choose to be abstinent and people can not accept this. What I have come to find is that sexuality is enforced for adults where it is denied to young people. Choosing to express one's sexuality differently than the majority only seems to become a crime against nature when one has crossed that artificial and arbitrary edifice into adulthood, into the coven of humanity. It seems voluntarily going without intercourse is a greater crime against nature than forcing others to involuntarily abstain.

It's as if human sexuality is some prize to be won for years spent in enforced abstinence. Suddenly as an adult, you're supposed to be living it up, you're required to be expressing your sexuality, enjoying it, because you earned it. Decadence is how adults celebrate the fact that they've made it to adulthood, it's how they reap the benefits bestowed on them for simply being an adult, and one of the most obvious is the way they are expected to express their new-found sexuality. The adult way of doing things is indeed steeped in unhealthy decadence. Sexuality is natural, and however an individual chooses to express or not express it should be acceptable (as long as it doesn't conflict with the rights and dignity of others)--this either/or extremism between involuntary abstinence and involuntary decadence is not. It's a perversion.

Because adults enforce that no individual below their line in the sand edifice for sexuality is allowed to be sexual, they expect and require sexuality from each other. Abstinence is first required, expected, and then it is stoned to death. People react, with the same shock, to the incongruities of a sexual child as they do at an asexual adult--or at least, an adult with a sexuality that deviates from the norm. If one has to explain their sexuality in more than one or two words, then it is considered abnormal.

Normal sexuality for adults is whatever advertisers have told us it is. It is an erection at the sight of a beer bottle, a sleek car, or a hamburger. What is normal for the adult only becomes an abomination, it seems, when the same effect rubs off on a child. Children are not supposed to have a normal sexuality after all, they are in fact required to have no sexuality. When they express a sexuality, it is an automatic abomination--so says the west.

However, it seems the moment a youth reaches this magical deadline, sexuality is not just expected from them, but demanded of them. Adults will not accept one of their own confessing to be asexual, or at least, confessing to have a sexuality that is not one the consumer culture has picked out for them. When adults speak candidly about their sexuality when gloating on their self-defined "ability to be sexual," they react with little more than scorn when one member of their group does not jump right in line with their sexual fetish proselytizing. Sexuality is demanded from the adult, and with it, the open and constant expression of it, lest they become outsiders.

Questioning the Amber Alert

2011-01-21T18:08:00.010-05:00

You may hear it said that anyone who questions something purported to save children's lives must be in league with whatever band of miscreants don't want children's lives to be saved. But what is a child's life worth to the people who make this broad leap of irrational zeal? Is a child's life a bargaining line against societal betterment? Are children now our excuse for apathy, for maintaining the status quo in a broken system? Does fixing the system's faults mean one is against saving children, and if such is the case, what does that make those who ignore the system's faults? Irrationality over children is the hideous beast that holds children captive if only to make sure no one else gets to set them free first, and it needs to die of a thousand cuts. Here's one cut we can make.

Let's consider Amber Alerts for a moment. Many may be tempted to think that such a dramatic, news-friendly theater narrative system recovers 12 children a day and costs nothing to implement--that its benefits outweigh any possible drawback to such an extent that it's not even worth investigating alternative methods for recovering children from abductions. In reality though, according to their own report for 2009 (the most recent one), out of 207 cases (269 children) nationwide, 45 (59 children) were recovered contingent upon the Amber alert having been posted, at a cost of 25 million dollars per state in federal money (from taxpayers) to pay for implementing the service. The average caseload per state (including three US territories), was about four, an average of one child per state and territory was recovered. So in effect, based on averages, 25 million dollars was spent to rescue about one child in your state in 2009. (Michigan had the highest at 27, but a majority of states had 0 or 1 cases).

The money seems insubstantial though, because if it helped save even one child's life, then it surely must be money well spent? A child's life, a human life, is certainly worth more than any dollar amount. But despite what any politician may say, the money that goes in to setting up the Amber Alert system does not "save children's lives." The Bill itself does not "save children's lives," it simply allocates money for states to set up Amber Alert systems. That 25 million pays for the infrastructure and technology needed to broadcast the Amber alerts--mainly, glowing highway signs, command posts, and emergency alert systems for television and radio. But why should this matter if all that equipment is being used in the service of spreading awareness about children being abducted?

In reality, the effect of these gadgets and special announcements on the police and investigators solving their cases, is minimal. That was the finding in the first independent study on the effectiveness of Amber alerts at the University of Nevada, carried out by a team lead by criminologist Timothy Griffin. Hundreds of abduction cases between 2003 and 2009 were studied, and the finding was that Amber Alerts played little to no role in the recovery of children, despite their glowing reputation in the mainstream media. It was found that the majority of cases deemed successes by the Amber Alert system during those six years were children involved in custody fights between parents where the child was not at risk. In the minority of cases where kidnappers were the perpetrators, Amber Alerts usually failed to save their lives. It would appear that murderous kidnappers are not swayed to spare the child's life when the kid's face and name is plastered on every screen in the county.

Essentially, the Amber Alerts generally help police and investigators recover children from lower risk situations where the child's life is not at least immediately in jeopardy. "The fact is that once someone abducts a child with a murderous intent," Griffin said, "there's really not that much we can do about it." In 2009, nine children were recovered already deceased, and none were found to be a result of an outside the family kidnapping: 4 children died at the hands of relatives, 5 children died from unknown circumstances. While the Amber Alerts certainly do have the potential to be life saving, to make the assumption that every Amber Alert saves a life, or that Amber Alerts are a life saving operation like the ER, is a gross exaggeration.

One may also contend that Amber alerts in 2009 saved the lives of children at the hands of murderous rapists, kidnappers, and strangers. This is the image glorified in the media, after all. In actuality, of the 170 cases in which the abductor had been identified in 2009, 139 of them were in known relationships with the child, making only 31 cases nationwide where the child had been abducted by some rogue kidnapper. Of those 139 cases, 109 of those known relationships were familial ones. Imagine that, family members are the greatest threat to our nation's children, with 64 being the child's father, and 34 being the child's mother. This means that the number of child abductions in which the offender was the child's own parents vastly outnumbers cases where children were abducted by the rogue slugs that make for such an endearing news hour.

However, none of this is meant to suggest that Amber Alerts be done away with. In fact, one promising thing about Amber Alerts, if not because of the number of children they save, is the speed at which recoveries are made following activation of an alert. Many children with activated alerts on them were recovered within three hours of the alert being posted. In fact, 35 of the 59 children recovered in 2009 were rescued within three hours of the alert being posted, mainly because officers were able to identify the abductor's vehicle as described in the alert. This is encouraging, but once again, when most of the abductors are related to the child, information about the child's parents' vehicle is already determined. While the number of Amber Alerts issued has declined over time, the number of abductions has remained fairly consistent.

How necessary is this measure? One could say society is better off with Amber Alerts than it would be if no such method of alert existed for the recovery of abducted children. But how effective is the measure? Is its efficiency so great that it can not even be questioned--so great that all who criticize it can only be among those "against saving children's lives?" This is hardly an over-statement. I'm more than confident that, seeing how few children are actually recovered (even given that perhaps the numbers have changed since 2009), this is a costly apparatus that could probably be scaled back to something a bit more representative of its effectiveness. All that is made by human endeavor should be questioned, because regardless of whether Amber Alerts ever saved a child's life, ignorance to reality never has.

Love in a Sound Bite

2011-01-20T18:22:00.005-05:00

I've heard the most poignant recitation of what we're really on about here, no doubt better articulated than I have made it. It was made by Dr. Cornel West, professor of African-American studies at Princeton University, while promoting his autobiographical book Hope on a Tightrope.

"Justice is what love looks like in public, just as tenderness is what love feels like in private."

Justice is the public expression of our compassion for the well being of others, and injustice is the public expression of the opposite. Those who express injustice or "perverted justice" against others in public, are incapable of expressing tenderness in private. They are devoid of compassion. They are vigilantes, downpressers, and molesters motivated by selfish desires. Let us consider that those who haven't been reprimanded for this wrongdoing have also been treated unjustly.

These expressions are connected. If we can not show tenderness in private, as the CL may express toward a child, or as we as human beings ought to be expressing toward one another in general, we grow incapable of realizing a just world in public. We continue to see disparity where we should see charity, and because of disparity (in class, race, gender, sexuality, and age), we continue to see hatred, bigotry, and fear.

Those who are motivated by an expression of love (like the love for a child) realize their ideal on their own terms, while those who are motivated by that hatred, bigotry, and fear, go the way of the vigilante.

Pride in the Name of Love

2011-01-17T02:05:00.024-05:00

Here in the United States, on third Monday of January, we celebrate the birthday of an inspirational man of peace, a courageous activist who forced change in a corrupt system, a preacher, an alleged conspirator against the US government, an eloquent orator for justice and brotherhood, and a tragic martyr for truth and understanding. In focusing on the man, it's easy to forget his message. The movement he became the impetus for brought the life of the disenfranchised to the average heart and mind from the streets of the south all the way to the congressional lobbies, and from there, all around the world.

Through him we came to understand that bigotry was the only thing keeping our corrupt bureaucracy from untangling and realigning itself to stay in keeping with our sentiments. We learned that fear, hatred, ignorance, and corruption should have no legislative excuse. The movement forced the change, but it was the man who taught us how to live within that change--that our moral obligation to one another in the moment trumps our obligation to tradition or regime.

As it is for race, gender, and creed, so should it also be for age, children not excluded.

On a personal note, King was one of the main inspirations for me as a young teen struggling to untangle his own desires. He gave me the clarity for a brief moment in my temporary angst to see a different path for myself, out from the public school haze that I'd been cast under. Suddenly everything they'd been neglecting to tell me in it started to ring in clear through King's speeches, and it was at that moment, as never before, that I decided I wanted to be a force of good in the world too.

And that's why we celebrate this man. He could delliniate what is good and what is wrong so profoundly that it became impossible to misunderstand the work of a selfless, loving soul, and the passionate self-righteous excuse making of a blind demagogue. And that is why we should celebrate him, because he can still teach us the difference.

In taking a man's life, a bullet attempts to also kill his conviction, but only succeeds when he's not in possession of the truth. As assuredly as the truth will bring out the bullets on the man, it will also bring new life to his message in his death. What is evil, can not win.

"I was in close confrontation with the devils. I could see them face to face. I could see them feed upon their brother's face as the fowls of the air feed upon the dead meat of the earth. I can see everything that is [deadly] upon creation...arranged to assassinate those who speak the truth."
- Peter Tosh

Road Rage

2011-01-04T04:12:00.007-05:00

Anyone who believes that adults are superior to children, needs only look so far as the driving habits of the typical adult to be put off that notion in a hurry. The road is truly the adult at his or her most childish, most aggressive, most vulnerable, and most impatient, and the morning commute, nothing but a group of adults throwing a collective temper tantrum. The same amount of self-centered fury you'd expect from a four year old who can't get what they want, you should expect from what the state considers to be its competent drivers.

Those who criticize the bushmen for beating drums to ward off evil spirits haven't seen freeway drivers honking horns to speed up stopped traffic--indeed, it is all a matter of a relative expression of the universal human condition. This same human nature also links adult and child behaviors, because in no way other than formally are adults better than children, and in no way are children better than adults. All the same virtues and vices apply to each, just on a bigger or smaller scale.

A child might throw a tantrum when they are forced to wait their turn, as if expecting to be first for everything, but by comparison, an adult will throw a tantrum on the road when they are forced to slow down behind a driver who has to merge onto the freeway. They'll ride straight up on the slower car's rear as if to virtually push the other car to accelerate beyond the speed limit, and if such an expectation is not met fast enough, actually start to lane jump their way around the vehicle (which by now has sped up sufficiently). Then they'll pull in front defiantly, having advanced ten feet from their starting position mistakenly believing to have made significant progress. Both behaviors are childish.

Children throw tantrums, it doesn't matter if they are three or thirty. Adults like to believe that they are in control of themselves simply for being recognized as an adult and being granted responsibilities and rights, but they are not. They are just as much a slave to instinct and environmental demand as the children they routinely demean for their "childishness." Neither tolerate impediments on the scale that directly affects their level of awareness, and both scoff at the tribulations affronted by the other on a daily basis. Adults laugh at a childhood squabble that children take very seriously; children fail to grasp the significance of moving 10 feet forward in traffic at all costs--for example.

Despite what any adult may think, being bigger means bigger things frustrate you and cause you to take your temper tantrum. There is no such thing as "handle it like an adult," because nobody's perfect.

Happy New Year

2011-01-01T00:09:00.001-05:00

Another year has come to a close. It's a new year for all of us together. This is a time we as humans have set aside for forgiveness, let's not forget that going into the new year.

Peace, love, and justice. -Crake

Adult Irony

2010-12-30T02:16:00.007-05:00

The most deplorable thing about the adult is their love of all things ironic. It's the adult equivalent to a small child's egotism in its annoyance and almost as ubiquitous. Television is littered with examples. Adults love an unexpected pairing or an incongruous situation--a child who stumbles onto his parents making love for instance (where a child is supposed to represent "innocence" and "ignorance," and the sex act is supposed to represent the "dirty little secret" that only adults know). Adults love to revel in their so-called advanced experience with the world, and parade it in front of children as if gloating the old "I know something you don't know."

Arguably, this phenomenon can be tied to the same egotism that causes the child to believe that every object of their desire is ultimately theirs, even under circumstances where it is in the obvious possession of a peer. Adults want to feel important, as is human, and because they have the power to do whatever they want, they have the ability to exert these desires in larger social domains (like television for instance). The problem is, just as it is with children, the broad majority lack the insight into why they enjoy feeling better and smarter than children. This makes them as childish.

In the same way that a toy doesn't belong to our proverbial child simply because they want it, the truth about the world (and all those dirty little secrets) doesn't "belong to adults" simply because they will it to be. Adults don't know anything a child should be kept from knowing just to preserve the little "smarter than you" game. Everything should be on the table because everything is on the table. We need honesty, not irony.

The Good Samaritan

2010-12-29T02:21:00.004-05:00

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.

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 that starts the ball rolling on compulsory Good Samaritanism and the legislation that follows, 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 assumption discredits those who would be Good Samaritans on their own volition? 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 on their own volition--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 that forms the basis of their desire to be proactive with the child in the first place. A good intent that has been turned away due to bureaucratic limitations is no good for anyone. In such a system, apathy seems to be an easier path after all, in fact, in many cases involving children, it seems to be actively encouraged. 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.

Someday at Christmas

2010-12-25T12:00:00.015-05:00

Someday at Christmas men won't be boys
Playing with [kids] like kids play with toys
One warm December our hearts will see
A world where [love] is free.

Someday at Christmas there'll be no [culture wars]
When we have learned what Christmas is for.
When we have found what life's really worth
There'll be peace on earth.

Someday at Christmas we'll see a land
With no hungry children, no empty hand.
One happy morning people will share
a world where people care.

Someday at Christmas there'll be no tears,
Where [all ages] are equal and no one has fears.
One shining moment, one prayer away
From our world today.

Someday at Christmas man will not fail,
Hate will be gone and love will prevail,
Someday a new world that we can start
With hope in every heart.

Someday all our dreams will come to be,
Someday in a world where [all] are free,
Maybe not in time for you and me
But someday at Christmastime.

Spoiled Into Submission

2010-12-20T02:08:00.007-05:00

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, which is an ass, 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.

Include the Kids

2010-12-17T00:09:00.005-05:00

Society believes the best interaction between an adult and a child ought to render the adult a designated mentor, care-taker, teacher, parent, doctor, or social worker of some sort, and the child a receptacle for their services. If the child is maintained, repaired, upgraded, or serviced appropriately by the designated individual, then society deems the partnership successful and they part ways. Children are not expected to do anything but absorb or allow rendered whatever service on them is being given, accept the upgrade for their sake, and carry on. In some instances, such as between a teacher and child, some dialogue or input from the child is necessary to complete the transaction, but that is in the context of their compulsory education.

I don't want to see the system crumble, I just want alternative (non- bureaucratic) practices in child guidance to become more socially acceptable and less of a target of scorn. This is to say, an ideal society would be one where so-called traditional, social, "cradle to grave" methods for bringing children up in the world would coexist peacefully with individuals doing good works for others on their own volition. The only difference between the two is that the traditional structures treat children like potted plants who are just expected to sit there and receive their water and sunlight, and these CL "good works" practices I've been preaching about accept that a child, while being "protected" and "saved" and "taught" and "mentored," may want to be the one giving, protecting, teaching, and mentoring for a change.

CL does not expect a child to want to reciprocate, because it expects nothing from children that one wouldn't expect from any other personal friend, but it won't stop them from reaching out if they desire it. CL is not out to "protect" or to "mentor" or to render a specific service in exchange for payment or some other motivation--the motivation for the CL is the protecting, is the mentoring, in and of itself. Children are not a means to an ends, they are an ends in and of themselves, and it takes a non-market based, non-bureaucrat, free individual in order to allow them to be. In this case, CL is about adults being there for children, but it's also about children being there for adults, or other children. It just requires the adult to be more honest and personal than they would be if they were fulfilling a professional service on behalf of the child--where their presence would just be a physical extension of their all-important title and nothing more.

Because kids know the difference. They know when you're there for them and when you're there because it's your job to be there. It doesn't necessarily have to affect their judgement of you, and certainly you can reach a child on a personal level even if it is your job to be there for them, but the quality of the interaction necessarily suffers from the compulsory, mandatory, or the "on behalf of X" context of the meeting. Officialdom always cuts the heart out of human interaction. If the child chooses their mentor and the mentor is not a fit with the child, or if the mentor chooses the child and the child isn't a fit, then the quality of the interaction suffers somewhat. If the child and the adult choose each other, or the child and the child choose each other, then the interaction is blessed for as long as it lasts. The truth is that kids don't want everything done for their sake, on their behalf, for their own good--nobody does--and will almost always see this kind of treatment as just another form of authority regardless of how friendly and "happy" it comes off. Some people will kill you with happiness, after all.

No. Kids don't want happy smiling faces telling them to sit still and receive the service for their own good, done on their behalf, for their sake. Kids are human beings too, and no human who hasn't been tampered with in some way will tacitly accept such condescension without either a flare of protest or silent withdrawal. Children shouldn't be expected to be any different. They want real people who are open and honest about their agendas. They want a person who can honestly answer the question, "Why the hell do you like working with kids?" If you answer with something along the lines of the "joy and wonder," then you've already lost all hope of connection, because the small ones won't get it and the older ones won't buy it.

A child is anything but "joy and wonder." A child is human--all that, the good, bad, and ugly.

There are times when a child has to be a receptacle for services, just like anyone, but there should also be times when a child can be the one reaching out and reciprocating. In a relationship, human beings can say no if they are being infringed on by another, in a top-down interaction between "mentor" and "protege," there is no consent or dissent. If the kids can't be included, it is just another doctor's visit, it's just another timed test--it's not a relationship. Child-centrism is just as vile as adult-centrism--tossing children into darkness just as disgusting as blinding them in the spotlight.

Thought-Stopping Cliches

2010-12-15T01:39:00.015-05:00

Our typical human overhears the cultural media pulpit repetitively spouting thought-stopping cliches about predators day in and out, takes them at face value and then perhaps turns around and criticizes those who practice religion. There is no difference. If religion is said to become anxious at the idea of critical analysis and receives criticism for it, then our media pulpit should be spared no less the same. The only thing that is necessary to say to render null all arguments for justifying our opinions based on reason alone is wrapped up in the confused media-fed jargon of the expression, "predators targeting innocent children." No one can contest paranoia like this without looking like they support the "predators," and so therefore, it becomes truth regardless of its truth.

The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.

(Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism 429)

Childhood innocence is a cultural designation for which there is no evidence--sure children exist inside a different developmental stage from adults, but there is no reason to believe they are any more innocent, pure, or angelic than your average adult given their own developmental state. Another is the purely cultural detestation for "pedophilia," where ignorance has produced in the mainstream its 1 to 1 correlation with "child molestation." Such a 1 to 1 correlation has no evidence, and even runs counter to evidence suggesting that not all pedophiles necessarally commit the "crimes" of child molestation and possession of child porn. But put these these two words together in the same sentence, "innocent child" and "pedophile," and all analysis stops. If you contest the jargon, you're in support of the perpetrator. In the past, such an ability to think beyond the words would doom your soul to hellfire, these days, it dooms our society to ignorance and illusion servitude.

Play Spaces

2010-12-10T01:01:00.006-05:00

It's true, the play space is where kids plot out their method for world domination. Now these methods aren't anything that will immediately take effect, but at some point, the children alive today who you see out playing will take over the world, and the kind of space they have to practice out their strategies now makes all the difference over whether they chose to simply replace us, or whether they will take it by force and demand from it something better. The powerful and the downpresser would prefer a gentle replacement that benefits them unto and beyond the end, but the powerless want their children to be a force onto themselves, bold enough to fix what does not work, stand up for what is good and just, and throw those benefiting from the broken system into the ground as fast as possible.

Thus the powerful have attempted to create a generation contented on its own gluttony and self-absorbsion, and it's not so much a conspiracy as it is just good business practice. If you want future customers or constituents, you only tell the incoming generation to challenge authority if you intend on being the authority, otherwise, you close and limit their play spaces for which they can carry out their revolution, and distract them with your gadgets so they never have to leave a parent's sight. But then when that technology expands their new insular play worlds to the largely unregulated spheres of play found online, a problem develops, for they seem beyond control once more and therefore a threat to power. The powerful then endeavor to turn even their newly formed play spaces into havens of corruption. Simply put, adults don't want kids playing in or outside the box, not behind the shed, not in the house, not in their room, not stuck to their computer--they don't want them playing here or there, they don't want them playing anywhere.

A child caught walking the public streets could easily find themselves in the back of a police car. A group of kids playing in the woods could find themselves branded as hoodlums and once again thrown in the back of a police car. Gone are the days when the cop would tell them to "get on home"--the message they're given should they choose to accept it, is that either their home is the shopping plaza, their own backyard (and even that is no more sacred), or if not, it's the hold up at the police station. Simply put, adults don't want their children in this day in age to play in the uncouth, unstructured, unsupervised ways in which a child seems naturally drawn. Most parents, most townships, most police, don't want children learning too much about what it means to be a free individual because a free individual is encouraged by a free, wide open to roam place space to think free thoughts--thoughts that threaten those who stand to gain from a broken world. They want the next generation to be "good little goobers" now, and forever.

One play space is really no more or less superior than another for children to learn about the workings of the world and other people, whether it is online or out in the neighborhoods of the sticks and concrete jungles alike. They will naturally test out their strengths and weaknesses, socialize, and grow fond of each other in these social spheres, regardless of what any adult tries to do to stop them. They carve out their own decadence in a world that adults wish to fashion for themselves alone, and that's why it is discouraged. But the adults are fighting the losing battle, for it is just a fact of nature that the children, regardless of what is put into them now, will someday rule the world, it is only a question of time.

We didn't really have what the kids growing up in this day in age have, we of the generation Y. We were in the unfortunate position of having our physical play spaces limited by the PC "don't let the kids ever get hurt" parenting, and at the same time, didn't have the boundless internet where we could replace that missing play space. We had no acceptable place where we could be truly beyond the eyes of our overlords, and because of that lack of opportunity to direct our own purpose, we were grown spineless. Due to the internet, we can't expect the same from generation Z, who grew up in a world divorced from many adult's understanding. The internet has become our mode of cultural rebellion, it is our play space--for now at least, so let the revolution commence.

We are Anonymous, legion.

Love Never Harms

2010-12-08T01:44:00.010-05:00

Having exhausted myself drawing the lines between the lifestyle of the CL and the dominant culture, I'd like to focus for a time on the places where there is agreement, or at least where there should be agreement. The place we find the most agreement is over the idea that children should never come to needless harm inflicted on them by selfish people of any sort--be them child molesters, anti-pedo vigilante crusaders (who would put children in jeopardy to destroy personal enemies), or just plain old abusive parents. Anyone who harms another human being for selfish reasons, whether they be child or adult, is unfit to parade around under any banner of morality or love.

Harm put upon anyone is never the outcome of love. If harm is ever put upon a child, that action is done out of either hatred, selfishness, and/or necessity, but never out of love. A loving person does not harm the person they love directly or indirectly out of love by itself--such action is always primarily motivated by another drive. A loving person may find it necessary to subject their children to harm for their own benefit (ie. discipline...etc), but the part of them that loves the child should feel a sense of remorse even as they know the harm they are instituting is ultimately for the child's benefit (the learning experience).

In this way, it was the sense of necessity that harmed the child, not love--the sense of love felt the sting of remorse for the child's suffering when they came to harm. So anyone, in the event a child being harmed, who has that sense of necessity without the sting of remorse does not love the child. They are instead sociopaths either without a conscience or with a warped one.

What the vigilante or child molester may reason out to be love and what that extension of oneself really is are two entirely different things. The vigilante, the child molester, the abusive parent--they all may have what they see as "good intentions" and they all could be said to be acting on them. After all, they too are "taking responsibility" for the welfare of others, taking it into their own hands, just I believe individuals ought to. That's why I champion personal choice, volunteerism, and charity as much as I do. But because what they perceive to be their love is actually motivated selfishly, by hatred, or by inaccurate ideas about what is necessary for children, these ulterior motives cloud their ability to truly be a force of good in the world, for kids or for anyone.

Vigilantes--though they may seem to be taking an active lead in pursuing society's enemies while all others wouldn't bother--are primarily motivated selfishly. The vigilante doesn't care about children, as their focus is on turning alleged perpetrators into victims--they do not want to see anyone become stronger, they simply want to create more victims. They care more about gratifying their desire to take an active lead in cutting people down--anyone who would stand in their way, no matter who must be harmed in the process. This is not an act of love, or passion to improve the lives of others--this is a selfish act to circumvent or "pervert" justice to destroy others in order to reap the reward (as Perverted Justice does, handsomely).

Likewise, child molesters themselves can not argue that they do what they do out of love, even if they believe to themselves that the child "necessitates" the harm, because their prime motivation--if they were honest with themselves--is their own selfish gratification. Parents who abuse their children under the delusion that their ritualistic beatings or assaults on their own kids count as discipline also can not make the claim that they do what they out of love. In the moment when their hands or belts come in contact with the child's flesh--if they were honest with themselves--they couldn't deny feeling gratified. It is a stress-reliever. They take their own anger out on human beings percieved to be weaker that reside in their own home, and there's no question that such an action is the very antithesis of love.

How easy it is to get sidetracked by one's personal demons enough to cultivate a distorted love.

Society believes actions that are beneficial to children ought to be performed selflessly--for the child's benefit, and so do I. However, I'm not naive enough to believe that true selflessness exists outside of pure altruistic knee-jerk situations of heroism (which are rare). For the everyday person, the only "benefit" one gains from loving a child--extending a bit of charity, some act of volunteerism, or perhaps just by raising a child if one is a parent or a guardian--is the "good feeling" that comes from knowing that one's selflessness has done good for another human being. It's arguably the only benefit you can gain from charitable work on your own accord that doesn't harm the child you want to be there for, or the society you want to make better, and ultimately, that lack of harm is what love is.

Slaying the Dragon

2010-11-30T15:28:00.005-05:00

In the town of Silene there was a large lake that housed a monstrous dragon that cast a shadow of fear on the community. In order to subdue the dragon, the townspeople began setting loose two sheep a day on its territory, and when they ran out of sheep, they began giving it their children. Every child was put onto a lottery to be sacrificed, just to keep the dragon appeased, and therefore, non-threatening. This happened until the lot fell down on the king's daughter, and though he bargained his riches and his kingdom in exchange for her to be spared, the townspeople revolted, and had her sent out to be sacrificed like all the others.

At that time, St. George was passing through, and he heard her cries. With her help, he was able to bind the dragon and bring it back to the town. He'd kill it if they converted to Christianity, and they promptly agreed, so he raised his sword Ascalon, and killed the dragon in one blow. This is the story of St. George and the Dragon.

I just can't help but be moved by how similar this story is to the situation we find ourselves in, even with the hint at a possible redemptive end. If we frame this story through the perspective of CL, the independent volunteer could be said to be represented by St. George--the outsider who took interest in the girl's plight when all of society had sent her out to be killed. The girl obviously represents children, boys and girls, who are the unwitting pawns of society's fear, cultural oppression, and bureaucracy.

The dragon represents that hysteria to which we see parents willingly "give their children up" to appease (and thus turn the laws made to protect children on the children themselves) if only to douse the fear they've been filled with. How many times have we heard the "protect kids at any cost" line, only to be let down by the fact that part of the cost is the security and happiness of the children themselves? This is what could be meant by the townsfolk and their willingness to feed their children to the dragon to subdue it.

Ultimately though, the outsider prevails, even if it's just in the life of the one child they've made a positive connection with, and in doing so, they slay the "fear society" with their own version of the sword Ascalon... genuine love. The CL does not get the same heroic status as St. George for accomplishing the same feat, but it could be said that even just one out making a child's life genuinely better through genuine actions is a "small victory" over the dragon that is our fear-fed society.

The part about conversion is admittedly the only part that doesn't fit, because it is too idealistic to say that independent CLs will actually end up swaying our culture off its self-destructive fear--our victory isn't something instantly attainable, it's a continual process of good works and charity working parallel to the destructive elements of society. The way I see it, once you decide to be a force for good in the world, that's one small victory against the "dragon."

Research Limits

2010-11-29T03:41:00.002-05:00

The bulk of knowledge attainable from research in general is limited to the kinds of questions that have been asked. In the social sciences, the questions that are being asked are the ones our culture permits us to ask. In this case, culture informs objectivity. If culture assumes that children are being harmed by something, then the questions for research become: "What groups of kids are being harmed the most? Who does the harm affect the most? Who/What is doing the harm? and What can be done to stop the harm from happening?" No one comes forth to pose the question: is the cultural assumption even right to begin with?

If the culture says that X, then research asks, "given X, how does X affect Y?" If it would be culturally inappropriate to question X, then X is not questioned.

However, the social sciences are not uniformly like this. There are numerous examples of research and researchers who have pushed boundaries and ultimately changed cultural perspectives to align more with the reality of the world, but notice it only seems to work that way with questions that, even if controversial, are still within the boundaries of acceptability. The level of attention a particular research question receives is proportional to its level of cultural acceptability. So given this, it's a wonder anyone can regard the social sciences without skepticism at the least. For instance, it seems obvious the increase in interest in questions about homosexuality outside the strict context of "pathological abnormality" has more to do with our culture's growing tolerance of the gay lifestyle than it does the researchers' objective "thirst for knowledge."

One question that seems to be outside the boundaries of our culture, and therefore shut off from objective investigation, is "when are children capable of giving meaningful consent?" This is because culture tells us they are never capable until they are [16, 17, 18, 21...pick a number]. Scientific investigation takes this as a given, and then asks "because we all know kids can not consent, how are they being harmed by X?" Who among us is brave enough to ask "is this man-made, superstitious, legal construct wrong about a child's objective ability to consent?" Don't hold your breath.

Victimology research feeds off of cultural limitations.

Babylon

2010-11-25T05:28:00.017-05:00

What is Babylon? The Mesopotamian small town--turned flourishing city-state, has been used as a symbol for human folly, oppression, the destruction of the soul, material worship, corruption, and moral depravity throughout history. The name "Babylon" has been appropriated to many lands that have fit these descriptors, including Rome, Europe, and the Americas. 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. The western world, it could be argued, has decided to run its course contrary to nature in a multitude of ways, 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 tainted historical legacy. Our society has been gripped by an unnatural bureaucratic regime that imposes a skeletal will of its own. 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 the daily oppression they inflict on the young living amidst the paper trails and false pretenses. A child becomes free to be secured so adults may not have to look at them, and little else, where nature has gifted them two arms and legs to go where they please under the gaze of a present adult. 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 irony is that Babylon asserts CL is contrary to nature, when everything it does in the raising of children at the "official" levels can scarcely be found in the natural world. It creates a daily abomination out of what it calls the modern childhood, and then goes on the hunt to purge natural adult/child bonds by singling them out as abominations. To live in Babylon is to be an unwilling or unwitting slave to such illusion. This 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 mind. 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, the 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. This is an abomination.

They are not tame though, and where they deviate, they are subjugated. Within Babylon, they are expected to be sedated, they are expected to live an "ideal happy childhood" at all cost to their actual living identity. They are put under arrest for being young at the wrong place and wrong time (the definition of the status offense). They are expected to lay low in their bedrooms playing on their computers, because that is where they can be easily monitored, easily controlled, and easily converted. Babylon is the residence of the downpresser. This 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 who 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, love--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, a loving embrace?

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

Seven Curses on Molestation

2010-11-24T00:58:00.012-05:00

Today I think for the first time I felt that "genuine sense of revulsion toward the abuser" that all of society seems to fall back on. I'm not usually one easily swayed by sensationalism, but this deeply disturbed me. I saw this child screaming and something just kicked inside. I stomped my foot on impulse and practically broke into tears. I am human after all.

There's something wrong with a society that is panicked over child molestation who will willingly sit back and not bat an eyelash at a child screaming "stop touching me!" and clamoring to get away as they're effectively "groped" in full view of their parents. In the natural world, when something preys upon the young of an animal, they're supposed to react, the child's evolutionary response to clamor to a parent who they "expect" is going to protect them. But when said parent is rendered incapable of stopping the predator from preying upon the child, parent/child protective bond is severed. The severing of the parent/child bond is nothing new to Babylon--modern society has been finding ways of doing it for decades.

It's against nature, I say, to do this to children boarding a plane. I wouldn't be surprised if that kid shows all the signs of a victim of true sexual molestation following this episode. This child has done nothing wrong, and has essentially been violated against her will. I don't blame the parent, I don't blame this particular TSA worker. What is to blame is the system that has allowed such downpressers to flourish without reproach. For any service that can make the media justify its sensationalism must truly be a product of evil.

A parent, or any adult who has purchased a ticket for a plane, can at least say "I agree to accept the pat down because I want to avail myself of your transportation services in return," and that is on the surface fine, seeing as it is a consensual interaction. There's the key word, consent! If without consent, the groping of a human being is indeed "molestation," then what has transpired here with this three year old IS nothing but. In her view, she simply rose up that morning, went wherever the adults told her, and was subsequently violated.

And if it was sexual, and not a TSA search, though they yield the same result, people would suddenly care about what she felt as a consequence of this non-consensual violation. They'd officially ordain that child a "victim" and have her in therapy. They'd lynch mob the house of the offender in the twilight. They would feel the utter disgust I felt while watching this unfold, as should be their nature. But because it's a TSA search, it's business as usual. The public has been desensitized to child molestation when it is carried out by sources they are instructed to trust, and only notices it when it is carried out by sources they are instructed to hate.

These be seven curses on downpressers both rogue and institutional:
That one doctor will not save them. That two healers will not heal them. That three eyes will not see them. That four ears will not hear them. That five walls will not hide them. That six diggers will not bury them. And that seven deaths will never kill them

Aphorisms for Hypocrisy

2010-11-18T03:24:00.017-05:00

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

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

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

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

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