We are Kronos, the devourer of children. We see in our children a threat, the reflections of the worst things that we do and instead of raising them, teaching them as is our responsibility, we swallow them whole hoping to destroy the problem. By destroying the youth. The youth who will one day inherit our world.

As the media shows it, there has been a recent trend toward teen violence. The children in our society are seen as angrier; no longer is the boy who fires his father’s gun while a friend is over a victim of circumstance, he is a cold blooded killer who deserves to be tried as an adult and put on death row or into lockup for seventy years of a life he has only begun to experience. But of course this is extreme. Most of the teen violence portrayed by the media is directed. It is always committed by some hate filled youth who somehow gets his hands on an assault rifle and succeeds in murdering someone’s son or someone else’s daughter.

But does that child deserve to be thrown away? He has done a horrible thing. He has made a mistake, and he has never learned the value of human life. But how does removing the rest of his life from him, turning it into a commodity to please the PTA and line the pockets of whichever news team happens to get there first. Meanwhile, the value of the lives of those that were killed is lost in the shuffle of the horror of a child committing such an act. No, it is not the loss of a life that inspires the emotion that drives the media frenzy, it is the terror that it might happen in one’s own hometown. We do not condemn this child because he committed a crime. We destroy his life for the sole purpose of making the USA, a country of people unwilling to properly instruct its progeny, able to sleep a little better at night.

We as a culture have lost a sense of responsibility to our children. Perhaps it was the women’s liberation movement when both sexes decided that they needed to work and neither needed to waste time raising children. I won’t go into the causes. I will, however, talk about the effects. As it stands innumerable children grow up effectively orphans. Parents spend time with their children on weekends or the occasional evening – as if raising a child were akin to being in the Army reserve. The best way to teach anything is by example; if a child grows up in a household of responsible parents then that child will likely grow up to be him or herself responsible. However, a child with parents who neglect their duties to that child is going to learn that one does not need to deal with the consequences of ones own actions. Lacking such role models does not prevent that child from absorbing that around him, however. It’s just that, instead of learning from conscientious parents, he or she will learn from his surrogate parent, the television, and from friends, children who are in the same boat – all equally clueless.

But of course it can’t be a parent’s fault that their own child turned out bad. They’re strict, they lay down explicit guidelines for the child while they’re away. They have SurfWatch © on their computers to prevent the impressionable youth from the corruptive influence of pornography. They even poke their heads in unscheduled sometimes to make sure the kid isn’t whacking off and degenerating himself further.

In short, they do exactly what they need to, going through all the motions that a society of people with just as little a sense of responsibility as they have suggests are the keys to being a better parent and having a child that doesn’t grow up to blow his teacher’s head off.

Recently at Friends Central, a small private school outside of Philadelphia, a child was expelled. The school itself was a Friends School – that is, it was affiliated with the Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers: one of, in theory, the more tolerant religions in the country. Quakers provided the backbone of the country; Philadelphia itself, once the Capitol of the nation, was founded by Quakers. The Underground Railroad had its good share of Quaker members. During the Second World War, a group of Quakers went to Germany to talk with the Gestapo, to plead them to stop killing Jews.

The child was expelled for saying that, ‘we should kill all the crazy and stupid people,’ which he later clarified was a joke, in an online chatroom, off of school property and out of school time.

The administrator who expelled the child was commended by a respected authority on Quaker education, as having made a, ‘great act of courage.’ This is a school – an institution devoted to the instruction, both intellectual and moral, of children. And yet, for making a statement that, while perhaps in poor taste, was fairly innocuous, this child is completely discounted. Thrown away.

Eaten.

We are the eaters of our young. What do we do when we look back, and all that is left is those too frightened to live, and the bones that could not be digested?

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