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?