Why Our Society Needs to Protect Children
So, true story from my childhood. When I was quite young, I’m guessing 5 or 6, a classmate pointed at a pinecone and said something like, “My uncle told me those pinecones are poisonous and if you eat them, you’ll die!” I knew about as much about pinecones then as I do now, which is essentially nothing, but that sounded like a lot of crap to me. So, I told him it wasn’t true. He insisted it was and dared me to eat it and prove him wrong. At that point, I did the natural thing for a young boy who has been challenged and I ATE PART OF A PINECONE (PS: Even if you live to be a hundred and read every day, you’re unlikely to see that sentence repeated anywhere).
The kid who dared me didn’t actually want me to eat it because he thought I’d die. I figured I probably wouldn’t die either based on absolutely nothing and chomped away. Happily, nothing happened. I didn’t get sick; I didn’t die and I just went on with my day.
Yet and still, does that sound like good decision-making to you? No, of course not – and we’re not just talking about little kids here.
Long ago, after I left college with a psychology degree, I did some work in a group home with teenagers, many of whom were deeply troubled and violent. I got to read their case files and at no point did I ever think, “Wow, this kid was just born evil.”
Most of these kids had really sad stories at home, started hanging out with and admiring the wrong people, got hooked into the legal system and there they were. I didn’t think any of them were “irredeemable,” but when a kid gets into his mid-teens with a huge chip on his shoulder, dropped out of school to deal dope, or has beaten someone severely with a steel pipe, it’s not so easy to guide them back in the right direction.
That being said, there was one kid there I felt particularly bad for because basically, he had a messed-up family life, tried to self-harm, and through some bad circumstances, ended up in this group home with kids that were meaner and far further gone than him. That kid wasn’t really a criminal, he just tended to follow the crowd to try to fit in and I always thought that if you put that kid in a good environment with a little support, he’d thrive in that environment and probably go on to have a pretty good life.
So, what happened to him? Well, a few years after I left, I ran into someone else who still worked there. I asked him about the kids. Some of them were dead already. Others were in jail. That kid? Well, he tagged along on some kind of dumb robbery and didn’t even do anything but ended up in prison just like more hardened teens he was trying to impress.
Nothing I am saying here should shock anyone and nothing should seem revolutionary.
Kids, whether they’re young or teenagers are famously ignorant, malleable, reckless, and generally don’t have the sense God gave a goose. Some of them (almost always the ones with good parents) are further along emotionally and intellectually than others, but none of them are all that great at it. That’s a natural, normal thing all of us have been through.
How could it be any other way? Experience is a big part of what makes us smart and kids that age don’t have any.
That’s why not just our society, but pretty much all societies up until recently, have taken great care to protect children morally and intellectually.
This is why, traditionally, people don’t want their kids hanging around with bad influences like gangbangers, junkies or kids that are just punks. There’s a reason this meme exists:
When I was a kid, a teacher who cross-dressed, was trans or had multi-colored hair was a non-starter because anyone who was odd, weird, or amoral in any way wasn’t seen as fit to be around kids. Sex ed was even controversial when I was a kid because parents were afraid exposing their kids to sexual content might lead to more kids having sex.
Drag Queen Story Hour would have probably turned out closer to “Drag Queen Beating Hour” back then. The idea that someone could be a good parent and have their kids around drag queens in any way, shape, or form would have generally been considered inconceivable.
We go back and laugh at previous generations of Americans insisting that married couples not sleep in the same beds together on TV, freak out over Dungeons and Dragons, or have concerns that Elvis swiveling his hips could corrupt America’s youth:
However, do you know what all of those things actually were? They were signs of a HEALTHIER SOCIETY than the one we have. Those were signs that the adults back then genuinely cared about protecting kids from what they feared were bad influences. Were they always right? No, but it was a healthy impulse. Kids are not supposed to be exposed to the same influences, temptations, decisions, and moral quandaries as adults because they ill equipped to handle them.
Why do we not want kids to be allowed to get tattoos? Because tattoos are permanent, and kids have bad judgment.
Why is there a drinking age? Because although many adults don’t have the greatest judgment when it comes to drinking, kids REALLY have bad judgment when it comes to drinking. For example, yours truly? I probably haven’t been drunk 20 times in my entire life, but one of those times was when I was a teenager. Someone offered me Everclear (which I had never drunk before) after I had already been drinking. I slammed down some big gulps of it STRAIGHT FROM THE BOTTLE and later drove home with another drunk friend in the front seat even though I remember weird things like hearing colors and seeing spirals in front of me. How did it work out? Just fine actually, but let’s face it, I could have very easily killed both of us. Should I have ever been in a situation like that, making that decision? Absolutely not. In an ideal world, at that age, I would have been protected from myself.
That’s why statutory rape laws exist. I don’t care if you’re mature for a 16-year-old, you don’t have the judgment to consensually have sex with say a thirty-year-old. You just don’t and even if it’s voluntary, you need to be protected from your own lack of judgment.
Instead of protecting kids today and sending kids to church where they get taught lessons about morals every week, what do people do in so many places? They send these kids to schools where mentally ill activists masquerading as teachers push weird ideas about gender and toxic ideological beliefs.
We put them in front of mentally ill, deviants in drag, who are encouraged to read to them. We turn these kids loose online with zero supervision where they look at pornography, make “friends” with deviants, weirdos, and mental cases on online forums, soak up whatever morality-free influencers and celebrities tell them, and then let them swim in the toxic soup of social media. Then, we wonder why so many of these kids are vapid, amoral, entitled disasters without realizing they are what they were taught to be by our broken culture.
Kids need protection. They need guidance. They need well-meaning, morally sound people looking out for them and helping them develop. If they don’t get that, things can go wrong in a hurry. Nobody would expect to just take a bunch of seed, throw it everywhere, never weed, water, or fertilize it, and then end up with a great crop, so why would we think our kids will turn out any better under those circumstances? If we continue to allow a degenerate and corrupt society to raise our kids, it’s not going to turn out well.
Good article, with lots of good examples to provoke thought from anyone who reads this. That said, deviants are always looking to have their behavior accepted and normalized. We saw it with gay marriage- even though it was always seen as sinful, make it legal and then you get to call people who supported traditions and institutions going back thousands of years "haters" and "bigots." I blame social media for this, because people can now dog pile, dox, and threaten people's jobs, homes, and families. Children are the ultimate prize for the state to control; of course they will use the support of the progressive left to get this done.
I am baffled and enraged when I see pictures of parents/adults exposing children to degeneracy like pride parades and other public displays of indecency and deviance, looking joyful and pleased to be doing so. Their lack of moral character demands that their children be removed from their horrible influence. Social services that allow abusive families to have chance after chance to continue abusing their innocent and helpless children on the misbegotten belief that abusive birth parents are better for their children in spite of what they do to them deserve to be brought up on charges of child endangerment. The same social services whose duty it is to oversee and monitor foster parents, but fail to do so, endangering already endangered children have directors who deserve the death penalty. I have nothing but contempt for people who harm and degrade children.