Every day or so I check into daily.rotten.com and see the detritus of American and global civilization settling around our feet, breaking off from the structure below as we crush it with new structures above. Imagine a "soft bottom" structure whose first floor pancakes in an earthquake but instead of rebuilding the whole thing proper, the second floor now becomes the first and they build a new second floor and over and over.
One thing that really fucking bothers me is the way the American public is headed towards an almost police state mentality regarding sex, especially as it is enslaving children and teenagers who have not even had the chance to grow up and decide on the way through that process what they want to do with their developing sexuality, in the ostensible name of protecting them, but truly and really in the quest for creating another power bloc to be spoken for.
All over the Internet, we see stories of people being busted for trying to get in the pants of teen girls. Hey fine, a man really did strike up a conversation with a real girl and for sexual purposes. Fine, investigate and press charges. Win if you can in a court of law.
Nope. Not how we do it anymore. We put up sting operations and actively attempt to entice people who are on the fence sitting but weak willed side of things, and use such enticements as they most likely would never ever have the possibility of receiving from a young girl, and without such enticement lack the initiative to do more than jerk off at home.
Once arrested, these men are then tagged as "Sex Offenders". Consider for a minute the meaning of that phrase. First, they've narrowed it down to being about sex. Second, they've claimed there is an actual offense which implies it is against society as the law enforcement people involved are charged with protecting society against law breakers and other offenders against the public.
You cannot have an offense unless there is a norm to be broken. What this means is that if there is such as thing as a "Sex Offender" there must by contrast be a "Sex Non-Offender". Which furthermore implies that there is a norm which determines one's compliance. Moreover, it also then implies that society has given its elected officials the power to direct the appointed officials of law enforcement to enforce that norm.
Does no one see the danger of de facto acceptance of the concept of a societal norm for sex? Does no one see the danger of this de facto norm being essentially decided and defined by elected politicians and appointed police?
In the name of "for the children" we are willing to internalize and swallow that idea, that there can be a societal norm for sex and it can be handed to others who are most definitely not involved otherwise in our very personal sex lives, and offenders however they are defined punished in any way that the system wishes?
What punishments do we levy? We tag them for life with a name, with a classification, that allows for no forgiveness, no changeability, no hope. We take an offense that we claim on paper has XYZ for a punishment but then we go beyond that in a very real and damaging way to practically insuring that they will be left with no chance for change, let them know we will never believe in them again, and wonder why the recidivism rate is so high.
At no time does morality enter into it. We never have anything like the Jewish Mussar phenomenon. Not even a whiff of a mention of philosophy and ethics is made. It is clear from the first moment that this is not about justice and correction of an offender. It is not even revenge for we ourselves in society who were not involved were not directly wronged and thus have no personal connection to claim vengeance. In fact, we make it clear that it is about society being deep down the bad guy. A cowardly bad guy. Like the Spartans who would prove themselves by murdering a Helot and getting away with it, we use the flimsy excuse of justice, we visit this hellishness on them with the fire of revenge, and we have no personal interest in it other than we've found a victim we can go cathartically medieval on.
Finally in the case of this child molester under every bed hysteria, we claim we are doing it for the children. At no time are the children involved in a sting operation so that argument is clearly bunk right there in that case. It was fishing and the claim that they would have targeted a real kid is not proven. We would not know unless they actually offend. Seeking to get people to make attempts at offending but not actually offending is what that is.
When it comes to real intergenerational sex, does anyone even ask the child what they thought? No. It is simply reflexively assumed that the child cannot decide for themselves what they want.
Well when I was in junior high, girls I went to school with thought boinking the high school seniors was cool. Some of them were eighteen already. Back then, it was ignored largely. Parents didn't know what their teens were up to and didn't want to and unless there was a complaint the police did not become involved. They rightly had the attitude that how parents dealt with their kids' sexual experimentation was their business and as long as they did not come out and tell them to fuck, hey, they're trying but teens exist to bust their parents' boundaries. This is nothing new.
Today, parents are just as willfully clueless and still don't want to know who little twelve year old Suzy is doing behind the K-Mart after school, they just wish she wouldn't or that she'd even stop rolling her eyes and take them seriously when they told her about the birds and the bees or even to tie her fucking shoes.
Police on the other hand, whipped into motion by a feeling of righteousness in protecting the public morality which is neither their job nor should it be, as well as prodded by grabby politicians, are full tilt kiddy protecting machines. And as with most government functions failing miserably at it because of the ham fisted Mr. Magoo conceptual grasp crossed with the swatting flies with cruise missiles Sledge Hammer nature of government functions. Of course there's also the fact that they are not doing it to protect the kids because neither the kids nor the parents charged them with doing so, and indeed cannot because an unspoken foundation of America and indeed most humanity being that the family has ultimate responsibility and influence in matters of child rearing and not the state.
Why are they doing it?
They are doing it because the grabby politicians are empowered by it. Don't believe me? Check out this article in the NY Times. 1% of all American adults is not a small number. Every last one of those people is a ward of the state and I do not mean one of the fifty states, I mean the state as in government. That is over 1.5 million people who they can speak on behalf of. They have no rights. No choices. No voice. They are captive. Someone else speaks for them. Obviously since they are incarcerated, the power of the voice for them isn't going to them. It goes to someone else.
It works this way with the unincarcerated as well. Children have no voice. They are by law not allowed to speak for themselves. They are disenfranchised by virtue of an assumption that until they turn eighteen they cannot reason for themselves much less be responsible. Usually, classically, the parents speak for their own children and not for each others' nor those of people half way across the nation.
No longer. In the vacuum of parental responsibility taking in the USA, the politicians have found a new class to speak on behalf of. One which cannot gainsay them and disavow that spokesmanship. One whose rightful spokespeople won't disavow that stolen representation because of the nature of the subject matter being used. The politicians are protecting my kid from sex predators. Why should I speak up?
Just because the stated aim of protecting your kids is the same as your own natural imperative, does not mean the actual aim is the same and you should have a natural and inherent knowledge that you as the parent alone can have such an overly protective feeling towards your kids. Your interest is the biological imperative of passing on your genes and the spiritual imperative of continuing your own existence through the impression you make on them and what you teach them, what you impart by their experience of you.
What is the political class' interest in speaking for your kids? What is the only interest the political class ever has? Think for a minute.
How long will it be before it goes from deciding that the societal norm is that your kids cannot have sex with adults, to deciding that your kids cannot learn about sex from you?
The public schools are an arm of the state and hence politically connected. Anyone who has been a teacher know the politically tempestuous nature of schools and understands the incestuous nature of the connections between school administration and town council politics. Town council politics where schools are concerned is affected very heavily by the state government of state taxpayer fund disbursements, or lack thereof should compliance with political motivations not be forthcoming. States suckle at the teat of the federal hog and no one can miss the nature of our congress or presidency.
So already the series of connections from the federal circus to the state carnival to the local petting zoo is well established. Do you really want that bunch to be the sole societally accepted venue for transmission of sexual mores to your kids?
Consider that schools are presently not teaching children abstinence or even self control, but starting from a proposition that they are going to have sex no matter what short of a G-d they figure doesn't exist telling them not to. All they say is use a condom.
Your average mass media from television to radio to Internet is alive with sexual imagery. We had a sexual revolution. We had a sexual revolution hangover. We got horny again and society's mirror shows it. When was the last time you felt truly effective in your attempt at communicating to your kids that they should not have sex and wait for when they truly felt ready, unpressured, and truly wanting it? Do you think the mass society reflects anything that helps you in this?
Okay, now go back two paragraphs and compare that with the paragraph following. Not only is the mass culture putting forth an image of sexual promiscuity as exciting and fun, of sex coming without ramifications personal or interpersonal, but your kids' public school's official government position is that your kids are going to fuck and there is no point in trying to tell them not to.
I don't know about you but I don't want a proven power hungry and eternally self-aggrandizing bunch of morally perverted fucks like our political class to practice this schizophrenic imposition of wildly contradictory messages that on the one hand there's no point in even broaching the message of self-control in anything much less sex, and on the other hand that whoever or whatever they have sex with, they have no right to do it, no right to choose it, and someone is going to prosecute someone somehow if they do.
Does this not seem like a prescription for complete disaster?
It seems rather odd to me that in the shift of twenty-five years from when I was a teen to now that the number of sexual offenders is now several thousand percent greater but the population is not. One would have to expect a concomitant increase in crime across the board and yet there has not been. We do not live in walled villages with bars on our windows and armed police manning emplacements at each corner. There are no mohawk-topped barbarians in assless chaps running loose raping and pillaging. This is not the criminal infested future we once imagined we'd have based on the tired conception of "if present trends continue".
The only thing that has changed is that police are now in a frenzy and hysteria driven so by politicians, their own egotistical need for feeling righteous and relevant, and the mass media phenomenon.
Did you never wonder if all the witched execute during the witch hunting hysteria of the previous centuries were real? Didn't it seem curious that before that, they had no problem with those thousands of witches in their midst and yet had been upright Christians for centuries already? Was it that witchcraft was suddenly being cleaned out? Or was it that they never were and were invented for the furtherance of the agenda of those doing the hunting and executing?
In the name of the further empowerment of a class that already has entirely too much power, the sexual doings of we the American people and the sexual and moral education of our children is being stolen at the gunpoint of a threat of societal ostracism and penal punishment. We silently let them take the power from us, even as the methods they use insure a further taking of our power ongoing into the future.
Anyone else thinking of that Ghost in the Shell series?
