Looking At The World Through The Eyes Of A Child

Another great column from Thomas Sowell this week.

It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left. The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow.

Most of us learn that from experience-- but experience is precisely what the young are lacking. "Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong.

Those who are insulated from that pain-- whether by being born into affluence or wealth, or shielded by the welfare state, or insulated by tenure in academia or in the federal judiciary-- can remain in a state of perpetual immaturity.
...

Those of us who can recall what it was like to be an adolescent must know that growing up can be a painful transition from the sheltered world of childhood.

No matter how much we may have wanted adult freedom, there was seldom the same enthusiasm for taking on the burdens of adult responsibilities and having to weigh painful trade-offs in a world that hemmed us in on all sides, long after we were liberated from parental restrictions.

Should we be surprised that the strongest supporters of the political left are found among the young, academics, limousine liberals with trust funds, media celebrities and federal judges?

These are hardly Karl Marx's proletarians, who were supposed to bring on the revolution. ...

Velvet Fascism (9): Infantalization and Rule by Experts

The link immediately below concerns "experts" intervening in the lives of children to save them from bad parents, and goes on to discuss the nature of these so-called experts who possibly do more harm than good, sticking up for each other in the case of objections to their Gnostic brilliance. Below that is a piece from Toronto, Canada about the state planting trees so children will be protected from skin cancer. Both pieces are examples of what I term "Velvet Fascism." Both articles are examples of totalitarianism and infantalization. Thanks to RS and Truepeers for putting me on to these stories.

Mediocracy: Inversions & deceptions in an 'egalitarian' society. 19 July 2008

The eighth circle of Hell

Remember: experts are not neutral. They have their own agenda. If they are employed by the state, as most doctors effectively are, they will reflect the interests of the state, and/or those of their own profession. An organisation with power will act to expand that power. Assertions about doing things for people's 'own good' should be treated with as much scepticism as the claims of dictators that they are acting 'for the people'. As O'Brien says in Orwell's 1984, "Power is not a means, it is an end".
http://inversions-and-deceptions.blogspot.com/2008/07/eighth-circle-of-hell.html


MARGARET WENTE, "Watch out! Here comes the sun." Globe and Mail. 22 July 2008

Toronto's citizens will be relieved to learn that the city's elected leaders are determined to stamp out a grave threat to children's health and safety. Can you guess what it is? No, not pedophiles. Not lawn spray (they've already banned that) or Coke in school vending machines (on the way out). All of those can harm your child, but now officials are on to something much, much bigger.

The sun! That's right. Sunlight is bad. Too much of it can kill. Parents can't be trusted to limit their children's sun exposure to the appropriate amounts. So the City of Toronto will do it for them. Not even the most powerful bureaucrats can regulate the sun -- yet -- but they can, and will, regulate the shade.

As you read this, city workers are fanning out to playgrounds and other public spaces to conduct what are known as "shade audits." These audits will measure the angle of the sun at different times of day, as well as the amount of direct and reflected sunlight, the quantity and usability of shade from trees and other structures, and how many children are likely to be in attendance. Then they will determine where our little ones are likely to be most at risk from dangerous UV rays that cause deadly skin cancer. I can guarantee it's not my part of town, where conscientious parents cover their children with so much protective goop and gear that it's a wonder they don't get rickets.

But why take a chance? As councillor Gord Perks argues, "It makes no sense to me that people would object to fighting an epidemic of skin cancers among children." Also, not all children get to live in the leafier parts of town. As another city councillor reminds us, we have a special duty to protect the less fortunate children who live in high-rises, because they are forced to play in hazardous sun-drenched public parks.

Personally, I think we should be happy the little tykes are outside at all. If you ask me, what we really need is a public-health campaign to pry them away from their video games. But public-health officials are so busy whipping up imaginary dangers it's a wonder parents ever let their kids out the door. Heat alert! Heat alert! Any day the mercury hits 32.1, they declare a heat alert. Where did these people grow up? Iqaluit?

The city's sprawling Shade Policy Committee (which includes environmental planners, foresters, meteorologists, dermatologists, architects, parks personnel, oncologists and a healthy lifestyles nurse) is a bureaucrat's delight. It is the logical offshoot of a mindset that believes ordinary people are completely incapable of exercising common sense, combined with the belief that the right policies, devised by wise public officials like themselves, can save the world. These policies have been years in the making, and have generated mountains of pilot projects and reports. So who am I to gripe? Personally, I adore the shade, and I think we ought to have more of it. But I wonder if we really need this many experts to figure out where to plant a tree.

Sometimes I suspect that in between pandemics, the main job of public-health officials is to dream up new menaces to make themselves indispensable. These are the same folks who warned last week that too much cellphone use could give your kids brain cancer (and, after all, nobody can ever prove it won't). They're always there to remind us that in summer it gets hot, in winter it gets cold and in spring it gets smoggy.

Whatever did we do before we had qualified experts to tell us how to cope? How did we survive before the healthy lifestyle nurses came along to nag that junk food is bad for us and exercise is good? Oh, yeah. We had Mom. But what does she know? If you leave it up to her, the kids will probably get skin cancer.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080722.wcowente22/BNStory/specialComment/?query=

This is more than just silliness. The danger is that in this world-view we come to see the meaning of life as that given to us by those who are better qualified to live our lives for us and our children than we are. We lose our right to make our own meaning of life. We lose our freedom-- and our meaning in that loss. This fad of idealizing the Gnostic Philosopher Kings is a danger we too often bow to uncritically in the usual social manner of most good citizens. We half-listen to the words, hear the sounds, pick up on the vibe, and we go along with things we are often too busy to concern ourselves with in our busy lives.

Experts know about our safety? Well, who are we to object and decide to do something stupid and unhealthy? Why should we stand by and let others do such things? Yes, we are infantalized, and increasingly so by Velvet Fascism. But it's for the good of all. Freedom? That's for stupid people.

Count me really stupid.

Game Over For Baby Killer

Reading about this nightmare makes me wonder, who is the bigger infant in this story... [my translation from the original French-language news report]:

A 19-year Spaniard who had killed his girlfriend's baby because he was bothering him during his video game, has been found guilty Friday by a tribunal. His sentence will be announced next week.

The young man confessed to having struck the baby but without intending to kill him. He was charged with having committed his act after the baby touched him, which then caused the young man to lose the video game he was playing.

He then laid on top of the baby for several minutes. When the baby stopped moving, the young man started a new game. The mother discovered the dead child upon her return.

Attorney for the defense pleaded that his insensitivity was caused by several consecutive days spent playing video games, an argument that was not sustained by the court. The young man could face 25 years imprisonment.

"All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation." ___W.H. Auden

Canadian Court Outrage Du Jour

Quebec's provincial license plate carries the motto, "Je Me Souviens", "I remember..." Well, today Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Superior Court of Quebec has given Canadians from coast to coast something useful to remember:
Don't try raising children in Quebec.



Justice Tessier decided that a father had no right to ground his 12-year old daughter for having disobeyed him:

The girl had taken her father to Quebec Superior Court after he refused to allow her to go on a school trip for chatting on websites he tried to block, and then posting "inappropriate" pictures of herself online using a friend's computer.
...
According to court documents, the girl's Internet transgression was just the latest in a string of broken house rules. Even so, Justice Suzanne Tessier found her punishment too severe.
...

The National Post reports the backstory that led up to the case:

The dispute between father and daughter began when he cut off her Internet access over her misuse. When she continued to find a way to use the Internet, he told his daughter she couldn't go on the three-day school trip.

The girl's mother allowed her to go on the trip, but because the school wouldn't allow the girl to go unless both parents consented, the girl, with the mother's support took legal action against her father.

According to [the father's lawyer Kim Beaudoin], the judge ruled that denying the trip was unduly severe punishment.

Has this judge thought about what happens to the family when the little girl gets back from her field trip? What if the budding teenager starts dating a boy much older than herself, and the father objects to that, as well? What can he do about it? What if the girl doesn't feel like going to school, and starts skipping class? What recourse does the father have to teach her right from wrong, as he values it...


...should he take her to court?



One place that he is not going to take her, thanks to the court ruling, is... back home:

The father, who is appealing the decision, was "devastated" by the ruling, and is refusing to take his daughter back "because he has no authority over her."

The Wisdom of Barbers

Even more than taxi drivers and bus drivers, the workers I most enjoy having a conversation with these days are barbers. Embarrassing confession time: when I was younger (and pathetically foolish) I went around with misplaced contempt for laborers such as these; why aren’t you out trying to change the world, I would scowl naively under their clippers… why aren’t you trying to “make a difference”? What kind of life are you living, by settling for being a “mere” barber??

Well, these half-forgotten memories bubbled shamefully to the surface today as I looked at my [sigh… balding] reflection in the bathroom mirror and judged that I desperately needed a haircut. Is it a sign of mid-life crisis, to be constantly measuring one’s current views against those held so dogmatically in one’s youth? Because I am increasingly stunned at the degree of change I notice within myself, especially my thoughts on the little things in life. I’ll take it as hopeful evidence that I’ve perhaps become a “grown-up”, at long last, for I now look forward to the perspective and wisdom that barbers, in particular, have to teach me.

This morning I found much to learn indeed. In my wanderings I discovered a wonderful shop owned by a warm and welcoming Eastern European gentleman. It didn’t take long to discover this was a match made in Heaven, him loving to share stories and me loving to listen.

Forty years in Canada after a youth spent rotting behind the Iron Curtain gave this older worker stories aplenty, let me tell you..! When I eventually asked him what he thought when he saw younger people sporting USSR logos on t-shirts and hammer-and-sickle icons on baseball caps, our conversation really turned interesting. “They don’t know, and they don’t want to know”, he said after the briefest of pauses. Is there any simpler way to summarize the willful ignorance of youthful vanity? His statement certainly summarized my position back when I was high on the illusory virtues of socialism during my own naïve youth.

From his perspective of having had the same shop in the same place for decades, often serving young customers from birth to college, he had many sad personal observations about the deterioration of the bonds of Family, and the changes brought upon family life by the ready prevalence of drugs. “Is it always the kids fault they take these things, when they see their own father selling it? When they see their own mother using drugs at home all the time?” Who will teach them right and wrong, if it is not their parents, he asked rhetorically.

Well, the memory of our fascinating conversation suggests to me a suitable answer to this rhetorical question: it is the example of the dedicated laborer, it is the witnessing of the harvest of the dependable worker, it is through contact with these positive experiences that civilization holds the chance to steer the young away from their current self-serving paths of self-destruction. Someone who takes pride in having their job done well, someone who enters into a contractual commitment with another and then works not just to fulfill expectations, but to surpass them… surely it is experiences and examples such as these that can have the necessary influence to save an empty life tumbling towards self-destruction.
Success doesn't just happen; it is made to happen. If a kid doesn’t know how to do anything, then no wonder they feel no loss in getting high; they have no skills to impair, no responsibilities to jeapardize, no future success to look forward to. If someone has never earned anything from the sweat of their own labor, then no wonder they are quick to adopt the belief system that the fruit of everyone's labor should be re-distributed “fairly”; they have not tasted the natural intoxication that can come from the pride of earning so much that much can then be given to charity… charity itself being the true blessing of wealth, socialism being the negation of charity.

If I could travel back in time, the older gentleman that I’ve become would greet his younger self with a sympathetic, yet stern correction to his youthful dreams of wanting to “change the world” by “making a difference”. Change the world, he would say, by daring to change yourself: embrace the ultimate challenge to make yourself into a Better Person, since, considering your starting position, that will be change aplenty to satisfy anybody. Make a difference in others' lives by making your own life one filled with differences: keep improving your ability to be of increased service to others. Change through the leverage of positive example.

The young who fry their minds with their poisons, whether in literal doses through drugs or figurative ones like marxism, are in a race against time, as each time either noxious fumes are ingested it weakens their ability to be of further long-term service to others, and therefore to themselves. In their adoption of a cynically self-serving nihilism they curse themselves to remain children of mind even as they age in body, always needing the protective care of servants, whether from their own family, or the proxy one of the state.

The race is on: will the minds of the young last long enough to learn the humiliating lessons so necessary to true growth? Will the good examples in their lives outnumber the bad, revealing that the biggest rewards so often come from the simplest of acts of service... like the humble achievement of being able to offer a good haircut, as advertised?
May they learn the humility to say a grateful “thank you” from appreciating the treasure that is a job well done…
and a Covenant fulfilled.

But he must have been crazy!

A man physically hinders himself in a ridiculous costume, walks into a bank with no weapon and demands money. The bank gives him some. Why? Maybe because the rule book just says give bank robbers some money, don't risk lives; and no one who writes rule books is creative enough to imagine this situation. We often talk about modern bureaucratic society creating a world of mental infants and cowards who bend to any and every threat from bad guys. Is this yet more proof or am I just imagining things?

(WBZ) MANCHESTER, NH Police are looking for a man who attempted to disguise himself as a tree and rob a bank in Manchester, New Hampshire Saturday morning.

Police say the suspect used duct tape to attach tree branches onto his body as a form of camouflage. He then walked into the Citizens Bank on Elm Street and demanded money.

No one was hurt in the robbery and no weapons were used, according to police. The bank was closed and police cruisers blocked off the entrances to the bank as officials investigated the incident.

Aside from sporting tree branches, the suspect was also wearing a bluish-colored T-shirt, blue jeans and had thick glasses. He was about 5' 8" tall with a thin build and dark hair.

The tree robber was able to escape with an undisclosed amount of cash.

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