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jducoeurSo there I was, a few days ago, driving around Cambridge, when I passed a sight that has stayed uncomfortably with me. It was a neat line of small children on the sidewalk, each maybe four years old. (I'm bad with ages: small, but big enough to be walking down the sidewalk escorted.) The line was neat because they were attached to a pair of ropes -- each child's wrist was tied into the rope, and each rope had an adult at the front and back, with about six kids between them.
My inner engineer marveled at the simple efficiency of this solution for keeping a dozen children safe while walking down a busy city sidewalk. But my inner sociologist squirmed uncomfortably.
Mind, the kids didn't seem to mind: their eyes were wandering hither and yon as they walked, largely ignoring their right hand held up slightly by the rope. But that's kind of the point -- children at that age learn from everything happening to them. So I have to wonder: what does this teach?
I confess, I find it creepy as all hell. The implicit message seems to be that captivity is right and appropriate, so long as it is intended to keep you safe. I suspect that most people would word that differently, but many would agree with it in spirit. It makes my skin crawl.
To understand a person, it's often best to understand their formative literature. If you want to understand me, I commend the novelette With Folded Hands, by Jack Williamson. (The basis for the followup novel The Humanoids.) It's fairly old (I confess, I last read it decades ago), but perhaps even more than 1984 it shaped much of my political philosophy. If the above scene does *not* make you squirm, the story might help you understand why it does me...
My inner engineer marveled at the simple efficiency of this solution for keeping a dozen children safe while walking down a busy city sidewalk. But my inner sociologist squirmed uncomfortably.
Mind, the kids didn't seem to mind: their eyes were wandering hither and yon as they walked, largely ignoring their right hand held up slightly by the rope. But that's kind of the point -- children at that age learn from everything happening to them. So I have to wonder: what does this teach?
I confess, I find it creepy as all hell. The implicit message seems to be that captivity is right and appropriate, so long as it is intended to keep you safe. I suspect that most people would word that differently, but many would agree with it in spirit. It makes my skin crawl.
To understand a person, it's often best to understand their formative literature. If you want to understand me, I commend the novelette With Folded Hands, by Jack Williamson. (The basis for the followup novel The Humanoids.) It's fairly old (I confess, I last read it decades ago), but perhaps even more than 1984 it shaped much of my political philosophy. If the above scene does *not* make you squirm, the story might help you understand why it does me...
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-23 08:34 pm (UTC)Yeah, maybe. Then again, maybe not. I remember knowing "that kid" from when I was a kid, and my experiences in my neighborhood don't really make me feel that there are that many more of "those kids" now than 30 years ago.
In my opinion, what has really changed is the immediate vilification of the parent any time anything bad happens to a child. I'm not saying there aren't really truly neglectful bad parents, but all of us have done something we "shouldn't have". Maybe we left the kid in the tub alone for thirty seconds. Maybe we drove to the store not realizing the kid was in his car seat but he was not buckled in. It's pure statistics that our one or two moments of "parent-fail" don't end in tragedy. But look at the comments in every news story. This one is a real gem:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/08/16/united_airlines_loses_10_year_old_girl_enters_social_media_hell.html
Note how many people are outraged, not that a company failed to provide a service that was paid for, but that a parent would allow a child to fly alone at all, without a cell phone and a GPS tracker chip and a can of mace.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-23 08:46 pm (UTC)Yeah, I think that's a big part of it, and is part of why I'm looking at this as a sociological problem rather than any individual's fault. There seems to be this pervasive belief that it should be *impossible* for any child to ever get hurt, and that someone must be blamed to the point of vilification should it ever happen.
That *does* seem to be a significant change from when I was growing up, and I agree that it is likely driving a lot of other things via the resulting social (and legal) pressure.
Of course, that's itself a special case of the growing meme that life should be fair, and that it must be *somebody's* fault when it isn't. But that's a much larger point...
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-24 01:12 am (UTC)I am worried some busybody neighbor will call CPS and I will have to spend the next week explaining away that one moldy item in the back of the fridge mold, or why cosleeping won't kill him, or why my gay roommate is not a potential pedophile, no matter what you saw on the news.