Jake Alsop http://oldscroteshome.blogspot.com/ is one of my favorite bloggers, a man full of drolleries, word play, love of tractors driven by well-endowed females, and sometimes surprising thoughts. Once in a while he gets indignant, as in the following post, which is the more surprising since he is in a quiet part of England, the better to bird watch.
Jake asks, “What is the matter with this photo?” The photo in question is a conventional group portrait of fourth or fifth graders with a distinguished-looking man standing behind them, hands innocently on the shoulders of two children.
Here’s the critique.
“1. It shows the children's faces, thus making them identifiable. Such photos should only be taken showing the children from the back, or at least with their faces not visible.
2. The adult is touching two of the children. No adult should touch children under any circumstances.
3. The adult is alone with the children. There must always be at least two adults when children are being accompanied.
“These are not my rules; these are published rules for the guidance of Local Education Authorities and similar.
“My friend Ruth is the head of a primary school. She cannot take a child in her car unless a second adult is present.
“My friend Amy Bell is a primary school teacher, who loves to organise outdoor wildlife events for her classes. But transport is now a problem because parents are not allowed to give lifts to other than their own children.
“Have we gone crazy, or what? We have created a society where mistrust and suspicion are the key virtues, where we all now have an unhealthy mindset, where normal relationships have been poisoned by those in authority who see sin in everything. A recent TV programme tested this by putting a child on its own in a shopping mall and then filmed the reactions of adult passers-by. The child was clearly distressed, but NOBODY offered to help it. Until finally some old scrote - and it would have been me if I had been there - went up to the child, took its hand and led it into a nearby store, from where they could make a phonecall for help.
“I love children. If I think a child is hurt or in distress, I will go to its aid. I am telling you this so you can start planning your prison visits to me when I end up in the chokey for being a Dirty Old Man. Damn them all.
“Envoi: I am very strict with myself these days: I only allow myself to be a Grumpy Old Man once a week."
I was telling a teacher and a school nurse about this post and they relayed an incident just days ago when a child needed a ride home. This is serious business on the rez at night with the temps below zero and icy roads. NO ADULT PRESENT WAS WILLING TO DRIVE THE CHILD HOME. The student luckily remembered she had a grannie in Browning who was willing to come get her.
How did we get so afraid of each other, so resistant to happenstance, so afraid of accidental injury -- possibly uninsured? Is it the steady media stream of ghastly incidents in which children meet terrible fates? I don’t have television and my radio station is NPR, so I’m spared quite a bit, but every time I go to visit Petunia the television is following in minute detail some unthinkable atrocity committed by some person no one suspected. (Mind you, there’s rarely or never anything about American bombs falling on children in some foreign country, though we occasionally see their bodies in the arms of despairing parents.)
Today the paper had a local story about two small children found on the street in our below-zero weather with no shoes or coats. A neighbor intervened. The police found the home through a name-sticker on one little girl. The parents were asleep with an infant howling on the floor by the bed -- both bed and floor covered with child and dog feces -- and another toddler screaming in a crib. The father works in a day care center. A normal response is to, well, over-respond. Forcible sterilization comes to mind: first the parents and then the premises. The same newspaper has a story about European proposed laws imposing castration on sex criminals. Of course, such irreversible penalties assume infallible detection of guilt.
When I reflect on the sources of Taliban/Puritan/draconian impulses in our society, I come upon two main causes: the first is money. We emphasize over and over how much money it is costing society for an irresponsible young couple to produce all these neglected children. We institute lawsuits that then make insurance rules more powerful than felony law. In history the times when Puritans have been in control have been the times when virtue was linked to parsimony, control, severity and hoarding. We have never given up the belief that wealth and status are markers of deservingness or that people get pushed to the edges of existence because they are no good. The current argument against the death penalty is that it’s too expensive because of all the appeals. It may only a matter of time before we give up the idea of sparing the occasional innocent by insisting on costly justice. Do like China: shoot ‘em, part ‘em out, and bill the family for the bullet.
The other force is community. Our emphasis on individualism and the right to do as we please has given us the idea that wanting something and working for it enough will get us ANYTHING. A comic strip is currently mocking this by showing a little boy, over-impressed by urgings to “be whatever he wants to be,” saying he wants to grow up to be a komodo dragon.
In the meantime, while our fear of taxes means that one out of fifty children in Montana is currently homeless for lack of government safety nets, we’ve all become komodo dragons by default. We don’t touch each other, we eat each other’s assets, we fear the warmth and human softness of fur and milk, those mammalian nurturing characteristics. We’ve forgotten that even dinosaurs -- at least maiasaurus whose bones are around here -- fed their babies in nests they kept clean.
2 comments:
I believe as the American Middle has disappeared, its media has as well -- NPR (and, up here, the CBC) being its final bastion. Network television and anything else you pull in via radio has been boiled down to tabloid sensationalism. Every week my mother-in-law informs us of a dire new activity "that's happening right in our own schools!" Usually these activities have been reported by whatever show happens to come before or after Oprah.
The constant barrage of sensationalism and psychopathic behavior has cultivated a fear culture that is wildly out of touch with reality. It's very difficult to work against it, but it certainly helps if you unplug that damn box once in a while.
The distortions also come, as you well know, because the media loves to report what is sensational as though it were normative. Yes, there are psychos out there—but they've never been in the majority, and they've never been as predatory as depicted. Yes, the world is a sometimes dangerous place—filled with disasters and dangers that it's much too easy to find out about now that the media has gone 24 hours—but no more than it ever was. Fear-mongering is the root of all this, and fear-manipulating is where it leads.
Some of this is also Orwellian surveillance culture: everybody is watching everyone else out of fear, as you say. I think it's nuts. I love children, too, although I have none of my own. The insane part of this scenario is that the culture has made itself crazy-bad insane over its own fears, and when the culture's insane, sane people are treated as though they were the crazy ones, when they're not. That's the aspect that gives me pause.
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