"THE QUEER CHILD" (Part Two)

In the end, the book called “The Queer Child”  by Kathryn Bond Stockton turned out to be not at all what I expected.  Not disappointing, but a lot of work to figure out and then not with the end point I expected — I suppose I thought it would be something like how to protect and nurture such a child.

First, let me note that the photographer for the front cover is Sean Graff who points out he has copyrighted his work.  Instead of reproducing anything more than the book cover, I’ll just link to his website:  http://www.seangraff.com/bio.php  His photos are remarkable, somehow familiar and yet askew in a subtle way.

In the end the chapters that began by focussing on children in terms of their gender identity (not necessarily considering themselves gay, but claiming a role that the culture labels either male or female) or sexual objects (with only hints at acts), went on to discuss children who murder or adult murderers looking back at their childhoods, and then finally children and money.  

His name was Eric Smith.

But it was NOT about comforting them and guiding them to “healing,” as in Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child.”  The real subject of this book seems to be NOT the odd or peculiar child, but the peculiar fear society has of the child who is unpredictable, atypical or maybe out-of-control.  As a powerless child (if there is such a thing) grows into an adult along a gradient of increasing power, at what point can sheltering stop and controlling begin without the adults becoming monstrous?  At what point can a child be said to have a clear legally defined motive of murder?

Queerness is comparative.  Our assumption is that there will be a mainstream path guiding the growth of children and that this will lead to a typical responsible adult.  But small minority cultures don’t raise their children the same way and don’t result in the same kinds of adults.   Even regional differences are famously liable to produce different adults.  Children who have survived disasters or criminal uses or captivity (which might be luxurious) are different — will always be different even as adults.  Some children are just wired differently.  Many studies show left-handedness has real-world consequences.

We are discovering the enormous plasticity of humans, even in terms of brain neurons which provide many workarounds and even maybe auxiliary hard drives.  But everything has limits and appearances can be deceiving, so that the most charming of little pinafore-wearing girls may set the house on fire.  Almost all of the school shooters seemed “normal” (sorta) until they obviously weren’t.  It’s a hard puzzle to solve, esp. when it’s complicated by people moving around from one culture to another, even if its from suburb to ghetto.  

As in the existence of any gradient, the inequity — which may or may not be transient if we’re talking about money — may linger in a hoard of resentments, betrayals, lusts and disgusts.  At some point the individual may have the power of payback and act in revenge, if only by creating a life that offends and embarrasses parents.  Possibly as drastic as murder.

We create such anomalies by our treatment of children, even the assumptions that could be called mainstream. That derives from what we think they are:  Embryo adults?  Higher than animals but no angels?  Repositories for our hopes regarding the future?  Lurking in the background is stuff not normally discussed: how we treat truly dangerous children, which currently seems to mean casting them into a bear pit with oversexed mercenaries.  In short, destroying them without admitting it.

The boundary between the generations is meant to be both control and protection.  The older generation is notorious for wanting the next set of kids to be just like they were or maybe the way they wished they were, but sometimes the way those parents turned out doesn’t say much for the desirability of the results.  Even if they are honorable and well-intentioned, the times change and what went well for one time can be a disaster for a later time.  Demographics alone stir the mix in ways no one really understands.  

What does it mean when over the half the US is “people of color” and what does “people of color” mean anyway, or even “Spanish-speakers” when the cultures of the Southern Hemisphere are so various: Cuba is nothing like Chile.  An increasing number of people are mixed in many ways: mestizo is beginning to be a demographic overlay on what was previously separate, a forming but invisible nation, like Metis on the northern prairie.

A child of eight is sent north by himself with a little money and the name of a big city where he may have an auntie, if she hasn’t moved on.  He knows how to get to the train that people ride but will need skills to keep from being taken advantage of, and a good grasp of possible danger to keep from being hurt by the train itself or by lawmen. 

Here’s what the academic shrinks say about eight-year-olds:

▪ Eight-year-olds enjoy having the opportunity to solve problems independently. They are able to concentrate on tasks for longer periods of time and begin to use their own resources prior to seeking adult help or they may seek out peers for assistance. Eight-year-olds demonstrate more highly-developed thinking skills as well as the ability to solve problems with creative strategies.

▪ The language skills of eight-year-olds continue to show the impact of their developing literacy skills. Children's fundamental reading skills are established and one function of reading becomes its use for learning about various topics. At the same time, children's writing skills continue to develop. A child's language and literacy skills lay the groundwork for academic achievement and will be the route through which academic learning will progress.

Our imaginary kid probably can’t read very well.  But the same skills might serve him pretty well: an eye for detail, a good memory for marks and shapes, a sense of story and relationship, and a line of bullshit.  When to resist people and when to join them, form alliances, be useful to them.  If he makes it to his auntie, and is taken to public school as the law requires though he probably doesn’t have a legal identity, he will be put into third grade unless no one thinks he can catch up without special ed or English as a second language.  Those same skills will work.

But what if he was raped, hurt, made to see things that were horrifying — like people falling under the train or children younger them himself shot because they ran?  Can an American impoverished school address that or the behavior that comes from that?  Will he be a citizen or even have a consciousness of the United States as a nation?  Who will he vote for:  a nice mommy with a very firm voice or a wildly entertaining madman with short fingers?

Maybe his auntie has fallen on hard times and is financing her drug comforts with sexual services.  What does the kid do to survive?  He is QUEER.  Forget "gay."  He is not any kid that suburban families are likely to know.  He is unpredictable.  He looks like bad people on street corners in the dangerous part of town.  Academics and journalists will be fascinated in a semi-sexual way, not quite tricks.

I myself am attracted, almost reassured by their darkness and exotic world, which I know in part from working the street in a uniform and in part from living on a rez.    But I don’t go sit on a curb and share wine with them — I COULD, but I don’t.  Somehow in my own queerness, I want to think about them in an abstract, generalized way.  So far that hasn’t gelled into one story or a book.  Blogging seems about right.  Reading Stockton seems worthy.  But I don’t recommend that just anyone enter this world.  It is, at core, as non-conforming as a drug-addicted auntie in a ghetto, though she is in fact conforming to her own world, to which she does NOT welcome me.  I’m feeling my way with empathy as much as deducing.

Stockton's later book.  It's about degradation.

How can I resist?

LUCIFER'S CHILDREN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-JzBeBfNEk

I have said and I believe that all evil is human.  It is created by humans, destroys humans, and nearly defines humans since I don’t know of another animal that is evil.  Some are destructive and some are killers, but not premeditated with evil motives.  Suffering is produced by human consciousness even when it is felt as though in the flesh, even when it is through empathy with others, including animals.  Evil is often attributed to the flesh, the bestial, in all its neediness and unreasonableness.  We demonize the yearning for food, water, love, control and status.  In the process of struggling over these things, we produce children -- sometimes so deformed and venomous that we might better call them spawn.  Is spawn evil?  But we are the ones who make them so. 

These things go in degrees, confused as our thinking about them may be.  In our Manichean-rooted world (filtered through Judaism, Christianity and Islam) which is all about enclosures (the fort, the palace wall), dichotomies (you’re either in or out), and control (hierarchies).  There are many definitions and boundaries -- always the goal and the effort is to keep things the same, inalterable, predictable.  But this planet is only temporarily and partially stained by this thinking.  We can find new paradigms.

I would like to distinguish between evil and sin.  Evil is human.  Sin, more than that, is institutional, a set of rules devised by humans in an attempt to control the Evil “FORCE” within people.  Sins are meant for lists and degrees of sinniness.   (The opposite of sunniness.) The worst list starts with everyone who, simply by existing, is sinful (Original Sin due to existing), so we all start “one down” which means that the authorities have the advantage.  (Not God.  There is no conceivable God.  The concept is a great emptiness and any attempt to define shrinks God to within limits so that he/she is NOT God, the Ultimate, the All Including, anymore.)  

The biggest sin, of course, is defying the authorities.  In a stroke of theatre, the Ten Commandments are engraved by lightning on tablets of granite and carried down off a mountain by Charlton Heston.  You’re supposed to do what they say, in spite of sly re-interpretations.  The next category “down” (all these defined by authorities who are authorized by institutions secular, religious or some mix) is capital crimes which justify a death sentence, then felonies, then misdemeanors, then “failure to obtain a permit” and regulations.  Where there are no institutions (failed states) and therefore no laws, there is no sin -- just force and chaos.  When laws become unjust, entangled, unenforceable, corrupted, the institution is attacked, which is the sin that ends sin.  But not evil, a force that remains so long as humans remain.

The breakthrough by the major religious thinkers (Jesus, not Calvin) was to leave rules and go to principles, like the Golden Rule.  That which one would want to be done to oneself, should be done to the others.  Universals.  The greatest good to the greatest number.  No monkey business about deservingness or whose turn it is.  (Experiments show that monkeys DO get upset about such issues.)

The breakthrough we’re trying to make now, in the 21^st century, is to the principle of fittingness.  As Shaw pointed out, the Golden Rule is not much help when dealing with a liver fluke.  But if we understand the place and interrelationships of liver flukes, we will understand more about life principles.  It is an ecological matter.  No need to spare the mosquito on our arm, as Schweitzer was reported to do, but we should only destroy enough of them to protect the children from malaria and be careful to understand what depends upon eating mosquitoes and what bats will eat if there aren’t any mosquitoes.  And not to use DDT, effective as it is, because of the side effects.  We don’t want to kill eagles.  As for the bed nets, they wear out and then where’s the money for replacement after Gates has bought so many?  Supplies need a money stream, not a donation.

So sin is fairly easy to deal with.  Just get the rule book, and, if you can, cross out all the rules that don’t answer to principles that serve the highest (oops, hierarchy alert!), broadest goals.  Throw out the petty offenses.  Try to be aware of what hurts others and oneself.  Over time.  Going into the future, make new rules that serve the well-being of self and whole.  Cultivate empathy.

Evil is the big problem, because it’s not an entity, it’s not supernatural, and it’s not definable.  It’s an ooze of temptation, suffering, greed, inequity -- well, it’s not exactly inequity because inequity (or probably more accurately unaddressed need) is what exudes evil.  It is the precursor pus of the infected wound.  We love its glamorous sheen.  We WANT scabrous inequity, so long as we have the high side of the seesaw.  It is the evil characters who fascinate us.

Evil is not sex, which is bright blood carrying the oxygen of life.  Not that blood can’t be infected or poisoned by hate microbes.  Evil is a process, a force, and so is sex, but they can be opposed to each other as much as mingled.  It’s not that sperm or ova are good or bad -- they are beginnings, potential, could go either way.  It’s the process that counts.  But it’s not a struggle between good and evil that creates a new child.  It is space in which to unfold them and diligent attention to mending their mosquito bed nets in a world where we can’t even trust highly trained loyal soldiers with our underground atomic missiles.

What’s to be done with Lucifer’s children?  Ironically, and in spite of Evil being a human force and Sin being institutionally defined, there is no human or institutional answer that has anything to do with Evil or Sin.  Institutions would put them in prison and lock the cell doors.  Evil would force conversion to the appearance of Obedience and Harmlessness.  Society could address the inequities and torturing stigmas, try to eliminate them by making laws and declaring rights.  Probably never will succeed.  These are only extensions and conversions of the same problem.

The only antidote to evil is good and good is as much a human construct as evil is.  That is, an impulse toward generosity and inclusion has to be there first, and then the ways of easing and justifying the suffering of children will appear.  The brain support for empathy -- whether it’s mirror cells or some other little knot of reacting cells -- is not there in everyone but for every person who looks at a child and feels what they feel, the moment of enfolding, warming and lifting up is at hand.  No institution, no rules, no greed can oppose that.  It’s totally subversive, sometimes secret, and even dogs can do it -- without drugs, without sex -- but with eyes.  We must learn to penetrate the darkness, to know without turning away, to double our gaze.

"Beau"