THE CHILD AT RISK

The phrase “children at risk.” involves complex layers of taboo and stigma that come from forces the child has no control over, but must accept the punishment for.  Every culture handles the duality in a different way.  Contemporary culture with its deeply potent confusion of sex, violence and commodification (money) offers little help, so individuals -- who themselves may have been corroded by bad childhoods -- just wing it, sometimes happily and other times with destructive injustice that they are motivated to keep secret.

1.  Deep philosophical assumptions about children are opposite to each other:  on the one hand they are considered “pure,” innocent, close to God who cherishes them, and angelic in a toy-like sentimental way.  On the other hand they are considered little animals, uncivilized, dirty, disobedient, and deserving regular punishment.  This doubleness is irreconcilable.

2.  A child’s value is determined by family.  Having no family or a rejecting family or an exploiting family means that that child suffers and is crippled because the culturome -- the “memes” that connect it to other people -- are not “built” in an orderly line of development.  The cues they give others, the meanings they take away, just don’t fit.  To survive and because no child can help it, he or she simply seizes on whatever can be grasped without help, seriously distorting potential, leaving out basics and grafting on harmful habits and assumptions.

3.  “Bad children” are stigmatized to the point that movies are made about “demon children” or “possessed children” and the ordinary resentment of kids towards authority figures is exaggerated beyond reality, criminalized.  The power of children is feared, resented, and punished.  The real paradox between powerless innocence and emotional potency shapes culture-wide reactions in mythology, like the representation of the Christ as both a newborn and as a fully mature man.

4.  Dirt and disease are feared in several ways.  Children have to be taught NOT to put everything into their mouths for fear of contamination and poisoning and yet that’s their basic instinct and way of interfacing with the world. In the days before habitual use of soap and water, sewering away of excrement and garbage, and antibiotics, children with their undeveloped immunities were subject to what are called “childhood diseases”:  measles, chicken pox, mumps, whooping cough, tonsillitis, colds and flu.  

More exotic diseases exist in tropical countries full of insect vectors.   A high percentage of the children die at a young age.  And yet starving women in Africa carry their dead babies a hundred miles, unable to put them down.  One of the most recurrent images in Third World documentaries is the mother outside with a small child in a basin, gently washing it.  Victorians who had the resources dressed dead babies elaborately and photographed them.

Children as vectors are not much discussed, though they may have carried HIV since before birth, their diapers may be dangerous (polio transmission after immunization was a concern when live but attenuated virus was administered), and children who are used sexually carry all the usual transmissible germs.  People who work with small children are notoriously prone to catch colds and flu.  Polio, called “infantile paralysis,” was a virus that targeted children in much the same way that HIV originally targeted gays.

5.  A child’s appeal and the normal impulse to fondle, cuddle and kiss can become sexual, but then if there is guilt or a wish to dominate and control, that can turn petting to harm and abuse.  Our culture and others consider children to be property of parents, “owned,”  therefore authorizing whatever is done with them, even starvation, caging, perversion and the withholding of life-saving medical care.  The category “child” tends to overlap with the categories of pet and toy, to be marginally inanimate.

The American Humane Society strives to protect both children and animals.  One of the earliest cases of child abuse prosecution is famously a little girl who was orphaned and abused.  Her rescuer wrapped her in a horse blanket and set her up high on the judge’s bench, asking, “Is this not a little animal who deserves our care and protection?”

6.  Children arrive so uncontrollably and abundantly, in spite of the provisions for contraception and abortion, that they exceed the capacity to care for them, particularly when the adults are themselves damaged.  Morality -- left over from the times when babies died and whole groups could thin and disappear unless fertility outstripped mortality -- prevents any sensible limits on giving birth.  Everyone wants to control everyone else’s bodies.  Poor people are told they cannot afford babies, but that they must have them, and yet there’s no help for raising them.  This is considered moral.

The desperate necessity of simply selling children, in part to save the lives of those kept in the family, can be overwhelming.  Jonathan Swift’s idea that the babies of Irish poor people be sold in butcher shops, considered a delicacy properly roasted for elaborate meals on the tables of the rich was only a more direct -- and some would say more humane -- strategy than letting them die by inches because of political policies that left them starving homeless.

On the other hand, children are constantly stolen as valued objects for trafficking, needed replacements because children “age out” of being attractive, or get sick, or just die.  With the ubiquitousness of HIV infection, children meant for sexual use may simply be killed -- certainly not treated, which is very expensive.  If they are simply thrown out, they become vectors.

7.  Society treats children as livestock: gathering, incarcerating, maintaining at minimum standards, and occasionally using violence or adult strategies (solitary confinement, lack of food, restraints, electric shocks) to keep them under control with a minimum of employees.  Therapy, medical treatment, contact with former intimates, education are all either skimped or omitted.  The public is not allowed to know any of this.

8.  Maybe children have always known about toxic substances but in modern times things that fume and poison are everywhere from glue to prescription drugs and the search for unconsciousness as bliss is constantly promoted -- miserable lives are certainly motivation enough.  Drugs are continuous with suicide, making the transition easy.

The previous considerations have applied to infants, toddlers, and children in what is called “latency” though the pre-adolescent years of 6 to 11 or so, when a child seems to be self-sufficient and in some cultures begins to work.  They are actually the most important identity-creating years of a person.  This is the period when a child becomes smarter than Lassie, more thoughtful than a chimp, more personally unique than any other human, more able to grasp ethnicity and religion.  Damage in these years is indelible and yet these are the years of exploration and voluntary risk as a child becomes more self-determining.  They are also years when a child is useful for labor, able to master something like rug weaving and keep at it day after day.  Toddlers are commercially useful only as sexual objects.

It is in adolescence that the “wickedness” of the pre-adult not-quite-children, is always suspected and often enacted.  A boy may be as big and strong as an adult;  a girl can produce a baby.  Sexuality is demonized by some and exploited by others.  A blurry boundary between non-consensual and the age of adult responsibility means confusion for the law.  The culture raises the desirability of the bodies of these ages above all others.  Even haute couture models are commonly teenagers.

Management of the trafficked teen must be harsher, more psychological, more drug-based in order to compensate for the near-adult ability of this person to rebel.  Sexual use can be expanded if the near-adult can begin to participate actively, to interact emotionally, to become attached to the “owners” or even devoted.  In addition, even pimps and tricks “fall in love,” meaning they become obsessed and will not release their possessed humans, like Jefferson refusing to free his quarter-black children and half-black second wife.

At adolescence people begin to pair off, a natural impulse that creates generative marriage commitment to support children or same-sex partnerships useful in war and hunting.  If the near-adult attaches to an exploiter, he or she becomes vulnerable emotionally.  Lives can become a desperate plummet from infancy to death.

But also, as a growing person becomes self-aware and able to think beyond immediate circumstances, they can change, even heal, rather miraculously help others who want the same.  It's called "free will."  Even if the body is trapped.

GIVE ME THE MAD CHILDREN WHO DANCE IN RAIN

Several quotes from the first page of this book ("The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping" by "Nasdijj") have become rather famous, as follows:

“I want the mad ones.  The children mad enough to struggle and survive.  I want the children who have seen war.  The children mad enough to question everything.  The children who have had everything taken away from them.  The children who are broken and mad enough to attempt to repair themselves.   The children mad enough to spit and fight.  Mad enough to laugh outrageously.  Mad enough to make a music of their own.  Mad enough to see themselves as individuals.  I want children who will dance in rain.  I want the mad, crazy ones.  I want the ones insane enough to love hard, and brave enough to be vulnerable.”  

This lays out the bill of particulars for the story.  It is a litany for discarded, troublesome kids, the kind that plague streets and ruined buildings around the planet.  The feral children who have escaped society.

Then “I am haunted by deep, electric flashes of music, memory, dragons and madness.”    So now we know where the author is coming from.  He sounds a little druggy, but up for adventure because of already being a little out of control.  Men who are like him -- carrying Castenada in their backpacks -- haunt reservations out West.  If you should happen to think he’s an Indian, he won’t mind.  He talks like an Indian: everything an evasion, about masks and secrecy, “the power of the enigmatic, and of things that breathe fire and fly about the midnight sky.”  This is neither anthropological nor demographic.  Some will find it spiritual.

I will not defend my right to talk about indigenous people.  I have fifty years of friendship with the Blackfeet and their braided-in related peoples like Cree or Metis or Sioux -- even whites like myself and (lately) African Americans.  This has taught me to never try to define how they eat, what they do, the content of their religion, or the way they describe their families.  In this book I see the spine of the story as being a tension between the mainstream culture and the doomed individual human being, esp. the child.  

The “Navajo” then constitute a third context that goes at least potentially closer to the ideal, a way that allows a person to be themselves.  Rez life is faulty, it's impoverished, it’s inconvenient, it’s scary.  This is not a critique of the indigenous but rather its use as a shadow of what could be.  In fact, one whole stream of Western thought believes that Indians are noble, generous, and therefore worthy.  They are “Other” in the best sense, because they live close to nature.  The narrator is trying to be this kind of “Other” without quite being able to get past the ugly side of stigma and poverty.

The core question is what anyone can do to be saved in a world that simply won’t allow salvation since we all die.  It is a heightened anguish when it comes to our desire to protect and love children.  Yet we discard children to disease, carelessness, ignorance and predators.  Many, as described above (mad, wild), are wanted by no one.  And it is a fact that everyone dies in the end.  (The Christian dogma is about AFTER death.)  But this need not be grim if we take joy in each other, what we might call the laughter of unfolding, so full of surprises, so irrepressible.

The story starts in rain, a powerful force in the SW high plateau country.  The Navajo sun god “cast his sons out, sending them to earth with enormous, almost impossible tasks to complete” and “my little jeep shook.” (I know he still drives that jeep.)  He speaks of his wife.  (He is telling the truth.  Tina IS the author’s wife and she is as he describes: urban, educated, gifted, strong and able to save people, including the author.)

The next move in the story is to the writer as he is giving a reading, frustrated by an audience which has no interest in poverty and suffering.  They want the familiar but paradoxically also magic. (Water to wine.) This time it is the boy -- not his father -- who comes to the bookstore and asks to join the writer.  

Look back at the paragraph about children who are mad, gifted, full of energy, impossible to capture.  They stay in school only long enough to get a hot lunch.  They cannot be put on detention.  No one knows where they stay.  Their parents are missing.  In his sensational way, the author says, “We find bodies of nude boys in ditches.  No one knows who they are or where they came from.  Strangled and dumped in the desert.”  In my practical schoolteacher, animal control officer, and prairie pastor way, I accept this as true.  You won’t find the facts in the newspaper or with the FBI.  The only inaccuracy is that usually what is found around here is bones.  I guess they were bare.

So there are two ways to read this story, one as an initiated person who reads with recognition and the other as a person who is barely aware of this under-world and doesn’t really believe it’s true.  As a mediating context, the author goes to baseball -- that all-American summer ritual that so many people understand.   He says Awee is “something extraordinarily unique, something more beautiful than anything you have ever seen.  Something mad.  Mad to live.  

"Inside a dream.”  

He puts a paragraph break just before that last phrase.  Does he mean the boy wants to live inside a dream?  Or does the author want to tell the story as though it’s inside a dream?  Or both?  (If I had written this book and it was about a Blackfeet boy, I would have had him play basketball.  Not because that is a tribal thing -- though it is now -- but because in this climate you need an inside game and because kids play alone, sinking baskets through empty hoops.)

He says, “This entire book (and then some) could be about his eyes.”  I’ve written a post about the theory of “the Gaze,” but until I sent it to him, Tim did not know this body of theory.  The fact that it seems so apt and useful justifies its arcane and esoteric source in French philosophy.  

But this author is after change.  He says, “Change is one child at a time.  Change is one family at a time.  Change is changing the madness of culture into the spirituality of the individual one social structure at a time.”  (p. 15)  This book is meant to make one child so irresistible that we will be willing to change.  At the same time he hopes to discover how to change that boy, who is a kind of changeling anyway.  He is supernatural, described in the most hyperbolic terms.  But the real tragedy to this author is the neglected suburban boys from single parent families who pedal their bikes home in the dark.  They are weeping.

The author says baseball “. . . is about that abrupt unheaval where a human being in his skin and bones and iron determination meets the unmoved thing that is the earth.”   This is not a realistic story so there is no use trying to force it into questions about legal technicalities or conventional propriety.  Nor is the story pornographic.  But it is explicit in the ordinary way of children learning about peculiar stuff like jockstraps.  Talk about seeing and being seen.  Awee discovers his butt hangs out of the rig.  

The whole team joins his opinion and decides to risk their young maleness.  They win the game anyway, but it is the suburban losers who at least get a banana split apiece.  The ball itself is lost in the weeds on its way to China.  Boy and man go home together.  Not lonely now.

These are the basics as I see them.  Now to look at how they play out.