Okay, this one may be controversial, but it burns my shorts when you see how much time, money and effort goes into “missing children”, the pictures on the postcard phenomenon that scares untold millions of parents into locking up their latchkey kids and teaching them to scream, “Stranger danger!” whenever they don’t recognize someone.
I got a phone call from a guy once raising money for the missing kids. I asked him why the hell I (or he for that matter) should waste time or money getting involved in somebody else’s child custody battle.
He was stumped.
He said 40 gazillion children were stolen last week.
Uh huh. How many by their own parent?
The first few he tried to document, turned out to be all about Dad taking the kids, when Mom had been awarded them or vice versa and I hung up. The most likely sexual molesters of kids are siblings, parents and other close relatives, so we are wildly overestimating a practically nonexistent threat while burying a real one. Ridiculous.
I also love the idea that everything is morally corrupt today, and was so much better, say, fifty years ago. The modern era is evil. How we have fallen morally. The Evangelicals love this one. What complete bullshit.
Ask anyone Black who lived below the Mason-Dixon line in the 50’s or 60’s how much better and more moral America was then. Ask a choir boy ass raped by a priest how much more moral it was then. Ask someone who became pregnant by sexual abuse from a loving, Christian family member how moral the homes they were sent to and abused in were.
I had a conversation with one of my sister-in-laws in which she tried to convince me how important it was to fingerprint and tattoo our kids, cuz so many of them are stolen.
How much nonsense do people need to spread to keep Americans in fear? STOP IT!
2 comments:
fear and sex seem to be the key madison avenue sales motivators
I guess it has worked, too.
The increased sales in viagra and prozac and their growing family of kindred drugs, suggest that fear's step child: anxiety, and ...well...anxiety over sex, have certainly entrenched themselves in the american psyche.
Are we morally fallen now?
Hasn't every new generation felt like this, or everyone getting older?
Times aren't what they used to be....
I even do this with my own life.
Oh my time here, blah blah blah, it was great, it was a golden age... blah blah blah.
No.
Live is somewhat cyclical, and I guess that means it always has been.
I am trying to live right NOW, learning from experience and history, and hoping.
I remember you telling me this whole missing child phenomena.
I grew up terribly frightened every time I had to venture to large public spaces like the mall, cause there were always large scary men, in trench coats, waiting to take me away to some tortured basement.
No one should have to grow up with that fear.
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