Of Childhood

And innocence

Image by Cedar

“Boy, you keep your nose out of grown folks’ business, you hear me?”

Delivered in the distinct, mellifluous tones of Southern African-American Grandmother; gentle, amused, and firm — a clear warning that disregard would result in me getting a knot snatched on my head, with more coming when my parents found out — this was something I heard fairly often as a child in the 1960s and 1970s.

At that time — at least in Africa and small-town Texas — it was the norm for children to be kept innocent of the evils and inequities of the world until about puberty; and then to be gradually and piecemeal exposed to the unfairness and unpleasantness behind the veil, until the age of majority, when you fully set aside the innocence and embraced the suck of being an adult.

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

Society as a whole — at least the parts I was exposed to — firmly believed that innocence was one of those “childish things” to be “put away” … but only after a certain age, and only on the way to being an adult member of society. That being innocent in childhood was a good thing; a necessary thing.

Archaic as modern society may hold that view, I’m not so sure that it isn’t the right one. I don’t recall a lot of childhood depression in the 60s and 70s. As a man in the 1980s, with friends who had children, I don’t recall anyone’s children being on mood stabilizers; and as a peace officer in the 1990s, that wasn’t something I ran across.

These days, though — bloody hell. I have several friends with children and grandchildren with clinical depression diagnoses and scrips for anti-depressants at single-digit age ranges.

That’s not good. That’s not right.

To be fair, and perfectly honest, a lot of the blame for that rests squarely on the shoulders of “social” media, and the 24-hour news cycle. Various platforms seem hell-bent on destroying childhood innocence in the name of it being good “for the children”.

Not perzackly sure how good it is for a bunch of nine year olds to be running around with the contents of an entire apothecary counter running through their veins, but … ok.

A lot of the remaining blame is on society itself. I used to say that the best thing for young boys (and young girls, too, I’d guess) was to hand them a dog of indeterminate ancestry, point them towards some acres of undeveloped countryside, and tell them to be home when the streetlights came on.

Unfortunately, these days Society Frowneth, and doing that will literally wind up with parents being arrested for neglect or somesuch. So, to avoid the Full Weight of Society’s Displeasure … we restrict them to only inside walls, in the company of devices that beam “social” media directly through their eyeballs.

You know who else we as a society restrict to spending most of their existence inside of walls? Criminals and inmates. Because it’s a punishment. Although prison inmates probably get more unsupervised recreation time during the day than the average urban child.

Madness.

And then there are those parents and politicians who use the destruction of childhood innocence to score social points.

Every time I see Greta Thunberg, I see a child who was so terrified by climate change that she became clinically depressed at age 11. And I love my Catholic friends — I really do — but when y’all’s Pope met with her and thanked that 16-year-old child for “her activism” and encouraged her to continue, y’all should have Gibb’s smacked that jackass and packed him off to a monastery to ponder his sins in silence.

When I see sub-teenage children holding signs at protests — particularly protests with a habit of going kinetic — I want to take a sjambok to their parents in the hopes that a couple of weeks in ICU will adjust the head-space and timing of their parents in regards to letting their children be innocent.

And when I see children involved in activities regarding the political aspects of human sexuality, I want to take their parents out behind a barn, tell them to look at the flowers and think of Ol’ Yeller.

But you know what? Politicians have figured out that destroying children’s innocence on the public stage is good for whichever side of a political argument they’re for; and we — as a society — have decided to tolerate such destruction.

For the public good, you understand.

I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know how to preserve the innocence of childhood, but I do know that we can’t keep putting more and more children — children — on chemical cocktails, because their unformed minds can’t deal with, aren’t equipped to deal with, adult issues … this isn’t a sustainable model for society.

We have to start remembering that children should keep their noses out of adult business again.

Ian