Protest Puppets
At what age do the privileges and responsibilities of adulthood begin?
To drive: 16-18
To drink: 21
To smoke tobacco: 21
To get a credit card: 18
To sign a contract: 18
To have a mortgage: 18
To get married: 18-21
To vote: 18
To serve in the military: 18
To buy a gun: 18-21
To legally consent to sexual interaction: 16-18
As we all know, our society has reached a consensus that a person becomes an adult at 18, with some variances to reflect another consensus that there's a transitional period, i.e. there's no magic switch thrown on one's eighteenth birthday. We can debate the fairness of allowing eighteen year olds to die for their country but not to buy tobacco or alcohol or (in some states) the guns they wield in the military, or argue about the age of majority itself, but it’s quite clear that it shouldn’t be 6 or 8 or 10 or 12.
Why?
Because the human brain isn't fully formed until after a certain amount of growth. A toddler is obviously incapable of understanding that signing a contract is a legally enforceable obligation, but a 40 year old of sound mind is. Therefore, there has to be a point in between where such understanding begins.
Many, however, grant a presumption of understanding to minors in many other areas.
Well, not quite.
Throughout history, adults have inculcated children with their beliefs, opinions, and preferences. That is a parent's prerogative, though we can find ample reason to object to extreme instances of this near-ubiquitous behavior. The best parents are the sorts who teach their children how to think in addition to telling then what to think (the latter is, I'd say, virtually inevitable in a child's early years). Ditto for school teachers, scout masters, and other parental proxies.
That "best" are, unfortunately, becoming rarer and rarer.
You have kids in elementary schools who are being urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressmen and presidents about nuclear energy. They're not a decade old, and they're being thrown these kinds of questions that could absorb the lifetime of a very brilliant and learned man. And they're being taught that it's important to have views, and they're not being taught that it's important to know what you're talking about, it's important to hear the opposite viewpoint, and more important to learn how to distinguish why Viewpoint A and Viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it. They disregard that. They hear something, and they get some rhetoric, and they run with it.
This is a terrible disservice to our young and our society's future, but it gets worse. It's not enough that kids are being told what to think. They are often mobilized, weaponized, and puppeteered to advance their inculcators' beliefs. How many kids who march at climate protests truly understand the realities, disagreements, debates, realpolitik, and policy disputes of anthropogenic climate change mitigation? How many brought out for abortion rallies - pro or con - comprehend the moral, philosophical, and metaphysical disagreements over abortion enough to form their own opinions or draw their own conclusions? Can prepubescent children understand the complexities of human sexual attraction and interactions when they join in Pride or “values” marches, given that the hormones that are at their core haven't started coursing through their bodies yet?
This use of kids as protest padding exists across the political spectrum, but the "what" rather than "how" is, nowadays, far more the Left's doing than anyone else's, especially given its overwhelming dominance in primary, secondary, and tertiary education. Lenin's belief that inculcation of minors could establish permanent socialistic tendencies is a century old echo of today's indoctrinaire mindset in many educators. That some want to lower the voting age to 16 is rather clearly a presumption that most 16 and 17 year olds will vote as they’ve been trained to.
Back to kids protesting. Up until very recently (as in the ideating that created this article), I had a sense of respect for the idealistic earnestness that kids who joined rallies and chanted slogans exhibited. And, I still do for those near-adults who appear to have put some original and critical thought into their opinions and activism. But I now stand quite skeptical of most such demonstrations, given the immaturity of young minds, the ubiquity of inculcation both at home and at school, and the substitution of Critical ABCDE Theory and FGHIJ Studies for critical thinking and epistemology.
Those kids waving placards at Protest_01? I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that their slogans and mantras reflect beliefs and conclusions put into their heads by the adults who brought them there. Most of them are nothing more than props, intended to add to the size of the crowd and to make "for the children" appeal-to-emotion fallacies.
Give me a high schooler who's well-versed in a subject and armed with a modicum of critical thinking skills, and I will happily engage in conversation. Both of us can learn from it. But, a kid that's simply repeating what his teacher or parent planted in his brain pan? Better to skip the proxy and talk to the indoctrinator.
And what a talk that would be.
Back in my restaurant days, we had employees of literally dozens of nationalities across the years. Many of Middle Eastern descent, practicing Muslims, would routinely break most of the religion's tenets, but a couple were as ingrained as DNA. Pork, in particular, horrified some so much that they'd not eat french fries made in a fryer that might have also been used to reheat sausages. Is there any basis for such a revulsion in a modern society? Clearly not, but the inculcation from birth onward was so strong that looks of fear or horror would cross their faces if they suspected they might have eaten a 'tainted' fry. Is that fair to do to a child?
Likewise, consider the arc of Megan Phelps-Roper, granddaughter of the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church, a sect (cult?) that gained notoriety for its public spewings of bile and hatred at the funerals of soldiers and murdered gays. As a child, she'd sing the church's songs, including "God Hates America," "American Sodomite," "Hey Jews," and many others beyond the ability of the young to fully grok. It took her many years and much strength of will to break from that hatred.
While on the topic of religious inculcation, need I mention the young people brainwashed into blowing themselves up with a promise of heavenly reward? Or the countless wars, mayhem, and murderous clashes born of conflicting faiths or conflicts within faiths? Nowadays, we can point at the Shia-Sunni rift, but the body count of Protestant v Catholic should not be dismissed or relegated, nor should that of the Indian Partition.
As I noted above, it is parents' right to teach their children the beliefs and value they esteem. I would argue that is parents' responsibility to also teach their children how to think, how to question, and in time how to decide upon those beliefs themselves. If the values, beliefs, and conclusions stand up to scrutiny, the children will continue to embrace them. If, however, the parents fear that in teaching them critical thinking skills the children might "stray" from what was taught, doesn't that bring into question the teachings themselves?
Today's musing was inspired in part by the news that Greta Thunberg, poster child (in both a figurative and literal sense) of global warming catastrophism, was "removed" from an anti-coal protest in Germany.
Thunberg, now 20, was 15 when she started to protest, and gained notoriety for her "how dare you" speech at a climate summit a couple years ago.
I cannot know, but I do speculate, that Thunberg's climate activism wasn't born in a vacuum, and that the presentation of the subject didn't come even close to covering either the complexities or the range of opinions and conclusions out there. And that she has been exploited by activists who really don’t care about leveraging her or other kids to serve their ends.
Oh, just to pull the curtain back a bit, Greta’s removal appears to be a stunt, with video of her taking pix with the police emerging. I rather doubt those who urge the young to emulate her are going to share that part of the story.
"For the children!" is a time-honored tactic for dodging dispassionate defense of a position or policy. That it's crass and exploitive doesn't bother its users, because winning the fight is, for many, more important than being right. If you're right, you shouldn't need to use or abuse kids to prove your point. The harm that's done is immeasurable.
An afterthought, because it's bound to come up in the comments or social media discussion: We are in the midst of a truly insane cultural moment, where children who aren't even allowed to drive are given the power to say "pump chemicals into my body and cut parts of me off, because I feel like I might be a girl rather than a boy, or vice versa." That those who think that for even a moment are set upon by the "gender affirmation" industry is, IMO, not only morally repugnant, it's callous and reckless endangerment. Get to adulthood, do what you want. But, this business of puberty-blocking or actually transitioning minors is something that absolutely boggles my mind, and things like suicide attempt rates pre- and post-, the wildly disproportionate number of minors that declare "trans-" and many other factors leave me very confident I'm right in my opposition.
And a second. We’ve heard, time and again, how the high muckety-mucks of education don’t think parents should have any input on how or what their kids are taught. Similar bleats from that side of the fence regarding minors who want to transition. And, now, vaccinations.
A bit over a year ago, I asked, “whose kids are they anyway?” The answer, in their minds, hasn’t changed.
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Peter.
"How dare you" should be the question asked of Thundberg's parents. The damage they've done to that child's psyche may be irreparable.
When my son was in high school, he and the entire student body were shepherded out of school by staff to participate in social/climate protest demonstrations. Our tax dollars at work in “education”, indeed.