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God bless
the child that's got his own
mama may have, papa may
have...
4-20
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- One of the things
that I worried about when I discovered that I was about
to become a father was the fact that through the act of
bringing a child into this world, I gained instant
membership into one of the most myopic, single-minded,
overreactive interest groups that this country has ever
known
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- Concerned
parents.
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- Especially when my
son was only a few months old, and you could literally
see how fragile he was, I wondered if it
would be too long before I switched from being a loving
parent worried about his own child's welfare to the point
where I was crusading against the whole of humanity to
protect all helpless children from a world whose only
wish is to see them suffer...
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- I honestly
don't know what I would do if something happened to
him.
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- Kim and I were
discussing this, after watching yet another horrible news
story about a child needlessly dying in some accident.
How could we not go insane? How could we
not take out our anguish on anything, anybody that we
felt deserved the blame for such a tragedy?
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- But there's the
word that scares me...
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- Blame.
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- Blame is a
dangerous word, and for my taste, it's one that is far
too overused in this country. For some reason, it always
has to be somebody's
fault when
something happens. Especially when the event is something
as catastrophic as children dying.
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- Santana High.
Oklahoma City. Columbine. How could these things happen?
Who's to blame? Who's fault is this?
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- My problem is not
so much with the blame culture, as it is sort of an
inevitable truth of human nature. We don't kill each
other for survival. We're motivated to it by something
else. Wanting to find out what that something is, that's
a function of self-awareness.
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- We think,
therefore we are.
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- My problem lies
with the scavengers who live off of this fear; feeding
our own uncertainties back to us, raising our suspicions,
cultivating our own paranoias.
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- My problem is with
the media.
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- All my life I have
been pro speech. I believe in our right to
expression, which extends to our right to be informed
about the world around us by a free press. But I also
believe that this right, just like any of the liberties
given to us by the founders, has to be exercised with a
level of restraint and responsibility.
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- The issue that
I have always had with the news media is
this: What's the difference between information that
people need to know in order to live better lives, and
information that lays blame for why the world isn't a
better place.
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- What's the
difference between facts and
fingerpointing?
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- Take
this
news story
as an example.
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- Basically the
story says that a recent research study found that the
more time a child spends in day care, the more likely
that child will grow up to exhibit aggressive behavior
and have trouble socializing with others.
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- Let me say this
first. Daycare scares the hell out of me. The horror
stories you hear: the daycare worker that picked up
a toddler at his home, drove him and several other
children to the center, and then forgot to take the
toddler out of the car for the entire day, causing
the baby's death. How about the fact that on the westside
of the city I live in there is a guy who goes around
to various schools and daycare centers, flashing his
genitals at the children who are there. A guy who has
been doing this on and off for six months... a guy they
haven't caught yet?
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- Add to that the
fact that daycare is ridiculously overpriced, and the
employees of these places aren't always the cream of the
human crop, and yeah, I can see where the research
studies findings might make sense.
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- Day care is
fucked. Kids who spend time at daycare are fucked. If
you don't want fucked up kids, don't send your kids to
daycare.
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- I get that.
Despite the fact that I think there's a whole lot more
that goes into making a troubled child than just how much
time he or she is spending at a day care center, I think
that this is good to know. To me, this is valuable
information. It tells me that we need to rethink the
entire concept of daycare. We need to figure out what can
be changed about it to make it a place for children to
develop and grow.
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- But the problem I
have is that the local and national newscasters who
broadcast this story did so citing by examples of
children who went to daycare for extended periods of time
who were now monsters. Showing footage of horribly out of
control kids who were portrayed as ticking time bombs,
waiting for the chance to go off.
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- Tell me something,
how are you supposed to feel if you are a single mother
with two kids who have been in day care since they were
six months old just so you can go to work to make ends
meet?
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- Basically the news
just told you that your kids are bad. You made a bad
choice, your kids are screwed because of it, and you
should feel horrible. If you can't stay at home with your
kids and forget all that silly feminist careerism crap,
you're going to be the cause of the next
Columbine.
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- It's not about
reconciling why something happened anymore. It's about
finding out who is accountable for these things
happening, and condemning them. It's about finding a
group to blame, so that the rest of the society can rest
easy that it wasn't anything they
did.
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- The other thing
that has been driving me nuts lately is this entire
situation in Cincinnatti that just ended a few days ago.
I don't know about where you are, but here in
Jacksonville, Florida -- the news coverage was next to
nothing.
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- What I heard
on the news was that black
people were rioting.
What I didn't hear on the news is that
white cops
gunned down an unarmed african american youth.
Furthermore, it
turns out that this was the 15th african american suspect
that the Cincinnatti police department has killed since
1995 (guess how many white suspects were
killed? Here's a hint -- it rhymes with zero).
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- It disturbs me in
a serious way that the local news services decided to
play this story down. Without the internet as a resource,
I might not have known about it at all!
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- The fact that cops
in Cincinnatti are running a private race war unchecked
by anyone is frightening enough. It's this kind of abuse
of power that keeps peace from ever happening. But the
idea of a press that picks and chooses what information
it doles out to the people should scare the hell out of
everyone.
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- Just
like it scared the hell out of the men who wrote
the
Constitution.
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