Our Children

Every one pays lip service to the importance of children, their nurture and their education. The facts speak otherwise: Some studies indicate that as many as one in four girls and one in five boys are sexually assaulted. And most of this assault happens within the confines of the family. Then there are those who are physically assaulted. And there just aren't figures for all those whose basic nature -- and freedom -- are assaulted by the assumption that a good upbringing is synonymous with forcing a child to behave according to the arbitrary beliefs of the society into which the child happens to find him or herself born.
First we condition children to submit, and if they don't we brutalize them, or both. Those who are successfully conditioned to believe what they are told is the truth, are also conditioned to force their children to submit in their turn, to become competitive and join the rat race...so the sorry-go-round never ends. And those who fail to submit, we imprison or "treat" with drugs. Or they find their own drugs, or both.
When we hear that there is a rape in the US every few minutes, or read of the numbers of men who assault their partners, just where do we think these fellows learn all this?
We fill them with our sexual guilt and hang-ups, and try to convince them that the natural flow of hormones through their bodies is dirty and should be repressed. We essentially cut them in half by turning them against their own natures -- and then wonder why so many people are ready to trash the nature of others, and the natural environment generally. Recycling anti-nature attitudes is hardly very bright as our poor old planet creeks under the weight of this waste.
And if all this were not enough, we continue a policy of impoverishing children. 18%, that is nearly one in five children in the UK live below the poverty line. And it is not just in the rich countries, but right around the world. Children are certainly the most abused minority on Earth -- and their mothers the most abused majority! The origin of "family" is Roman, and meant the furniture, women, children, the pigs....
Strangely, even if the inhumanity of it all failed to move us, you would have thought the cost might get our attention.
A recent study tried to put a figure on the cost of crime in the US and came up with a figure of some 500 billion dollars...which included the court costs, the prison costs, the costs of the damage done...and so on. California now spends more money on locking people up than on educating them.
Is it really intelligent to spend such a vast amount of effort and money on forcing our children to be "just like us" -- ensuring that they continue to make all the mistakes that we have made. And then spend another fortune locking them up because they didn't buy into our game.
We are the ones who have been blinded by our own conditioning so we can see the world only through those conditioned lenses. That's the function of conditioning. And every minute, these new young folk arrive, free from any conditioning, without any prejudices or biases, with their natural intelligence intact. What would be the smart thing to do? To simply show them our world, and listen to what they say about why it is as it is. Whether we agree or not is another matter, but at least we could start by listening. And what do we actually do? We blind them with our belief systems, so they can't see either. And give it pretty names like "a good upbringing," or "education."
Is there a choice? Of course, there always is. But before we can even begin to hear the options, we will have to be prepared to admit that we don't know -- that we are failing our children, and that this failure is suicidal for them and for us.
These children did not ask to be here. And if existence has invited them to partake of this incredible experiment called life, they need no one else's permission. They are who they are.
It won't be a child who is accepted and loved as he is who will become tomorrow's Adolf Hitler. It won't be children who are encouraged to roam freely and to discover for themselves -- both who they are and the nature of their world -- who become tomorrow's psychopaths, tomorrow's terrorists with biological weapons. It won't be children who love their own natures who will destroy the nature on this planet. It will be people like us -- people who were taught that might is right, that love and respect "have to earned," that submission and obedience is only proper, and above all who are taught, not in an atmosphere of love and freedom, but through punishment and reward, like laboratory rats being taught to perform tricks in a cage. Some tricks. Some cage.
This book provides a basis for that alternative. Will we listen? Who knows?
One thing is already clear: we can no longer afford not to.

Amrito, M.D.