Too Young To Know

#MeAt14 Reminds Internet 14-Year-Olds Are Innocent, Immature, Unable To Consent. Sounds legit. But it's interesting in that when you read through the NPR article, you're presented with pictures of young white women; photos that are clearly selected to show them as childish. Well, it's interesting to me, anyway. Because it's a reminder of the children that I used to work with, in a past life. For them, being "innocent and immature" wasn't a fact of biology, it was a luxury that they didn't have. They needed to have a clear-eyed and practical understanding of how the adult world worked, because they couldn't rely on their parents to shield them well enough that they could manage to be unfamiliar with it.

And it left many of them in a difficult position, because they were legally unable to consent to anything. And this has nothing to do with sex. many of the children in the residential treatment center I worked in chafed under the rules there, but they had no legal right to chose anything else for themselves; the state had made the choice for them, and that's all she wrote. And this isn't to say that they should necessarily have been allowed free rein to determine what their living situations were going to be. It wasn't difficult to see how the choices that many of the kids would have made (or even had access to) would have ended badly. But that didn't erase from many of them the understanding that they'd been able to manage more or less for themselves for some time before state social workers had shown up and decreed that they were going to live in a big brick building miles away from their friends, communities and whatever family they still had.

And so, even though the youth in our center generally ranged from 5 to 14, to survive in the world, one had to understand that for many of them, innocence and immaturity were not their native state, but one that we were attempting to restore them to, despite the fact that those particular children were much more streetwise than most of us staffers and some even had better housekeeping skills. (In all honesty, some of the children I worked with were better cooks then than I am now, some two decades later.) This isn't to say that I would have condoned them being in relationships with adults twice their age or other. We didn't condone them being sexual at all. But many of them had needed to learn to navigate sexuality before they'd come to treatment, and they'd developed differing levels of skill at it. And again, our goal was, as much as we could, dehabituate them from using those skills.

In modern parlance, the fact that some teenagers can afford to be complete naïfs in a world where that carries such serious consequences for others is considered a privilege. When I was growing up, it simply made one lucky to one degree or another. I hadn't realized how fortunate I had been in my own childhood until I was faced with stories of how other childhoods had gone horribly and irreparably wrong. I don't know that those stories have a place in the narrative being woven by "#MeAt14." I suspect they don't, if for no other reason that they'd be seized upon by people looking to justify relationships we commonly consider to be some combination of criminal and perverse.

But I do think that it's important, at some point, to make sure that we remember that the extension of childhood through adolescence is not ordained. We worked to make it that way, and there are people who were missed in that work.

Or the Wrong Side

Postscript: GOP officer who'd vote [Alabama Republican Senate Candidate Roy] Moore even if he was a proven sex offender refused in 2015 to accept the legalization of gay marriage, saying "it's wrong."

"Other than being with an underage person - he didn't really force himself," Alabama Geneva County GOP chairman Riley Seibenhener tells me. "I know that's bad enough, but I don't know. If he withdraws, it's five weeks to the election...that would concede it to the Democrat."
'I Have Never Engaged In Sexual Misconduct,' Moore Says In Statement

To paraphrase from a comic book I once read, anyone can stand by a fellow party member when they're in the right; true partisanship is when you stand by someone when they're wrong. Although to be sure, a lot of people take exception to equating "legal/illegal" with "right/wrong." But while I understand that people (or at least NPR's target demographic) are intended to find the quotes that Toronto Star reporter Daniel Dale Tweeted "shocking," the only thing that I find mildly surprising is that people openly admit to such nakedly partisan motivations in the face of a public piety that says one should always do otherwise.

And I'm starting to think that the "rally 'round the flag" response to the accusations against Roy Moore are showing that this particular piety is starting to fade. I'm also thinking that this is a good thing. Public peities that encourage us to lie about what we're thinking, or who we are, aren't very helpful in the long run; they simply legitimize deceit in the name of avoiding being punished for, well, saying out loud that the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes. And of course, the thing about sticking to the fiction that the Emperor is well-dressed is looking intelligent in front of other people, even though one's allowed themselves to buy into the fact that it's only the foolish who see the Emperor's nakedness. But if we're going to buy into the fact that, come a general election, the only thing that matters about a candidate is the letter after their name, let's own that. It's not like, as a society, we're fooling anyone. Gerrymandering specifically requires people's voting patterns to be predictable well into the future, when state legislators don't know who will run, only that a broad majority of voters will make their selection based, in the end, on partisan affiliation. And while it's true that partisan affiliation can tell you a lot about a person, one would think that there's still some room for genuine evaluation of positions in there. (Even though, clearly, there isn't.) So if the choice comes down to a proven sex offender who holds the right political positions and a person with a clean record who doesn't, why bother to even raise an eyebrow at the "wrong" choice?

Maybe if, as a society, the United States can more easily own up to forming opinions of right/wrong or good/bad based mostly on whether a candidate mirrors back the proper politics, it will be possible to dispense with the need to link mass shooters to politicians we don't like, or declare large swaths of people heroes based on their affiliations.

On The Side

But [Attorney General] Sessions also voiced a concern expressed by many business leaders and politicians over the years: "You just simply can't have a situation in which your competitors pay bribes and you don't."
Trump Used To Disparage An Anti-Bribery Law; Will He Enforce It Now?

On the one hand, I get it. Following a rule that one's competitors don't follow is a voluntary disadvantage. No one likes to compete at a disadvantage when they feel that the stakes are high, and no one likes to feel that they're placing themselves at a disadvantage and not gaining anything for it. But on the other hand, there are no principles of good governance that countenance bribery and other forms of official corruption as a desirable thing.

And so this perhaps feeds into a common critique of the United States; that its businesses are concerned with profitability, and its citizens are concerned with cheap consumer goods, to the exclusion of other considerations. While the United States is thought of as a rich nation, there is the lingering understanding that it got there by screwing over other people. And being more concerned with a little more material wealth than taking a stand against corruption doesn't help that.

There is a feeling in the United States of poverty, and President Trump rode a wave of that feeling into the White House. And in much the same way that a stereotypical Trump supporter is seen to view the prosperity of others as an unwarranted threat to themselves, the Trump Administration seems to view the health of foreign governments as something that unjustly impoverishes the United States. But then again, who ever said that the perception of poverty and ethics were natural bedfellows?

Fallen Star

I don't know if I'm any good at it, but I'm starting to enjoy found object photography.

Bad Geeks

One of the things that pops up in my Google+ stream now and again are complaints about "Geek Guys" (or, to be more precise, the jerks among them) and their treatment of women ("Geek Girls" in particular). My first response to something like this tends to be my standard one - no group large enough to have entered the social consciousness is small enough to not have any assholes in it, and geek culture now having made inroads into the mainstream, there are more than enough geeks out there for them to have a presence.

But with a little more thought, I've come to the conclusion that there's also a greater expectation of empathy and understanding from stereotypical geeks, and that it may not be warranted. Back in the days before personal computers were ubiquitous and programmers could be treated like "rock stars," being a geek (or a nerd) could be kind of sucky. It was, for a very long time, a ticket to being pushed around by the stereotypical "jocks," ignored by just about everyone else and being told to put down the books and pick up some weights. Granted, this behavior wasn't as common as movies made it out to be, but there was, to be sure, a certain amount of truth in entertainment.

And I still think that it's something of a truism that suffering breeds resentment far more often than it breeds empathy. And I think the resentments of geek culture have come to manifest themselves as doing unto others as someone else had once done unto them. Which, even though it seemed fairly predictable, is something of a shame. It would be nice for some group or another to break the cycle, rather than perpetuate it.