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On Choice, Punishment, and the Color of Lipstick

(Copied from my essay up on the Net at http://khemehekis.angelfire.com/bixochromatism.htm)

"Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." --C. S. Lewis

The year was 1995, and it looked as if the United States was about to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, along with just about every other country on Earth. Hillary Rodham Clinton was championing the cause of children's rights, to the chagrin of Republicans. Then came theoconservative howls about "parents' rights" and "family values" and the traditional family order of Western civilization. Teen-agers were accused of being wayward, and the Millennial children who were now becoming teens were argued to need a firm hand to "guide" them. Bill Clinton drummed up support for curfews on the streets and uniforms in public schools. School rules became stricter, and schools began targeting ethnic minorities, neurodivergent (ADHD, bipolar, Asperger's, Tourette's, OCD, and so-called ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) and conduct disorder) students, and goths. Columbine led to a scapegoating of video games, goth culture, and youth in general, and that deadly school shooting by the oft-bullied Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold taught adult authority figures the wrong lesson: kids need strict rules, kids currently have too much freedom, kids who are "different" are dangerous and are to be viewed with suspicion at every corner. Algorithms were developed to identify the high-schoolers most at risk for shooting up their schools. Schools started enforcing zero tolerance against sharp objects in students' pockets, requiring clear backpacks, conducting warrantless locker searches, and even banning sunglasses, all in the name of "protecting" students . . . or at least protecting the majority.

In November of 1996, USA Weekend did a survey for teens across America to fill out, dealing with teen rights. When the results came in, the newspaper spun the results of the "Teens and Freedom" poll to announce: "An exclusive national survey shows a surprising number of teens want some limits in their lives." Inside, the survey results page showed the questions asked in the poll; on 17 out of 25 questions asking teens to choose between freedom and restrictions, more teens took the pro-freedom position than the anti-freedom position (for instance, 83% opposed school uniforms, 70% opposed Internet restrictions, 64% opposed V-chips, 56% opposed schools banning body piercing). And yet the three statistics announced on the cover were than 30% supported Internet restrictions (a minority, but they seemed to be emphasizing the fact that it was more teens than people would expect), 50% were in favor of curfews, and 75% said schools should ban clothes with "gang symbols". Of the six subheadlines on the first two pages, five send a "teens support rules" message: "Teen-agers acknowledge they need and want rules -- even if their freedom is curtailed"; "Teens are most willing to sacrifice freedoms in matters of safety and health"; "Rules at school designed to protect students also receive strong approval"; "Some censorship is all right"; and "Teens show a conservative streak". In the first two pages of the article on the survey's findings, a photo on the left showed two teens, both from Kansas, described by their anti-freedom views: a boy who believed students should have to stand for the national anthem and a girl who supported banning tattoos on teens. Even with the unscientifically self-selecting sample, the winning side for each of the questions was usually the side in favor of youth rights. However, these were downplayed as much as possible by the indomitable spin of the journalism. And on page 26, Tipper Gore had a roundtable discussion about rights from seven teens, one teen from each of seven panethnicities selected; despite the diversity in ethnicity, there was little diversity in views, as most of the seven spoke up strongly for curfews, school uniforms, piercing restrictions and criminalization of teen drinking. At the end of the roundtable, Ms. Gore gushed preachily: "It seems like there's a resounding affirmation that rules in general are pretty good things. We do learn to live by them . . . They're a guidepost for parents and families to go by." The Convention on the Rights of the Child never did get passed.

All the spin journalism of the "Look, teens are good little authoritarians!" industry couldn't change the fact that most of these restrictions left the majority of teens from the early part of the Millennial Generation feeling psychically hurt. And they often did quite tangible damage to undeserving teen-age victims, such as the high school boy named Matt who said "Only four days left", meaning only four days until his sixteenth birthday, and ended up getting reported by a classmate who misinterpreted it as meaning only four days until he shot up the school. Other students stood up for Matt, but in the end he got expelled and the court upheld his expulsion on the grounds that his "Only four days left" sentence had "scared" people. Public school students watched their peers get expelled for starting websites -- from their home computers -- that criticized their schools. Millennial teens were also frequently the victims of "youth profiling" by cops.

And then came September 11, 2001. Baby Boomers (born 1943-1957), Jonesers (born 1958-1963), and Xers (born 1964-1978) started calling for racial profiling of Arab-Americans, being required to carry a national ID card on one's person, and often even restrictions on the freedom to speak out against the war or George W. Bush, all in the name of the new buzzword of "homeland security". Fox News famously announced that "Americans prefer security to liberty, 2-to-1". But Millennial high school and college students? The same ones who USA Weekend reassured us supported curtailment of freedom if it was in the name of protecting them? In a Harris Interactive Poll of American teens taken a mere week after September 11, 2001, only 3% said they would give up the right to speak their feelings about the government if it prevented something like this from happening again. 32% would give up the right to own a gun later in life, only 3% would give up freedom of religion, only 14% would agree to having their phone calls spied on by the government, and 78% would not pay higher taxes even if would prevent another 9/11. True to a generation that often snickered that the real motive of the war was oil, only 43% of boys and 19% of girls supported a war in Afghanistan if innocent civilians would be killed . . . very different from the answers the adults of 2001 gave to the same question. A post-9/11 poll of Americans 18+ (mostly Xers, Jonesers, and Boomers) showed 60% of respondents saying they would support going to war with Afghanistan even if there were "thousands of civilian casualties"! Young Millennials' attitudes after 9/11 were hardly surprising: teens opposed authoritarian measures and a U.S.-centric doctrine of killing the "Other" because it was their generation who knew firsthand the sting of having liberty curtailed and paternalistic punishments meted for the cause of "safety" and "protection".

Paternalism, the belief that the freedom to choose needs to be restricted and consensual actions punished if said restriction is "for people's safety", or "protects people from their own stupidity", or "is for your own good", is often used to justify curfews, drug laws, seatbelt laws, laws against gambling, and the 21 drinking age in the United States. It's used to deny everyday choices like what hairstyle to get, or highly important and personal choices like whether to undergo a medical operation, to teens, as well as many psychiatric patients and people diagnosed with mental retardation or sometimes other developmental disabilities. But paternalism is not a morally just philosophy: it assumes that an authority figure's or the Establishment's idea of what is best for someone is necessarily the right one, assumes that said authority figure's or the Establishment's idea trumps a child's, teen's, senile person's, mentally ill person's, intellectually disabled person's, or sometimes even woman's or ethnic minority's own wishes and quest for happiness, leaves the victim of paternalism with permanent consequences s/he may not be able to accept (even if the vulnerable group to which s/he belongs is a group of temporary membership, such as children or teens), and even dishes out punitive treatments for actions that are not morally wrong.

In the West today, paternalism is levied mostly against minors, but also for people judged on an individual basis to be mentally incompetent to make decisions on their own behalf, be it for mental retardation, Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, psychosis, schizoaffective disorder, or whatever diagnosis. In the past, though, it was also levied against enslaved ethnic groups (such as African-Americans in the United States) and women. Scientific racism, from Christoph Meiners to Hans F. K. Günther, was often used to argue that the White race was of superior intelligence to the Black, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, Amerindian, and often even South Asian, East Asian, Persian, Afghan, Turkish, and Semitic races. Despite all the Simon Legrees who were out there, many antebellum Americans, especially Southerners, argued that African-Americans needed "benevolent" White people to take care of them. In 1851, Samuel A. Cartwright, a physician who practiced in Mississippi and Louisiana, posited a mental disorder called drapetomania. He identified drapetomania as a mental illness whereby Black slaves would run away from their masters, attempting to become free. Cartwright wrote that this was the result of masters who "made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals" -- that too many African-Americans did not know their place. African-American slaves were often even taught lies by their masters that they were stupid, and frequently came to believe these lies themselves. Back in the time of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, Westerners often argued that Filipinos were essentially too dumb to govern themselves, and needed some good White Americans to annex their land and look out for their best interests.

Women, too, were once the victims of paternalism. Sir William Blackstone famously wrote about the subjection of married women under the Anglo-Saxon law of his time that "In marriage husband and wife are one person, and that person is the husband". The female sex was actually seriously believed to "have delicate brains" as well as delicate bodies (which is why girls once did not go to school). American women at the national level could not vote until 1920, and married women were regularly beaten by their husbands without being able to do anything about it. A 2019 article in The Atlantic gives an enlightening illumination into the kind of junk science that was used in its own time against women's suffrage: "According to the mainstream science of the time, 'Women simply had inferior brains, which made them unsuited to the rigors of voting,' says Cheryl Jorgensen-Earp, a professor at the University of Lynchburg who studies rhetoric in science and the British women's-suffrage movement. 'Anti-suffrage cartoons poked fun at women's reasoning ability . . . which showed the interior of a woman's head filled only with letters, puppies, hats, chocolates, and the faces of admiring young men.'" It was also argued that the mental fatigue from making cerebrally taxing electoral decisions could jeopardize a woman's ability to be a good baby-making machine. Note that William P. Sedgwick, an outspoken opponent of women's suffrage who claimed voting would be bad for women's brains, was a reputable professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The parents who raised Elizabeth Cady Stanton and such feminists were often believers in the mental capabilities of girls, ahead of the dominant thought of their time, who believed that girls and women had brains every bit as good as those of boys and men, and their daughters did indeed live up to their expectations of intelligence and independence.

Even today, women in many Islamic theocracies are treated paternalistically. Married women's husbands make most decisions for them in these countries, and in some countries, if a married man gets arrested for drunk driving, his wife is thrown into prison along with him! This practice is no more excusable than ancient societies that murdered slaves when their masters died, so the master could have many slaves to serve him in the afterlife. In 1996, Syed Ghiasuddin, the education minister in the newly established Taliban, stated that a woman is like "a rose -- you water it and keep it at home for yourself to look at and smell . . . It is not supposed to be taken out of the house to be smelled".

In the United States, paternalism against African-Americans and women is now seen as veritably antediluvian. And yet, discrimination against youth persists. Americans under 18 are forbidden from voting in a general presidential election (although 17-year-olds may vote in the primaries in some states if they'll be 18 on the day of the general election). Americans under 21, even 17-to-20-year-old soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who are mature enough to serve their country, are forbidden to purchase (and in many states, even consume) a wine or a beer. State laws require everyone under 16, 17, or 18 to attend school, if only a public school (and if so, it better be in their own geographically delineated school district), where they have their freedom of speech, freedom of dress, and freedom to go to the bathroom restricted at the whims of teachers and administrators. Teens under the age of medical consent in their state (which varies from 15 in Oregon to 19 in Alabama) are denied the right to make critical and personal medical decisions. Teens are even arrested by cops for leaving home after their parents told them they're grounded, and those parents have the power to dictate their minor children's clothing, hairstyles, and religion, subject them to conversion therapy, disallow their sons to have a boyfriend or their daughters to have a girlfriend, and forbid their transboys to live as boys or their transgirls to live as girls.

A plethora of excuses as to why this ageism is acceptable whereas racist and sexist discrimination and paternalism are unacceptable are whipped up by defenders of the anti-youth status quo. Some argue that age is different from race or sex because being a minor is temporary whereas being Black or female is not, an argument I'll get into more below. Others use slippery-slope arguments like "Would you let a 4-year-old drink?" (which I will also get into), which have the usual problems of the slippery-slope fallacy (the fact that a 4-year-old shouldn't have alcohol is not a prima facie case for why we can't let 19-year-olds drink), and also fail to address the fact that some things that are currently age-restricted (like freedom of religion or the right to dye one's hair) shouldn't be restricted by age at all. And then there's this facepalm-worthy attempt at an argument at the Wikipedia essay Ageism: "Criticism of racism/sexism analogies highlight existing legal treatment of minors. The legal system withholds rights and roles from minors, but differentiates the discrimination of race or sex." Basically, the Wikipedia essay argues that it's acceptable to discriminate against minors because ageism is legally endorsed, but unacceptable to discriminate against ethnic minorities or women because discrimination on the basis of race or (in most cases -- consider the draft and toplessness laws) sex is no longer legally permitted in the United States. Yet if we were living in the year 1800, both racial and gender discrimination would be legal, and strongly enforced by both state and federal governments in the U.S. Is Wikipedia's essay then claiming that discriminating against a Black man or a woman would be morally acceptable if we were living in that time? This is the naturalistic fallacy if I ever heard it!

From the degrees to which mainstream Americans will go to defend discrimination against adolescents, one would expect that the youth rights opponents would have put forth a moon-hanging demonstration that people under a certain age are immature, irresponsible, not worthy of rights, etc. But all they have been able to come up with are vague statements that "they're just not mature enough", anecdotal examples of teen-age immaturity, circular and etiam in libris appeals to other ageist laws, deceptively manipulated statistics about how raising the drinking age has "saved lives", and junk science about adolescent brains.

Starting in the 1990's, it became fashionable for neurologists to argue that teens had "underdeveloped" brains, and that this was to blame for all the terrible, horrible things teens do. However, in a 2007 Scientific American article titled "The Myth of the Teen Brain", psychologist Robert Epstein debunks this "cerebral determinism". As Epstein points out, the studies that examine adolescent brains, teen-age pathologies, and teen angst do not distinguish cause from effect. Teen-age ills are caused by the restrictions on youth and segregation of teens from adults that got started in the early twentieth century. Teens in preindustrial societies do not show high rates of crime, and spend most of their time with adults. They do not feel teen angst. When Western-style schooling and television are brought to these societies, the adolescent members of these now Westernized societies begin to exhibit delinquency and teen angst. The Inuit living on Victoria Island, Canada had no problem with juvenile delinquency until their community was Westernized in the eighties, and by 1988 they had established their first permanent police department now that the worms had escaped from the can. Epstein also points out that brain imaging studies show only a correlation between age and brain anatomy, not a causal relationship. A 2017 study from Penn State University showed that in Taiwan, crime was at its highest among people in their late twenties and early thirties, not those in their teens and early twenties as in the United States. This all suggests that teen-age pathologies are sociogenic, rather than part of a natural timetable of human development. While the orthodoxy in the 1970's was that the brain reached its adult state at 18, and in the 1990's the line changed to "The brain isn't fully developed until 25", research in the 2010's now reveals that a person's brain in fact continues to develop and change for her/his whole life.

Nightvid Cole, analyzing a study that compared the abilities of 11-to-13-year-olds, 14-to-15-year-olds, 16-to-17-year-olds and 18-to-24-year-olds to pass the MacArthur Judgment Evaluation (an evaluation used by courts in determining whether a defendant is fit to stand trial), points out that "the population mean for the 11-13 year olds is less than one standard deviation below the adult mean in all three areas" (understanding, reasoning, and appreciation). And in a 2010 academic study titled American Sixteen- and Seventeen-Year-Olds Are Ready to Vote", Daniel Hart and Robert Atkins found that 16- and 17-year-olds are "generally indistinguishable in their capacities to function as citizens and to vote responsibly from the youngest adults (18-year-olds) who are entitled to vote".

And the stereotype that adolescents are impulsive? Well, in 2012 came a new study conducted at Weill Cornell Medical College that turns the tables. Subjects (divided into teen groups and adult groups) played a game. A dot moved across the screen, and the subjects had to guess which direction the dot would move. If their predictions were correct, they earned points. The teens took, on the average, longer than adults before they made their prediction. Teens were looking for patterns and analyzing, it turned out, while the adults wanted to choose quickly -- just the opposite of the stereotype that teens are impulsive!

And, most surprising of all: a 2009 study by Dr. Gregory S. Berns showed that teens who participated in such risk-taking acts as drinking, toking, sniffing glue, staying out late, rollerblading, overeating, leaving school, and having unprotected sex had more adult-like white matter in their brains than their straight-arrow peers.

Opponents of one form of youth rights will often make etiam in libris appeals to other ageist laws ("A 16-year-old is deemed too immature to vote/sign a contract/drink/buy a lotto ticket, so how can s/he be mature enough to decide what should be done with her/his body?"), without even considering the possibility that it is the conceit that a 16-year-old is too immature for the other things, rather than the conceit that a 16-year-old is mature enough to have bodily autonomy, that is in error. Indeed, today's teens are less pathological and smarter than previous generations, and are handling freedom well in the parts of the world in which they already have it. Studies about teens' brains being flawed have been revealed to themselves be flawed. But just suppose your average 15-year-old or 17-year-old weren't quite so bright, morally endowed, and capable of using judgment. Then would it be acceptable to deny her/him the right to smoke weed, stay out late, live away from her/his parents, or choose what is done to her/his own body?

To answer this question, I will pose to my readership this dilemma. Suppose a purportedly scientific study showed that 90% of women who wear red lipstick pass an arbitrary neuroscientific test of intellectual maturity, 70% of women who wear tan lipstick pass it, and only 40% of women who wear pink lipstick pass it. Should women who wear pink lipstick be denied the right to drink, smoke, gamble, choose what clothes (besides lipstick) to wear, sign a contract, leave a will, or (if married) move away from or divorce their husbands? A social liberal would say no, since just because a majority of pink-lipsticked women are that way, that doesn't mean those who are capable of good decisions should be discriminated against on a sweeping basis. A social conservative would say yes, since the government needs to make decisions that are in these women's best interest, decisions they are too incompetent to make, and if the law made an exception for the compos-mentis pink-lipstickers, it would have to make an exception for everyone (i.e. the non-compos-mentis pink-lipstickers). I say no, since these are personal decisions that these women wanted to make, even if the results aren't judged to be in their material best interest; it's not an unethical decision, assuming that those who drink or toke don't drive under the influence, that those who gamble don't break into their husbands' bank accounts to finance their habit, etc.

Since this moral philosophy -- that the freedom to choose is more important than the capacity to make a "good" decision -- needs a name, I shall refer to my moral philosophy hereinafter as bixochromatism, or "the philosophy discussed in the essay 'On Choice, Punishment, and the Color of Lipstick'". The root bix- comes from Bixa orellana, the scientific name of the plant sometimes known as the lipsticktree, and its family Bixaceae. Bixa is best known in English as the achiote or achiotl. In the Western world, achiotes are best known for providing the flavoring annatto, but indigenous Latin Americans have traditionally used it as a lipstick, hence the alternative common name lipsticktree. Chrom(at)- is the Greek root for color, appearing in such words as "chromatic", "chromatology", "chromosome" ("colored body") and "chromatid" (referring to their strong staining tendency in the lab), "monochrome", "Photochrom", and "Kodachrome". -Ism, of course, is a suffix for all sorts of belief systems, from Hinduism to socialism to fascism to transcendentalism. So, "lipstick color belief system".

If a teen wants to get her navel pierced, even knowing the risk of infection, it's a decision she should be allowed to make (assuming, of course, that she pays for it with her own money, rather than leeching off her parents' income), not because it's a well-thought out decision, but because it's her decision. (Concerns about her parents having to pay for treatment if the navel gets infected will be obviated once youth rights is instituted and the age of emancipation is reduced.) And if the navel does get infected, then who's to say that the infection was not worth the payoff of being happy about the hip way a piercing looks? What's appalling is that many youth rights opponents will say the teen shouldn't have gotten pierced after they watched the navel get infected, even when the teen declared upon the infection that the trip to the piercing clinic was "worth it".

Another problem with exclaiming "It's for their own good!" is that claiming something is for a kid's own good does not necessarily make it so. If a father who feeds his child rat poison so "the kid'll learn not to talk back to his elders" insists that the poisoning is "for the child's own good", does that necessarily mean the child will not be harmed by the action of the father, just because the father says so, and has authority over the child -- or even that the father's action was morally justified? Sincerely believing something is in a minor's or mentally disabled person's or pink-lipstick-wearing woman's or whoever's best interest does not mean the belief cannot be wrong, nor that the authority figure should be allowed to go ahead with it -- there's an old saying, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions".

Also, what is in a person's best interest physically is not always the same as what is in a person's best interest emotionally. If I were blinded in one eye in an accident as a kid and had the eye surgically removed against my wishes, physically I would avoid going blind in the other eye, but emotionally I would be unable to accept myself, engage in self-loathing for having a glass eye, and live the rest of my life in resentment. If the doctor respected my wishes, however, physically I would eventually go blind in the good eye from sympathetic ophthalmia, but emotionally I would calmly accept myself, knowing I still had both my eyeballs in their sockets. Who's to say that the physical good is more important than the emotional good and therefore a child or teen shouldn't be able to make a medical decision for her/himself?

Then there's the issue of punishing a person. Punishment is not meant to be a concept taken lightly, carried out without a thought. Punishing people hurts them emotionally. People feel guilty when punished, and sometimes being grounded can lead to boredom, having a privilege taken away can lead to sadness, corporal punishment can create physical pain, and punishments of public ridicule can be embarrassing. There is also research showing that when a child is spanked, that leads to the child coming to fear her or his parents throughout life and view them as big, bad authority figures whom they cannot trust, nor confide in with their problems.

Then there are the future prospects of a person who has been punished. When an employer learns that a job applicant has been arrested, she is less likely to hire him, even if the records indicate that the charges were dropped. Colleges look at a student's permanent record, eyeing suspensions. And once someone has been required to register as a sex offender, her or his life is turned inside-out. Someone who was arrested for streaking at the age of 13 will be unable to create a Facebook account due to being on the sex offender registry.

Then there's the way people who have been punished are viewed by society. I doubt anyone reading this will question my assertion that there is a social stigma attached to being arrested, not to mention being convicted. Many people will always feel a little less comfortable with being around someone after that person has spent some time in jail.

When is punishment justified? When should an action be criminalized? Actions (such as staying out late) that are not morally wrong should not be criminalized. An action is morally wrong if and only if it:

(a) Violates the consent and wishes that another person is free to have, including the destruction of their property, except as punishment for an immoral action that the person being punished has actually committed: murder, rape, child molestation, mugging, armed robbery, burglary, joyriding, arson, assault, adultery, lying about your HIV status to your prospective sex partner, libel, locking people up in concentration camps, medical procedures conducted against the patient's consent, denying medical treatment to a patient who wants and can afford it, arresting people for drinking from the wrong color fountain, hauling teens off to gulag schools; or, through inaction, allowing another person to be harmed against her/his consent: the baby-sitter looking on passively as a stranger kidnaps her client on an outing. Note that "person" here includes all sapient species, including intelligent extraterrestrials once they've made their presence here on Earth. Note also that this includes undeserved assaults that will destroy a person's reputation (hence the inclusion of libel, or of publicly arresting a person for dubious reasons in order to destroy her/his reputation, or of posting revenge porn on the Internet).

(b) Creates a significant risk that another person or people will be harmed against their consent: drunk driving, speeding, playing with firecrackers, target practice in public.

(c) Violates standards of honesty: lying, academic dishonesty, adultery again, counterfeit, white-collar crime, all sorts of government conspiracies and collusions, Dr. Andrew Wakefield's falsified studies on the MMR vaccine and autism, conducting junk science attempting to prove global warming false in order to help out your buddies in the oil industry.

or:

(d) Harms the planet and/or ecology: littering, lake pollution, air pollution, the killing of endangered species, razing the rain-forests, Big Oil giving money to politicians to influence their votes to further climate change and ultimately destroy humanity.

What are some things that aren't morally wrong, and shouldn't be illegal? Smoking marijuana. Drinking alcohol. Vaping. Taking LSD or psilocybin. Gambling. Prostitution (without a pimp). Couples living together before marriage. Keeping your hat on indoors. Growing your hair long. Growing a beard. Growing dreadlocks. Wearing sunglasses indoors. Wearing flip-flops to the office. Using the F-word. Getting a nose ring. Males getting their ears pierced. Staying out late. Men marrying other men and women marrying other women. Consensual gay sex. Consensual oral sex. Viewing or selling porn. Sex between a 16-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl who love each other very much. Singing loudly in a grocery store. Women driving (it's illegal in Saudi Arabia). Women going out in public without their heads covered. Going to the beach topless. Going naked in public. Masturbating in public. Driving without a seatbelt on. Riding a motorcycle without a helmet. A patient with bodily integrative identity order going to her psychologist to get a limb amputated in accordance with her wishes. Eating too many doughnuts. Rapping your fast food order.

The four criteria for judging the rectitude or wrongness of a behavior that I have listed above should cover all cases, but often social conservatives will attempt to appeal to other concepts, such as "order", or "decency", or "tradition", or "being normal", that have no bearing on whether something is right or wrong, or will try to ban something by appealing to the dogma of a religion that is hundreds of years old, or perhaps the more recent invention of fervent fundamentalists but arbitrary dogma nonetheless. Looking at preëxisting laws, or at social norms, or at old classroom or workplace rules will only lead people down false paths and obscure clarity of thinking about what is moral and what is immoral.

People should also avoid argumentum ad baculum, the logical fallacy of stating something is morally wrong not because of the natural consequences thereof, but because of the artificial consequences thereof, i.e. punishments. Saying "Smoking pot is morally wrong because you could go to jail" is fallacious; even if a pot-smoker got caught and did spend some time in jail, the punishment would have no bearing on whether this personal choice was immoral or "irresponsible".

Since punishment is so stigmatizing and everything, is a person is to be punished, it had better be deserved. Punishment had better be for an action that was actually wrong -- be it a teacher punishing little Ava for hitting little Madison because Ava was jealous of the far cooler doll Madison had, or a government punishing a dictator who had theretofore carried on and gotten away with conducting a genocide against a people in his own nation. And it had better be for something a person actually did. No more putting ethnic minorities falsely convicted of killing cops -- from Leonard Peltier to Troy Davis -- on death row.

Note that this does not mean the death penalty is always wrong. The relevant question here is whether someone truly deserves the fate of death. The life of a 50-year-old man who kidnaps a 7-year-old girl, rapes her (mutilating her vulva in the process), then slashes her throat and heart to murder her, before tossing her corpse into a ravine where (he hopes) it won't be found, does not have the same value as the life of the innocent 7-year-old girl he murdered.

Many people say violating a minor's wishes and freedoms is acceptable because it's "for their own good". But if something is a personal choice that doesn't harm a second party without her/his consent, it's not morally wrong, and therefore should not be illegal.

Even though being against the law does not make something illegal, humans who make laws should endeavour to criminalize only immoral actions (those that harm others against their consent, create the risk of doing so, violate principles of honesty, and/or harm the environment), and avoid creating consensual, or victimless, crimes, because it is by and large understood that morally acceptable things are supposed to be legal and criminalized actions are supposedly morally wrong, and because law enforcement will enforce whatever the current laws of a jurisdiction are. If a town has a curfew, for instance, even if it's only for Japanese-Americans or adolescents or women wearing pink lipstick (and especially if it's thus discriminatory), police will be required to arrest people for staying out late, which action (curfew-breaking) is not morally wrong, and that will result in people being arrested and punished for such an innocuous action. That very situation -- people being arrested and punished for such an innocuous action -- would be morally repugnant.

At this point, a social conservative might say, "But the purpose of laws isn't to encode and enforce right and wrong, it's to protect people!" This is not true. People, at least in Western societies, are indoctrinated from a young age that laws are about right and wrong. Think back to when you were 5 years old and watching a police show with your parents, viewing the cops in their squad car chasing the criminals like LAPD chasing OJ through California. They said, "There go the bad guys!" Did your parents tell you, "They're doing that to protect people"? Hell, no!

Being socialized to think of breaking the law as wrong and criminal actions as immoral actions, of criminals as "the bad guys", people grow up to interpret the legality or illegality of an action as at least a commentary by lawmakers about the morality of it, if not an authoritative, final word from above on its morality. And so adults who make laws will have this concept of "acceptable things should be legal, unacceptable things should be illegal" running through the front of their minds as they legislate. As the California Bar Journal writes in its booklet Kids and the Law: "Criminal law and crimes represent those acts, behaviors or attitudes that society believes are wrong and wishes to discourage". As the perfect example: why are sodomy laws on the books in so many places? No one is protected by being prevented from having consensual anal sex with another person, much less by being arrested for a breach of that law. Gay sex (and often even heterosexual anal sex) are illegal where they are illegal because the dominant religion or culture of the lawmakers believes -- albeit falsely -- that it is morally wrong -- against the word of God, or whatever.

To call that which is good good . . . is good.

To call that which is bad bad . . . is also fine.

To call that which is bad good . . . is bad.

But to call that which is good or neutral bad . . . is also bad.

Paternalists like to say that curfew laws or marijuana laws are "protecting people from their own stupidity", that people need to be prevented from making "stupid decisions". Frankly, the very concept of condemning a choice as stupid does not compute with me. People should be punished for, and if possible prevented from, making unethical choices, such as poisoning their neighbor's baby, but they should never be punished just because their judgment in a decision that affects themselves was not up to a judgmental person's liking. I believe there are no "stupid" choices to speak of, only unethical ones. So Steve chose to become a psilocybin user. Say Steve uses responsibly, he's never attacked anyone while on a trip, but now he spends a lot of time in his room not contributing to society, and has had psilocybin mushrooms confiscated from his dorm room from the police a couple of times. I'm not going to excoriate Steve's choice to get into 'shrooming, and frankly, neither should you. Whether a lady with pink lipstick is choosing to spend her money on the lottery, or a woman with red lipstick is choosing to spend her money on the lottery. or a dame with pink lipstick is choosing to spend her money on nutritious vegetables for her new health diet, we should not use anecdotal examples of these choices either or arguments for or in arguments against granting her and people like her the freedom to choose, because the freedom to make one's own choices is more important than making a wise choice -- or, more accurately, what the subjective priorities of a human onlooker to this woman's purchases would inform him is a wise choice.

Ageists often use the argument that being a minor is only temporary, so unlike racism or gender discrimination, ageist laws are acceptable. There are many flaws with this argument. There is the fact that one can point out interesting differences between situations, but said differences are not necessarily relevant to whether such something is right or wrong (I have a whole blog entry on the "temporariness" argument in which I explain this point with the knife murder analogy). Then there is the fact that, with race and ethnicity as the Platonic prototype of a reason to be discriminated against and racism the Platonic prototype of discrimination, every other demographic variable is unique in its own way. Yes, age and ageism are unique because a person's age changes over time. But gender and sexism are also unique because the gender an individual is assigned at birth will be the same across all countries and cultures (whereas the same person might be seen as Mulatto or Mestizo or Black in Cuba, but as Hispanic in America; different countries have different legal ages for things; and what is seen as ADD in the context on one culture is "normal" in the context of another). Religion and religious discrimination are unique because people choose their own religion (but don't choose their gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, or, unless they deliberately stab their eyes out, disability.) Sexual orientation and homophobia are unique because homosexuality and bisexuality revolve around certain behaviors that many people believe are morally wrong, being about what someone does rather than just about what someone is. Disability and ableism are unique because a person's disability often renders her/him by definition unable to do something such as driving (and the term "bona fide discrimination" is in use for discriminating against disabled people in cases like these). And then there is the fact that the transience of temporary pain or damage has never excused hurting people. As someone on the forum for National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) once wrote about people you argue that discrimination against teens is acceptable because minority is temporary: "Someone should give them a hard punch in the face. After all, it will only hurt for a little while". As Martin Luther King famously stated in 1963 in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied".

Then there is the fact that your world does not become a clean slate again once you reach the legal age to do something nor even when you reach full adulthood; rather, the discrimination from the past carries on. A butterfly that flaps its wings when you are 13 will still have the ripple effect going when you are 40. For example, if 15-year-old Rachel's parents restrict her from taking the courses that competitive colleges like by refusing to sign her course selection form until it is whittled down to the dumbed-down classes that satisfy their anti-intellectualism, Rachel will have a very hard time getting into the colleges she wants by the time she's applying for colleges her senior year. As an adult, her opportunities will be limited against her will because of the choices her parents made for her against her will as a teen-ager.

In 2016, a 16-year-old boy named Gary Ruot was diagnosed with Leber hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON), an ocular disease that causes rapid degeneration and ultimately leads to blindness. The only hope for Ruot was a treatment called gene therapy, for which GenSight Biologics was running a trial for the treatment of LHON. However, the FDA had only approved the gene therapy LHON trial for patients over 18. By the time Ruot would turn 18, it would be too late, and he would be blind. Ruot's relative, Avery Wilson, posted a petition on Change.org, demanding the FDA lower the age for this trial to 16. Less than three months later, the FDA did the right thing and lowered the age for the trial, and Gary Ruot was saved. But what if the FDA had not reduced the age to 16? By the time Ruot was 18, he would be blind, and it would be too late for the gene therapy to save him. He could turn 21, 25, 30, 50, 75, and 100, and he would still be blind. The damage would be done.

People who have been arrested under status laws may feel the effects of the arrest for the rest of their lives. Many employers would not hire a 30-year-old if they dug in his records and found he had been arrested for underage drinking at age 19. In California, where Proposition 21 eliminated the automatic sealment of one's juvenile record upon reaching 18, a conviction for breaking a city's curfew law at age 15 could put off potential employers. And the social stigma will attach to the arrested ex-minor from many people who know, firsthand or secondhand, about the arrest.

The choices adults make for minors may even last beyond their terrene life and carry beyond the grave. For example, a recently deceased 17-year-old may have his organs harvested for donation against his consent. Or imagine that Blebdahism is the one true religion, that God is a Blebdahist and believes anyone who betrays Blebdahism is sentenced to Hell. But one young person who believes in Blebdahism deep down in his heart may have parents who are Sporgalists. In the United States, the parents may, by law, force their child to practice Sporgalism even though it is wrong, which would thereby condemn not only the parents, but also their child, to Hell for refusing to practice the rituals of Blebdahism. Since no one knows God's exact sentiments, one could not promise children that God would understand if they betrayed their religion only because they were forced; it could very well be that God thinks conforming to parental force is no excuse for not following Blebdahism, even for part of one's life, and still refuses to let those youth into Heaven, regardless. Of course, it may very well be that God understands people who betray their religion because of coercion by authority, that several religious paths lead to "heaven", or even that Heaven does not really exist . . . but what if those aren't the case? Or suppose, arguendo, that God does let people into Heaven who practiced Sporgalism as minors but converted to Blebdahism as adults, but not people who were still practicing Sporgalism when they died. What if the child of Sporgalist parents who wants to practice Blebdahism gets hit by a truck at age 15? She'll never get another chance at practicing Blebdahism, and will be stuck spending an eternity in Hell. And the Blebdahist child of Sporgalist parents will probably be buried, in accordance with her parents' wishes, in a Sporgalist cemetery, where her body will lie forever . . . and ever . . . and ever.

As a sort of extension of the above point, everyone only has a finite time to live -- at least until human life extension technology is invented, and we don't know how soon that will be. If the first 18 years of a 90-year life are spent in chains, that's one whole fifth of your life -- lost forever. Say a girl named Danielle wants to wear dreadlocks starting at the time she begins high school in September of 2016, at the age of 14 years and 6 months, but her school clamps down and forbids her to wear dreadlocks because they are against the dress code. Danielle graduates in June of 2020 at the age of 18 years and 3 months. She is then free to wear dreadlocks, until she dies the day after her eightieth birthday. She got 61 years and 9 months to wear her dreadlocks, but if her high school hadn't disallowed them it would have been 65 years and 6 months of her life. God is not going to magically add 3 years and 9 months to her life, allowing her to live to 83.75, to make up for the years she could have spent dreadlocked but was wrongly denied the right to.

Then there are slippery-slope-type concerns when one switches from talking about adolescents to talking about children, or in particular small children. "OK," they say, "I can see a 20-year-old or a 16-year-old drinking responsibly, but now are you going to let parents put vodka in their baby's bottle?"

It is not just a difference of degree, nor a difference of statistical turnover. It is indeed true that it is easy to find 20-year-olds who are capable of drinking responsibly, whereas a 2- or 4-year-old is almost never developed enough intellectually to even begin to understand all about responsible vs. irresponsible drinking. Some youth rights opponents may also need reminding that the idea that a majority of 21-year-olds are mature enough to drink responsibly while the majority of 20-year-olds are not is merely a legal fiction that probably has nothing to do with reality. In fact, most legal ages are arbitrary and are often based off of other ages. The voting age of 21 that was traditional in Western democracies, for example, was taken from the traditional age of majority in Europe, which in turn came from a boy's timetable of being apprenticed into knighthood. It did not actually reflect whether your average 20-year-old vs. your average 21-year-old was wise enough to vote. And when the U.S. finally lowered the age to 18 with the Twenty-sixth Amendment, it was lowered not because people suddenly started noticing remarkable maturity in 18-to-20-year-olds, but because 18-year-old male Boomers were being drafted into Vietnam while unjustly being legally incapable of voting to end the war (the draft age originally having been lowered to 18 because Franklin D. Roosevelt needed more soldiery during World War II).

No, it is not just a difference of degree; there are very real physical differences between 20-year-olds and small children. Most 20-year-olds, save for some with such conditions as dwarfism, can drink a modest amount of beer or wine without being poisoned or killed. This even applies to 12-year-olds; look on a medication bottle in your medicine cabinet and you'll see that the "adult dose" applies to anyone 12 and up. A 3-year-old who consumes the same amount of alcohol, however, will almost certainly end up in an ER and might not make it. Another relevant fact to point out is that college students who drink drink of their own volition, whereas a 3-year-old is likely to toy with an unattended beer bottle at a backyard party, not comprehending that it is alcoholic, or even to be fed alcohol directly by an abusive adult. Parents should not be allowed to put vodka, nor even a light beer, in their baby's bottles.

The legal consequences of a 20-year-old drinking and a 4-year-old drinking are a difference of substance, not a difference of degree. If a 20-year-old drinks beer at a party in any of the fifty states of the U.S. in 2019, the 20-year-old will be arrested, arraigned, and tried. Even if middle-aged men and women who provided or bought alcohol for the 20-year-old are caught and arrested too, the 20-year-old himself will still be legally responsible for his crime of underage drinking. If the 20-year-old is convicted, he may have to face prison, hefty fines, community service, or all of the above, even though drinking was a choice he had the God-given right to make. He will have trouble finding a job because of his MIP, and his reputation will be smashed as a result of getting arrested. If an adult gives alcohol to a 4-year-old, however, the adult will be punished, while the 4-year-old child will not because the child has the defense of infancy. While the adult's arrest for furnishing alcohol to a minor (and possibly child abuse) will tarnish her image, no one will begrudge the child who was fed alcohol several years down the road. The 4-year-old child will be seen as an innocent victim, whereas the young-adult 20-year-old (at least in the United States) will be seen as a criminal.

No doubt, some of you are now saying, "But teen-agers who use alcohol might drive drunk because they don't have the good judgment to know better, and then they'll be hurting other people in drunk driving accidents!" Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) likes to tout the claim that raising the drinking age from 18 to 21 has "saved lives", and argue that the statistics prove it, insinuating that 20-year-olds are too immature to drink responsibly. Closer analyses of the statistics, though, make the case against MADD's claim.

The early research that led to the adoption of the Federal Uniform Drinking Age Act (FUDAA) examined only the states that raised the age of their own accord before the 21 drinking age went federal, and came too early to examine the states that were coerced to raise their ages under FUDAA. A 1987 study by Peter Asch and David Levy concluded that by the time all but two states had raised their drinking ages to 21, drunk driving fatalities among 18-to-20-year-olds fell, but those among 21-to-24-year-olds actually rose. They conclude that inexperience with drinking regardless of age is the culprit for driving while intoxicated, not being under the magical age of 21.

Furthermore, traffic fatality rates rose from 1913 (the earliest year statistics were recorded) until 1969, after which point they began dropping. They even dropped in the early seventies, as states were lowering their drinking ages from 21 to 19 or 18! MADD mentions that after FUDAA passed in 1984, driving fatalities decreased, but this is a canard, as they had already been dropping for years.

Other factors than FUDAA had a probable effect on drunk driving fatalities in the eighties: for instance, New York became the first state to make seatbelt use mandatory in 1984 and other states followed; legal BAC's went down that same decade; and Candy Lightner's foundation of MADD in 1980 helped frame drunk driving as a real evil in the public's mind; before that, drunk driving was viewed by society as a minor offense that could be laughed off. Dan Fogelberg's song "Same Auld Lang Syne", released that same year, sings, "We bought a six-pack at the liquor store/And we drank it in her car". When George W. Bush was arrested for drunk driving in 1976, he paid only a $150 fine and had his license suspended for a mere 30 days.

And finally, let's consider some ethical logic: The 21 proponents' reasoning is that teens who would have driven drunk at 16 or 18 if the drinking age were 16 would docilely obey the law and avoid drinking alcohol if the legal drinking age were set at 21 instead. Drunk driving is a horrible, truly criminal act, and would be immoral even if it weren't illegal. People who would drive drunk if the driving age were 16 or 18 would be breaking the law by drunk driving; the law against drunk driving wouldn't stop them from doing so. They are headstrong law-breakers. Are we, then, to believe that if possession of alcohol before one's twenty-first birthday is made a crime, these same people who broke even a (just) law against drunk driving will without question obey the (unjust) 21 law, and stay away from alcohol, because "it's the law"? In fact, the average age at which Americans started drinking decreased from 16.6 in 1984 (the year of FUDAA) to 16.2 in 2002, showing just how dubious MADD's assumption "higher drinking age -> teens obeying higher drinking age -> less teen drinking -> fewer accidents caused by young and immature drivers" is.

For those who want to learn more about FUDAA and the drinking age in America, I recommend Pete Lorenzo's excellent blog http://21debunked.blogspot.com, wherein he examines the flaws of the 21 proponents and roundly destroys the myths behind America's criminalization of teen-age alcohol possession.

At the essay “Reasons to Challenge the Drinking Age” at the website of the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA), the reason that is the most compelling to me, out of all of the ten reasons given, is Reason #1: "The punishments for underage drinking cause widespread harm." As the essay states, "For every life the drinking age is supposed to save, it disrupts or ruins a hundred others". It points out that in addition to penalties like fines and jail time for underage drinkers, college students who drink in their dorms before their twenty-first birthdays may lose financial aid or even be suspended or expelled; that bar and restaurant owners can lose their liquor licenses and employees who serve under21s can end up fired; that parents can be arrested for hosting keggers for their under-21 children and their under-21 friends, or even lose custody of their children; and that even teens who did not drink alcohol can be arrested under the absurd concept of "constructive possession".

The United States ought to adopt a system of age-regulating alcohol like that of the United Kingdom. In England and Wales, the mere possession and consumption of alcohol by older children and adolescents is not legally prohibited nor criminally penalized. At 16, an Englishman, Welshman, or Scot may legally consume wine, beer, or alcoholic cider on premises with a meal, and at 18, the U.K. allows people to purchase alcohol in bars. It is illegal for an older person to give a child under 5 any form of alcoholic beverage, even if it is a parent giving a toddler a beer at home. Giving an older child or a teen alcohol, however, is not criminalized, nor will the kid receive an MIP for drinking at a family gathering, nor even have her or his drink confiscated. The British system strikes a balance between protecting the physical health and safety of children from abusive encroachments by adults on one hand, and allowing adolescents to make decisions for themselves without having their life derailed by an external punishment on the other hand.

Aside from being actively punished for personal choices, bixochromatism holds that it is also wrong to prevent a person from making a choice that affects something as personal and immediate as her or his own body. A newborn is too young to express objection to getting a tongue-tie cut or a pyloric stent done, but if someone is mentally alert and developed enough to object, then it is very unethical for a doctor or dentist to disregard her or his patient's wishes, be it because the patient is a minor, or because she is schizophrenic, or because he has an intellectual disability, or because she wears pink lipstick, or because she is a woman living in a sexist theocracy, or whyever.

Parents will often tell their teen-age children, "You don't want to . . .": "You don't want to apply to a vocational school." "You don't want to go sky-diving/bungee-jumping." "You don't want to spend your money on that expensive skateboard." Even "You don't want to get emancipated". There are plenty of teens for whom, had they a dollar for every time an adult told them what they do and don't want, would rival Donald Trump in wealth. I heard this plenty of times growing up. "They're trying to tell me how to feel", as Taylor Swift sings in her song "Love Story". You are the best judge of what you want and do not want, what would make you happy and unhappy. Furthermore, when a parent tries to tell a teen not just want to do, but how to feel, the teen starts questioning whether her or his parents understand her or him at all, to the point where she or he may stop confiding in her or his parents to help her or him with a problem.

The point made earlier about how the things done to a person while young stay with her/him or her/his whole life (so therefore the "being a minor is temporary" argument is flawed) apply here. Suppose the doctor wanted to remove a child's tonsils, but she said no because she was uncomfortable with the thought of permanently losing a body part. The child could turn 13, 16, 18, 21, 25, 30 . . . even 110, but the tonsils could never be stuffed back in her mouth after she reached the age of medical consent (in fact, they would probably have been incinerated long ago). Or suppose a 15-year-old boy living in a state where the age of medical consent is 18 has parents who want to take him to get a circumcision, and he says no. Judging by their "Being a minor is only temporary!" argument, ageists seem to believe the boy's foreskin will magically regenerate on his eighteenth birthday.

"But!", you object, "Informed consent generally requires the person or her/his proxy to understand the treatment and its ramifications!" The thing is, the concept of informed consent is a sham. To understand why informed consent is a sham, consider the following scenario: A man named Joe has just had an accident that blinded him in his left eye. Joe is 45 years old, but he has an IQ of 65 and his caretakers are calling him a "retard" and say he shouldn't be able to make his own decisions. Joe does not understand how sympathetic ophthalmia works, but he nixes the thought of an evisceration and enucleation because "I don't wanna be some freak with a glass eye!" Sometimes people have a simple yet overriding reason for the choices they make. If such a decision really is so overriding, whether the patient gave a subtle and complex consideration to all the issues is not really material.

"So", you say, "Without a standard of informed consent, doctors will trick patients into allowing all sorts of horrific surgeries without having to explain all the consequences, drawbacks, and potential risks!" That would indeed be a bad thing, but the problem is that the concept of informed consent conflates "explained consent" with "understanding consent". Requiring explained consent is a good thing; requiring understanding consent allows societies to create legal fictions whereby whole groups of people are assumed to be categorically unable to consent to or against medical treatment, whether on the basis of age, or of intelligence, or of neurotype, or even possibly gender or ethnicity. Thus we must divorce the "explained" component of informed consent from the "understanding" component. The current Western medical standard of informed consent should be replaced with the simpler but better standard of explained consent.

Short of changing the standard to explained consent, the reason why the patient opted for or against a specified treatment should be taken into consideration in deciding whether to grant medical autonomy to a minor, senile person, or person with intellectual disability, especially if the reason is so overriding, as with the scenario of Joe mentioned above. Medical autonomy is especially important in two cases: (1) when the patient opposes a proposed treatment that will alter the bodily integrative identity of her or him (such as an amputation, filling, root canal, extraction, tonsillectomy, splenectomy, evisceration and enucleation, mastectomy, circumcision, castration, or surgeries on intersex children); and (2) when the patient favors a potentially life-saving treatment. It is unspeakably wrong for the child of Jehovah's Witness parents to be denied a life-saving operation that her parents are trying to keep her from getting because of their religious beliefs, beliefs that their daughter does not share; or for a teen to be denied a vaccine he so desires because his parents refuse to let him get vaccinated. Imagine if he dies of pertussis before his eighteenth birthday because he came in contact with Bordetella pertussis at the age of 16 or 17 and his anti-vaxxer parents' wishes were given precedence over his own! One wonders if such parents would even mourn their son.

Why are adults in the United States, and the rest of the so-called free world (and every country should be a free country), accorded the legal right to make their own medical decisions? It is not because it is assumed that they can make good decisions. It is because, as Sir Isaiah Berlin put it, "those who have ever valued liberty for its own sake believed that to be free to choose, and not to be chosen for, is an inalienable ingredient in what makes human beings human".

As the Internet poster Critropolitan wrote in a response to the blog entry "Ageism is an LGBT Issue" at LGBTQ Nation: "Appealing to adult's [sic] superior rationality and experience is no way out of this dilemma. Putting to aside [sic] the fact that what is 'rational' and what experience relevantly informs competent choices is an inherently subjective matter judged by fallible human beings - the entire point of the liberty society extends to adults is a liberty to make their own choices *even when* the government, experts, the majority, and other 'rational' adults see their choices as irrational, unsound and unwise. For example, the right to refuse medical treatment would be no right at all if it could not be exercised when to do so would be 'irrational' - since physicians only recommend medical treatment when it is presumed to be the rational course of action. The conclusion is that when it comes to adults, that except where prohibited by the law for the safety of others, for an adult to make a bad choice is a less invasive, less offensive possibility than the prospect of overriding their choice paternalistically and taking away their freedom. To say the opposite is true of children is not to say that children are simply more apt to make bad choices - since the desire to override anyone's choice, whether child or adult, only arises when they make an allegedly bad choice. It is instead to say that children's freedom matters less. And this, is at the heart of all forms of dehumanization, whether directed at minorities, women, low caste members, lgbt people, immigrants, disabled people, or children." What an eloquent way to explain the concepts of bixochromatism!

If a patient who has a cavity does not want his tooth filled, and even shies away from the thought of an SDF treatment, s/he is going against the advice of a dentist who no doubt favors a filling. The dentist is almost certainly an expert who would not advise the patient to get his cavity filled were it not the "good" or "wise" choice, but the patient probably has his own reasons for refusing the filling, be it because he doesn't like the pain of drills, or because he has a reaction of dread to being numb even temporarily, or because it's against his religion, or because he's had a dream of a filling-free mouth ever since he was little and views fillings as an "imperfection", akin to getting a traffic ticket, that would be unacceptable to him. None of those reasons may hold up to the scrutiny of Western science and a mechanical concept of material best interest, and many, perhaps even the majority of, Westerners, would see refusing a filling as an objectively bad decision. So why doesn't the U.S. institute laws requiring a 40-year-old of average intelligence to get a filling (or at least an SDF or silver nitrate treatment) if that's what the doctor ordered? What's that, you say? "Because that would be a violation of constitutional liberty"? Exactly.

God and nature do not care about the artificial laws and legal fictions created by human societies; they fly over them as the crow flies. Such laws and legal fictions are transient. If a person overdoses on alcohol, God and nature do not care if she was 21 in a place with a drinking age of 21, 20 in a place with a drinking age of 21, 20 in a place with a drinking age of 18, or 21 in a place with a drinking age of 18. States may pass a law that anyone under 18 needs parental permission to get vaccinated, but if a 17-year-old who did not get vaccinated because his parents wouldn't let him contracts a virus, nature will not necessarily spare his life out of respect for concepts like parental rights and the imagined good judgment that comes with age; he may very well die. The nation of Feministan may decree that women are wonderful beings, entitled to all the same rights as men, while the nation of Chauvinistan may grant women fewer rights than the Taliban, but a spousal rape will be just as traumatizing and a clitoridectomy just as possibly deadly in Chauvinistan as in Feministan. Nature will not consider the limited freedom the woman had to escape female genital mutilation in Chauvinistan and thereby lessen the damage sustained. If a 16-year-old living in a country where the age of criminal responsibility is 18 commits a murder, God does not care that his country legally infantilizes him; God will hold him morally accountable for his crime. And if a White man living in 1859 Alabama turns in a fugitive slave because "it's the law", God will not care that the Fugitive Slave Act requires such unethical behavior, nor that the law in Alabama at the time does not see a Black slave as a full human being; the slave-catcher will still face eternal hellfire in the afterlife, and God would still see the Black slave as perfectly human. There have been a billion unjust laws throughout the history of humanity, and God has cried a quadrillion tears thereabout; our goal, then, should be to align the laws of Man with objective morality, with the morality of bixochromatism.

These points are all very good and well, you say, but what about choices made by children who are so young and innocent that they want to jump and run and climb everywhere yet cannot understand danger -- even though they almost certainly will when they grow older? What do you do if you have a child -- say, a 5-year-old -- who is too young to know that running into the street is dangerous? Surely, you don't want your children to go untaught and die experimenting before they reach an age when they know better. You will likely be tempted to spank your children to rub it into them. Instead, tell your child matter-of-factly about the dangers of running blindly into the street, of crossing the street at their height without holding an adult's hand, and tell them that they could get hit. Don't be afraid to be graphic describing scenarios of child death to scare them into safe behavior. You may even want to show them footage of a child running into a street, getting hit by a car or truck, and later dying. But do not spank or slap your child. What your child did was not morally wrong, just unsafe, and therefore does not warrant a spanking, which is punishment. Would you call for an adult who ran blindly into the street, knowing the risks, to get arrested for it? Would you even accept the idea of punishing a developmentally disabled 40-year-old who ran into the street without looking, not knowing it was dangerous? The answer, I'm guessing, is almost certainly no. Plus, there is plenty of research showing that children who get spanked grow up with educational delays, psychological issues, and violent behavior.

Strict parents often rationalize their strictness by referencing laws that hold them morally responsible for taking care of their children, civilly responsible for the things their child breaks, and even, in many states, criminally responsible for truancy or other crimes committed by their child. They will say, "I pay the utility bills for the house and the medical bills for my child" (sometimes even using the dehumanizing analogy that if their dog gets treated at the veterinarian's, the vet will bill the human adult rather than billing their dog), and make strict rules so their child does not break the law thereby incurring punishments upon the parent or parents. But laws punishing parents for the crimes of their children violate American principles of personal responsibility and the sacred tenet that Person A not be punished for the actions of Person B. Almost every American agrees that if Alice steals money from her employer, but Bob, who had no involvement in the theft of anyone's money, goes to jail for it instead, it is an outrage. Yet when innocent parents go to jail because their minor child assaulted someone, people just write it off as the law of the land. Such laws need to change, and by acquiescing to these laws without speaking out against them, parents are only being part of the problem instead of part of the solution.

Indeed, the culture of helicopter parenting over the past few decades has created a system that makes it increasingly hard for parents to give their children the freedom, autonomy, and free time to play that the latter deserve. Because children and even 17-year-olds are believed by society to lack "maturity", current laws abrogate the right to make most decisions, even simple decisions like what clothes kids may wear, to the parents, hold parents responsible for keeping their kids safe, and even punish parents for their minor children's misdeeds. Because of this, parents then say, "I'm responsible for my child until s/he is an adult", and become very circumspect about whom they allow their kid to see and where they allow their kid to go. They micromanage what courses their kid takes at school and how their kid spends her or his time. This helicopter parenting then creates permanently banjaxed kids who never learn to fly because their wings were clipped in childhood. Panics about child molesters and kids getting their knees cut and infected while cycling have blighted the childhoods of the Millennial Generation (born 1979-2004) and the Fifth World Generation (born 2005-today), and by the time 1990-born kids left off for college, or even graduated college, the train of practicing how to be a responsible adult had left the station. Now parents can be legally prosecuted in many states for so much as letting their 6-year-old play unattended in the backyard, or letting their 11-year-old walk to elementary school with a 10-year-old friend and no adults accompanying. And elementary and junior high schools have cut down on free play and recess, often cutting recess entirely out of the curriculum. Luckily, the light at the end of the tunnel of decades of helicopter parenting is coming, though: in 2018, Utah legalized what Lenore Skenazy calls free-range parenting.

So what do parents who are concerned they will get into trouble for letting their minor children do what makes them happy do? The answer is simple: actively crusade for youth rights. Protest in the streets, along with your children, for the age of majority and age of emancipation to be lowered -- and for a lower voting age, so teens can protect their rights. Rail against systemic injustices that punish parents for the crimes of their minor children. Vote the YR-friendly way on any measures or propositions on your state's ballot, or, if you are on a city council, on council proposals. Argue for youth rights when you hear relatives or friends treating or speaking to youth in an ageist way. Defend your child against school faculty who want to violate your child's rights, be that violation by making him take his hat off in class, by sending her to the principal for correcting her teacher on a factual point, by failing him for the semester because said teacher dislikes him, by slut-shaming her, or by denying him his medicine. Boycott businesses that have "No more than two high school students allowed at one time without an adult" policies. Start petitions on sites such as Change.org for a lower voting age and drinking age, and against your child's school's dress code. And call people out on the ridiculous, paranoid, Niemöllerian, bigoted claim that people speaking up for youth rights must be pedophiles.

So what are the fundamental truths and principles behind bixochromatism? Let us review:

1. People should allowed to make personal decisions, as long as they are not unethical. 2. A person should be allowed to make a decision not because it's a wise decision, but because it's her/his decision. 3. Since personal decisions that don't harm others are not morally wrong, discrimination against a group's right to make free choices is wrong -- whether a demographic group typically has good judgment is irrelevant. 4. Claiming something is "for their own good" does not necessarily make it so. 5. What is in a person's best interest physically is not always the same as what is in her/his best interest emotionally. 6. Consequences of punishment have some heady consequences of their own, so are not to be taken lightly. 7. People should not be punished for things that are not morally wrong. 8. Things are wrong if and only if they (a) violate the consent and wishes that another person is free to have, including the destruction of their property, except as deserved punishment, or through failure to succor allow another person to get so violated; or make an unjust assault on their reputation; (b) create a significant risk that another person or people will be harmed against their consent; (c) violate standards of honesty; or (d) harm the planet and/or ecology. 9. Laws should endeavour to encode ethics and morals, and actions that are not morally wrong should not be criminalized. 10. There are no "stupid" decisions, only unethical ones. 11. People should not be denied bodily autonomy, even if an individual or the law assumes that the person, on an individual or sweeping demographic basis, is incapable of making a wise medical decision. 12. An individual knows her- or himself best and is the best judge or her or his own wishes. 13. The free world allows people to make their own choices not because it trusts that those choices will be wise, proactive, responsible, and well-thought-out, but because freedom for its own sake is so valuable (and every country should be a free country). 14. God and nature do not care about nor stop for the artificial laws and legal fictions created by human societies. 15. We should endeavour to align the laws of Man with objective morality. 16. Humans should act to change discriminatory laws.

It is time, then, that humans stop speaking of "what's good for" people, or "for their own good", and what's in someone's "best interest", and start speaking of "what makes people happy", and "respecting people's wishes", and whether someone's "rights are being violated", or what goes with or against someone's "consent". This, bixochromatism, will be the philosophy of the future -- setting humans, regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, or neurotype, free of the impositions of others and allowing them the pursuit of happiness, each in her or his own way.

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savegraduation · 6 years ago

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John Hensle, 1993-2016

It was three years ago today that my friend and fellow NYRAnian John Hensle passed away.

I first met John in 2010 when he was 16. I had finished the first draft of my libretto for The Bittersweet Generation (then called Angst). For those who haven't read my previous posts wherein I reference it, The Bittersweet Generation is a rock musical I'm writing that tells the story of a year in the life of six teens (Melanie Hayworth, Bryce Schlitter, Paul Moreno, Trina Evangelisti, Alan Isaacs, and Sarah Chiang) in the fictional Sun Belt suburb of Armando, starting in the summer of 2007 just before school begins, and ending with the alternative prom in 2008. They experience their struggles with youth rights issues. Their high school, Dulcevida High, has an assistant-principal named Mr. Pittman who lectures students about how they "must obey the rules", despite being very underhanded himself, a social conformist math teacher named Mrs. Dahlgren, and a believe-the-worst-stereotypes-about-Millennials AP Bio teacher named Mr. Orozco, among other faculty. One student is even framed for doing graffiti in the boys' restroom by Mr. Pittman as revenge for being intransigent when his teacher and assistant-principal expect him to take his hat off. It is highly recommended reading. (Oh, and the songs are great too.)

I had the libretto and lyrics, but wanted someone to set my lyrics to music. John, who was posting under the screenname Badlands1790, contacted me by PM on the NYRA Internet forum, telling me he was willing to collaborate on my rock musical. He said he played guitar and had had writer's block "for the longest time". He put up a YouTube video for our song "Students of the World, Unite!", which he later took down. "Students of the World, Unite!", the song sung at the climax of the story, is a pop-punky rocking tune that sounds something like Green Day, the Offspring, or Lit. John's melisma on such lines as "Now we form a wall that is gia-ant" is superb.

I researched John Hensle's activities with NYRA and learned that John had coauthored a booklet to help youth with students' rights issues with a number of other NYRAnians. I maintained an interest in John's posts on the NYRA board.

After a few Facebook conversations with John, I discovered John and I had many things in common. I discovered, for instance, that we were both youth rights supporters and both rocked out. We were both fascinated with drugs. We also share our dislike for the way the holidays are hyped and our deist religious views. There are some differences, though. For example, John is an INTP per the Myers-Briggs taxonomy of personality, while I'm an ENFP. And John was an avid cyclist, whereas hearing or reading the word "bxke" makes me have to pick my navel due to my logaesthesia (it feels as if a jagged piece of metal is caught in my navel).

Shortly after we met, I discussed my logaesthesia with John. He told me he had been diagnosed with Asperger's when he was 2 years old, but called for an end to all the IEP's in the eighth grade after he stopped meeting the diagnostic criteria. He had his diagnosis revoked, and said it was the only time a student with a diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder had been undiagnosed and taken out of special ed in his school district.

Once I was discussing the cynicism that led many people to McCarthyesquely accuse youth rights supporters of being pedophiles, and commented that if a state senator or assemblyperson wants to lower her or his state's age of consent from 18 to 16, someone in the audience is sure to claim that that politician really wants to touch 7-year-olds' junk. John replied: "Yeah, I wish the general public could have intellectual debates about actually understanding articulate points, instead of reacting to a word or two and painting a negative stereotype. The world would be a lot better of a place if we could do that." That has become one of my favorite John Hensle quotes of all time!

Another time John said: "Youth is largely a relative construct, I would agree . . . but it's a matter of society seeing potential in youth. Society does not see youth as a period immediately useful to it so it marginalizes it and doesn't give young people meaningful opportunities."

When I asked John about his religion, John said: "I have come to believe in destiny and it's a great way to live life. You can't prove it either way, so you might as well believe what makes you happiest is true."

Sometimes when I created art, I'd listen to John Hensle's masterpiece with Secret Lands, "Voyager Golden Record". It is still my favorite Secret Lands song, as it makes me think of creating alien conlangs!

John hoped to meet me in person when he was coming over to the West Coast, but that never materialized. John began smoking weed and attending Buddhist meditation sessions and later Bahá'í temples in college. As his college years progressed, John became deeply into weed and later psychedelics. He once rode his car into the wilderness under the influence of drugs. He became a Shia LaBeouf fan and suggested I try a guided psychedelic experience to help me with my logaesthesia. In 2015, John was diagnosed with schizophrenia. While he had been a down-to-earth, even cynical realist when I met him -- he reminded me of Howe & Strauss' description of the Nomad archetype -- his drug-induced schizophrenia made John start to sound like what Howe & Strauss would call a Prophet instead. All this for a Millennial born in 1993. (Although, to be fair, few Millennials I know fit the dutiful authoritarian description of the Straussian generational theory.) At the end of 2015, he closed down his Facebook account. I emailed him, and he replied that there were too many people he didn't care about following him on Facebook (but that I wasn't one of said people). In May of 2016, his Facebook account was reactivated. I last spoke with John on October 22. We never met in person.

In mid-December of 2016, I was shattered when I went to John's Facebook wall and saw messages about how he had passed away. At first I was just numb -- in shock -- but then I lay down on my bed and started to feel ill. I knew John was into psychedelics, so at first I suspected it was a drug overdose, but then I read the obituary that said he "passed away on Dec. 5, 2016, in his sleep". At first I was just in shock -- stunned. Then I lay on my bed and felt really bad.

When I heard John had passed away, I thought about the things Landau & Hensle will never be able to do together, like accept music awards. I read the stale obituary, which didn't do justice to this amazing friend with an amazing and unconventional mind. I want to meet John again, but I don't know when or under what circumstances it's going to be. I want to share so many new songs with him, but I don't know whether he's hearing them as I play.

Until December of 2016, my circle of friends didn't overlap much with John's circle of friends. To the people in my life, John was just "the boy who's writing the music for James' play". And to John's Facebook friends, I was just "the boy who's writing a rock musical with John". But after John passed away, I've had his friends reach out to me.

I wrote John Hensle's mother on Facebook on January 3. For almost 5 months, she didn't even read my IM. Then, on June 2, she read my IM and friended me. I later learned that John was hit by an 18-wheeler while riding his bicycle in Terre Haute (where he’s from) in November. He had his tibia replaced with a rod, and John said, "Thank you all. I hope I didn't bum out your day too much." as he was lifted into the ambulance. On December 5, John finally passed away. The official cause of death was given as cardiac arrhythmia.

John jammed with Daniel Mutchler in the John Hensle & Daniel Mutchler Unnamed Project. He also did a number of songs on a project called Secret Lands, which are up at Soundcloud. Secret Lands released such songs as "Trap", "Ebbinghaus", "Floating" (about his transmale ex-girlfriend), and "The Final Girl Lives On", which can be read at the /secretlands directory on Soundcloud. I enjoyed all the times I spent songwriting with John and remember the dreams we share to have our music become part of the national repertoire.

I never met John in person, even though we discussed meeting up on many occasions. Our friendship was an online friendship, and yet it was much more than another online friendship. We were like soulmates. We were artistic partners. I was his brother from another mother.

After Avatar composer James Horner was killed in a plane crash, someone wrote, "I hope, you are somewhere, you would want to be after the death". This is the best wish John can receive. I, too, hope John went where he wanted to go, instead of the popularized version of the Christian Heaven where angels play harps and sit on clouds all day, doing notiing but singing songs that never run out of things to say about the glory of God and how he has saved us all from our sins.

And that song, "Students of the World, Unite!"? A few days after John passed away, I searched for it in my email box at Yahoo, and finally found a demo version of John singing the first verse, with his guitar, on video. You may email me at [email protected] if you'd like a copy.

In commemoration of John today, I've been listening to his favorite artists on my iPod -- the ones I also have (Muse, Primitive Radio Gods, the Sundays, Third Eye Blind).

John has always had the view towards life and death that Patrick Henry had:"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" He believes life is not worth living if you can't enjoy it, which is a very youth rights attitude. It's ageists who believe in enforcing punitive laws like curfews and MIP's that punish teens "in order to protect them from their own stupidity". His views on life and death are attested to in his song Six Feet Below.

Although I'm sad my friend passed away three years ago today, I hold onto my conviction that it would have been unspeakably wrong to arrest him for smoking weed and trying hallucinogens in college, while his brain was supposedly still developing according to the "25" myth. (Technically, your brain is still developing during the college years, but it turns out this is a canard, as science has now discovered that the brain continues to develop and change all throughout a person's life. It's like saying a 50-year-old shouldn't have any legal rights because her brain is "not finished changing".) It was John's choice, and John's having the freedom to choose drugs without being arrested or jailed for it was so much more important than whether John had a capacity to make what social-conservative arbiters would judge as "good" decisions.

Here's to John Hensle, youth-rightser extraordinaire. You don't look a day over 23. (OK, maybe 5 months over 23.)

R.I.P. John Alfred Hensle, July 5, 1993 - December 5, 2016

#john hensle #the bittersweet generation #youth rights activists #autonomy #choice

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savegraduation · 6 years ago

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On maturity and blaming the rebel

When I was perusing the NYRA Youth Rights Discussion group on Facebook the other day, Nightvid Cole posted something that really blew me away:

When a parent lashes out by hitting a child in response to something the child says, it is "corporal punishment", but when a child does exactly the same to a parent for exactly the same reason, it is a "temper tantrum". This doublethink is precisely what is so wrong about the concept of "maturity" -- it is essentially defined to pre-suppose that the parent or adult is objectively correct no matter what simply because they are the adult. Therefore, using "immaturity" as an excuse for depriving the young of rights is often just circular reasoning in disguise. If this example seems silly, note that a very similar double standard has been used to deny teens the right to refuse medical treatment, as for example in the case of Cassandra C., the Connecticut teen who lost the legal battle to avoid forced chemotherapy. She was considered "immature" by the judge, largely because she ran away from home to avoid forced chemotherapy. But the entire idea that "running away from home" is "immature" rather than "assertive" when faced with a forced invasion of basic bodily autonomy, is the same type of self-serving adultist doublethink as the distinction between "corporal punishment" and "temper tantrums", except at a much higher level.

This is why I think that youth liberationists should question the concept of "maturity" rather than simply arguing that all or some youth are "mature". When you live in a world where you are forced to live by decisions made on your behalf without your input, it is only natural that you would sometimes behave in ways that are outside the bounds of the social norms that were put in place by the oppressor class. Using that as an attempt to justify unequal rights is one giant Catch 22 -- and the individuals doing this are guilty of participating in a dehumanizing disregard for the position of the oppressed.

Now, this is a great insight, and I'd like to discuss this some more. Circular arguments are grist for the mill of ageists. They will argue, for instance, both "You shouldn't have any legal rights because you're still in K-12 school", and "You need to attend school because you don't have any legal rights". Or the variation: "Teens need to stay in school because they don't have the life experience to choose otherwise", and "Teens don't have enough life experience because they're still in school". They will tell their children both "You have to follow my rules because you live in my house", and "You have to live in my house because you have to follow my rules". They'll say, "Children shouldn't swear, because profanity is inappropriate", but also "Those words are inappropriate because children might hear and learn them". (If the only thing wrong with those words is that children might learn them, rather than something inherently evil about those words, then what's the big deal if children learn and use the F-word or the SH-word?) Some will even argue "We need compulsory education because some parents are abusive fascists who try to indoctrinate their kids with KKK values", but also "Parents need to have the power to make whatever strict rules for their kids they feel are appropriate, because otherwise how would they make sure their kids go to school and do their homework?"

If you google the word "immature", the dictionary that pops up will provide to you the definition: "having or showing an emotional or intellectual development appropriate to someone younger". When lexicographers are forced to find a definition for "immature", all they come up with is acting the way younger people act and thinking the way younger people think.

Firstly, it is awfully presumptuous to say that something is "bad" or undesirable because younger people do or believe it. Today, teens are less likely than fiftysomethings to be homophobic, or even to believe that homosexuality is morally wrong. A 2018 Pew poll found that Millennials (born 1979-2004) are less likely than Xers (born 1964-1978), Jonesers (born 1958-1963), Boomers (born 1943-1957), or Silents (born 1925-1942) to consider global warming unsupported by science, or merely natural rather than anthropogenic. (The Pew Poll used somewhat different generational boundaries from me, defining Silents as 1928-1945, Boomers as 1946-1964, Xers as 1965-1980, Millennials as 1981-1996, and "Generation Z" as starting in 1997. I'm not down with breaking late Millennials off as "Gen Z" -- the real change starts in 2005 with the birth of those too young to remember life before the Crash of 2008, which changed the zeitgeist more fundamentally than 9/11, and even then the name "Generation Z" is derivative of "Generation X" and then "Generation Y" (a much worse name than "Millennials"; "Generation Y" sounds like a linearly progressing extreme version of Generation X). I call the kids born 2005 to today the Fifth World Generation, because most of them have their first memories of the world during the Fifth World, as per the Mayan calendar.)

In fact, if one looks at the generational conflicts over the course of history, one sees the pattern that it has been the older generation that was in the wrong and the younger generation that was in the right, for everything from the Vietnam War (Boomers vs. the Greatest Generation (born 1911-1924)) to the emancipation of African-American slaves (the Transcendental Generation (born 1792-1821) vs. the Republican Generation (born 1742-1766)). When kids are 4, 5, 6, they have the ability to question authority and think positively of other people, without becoming leery of outgroups. Thirtysomethings, twentysomethings, teens, and even children have led new social movements, including such movements of today as Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, Antifa, the Battle for Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, the Global Climate Strike, the Free the Music movement, Boobquake, and, yes, the youth rights movement.

Youth rights opponents like to use the argument that youth have brains that have "not finished developing", but if they believe that, then shouldn't they support the ideas that under25s have, since their brains are supposedly still malleable enough to be open to new ideas whereby people can see injustices and systemic problems to which previous generations were blind? When the Interbellum Generation (born 1901-1910) was young, they wore T-shirts as outerwear and their young women smoked (smoking was viewed as a male activity at the time, and society believed T-shirts should be undershirts only). Interbellumers had sit-down strikes to fight for the labor reforms of the Great Depression, and often became Communists, socialists, or anarchists. When the Interbellum Generation became middle-aged, they were still accepting of women smoking, T-shirts, and leftist economics, but the Old Left couldn't handle the even newer innovations of the New Left: gay rights, cohabitation, interracial dating and marriage, miniskirts. Today the same Boomers who were, and are still, perfectly fine with blue jeans, Black boys dating White girls, the Rolling Stones, and couples living together before marriage are shuddering at music piracy, sexting, JUUL, suffrage for 16-year-olds, and non-binary teens who ask to be called "they" or "zie".

Secondly, this kind of circular thinking and concern with "maturity" and "life experience" creates a vicious circle. Because teens are believed by society to lack maturity, current laws abrogate the right to make most decisions, even simple decisions like what clothes kids may wear, to the parents, hold parents responsible for keeping their kids safe, and even punish parents for their minor children's misdeeds (punishing Person A for the wrongdoing of Person B is unspeakably wrong, but that's a topic for another day). Because of this, parents then say, "I'm responsible for my child until s/he is an adult", and become very circumspect about whom they allow their kid to see and where they allow their kid to go. They micromanage what courses their kid takes at school and how their kid spends his or her time. This helicopter parenting then creates learned helplessness and infantilized kids ("learned helplessness" and "infantilization" are two hot words within the youth rights community). These helpless overgrown babies are then made into Exhibit A as evidence that today's teens "aren't mature enough" to be trusted with even basic and essential "adult" rights, like, oh, getting vaccinated even though their parents don't want them to. Reasoning in circles correlates with vicious circles.

Thirdly, it is too easy to fall into the fallacy I call "blaming the rebel". Ageist adults will see a teen, or a whole generation of teens, filled with angst or righteous indignation about school uniforms, or a curfew, or gestapo parents who won't let their sons be (platonic) friends with girls, and then said ageists will latch on to the emotionally charged rage, the righteous tone, the subsequent disobedience which they've come to believe is always "irresponsible", and they'll argue, "If teens react like this to something adults believe is in their best interest, these hysterical, petulant, irresponsible kids don't deserve rights".

But what if those restrictions on teens didn't exist, and teens enjoyed all the same legal rights and socially recognized freedoms as 35-year-olds (recall the vicious circle mentioned above)? Then that angst and those "petulant" behaviors would not exist, and there would go ageist adults' argument for why teens don't deserve rights. In his Scientific American article "The Myth of the Teen Brain", psychologist Robert Epstein explains how for most of human history and in hunter-gatherer societies into the present day, people Anglophones would call "teen-agers" were simply young members of the adult community; juvenile delinquency and teen angst are nonexistent problems in those societies. Epstein writes:

Even more significant, a series of long-term studies set in motion in the 1980s by anthropologists Beatrice Whiting and John Whiting of Harvard University suggests that teen trouble begins to appear in other cultures soon after the introduction of certain Western influences, especially Western-style schooling, television programs and movies. Delinquency was not an issue among the Inuit people of Victoria Island, Canada, for example, until TV arrived in 1980. By 1988 the Inuit had created their first permanent police station to try to cope with the new problem.

As a matter of fact, the uppity behavior of young people ias been used before as an argument against affording teens new rights that people now take for granted. Back in the sixties and seventies, when Boomers were fighting to get the voting age lowered from 21 to 18 because of the draft in Vietnam, the old guard leveraged the unrest among college students as an argument that 18-year-olds weren't mature enough to vote. Stuart Goldstein, who fought to lower the voting age in New Jersey to 18, said: "It was kind of an uphill battle for us trying to convince people young people were responsible, because it was an era when, from a national political point of view, the national leaders were pitting young against old. Our thing was, 'We're going to try and work within the system.' There was all this tumult going on across the country. We didn't think that would help us convince people that they should lower the voting age." And yet 18-year-olds got the vote not long thereafter, and have been using it well.

Blaming the rebel has been done not only to youth, but also to other oppressed groups throughout history. In 1851, Samuel A. Cartwright, a physician who practiced in antebellum Mississippi and Louisiana, posited a mental disorder called drapetomania. He identified drapetomania as a mental illness whereby Black slaves would run away from their masters, attempting to become free. Cartwright wrote that this was the result of masters who "made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals". (That line makes me flinch, because it reminds me a little too much of the "Be a parent, not a pal" line directed towards permissive parents today.) This was an argument levied against granting freedom to African-Americans, as if it were innate to the Black race to "irresponsibly" disobey. Today, virtually all Americans realize that fleeing slavery was only a perfectly proper response to humans being legally treated as someone's property, and would find the idea that Black people are somehow undeserving of the right to be free by virtue of their Blackness to be preposterous.

Also, are you really so sure we would not see rage, uprising, even tantrums, if an age restriction were imposed on Boomers today? Howe & Strauss attribute to Boomers a tendency to be idealistic, impassioned, quick to anger, emotional, easily outraged. A recent comment on the NYRA Youth Rights Discussion group put it so well: "If all age restrictions were applied at both ends of standard 'adulthood' we would see much less of this shit. Boomers would fume if they couldn't buy alcohol after age 52."

Would this fuming be proof that sexagenarians were unworthy of the right to drink, vote, drive, sign contracts, or make their own medical decisions?

I say no. What say you?

#maturity #millennials #baby boomers #interbellum generation #voting age #drapetomania #blaming the rebel #learned helplessness #helicopter parenting

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savegraduation · 6 years ago

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5 posts!

#5 posts #tumblr milestone

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savegraduation · 6 years ago

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Spanky ghost

In the front of the office at my day program there are decorations up for Halloween. One of them shows a ghost standing/floating over a black cat, the cat with its back arched; the ghost seems to be putting its hand out.

"Doesn't that ghost look as if it's about to give a spanking to that black cat?", I asked my coaches.

"It does!", one of them commented. "The way it looks like it's got its hand pulled back, like it's about to hit the cat". The other coach agreed.

"I never noticed that before", one of them said.

A few weeks before, the topic of spanking had come up at our program. My coach "Tamika" will often discuss how her parents spanked her and she spanked her kids (now 17 and 22). This time the topic of spanking was broached, though, I mentioned the news story I had read about how the American Academy of Pediatrics now advises parents not to spank their children. It even called for a federal legal ban on spanking in the United States.

I then brought up the scientific studies that found spanking children increases their chances of growing into violent adults.

"My brothers and me were spanked, and we're not violent", said Tamika. "I don't know about that." The other coach concurred.

"The study doesn't say everyone who gets spanked will become violent, just that they're statistically more likely to", I explained.

One of Tamika's frequent talking points is how when she was a child, kids respected their elders and knew the boundaries, because parents were free to spank them, whereas now kids are thugs because they know they can call CPS if they get spanked, and therefore escape receiving that kind of discipline.

This seems to be a common talking point of social conservatives in general. In response to the Quora question "Can a liberal explain why they view conservatives as ignorant?", Teresa Bryan Peneguy writes a number of demonstrably false beliefs that conservative voters typically hold on factual issues. One of her examples of conservative myths is: "Today's teens are so much worse than in previous generations. They are more promiscuous, use more drugs and are more delinquent. No wonder, since spanking is out of style and they took corporal punishment out of most of the schools."

One thing that bothers me that Tamika says is that CPS turns parental authority over. In fact, CPS is the best ally kids have in a world full of parents who are real Simon Legrees. If your father wants to punish you because you were dating another boy, or dating a girl whom your father won't let you date because she's Black, if your mother tries to punish you for something you didn't do, if your father wants to punish you every time you "contradict" him (even if it's something as innocuous as disagreeing on whether it's a cold day outside), if your mother wants to punish you for growing your hair long or getting your ears pierced (if you're a boy) or won't let you wear pants (if you're a girl) because "girls wear dresses", then by all means, use CPS to your advantage if the parent wants to administer a spanking to punish you. We already live in a country so backward that parents can ground their teen-age son for talking to girls at school or their teen-age daughter for having male platonic friends.

Check out this answer (by Dylan Owens) on Quora to "In parenting, how strict is too strict?":

My best friend is 15. These are his rules:

His bed time is 8:00. He has to be in bed, lights off, and not moving. He breaks it, no phone for a month. He usually has go to church three times a week. This is not optional. He has never missed church. He can't watch any movies, videos, or TV shows that contain magic. He does, no phone for a month. He can't ever argue with his mother on anything. If he does, he gets beat with a belt. He fights with his brother, he gets beaten with a belt. He uses Quora, he gets beaten with a belt. He forgets to put the cap on the toothpaste, no phone for a week.

I'd say that's pretty strict. His mother is a fanatical Creationist Pentecostal Christian. She likes to beat the sins out of her children. She's also on her third marriage.

Please don't use the Bible as a rubric for raising a child. It just messes them up.

You seriously think Dylan's friend shouldn't call CPS on his mother when she beats him with a belt for using Quora?

This delves into a deeper issue with social conservatives. They seem not to care when an authority figure wrongs someone, be it a parent wronging her/his child, a teacher or principal wronging her/his student, or a cop wronging the arrested. This kind of thinking dates back to Aristotle, who said, "A son or a slave is property, and there can be no injustice to one's own property". The only exception, apparently, is when the authority figure in question subversively makes a move too far to the left for these social conservatives' liking -- an example being the teacher who assigned her students to fill out a Venn diagram comparing George W. Bush vs. Adolf Hitler.

Spanking is in the news right now, in fact, as Scotland (a country where the age of majority is 16) became the first country in the U.K. to ban corporal punishment. Around the world, the move to criminalize the spanking of one's children is gaining steam.

Pop singer Kelly Clarkson took some heat after she said, "I find nothing wrong with a spanking", admitting she uses this method of disciplining her small children. She is shown holding her children lovingly, with a smile on her face. "I punish you because I love you". When my parents punished me, it scarred me emotionally. Wouldn't you find a wife you said she was loved by her husband despite his beating her to be . . . weak? Subservient? Submissive? Beating your dog is now illegal and considered abuse . . . do human children really have fewer rights than freaking dogs?

Here are some facts on spanking that can fuel the next conversation you have on the topic.

Being regularly spanked has been found to cause developmental and educational delays, mental illness, and even physical disorders as your child grows up. Spanked children are more likely to hit other kids, and to grow up into violent adults.

Spanking teaches a child to fear her/his parent rather than to trust said parent. This fear of one's parents can last a lifetime. I was spanked by my mother as a small child, and even when I was a teen-ager, I would start walking out of a room as soon as my mother walked in.

What do you tell the people who will inevitably say, "I was spanked, and I turned out fine!"? Dr. Alan E. Kazdin says, "There are people who smoke cigarettes and live to be 100 but that does not refute the findings that smoking is likely to lead to early death. Exceptions are interesting (some people who contract HIV do not get AIDS) but they do not alter the finding and it would be foolhardy to think that one is an exception."

Spanking does provide short-term gratification for a parent and can stop a child then and there, but over time it becomes less effective until the parent needs to spank progressively harder and harder, like taking higher and higher doses of LSD to get that effect.

Parents who approved of spanking often change their mind after reading the professionally published scientific research showing spanking leads to aggression, delinquency, and blighted relationships with one's parents.

Spanking is now on the decline; from 1988 to 2001, the percentage of middle-class mothers who believed corporal punishment was an acceptable form of discipline dropped from 46% to 21%.

Only half (50%) of Millennial parents have spanked their children, compared to 70% of Gen-X parents, 72% of Boomer parents, and 76% of Silent and Greatest parents.

And that claim that today's kids are thugs because they don't get spanked? Urban myth. Starting around 1993, there was the famous nationwide (and global) crime drop. Today's preteen, teen-age and college-age African-American boys have the lowest rates of violent crime of any generation on which we have enough data to draw an accurate conclusion. As Mike Males put it: "Imagine that a time-liberated version of vigilante George Zimmerman sees two youths walking through his neighborhood: black, hoodied Trayvon Martin of 2012, and a white teen from 1959 (say Bud Anderson from Father Knows Best). Based purely on statistics of race and era, which one should Zimmerman most fear of harboring criminal intent? Answer: He should fear (actually, not fear) them equally; each has about the same low odds of committing a crime." In fact, homicide, assault, and rape statistics are now lower among teens than among fiftysomething Jonesers -- the generation born from 1958 to 1963. Oh, and teen pregnancy in the U.S. is at its lowest rate since they started keeping data.

It's too easy to fall into facile stereotypes approved by one's ageist peers and be cheered for speaking the party line about how "kids need more discipline -- more! More! More!" Instead of glibly falling for myths that seem like common sense, parents and anyone planning to be a parent should first examine the credible research before they start spewing oxymora about "tough love".

#spanking #corporal punishment #millennials #generation jones #crime drop

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savegraduation · 6 years ago

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Global Climate Strike Day and compulsory education

Today, September 20, was the Global Climate Strike. Around the world, people with day jobs took their jobs off to protest global warming. And students -- college students, of course, but also kappatwelvers -- ditched school.

Leading the call for the climate strike was Greta Thunberg, a teen-age girl who has been cutting school for months to call attention to the urgency of climate change, an issue leaders like Donald Trump just don’t seem to care about. Thunberg thumbs her nose at compulsory education, and given what K-12 schools in the U.S. can get away with making their students do, or not letting their students do, she’s absolutely right to.

I have read that Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s. This piqued my curiosity as to whether Thunberg may have any problems with compulsory education because of her Asperger’s. I say this because my own disability, logaesthesia, shaped my views on compulsory schooling.

In my junior year of high school, the wood grains on many of the desks at my school were bothering me more and more. Many of the formica desks had this recurring sicklocyte shape on them -- it reminded me of an eye. I would need to scrape these eyes off the desks as I saw them, even if the desk wasn’t my own.

One day, I had just finished history class and was headed towards the homecoming skits in the auditorium (that year’s theme was Dr. Seuss books). After I walked out of the history classroom and it was locked, I looked inside and accidentally saw the desks in there, all of which had the eye formica pattern.

I panicked. Then I got an idea. I threw my five-dollar bill lunch money inside the classroom, through a window, and decided to tell the assistant-principal, Mr. McGinnis, that my money was locked up in the history classroom.

All the eyes that I saw, all the occurrences of the words “eye” or “I” that I heard, and other words that had the diphthong /ai/ in them (like, might, time, my, by, find, etc.) were accumulating inside me as I waited for the classroom to be opened so I could scrape the eyes off the desks and begin purging them all off.

I reached the auditorium, where I heard the skits. The freshman class did “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” Then the seniors did “How the Grinch Stole Homecoming”, a (faculty-censored) skit in which the senior class steals the other classes’ homecoming floats, but magnanimously gives them back at the end. Lots of /ai/ sounds. I saw Mr. McGinnis in the crowd, and said, “Mr. McGinnis?” No response. I repeated: “Mr. McGinnis?” Still no reply.

Then I said, “Mr. McGinnis?” loudly. He didn’t budge, and I concluded that my assistant-principal was ignoring me.

The homecoming rally finally ended. I was able to find the library assistant, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who had the keys to all the rooms.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick opened Mr. Hart’s history classroom for me. I grabbed my dollar bill, and scraped the “eyes” off every desk in the room. But by now I had hundreds of “eye”s to purge off. I thenI left and followed Mrs. Fitzpatrick into the library.

Once in the library, I hid behind the shelf of paperback novels. I closed my eyes and begin purging and chanting “adolye, adolye, adolye”, hundreds of times. My nails were down at my groin.

Before I finished purging, Mrs. Fitzpatrick saw me. “Inappropriate!”, she said. “Please go and eat your lunch!”

That “inappropriate” was the last straw! I then began crying and hyperventilating, crying and hyperventilating. I made it all the way to the office, still crying and hyperventilating.

Mrs. Abel, the school nurse, saw me in there and heard me. “James!”, she said. “Stop making that noise! It’s very loud and very disruptive!” Noise? Hello?!? It’s called “crying”! You do it when you’re sad? And disruptive, dischmuptive! This was lunchtime, for Pete’s sake! How could any disruption occur then?

I said I couldn’t stop crying. Mrs. Abel said, “Your mother told me that you’re able to control the things you do”. I explained to her that my mother was referring to the purging, not to things like crying!

I went to Mr. McGinnis’ office and told him everything that had happened. He called my mother to pick me up. My mother arrived and I was still crying and hyperventilating. “Close your eyes and breathe in”, she said.

My mother drove me home. Mr. McGinnis was no longer on Campolindo High School’s campus, having driven home for the day. As my mother drove me home, I told her about the wood grains and the purging and everything. I told her how Campolindo wasn’t made for students with OCD. She asked if their treatment of students was too uniform, and I said it was.

I was forced by state law to afford school (the school-leaving age in California was and still is 18, not 16 as in many states). Once I got to school, I got put into situations where I had no choice but to purge, and because of the conservative faculty culture at Campolindo, my behavior was called “inappropriate” (a label I have a real problem with). I now realized that high school students (and grade school students) were forced to go to a place where their freedom was taken away. This made school, by definition, a prison.

All the things like the hat rule (”Take your hat off inside the classroom!”) or the dress codes that forbade baby tees were now seen as indications of a prison -- a prison for people whose only crime was being the wrong age. And the senior homecoming skit? After the fact, an article was written in our school newspaper about skit censorship. It quoted a boy from the then-senior class saying, “This is the tamest skit we’ve had in years, and they’re still hacking away at it!” I now viewed being forced to go to a place with censorship as an indicator of a prison. I also learned about Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier in history class. This was a Supreme Court case wherein the court ruled that censorship in school papers was constitutional! I was infuriated by the concept.

I was talking with my father, who said I had to go to school, and told him I didn’t like high school. “Too restrictive?”, he asked.

“Yeah”, I replied.

“Well, the purpose of high school is pretty much to teach you what your restrictions are going to be in life”. Why have an institution that existed only to teach restrictions? Especially many restrictions that were going to be lifted in college! And sure, adults often say “Preparation for the workplace”, but what if you don’t want a corporate office job (and this applies to the majority of Millennials!)? What if you’re going to be a bricklayer, or a rock star, or an MTV cinematographer, or a field linguist, or an avant-garde philosopher who publishes books about your radical philosophy?

I even remembered going to a bookstore and reading on a laminated summary of sociology that education was conservative. The reason therefor was that education’s purpose was to socialize, and that teachers were typically upper-middle-class White people who had a lot of stock in the status quo. Basically, teachers (like Mrs. Dahlgren in my play The Bittersweet Generation) set out to indoctrinate students in arbitrary social norms: “Don’t put your hands in your pants.” “Tuck your shirt in.” “Take your hat off inside a classroom.” “Boys, hold the door open for girls.” “Don’t talk about lower bodily functions.” “Boys can’t wear their hair long.” “Don’t cross-dress.” “Don’t be gay.” Ad nauseam.

The scales had fallen from my eyes. There was no going back. I was now a youth-rightser for life.

Luckily, my peers -- the first Millennials -- were making a distinct turn to the left, in reaction to the Jones/Boomer/Greatest culture of curfews, school uniforms, unbridled parental authority, social conventions, tightening gender roles, homophobia, patriotism, trust in big corporations, and desire to prepare their kids for the corporate workplace that dominated political and social discourse at the time -- the Bill Clintons, Tipper Gores, Bob Doles, Fred Phelpses, James Dobsons, William J. Bennetts, Newt Gingriches, and Pat Robertsons of the world. I grew a beard at 17, as many of the other boys at Campolindo were doing. I was able to communicate to my peers: “The state is forcing you to go to a place that forces you to take your hats off!” The Students’ Far Leftist Union, or SFLU, was formed at Campolindo before 1996 was over.

As long as the state has compulsory education laws, and as long as those compulsory schools restrict their students’ freedom, whether for reason of social norms ("Boys can’t hold hands with other boys”), supposedly making students safe (requiring students to wear bar code ID’s to school), or just because it looks nice (”Aw, look at those kids in their uniforms! Isn’t that cute?”), schools will be prisons. May we rush the day when there are no more prisons in America for people whose only crime is being young.

#greta thunberg #climate change #compulsory schooling #asperger's #logaesthesia #Millennials #social norms

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savegraduation · 6 years ago

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The eight stages of life

Today, I officially become middle-aged. At 10:45 p.m. Pacific Coast Time, I turn 40.

When I was little, I thought being 40, 70, even 100 would be fun. But when I was a teen-ager, the prospect of going from an edgy, rebellious lad to a middle-aged man who's supposed to settle down no longer seemed something to look forward to. I've been in the latter mindset ever since.

In 1964, Jack Weinberg said, "You can't trust anybody over 30". Weinberg, a late Silent born in 1940, is now 79. The Silent Generation (born 1925-1942) had their last members turn 30 on December 31, 1972. The first Silents turned 40 on January 1, 1965, and the last turned 40 on December 31, 1982. The first Baby Boomers (born 1943-1957) turned 40 on January 1, 1983; the first Jonesers (born 1958-1963) on January 1, 1998; the first Xers (born 1964-1978) soon afterwards on January 1, 2004; and the first Millennials (born 1979-2004) on January 1, 2019.

As Millennials begin to fill up the middle-aged bracket without giving up our pro-youth beliefs in our forties, the movement to lower the voting age will gain only more and more steam as the "You'll agree with me when you're older!" claims directed at Millennials by ageists when we were teen-agers become discredited. People often say, "Wait and see". The wait was more than twenty years in the making, but now we're seeing. I didn't stop supporting youth rights when I turned 21. I didn't stop supporting youth rights when I turned 25. I didn't stop supporting youth rights when I turned 30. I didn't stop supporting youth rights when I turned 35. And now it's my fortieth birthday, and I still support youth rights.

It seems that society, at least in the U.S., recognizes eight basic age brackets. It has its expectations and norms about each of these brackets, and once someone has a milestone birthday, she or he is expected to become a different person.

0-5: Early childhood. This is the earliest and most dependent of all the age brackets. Children under 6 are expected to be totally dependent on adults, and watched at all times. Now, even letting a 4- or 5-year-old play unsupervised in the back yard is considered too dangerous. These children are to be kept away not only from profanity and sexual themes in movies and on TV, but also from entertainment that is just too scary or "intense". One would believe that children this age are supposed to be watching Barney and Bear in the Big Blue House -- nothing with death, violence, nor even fear. Although these little ones are under complete control of their parents and denied so much as choice in what to eat for lunch, at least they are safe from compulsory schooling for the time being.

6-11: Elementary school years. Kids this age are still children, but not small children. It is at this point in life that children are forced to go to school and learn to sit still without fidgeting and do work presented as "boring" -- a kind of forced learning that takes all the fun out of learning. Children this age might have a choice in whether to wear their red polo shirt or their blue polo shirt to school if their school has no uniform policy, but their parents are ultimately the ones selecting what assortment of clothes they have in their wardrobe. Although children of this age often have their likes and dislikes in food respected, society still pushes their parents to be in complete control of these children's lives. They are forgiven for going weeks without bathing and for scatological humor; but they are expected not to swear in front of adults, and adults or even older teens are expected not to cuss in front of them. They are absolutely to be guarded from sex and pedophiles, and older people molesting these kids is seen as strictly off-limits. Majorities of middle-aged Americans believe elementary-school-age children should not be left home without a parent or baby-sitter.

12-15: Pubescence. Although society does definitely not see 12-to-15-year-olds as adults, it does recognize that they are going through puberty. As such, junior high schools incorporate sex education and teach 12- and 13-year-olds about the male and female reproductive systems, pregnancy, conception, and the different STD's and their symptoms; schools will also teach about avoiding pregnancy, even if it's just abstinence-only sex education. Society considers these kids too young to be having sex, or to see R-rated movies at the cinema without a parent, but at least it recognizes them as free to be exposed to educational sex talk, and recognizes that they will have crushes on hot boys or cute girls -- both their approximate age and older. 12-to-15-year-olds are often free to go to the mall without a parent and get into fashion and trendy bands. They are not, however, expected to "grow up" and "stop acting like kids". Your average Gen-X 50-year-old today would rather her/his 13-year-old daughter or son watch children's cartoons than vape, or even make a big decision about a medical procedure.

16-17: Semi-adulthood. This period is a jarring transition for teens. 16-year-olds are restricted by social norms that expect them to behave "like an adult", told by 45-year-olds that they are too old to watch Saturday morning cartoons, to tell or laugh at fart jokes, to sing "Miss Suzy Had a Steamboat". At the Oregon Library mentioned in this UPI article, "adulting classes" are offered for 16-to-25-year-olds. In the article "10 Things Your Teenager Isn't Telling You", Izzy says, "I can't stand it when my parents say, 'You're 17. Act like a grownup,' one day, and then turn around and say, 'You're not old enough to do that. You're only 17,' the next. Which is it? Make up your mind!" Middle-aged Americans expect 16-year-olds not to behave like children. But most of them do not believe 16-year-olds should have freedom from their parents or freedom to choose where to go to school. Society also believes that these girls and boys should definitely not be voting, drinking, smoking, vaping, toking, gambling, sexting, or signing contracts. Teens at this point of life are considered old enough to work, and often accused of being "lazy" if they don't have a job, and yet many employers see their young age as a liability and will pass over them. If a teen this age molests or rapes a child, she or he will be seen as a predator and a sicko. Someone who does something evil at this age is destined to be held to it for the rest of her/his life

18-24: Emerging adulthood. When an American turns 18, she or he not only finally gets to vote, but is told that it's her/his civic duty to get out and vote, or else she or he's "not a good American". Pollsters also start caring about what these girls and boys think once they're old enough to vote. Since the seventies, older Americans have been fine with emerging adults signing contracts, consenting to operations, leaving wills, and buying pornography, and also are fine with them either getting married or not getting married. Although most Americans do not believe parents have a right to be a dictator over an emerging adult, these same Americans often welcome parents in as "guidance" figures of a sort when a 20-year-old takes a DBT class or has psychotherapy. Emerging adults are also seen as to be helped with any decisions with alcohol or drugs, due to the outdated scientific belief that "the brain does not finish developing until age 25". Older people often see this age group as lacking in life experience, but are fine with them being idealistic. 18-to-24-year-olds are considered too old to date someone in the 12-15 range.

25-39: Young adulthood. To Boomers' eyes, these people have attained a sort of cultural adulthood that earlier age brackets have not. Society no longer thinks it weird if people are having children at this age, and many people actually pressure 25-to-39-year-olds to get married, to buy a house, to start popping out babies and thereby overpopulate the Earth. Young adults are forgiven by anti-idealism grumps for being idealistic at their age, and allowed the freedom to travel a lot before they have children. Yet they are not protected by age-discrimination legislation against being turned down from a job for being too young. Young adults are expected not to be dependent on their parents, and not to live at home (at least by WASP Americans); they are told they should be working as members of the same society that judges people so critically. 25-to-39-year-olds are considered too old to date someone in the 16-17 range.

40-64: Middle age. These people are considered grown women and grown men, no longer kids nor even young adults. They are expected to act "matore" . . . and also humorless, to be "responsible" parents who have settled down. They are told that everything should be about the children they ought to be raising, not about them, and as much are not given much free rein in traveling or extreme sports. Middle-aged people are expected to be practical rather than idealistic, and as a result 40-year-old Millennials are coming as a shock to the Old Guard. Middle-agers are at the same time free to make their own decisions and judged for choosing to live "too freely" or "too wildly". They are seen as at just the right age when no one should refuse to hire them because of their age, either for being too young or for being too old. They receive the least discrimination from the Establishment of any of the eight age brackets. 40-to-64-year-olds are considered too old to date someone in the 18-24 range.

65+: Old age. Seniors are subject to prejudice from mainstream middle-aged Americans, not for being too young, but for being "too old". Youth and middle-agers alike often view the elderly as "fossils" or "dinosaurs" whose experiences have become too long ago and far away to have remained relevant, and yet many others consider them to have supreme wisdom. Parents will often teach their children not to contradict their grandparents, because while they may no longer be adults at the top of the world, seniors are still adults. Many will go out of their way to help people in their seventies, eighties, or nineties cross the street. While seniors often live in retirement homes and no longer have to work, or are taken care of by their 40-year-old children and no longer have to work, most people consider them fit to vote, and people believe they should make personal decisions of their own accord. Sometimes, though, they get declared unfit to make their own medical decisions or other life decisions due to senescence, and are subject to a second nonage, wherein every aspect of their lives are dictated by other (younger!) people. When a senior's ability to take care or her- or himself lessens, she or he can be viewed as similar to a child, as in the Shel Silverstein poem "The Little Boy and the Old Man":

I hope for the day when human life extension technology comes and a fortysomething or even a centenarian can have the body and soul of a 25-year-old again, because the life expectancy is 1,000 years.

#silent generation #baby boomers #generation jones #generation x #millennials #childhood #adolescence #semi-adulthood #emerging adulthood #young adulthood #old age #social norms

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savegraduation · 6 years ago

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“But being a minor is only temporary!”

On the old Fourth Turning forum one day, a teacher who called herself TeacherOfMillies ("Millie" being a diminutive of "Millennial" popular on the board) started a thread in which she wrote about telling her son that he needs to "respect adults". Adina, a Millennial on the board, accused her of ageism. TeacherofMillies' response was:

Adina: Recognizing that minors have different capacities from adults and therefore do not deserve the same rights cannot be put in the same category as racism or sexism. A minority group is a group (such as sex, race or religion) whose membership is normally permanent. People who are born black stay black for life. Adolescence is not permanent. There is no discrimination here.

Then there was the old Pagan message board at AOL, where Brocéliande, a Joneser Wiccan with a 12-year-old son, told me that teens were not a minority group, because a minority group was by definition permanent, with the implied reasoning that discrimination on the basis of age was therefore acceptable.

It happens again and again when youth rights is brought up. Someone will bring up the -isms: sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and by extension, ageism. Someone will then bring up Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve or other ostensibly scientific claims that some demographic groups are statistically more likely than others to be wise or have a higher IQ. Someone might say, "Statistics show that Asians are, on the average, worse drivers", or "Simon Baron-Cohen showed that men are better than women at systemizing tasks and women are better than men at empathizing tasks", or even, turning the tables, "Statistically, women are less likely than men to start wars; does this mean we should deny all men the right to positions of world leaders, even the gentler men, so the world will be safe from the risk of blowing ourselves up?" And then she or he will ask, "If it's not right to deny freedoms to deserving ethnic minorities, or deserving women, or deserving men, just because a large number of other people in their demographic aren't qualified -- it would be discrimination -- why is it OK to deny a mature 17-year-old the right to vote or drink just because some other people her/his age are immature?" And then some defender of the anti-YR position will fumble to defend it by arguing, "Being a minor is only temporary, so age is different from race, gender, or religion!"

Before I go any further into rebutting this argument, let's play this on an honest ground with our terms here. I prefer the term "demographic group" to "minority group". A group does not have to be a minority group to be discriminated against. Males are not a minority group, and the draft discriminates against males. Blacks are not a minority group in South Africa, where only 10% of the population is White, and apartheid discriminated against the Black majority. But males and Black South Africans are demographic groups, and prejudicial treatment against them is discrimination. Discrimination simply means treating someone wrongly differently because of her or his demographic group. And no one can argue with the fact that teens are a demographic group (as are seniors, for what it's worth!) When you say "minority group", you're really saying "demographic group that has traditionally been at a social disadvantage in the society/civilization in question" (in this case, the United States, or the West). So it's not "minority group", but "demographic group" that's the relevant concept here.

The first problem with this argument is that the impermanence of being a minor ("An American who was born Black could never wake up one day and be White all of a sudden!"), while making this different from other forms of discrimination, is not really relevant to the issue of whether discrimination is justified. One can pull up interesting differences when comparing two things, but just because those differences exist, it does not necessarily follow that said differences are relevant to right and wrong. For example, one might argue that in England, committing murder with a knife is different from committing murder with a gun because knives are legal to own in England, just not to use for murder, whereas guns are outright illegal to so much as possess. While this as a fact in and of itself is true, is this difference in any way germane to whether an Englishman killing someone with a knife is morally acceptable, or whether it should be legal to murder someone with a knife in England? Exactly how does the temporariness of membership in a group make discrimination defensible? I don't think that if that person became White one day and was finally allowed to vote because of it in the pre-1860's world, he or she would forgive and forget all the needless discrimination in the past!

Secondly, being mistreated during one's teen-age years will stay with a person for life. Your world does not become a clean slate again once you reach the legal age to do something; rather, the pain of discrimination from the past carries on.

A butterfly that flaps its wings when you are 13 will still have the ripple effect going when you are 40. For example, if 15-year-old Rachel's parents restrict her from taking the courses that competitive colleges like by refusing to sign her course selection form until it is whittled down to the dumbed-down classes that satisfy their anti-intellectualism, Rachel will have a very hard time getting into the colleges she wants by the time she's applying for colleges her senior year. As an adult, her opportunities will be limited against her will because of the choices her parents made for her against her will as a teen-ager.

And what if your parents take you to get a circumcision before you are old enough to legally say no to an operation? Your foreskin isn't going to magically grow back once you reach the age of medical consent (which, in the U.S. varies depending on your jurisdiction, from 15 in Oregon to 19 in Alabama). Judging by the arguments ageists use against 12-year-old boys being allowed to say no to circumcision, you’d think they were convinced a boy’s foreskin will magically regenerate on his eighteenth birthday! Similarly, we're now hearing news stories about teens who live in states where under18s may not get vaccinated without their parents' permission researching vaccination on the Internet and often driving (or, if under 16, being driven by a friend) into states where minors do not need parental permission to be vaccinated. If some teen's Christian Scientist parents say no to a vaccination, and then s/he is exposed to the bacterium Bordetella pertussis or the rubella virus at 16, and catches pertussis or rubella, the teen will most likely die before her/his eighteenth birthday of a preventable disease -- are you seriously then going to defend this with the "But being a minor is only temporary!" argument?

The emotional enscarment that comes from being hurt by age-discriminatory laws will also last for the rest of one's life. If someone goes through a gulag school where he is subject to waterboarding, electroshock therapy, straitjacketing, and sensory deprivation, he may eventually be out of it as an adult, but by then the damage will be done. He will suffer the trauma for the rest of his life. Survivors of conversion therapy may be past conversion therapy, but by now they're 8.9 times as likely as their peers to consider suicide. Since I was 6, I suffered from a mental disorder called logaesthesia, where I taste words and have the sensations of swallowing them. The words I don't like I have to "purge" out by scraping my nails against my groin and then "vomiting" them up by carrying my nails over my abdomen, chest and throat. All the "socialization" I received in high school, all the being forced to do things, all the fascist comments that my behavior was "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable", haunt me to this very day. I'm 39 now. Every day I still think back weekly to run-ins with authoritarian teachers that happened during my school years over both logaesthesia and other conflicts that came up. I have flashbacks, I bite myself, I slam my fist against my head, and punch my abdomen as if slicing open a watermelon, I yell. If I had only been given the chance to stop going to school, to live away from my parents, to move to Berkeley, I may have been able to get away from it before too much damage was done.

And what if you die during your teens? Then your adolescence will indeed become permanent. If you die before age 18, you will never have the chance to vote for or against a president. If you abided by the law stating no one is to drink alcohol until his or her twenty-first birthday, then you got drafted and went to war rather than dodging the draft, and got killed in war at the age of 20, you would die without ever having the chance to try alcohol. You think a belated "sorry" is going to make that OK?

The choices adults make for minors may even last beyond their terrene life and carry beyond the grave. For example, a recently deceased 17-year-old may have his organs harvested for donation against his consent. Or imagine that Blebdahism is the one true religion, that God is a Blebdahist and believes anyone who betrays Blebdahism is sentenced to Hell. But one young person who believes in Blebdahism deep down in his heart may have parents who are Sporgalists. In the United States, the parents may, by law, force their child to practice Sporgalism even though it is wrong, which would thereby condemn not only the parents, but also their child, to Hell for refusing to practice the rituals of Blebdahism. Since no one knows God's exact sentiments, one could not promise children that God would understand if they betrayed their religion only because they were forced; it could very well be that God thinks conforming to parental force is no excuse for not following Blebdahism, even for part of one's life, and still refuses to let those youth into Heaven, regardless. Of course, it may very well be that God understands people who betray their religion because of coercion by authority, that several religious paths lead to "Heaven", or even that Heaven does not really exist . . . but what if those aren't the case? Or suppose, arguendo, that God does let people into Heaven who practiced Sporgalism as minors but converted to Blebdahism as adults, but not people who were still practicing Sporgalism when they died. What if the child of Sporgalist parents who wants to practice Blebdahism gets hit by a truck at age 15? She'll never get another chance at practicing Blebdahism, and will be stuck spending an eternity in Hell. And the Blebdahist child of Sporgalist parents will probably be buried, in accordance with her parents' wishes, in a Sporgalist cemetery, where her body will lie forever . . . and ever . . . and ever.

Thirdly, lost time is never found again. Everyone only has a finite time to live -- at least until human life extension technology is invented, and we don't know how soon that will be. If the first 18 years of a 90-year life are spent in chains, that's one whole fifth of your life -- lost forever. Say a girl named Danielle wants to wear dreadlocks starting at the time she begins high school in September of 2016, at the age of 14 years and 6 months, but her school clamps down and forbids her to wear dreadlocks because they are against the dress code. Danielle graduates in June of 2020 at the age of 18 years and 3 months. She is then free to wear dreadlocks, until she dies the day after her eightieth birthday. She got 61 years and 9 months to wear her dreadlocks, but if her high school hadn't disallowed them it would have been 65 years and 6 months of her life. God is not going to magically add 3 years and 9 months to her life, allowing her to live to 83.75, to make up for the years she could have spent dreadlocked but was wrongly denied the right to.

An election only comes once. A person born in 1980 would not get to vote until 1998, and the thousands of decisions voted on in 1996 and 1997 did not have that person's say. He may get to vote on 1998 propositions or in the 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections, but it is already too late for him to vote in the Clinton-Dole election of 1996, which is lost forever in the annals of history. For any of the bad decisions of voters leading up to the current day, there’s a possibility it could have been avoided being passed had more young people, those who were 16 and 17, been allowed to vote.

Fourthly, ethnicity is the platonic prototype of a demographic variable and racism of discrimination, and every other demographic variable about humans has something about it that makes it different from race and unique from other demographic variables.

Take gender and sexism, for instance. Gender is a universally recognized trait; the gender someone is assigned at birth would be the same across the world in more than 99% of cases. Someone's race may be labeled as Mulatto or Mestizo or Black in Cuba but Hispanic in the United States. In one society, having sex with another person of your gender automatically makes you gay, whereas in another society, it is viewed as natural to experiment even if you are straight, and a third society may have no concept of "sexual orientation” whatsoever. The legal ages for things differ from country to country. Someone with epilepsy is viewed as disabled in modern countries but as having special, supernatural powers in the Hmong culture, and what is seen as ADD in the context on one culture is "normal" in a traditional nomadic culture. But everywhere around the world, someone with a penis and testicles is assigned male at birth and someone with a vagina and ovaries is assigned female at birth. (Defining someone by their karyotype -- XX vs. XY vs. various trisomies and polysomies like Klinefelter's syndrome -- is a twentieth and twenty-first century development, and even then, fewer than 1% of births are ambiguous or "intersex" when external genitalia, gonads, and chromosomes are taken into account.) Some people turn out trans, and there are some special gender categories, such as the berdaches/Two-spirit people in Native American cultures or the Thai kathoey, or ladyboys, in some cultures, but even then the person's biological sex is still acknowledged. Even in the relatively trans-friendly United States, the Selective Service system still has laws on the books requiring transfemales to register but denying transmales registry, because gender assigned at birth is so hardwired into the law. In 2002, in the case of In re Estate of Gardiner, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that a man and a transwoman could not marry, because the transwoman was male before the law and Kansas did not recognize same-sex marriages at the time.

Religion and religious discrimination are unique because unlike other demographic variables, people choose their religion. No one chooses to be male, or Chinese, or gay, or 23 years old, or disabled (unless they deliberately stab their eyes out or jump off a height to make themselves paraplegic). But people have control over what religion they practice, and this makes religion different.

Sexual orientation and homophobia are different because sexual orientation revolves around certain behaviors, and behaviors that certain factions and individuals believe are immoral at that. No one gets arrested for the mere condition of being African-American, or female, or teen-age. No one believes that blind people will burn in Hell. But many nations still have sodomy laws on the books making gay sex illegal (this included several U.S. states as late as 2003). Many churches teach that LGBT people will burn in Hell after they die. There are no controversial behaviors that are defining of Blackness, or defining of womanhood, or defining of adolescence. But sexual orientation is about what someone does just as much as what she or he is.

Disability and ableism are different because a disability can render someone by definition unable to do something. An example would be paraplegics being unable to do work that requires you to walk on feet. Men are generally stronger than women, but there are amazonian women and plenty of weak men. Stating that 20-year-olds are too immature to drink but 21-year-olds are mature enough to drink is a loose generalization. Some psychologists, most notably the White Charles Murray and the Jewish Richard J. Herrnstein, in The Bell Curve, make claims that average IQ of African-Americans is lower than that of Whites, which is in turn lower than the average IQ of Asians. There are disputes as to whether these statistics come from culturally biased IQ tests written by upper-middle-class White males, and many people believe there is no difference in intelligence among ethnic groups at all. Others believe that different ethnic groups and different genders have different tendencies towards strengths and weaknesses, such as Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen's theory of female empathizing and male systemizing. Whether the Bell Curve statistics are legitimate or not, though, no one can deny you find bright people and dim people -- even a few autistic savants with extremely lopsided abilities -- in all racial/ethnic groups. But blind people driving? This form of discrimination based on disability is recognized as "bona fide discrimination", and actually is legal in certain cases in many jurisdictions across the world. On the other hand, forbidding an epileptic to become a lawyer or refusing to let someone with cerebral palsy into your cake shop would most certainly not be bona fide discrimination, and pointing out this way disability is different from other demographic variables would not be an acceptable argument.

Socioeconomic class and classism are different because class is mutable (yes, possibly temporary!) in some societies but not in others. If you live in present-day Nashville or Los Angeles, you can rise to the top echelons just by being a great singer or actor. If you lived in Edwardian England, on the other hand, being a prole pretty much meant you were stuck being a prole, all your lower-class ways and mannerisms hard-wired into your identity. Rising in social class was very difficult.

Every rights movement has its own hurdles to overcome, and people who shout, "But this is different!" cause every rights movement to have to start at square one. A good example is Martin Luther King's niece, Alveda King, who fights against the gay rights movement and argues that homosexuality flies in the face of "family values" and therefore cannot be compared to the Civil Rights movement. Youth rights, like women's rights, LGBT rights, disability rights, and civil rights for ethnic and religious minorities, are human rights, and human rights supporters today don't say that being free from anti-Islamic discrimination isn't a human right because people choose their religion, or that being free from sexism isn't a human right because sex is a biological reality instead of just a social construct.

Finally, the transience of temporary pain or damage has never excused hurting people. As someone on the forum for National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) once wrote about people you argue that discrimination against teens is acceptable because minority is temporary: "Someone should give them a hard punch in the face. After all, it will only hurt for a little while". Damage can be temporary (even though damage caused by ageism is NOT always temporary), such as the 7-year-old who gives his baby sister a bad haircut, knowing it will grow back. But, as Martin Luther King famously stated in 1963 in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, "Justice too long delayed is justice denied". Perhaps no infliction of suffering should be illegal because life itself is only temporary, and therefore all of a person's suffering will one day come to an end?

"But!", you say, "What about the definition? You can't deny that a minority group is a permanent group, like female, or Chinese, or lower-class, or Hindu, and therefore teens are not a minority group!"

Putting aside the "minority group" vs. "demographic group" issue, the problem is this: what you've got here is an ad hoc definition. It's what logicians call the definist fallacy. Let's look at the definition of "minority" (definition 3a) in Merriam Webster's Webster's Unabridged: "A part of a population differing from others in some characteristics and often subjected to differential treatment". No mention of the membership in that group being permanent. Next, Wiktionary defines "minority group" as: "A group that forms only a small part of the population, whether it be for ethnic or other reasons". Still no mention of being permanent. Finally, for something different, let's look at the Collins COBUILD dictionary's definition (definition 2): "A minority is a group of people of the same race, culture, or religion who live in a place where most of the people around them are of a different race, culture, or religion". This excludes age, but this definition is so narrow that it also excludes such undisputed minorities as lesbians, transgender people, and the blind! Does that mean the U.S. government should feel free to round up gay people or people with bipolar disorder, since they're not protected by the definition of "minority group"?

As a matter of fact, some published, professional authors have referred to youth as a minority group. In 1971, Edward Sagarin edited a book titled The Other Minorities, which consisted of essays concerning the minority status of non-ethnic minorities: there are essays on women, gays, teens, the elderly, the disabled, criminals, and even intellectuals as minority groups. From pages 95 to 107 is Edgar Z. Friedenberg's essay "The Image of the Adolescent Minority". In it, Friedenberg writes: "In the most formal sense, then, the adolescent is one of our second-class citizens. But the informal aspects of minority status are also imputed to him. The 'teen-ager', like the Latin or Negro, is seen as joyous, playful, lazy, and irresponsible, with brutality lurking just below the surface and ready to break out into violence. All these groups are seen as childish and excitable, imprudent and improvident, sexually aggressive, and dangerous, but possessed of superb and sustained power to satisfy sexual demands. West Side Story is not much like Romeo and Juliet, but it is a great deal like Porgy and Bess." Friedenberg recognizes how facile stereotypes of teen-agers are about as respectful as the old "minstrel show" stereotype of African-Americans.

"But!", you object, "I'm just saying teens aren't a minority group!" Then if the question of whether teens are a minority group isn’t relevant to whether anti-youth discrimination is acceptable (and it isn't, given all the other problems with the "temporariness" argument), then why are you even bringing it up?

Teens are a (very often) oppressed demographic group. Discrimination against teens is still discrimination. The fact that unless you die before your twenty-first birthday you will not be underage forever does not justify your parents dictating what high school courses you will take, or you being denied the rights to medical consent, or you getting arrested for breaking curfew or underage drinking, or you being denied the vote at 16. So please don't use this argument.

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savegraduation · 6 years ago

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Aaliyah Would Be Proud

I'm James Landau, known on the Internet as Savegraduation.

I am starting this blog, Aaliyah Would Be Proud, to discuss one of most important and flammable issues of our time: youth rights. There are civil rights (for African-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Arab-Americans, Native Americans, Mexican-Americans, Indian-Americans, Filipino-Americans, and others); there are women's rights; there are LGBT rights (for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people, and non-gender-binary people); there are workers’ rights (for union laborers); there are disability rights (for the physically challenged, the blind, the deaf, the mute, the obese, arthrogrypotics, epileptics, CPers, autistics, Aspies, Downies, people with bipolar, people with borderline, schizophrenics, Touretters, obsessive-compulsives, ADDers, PTSDers, etc.); and then there are youth rights. The youth rights movement seeks to abolish or lower the age of legal restrictions, as well as change informal societal attitudes, that look down on people below a certain age (often 18, 21, or 25) as inferior and undeserving of even basic human rights.

We youth-rightsers aim to lower the voting age to 16. To lower the drinking age back to 19 or 18. To lower the age of majority and age of emancipation to 16. To protect students’ rights at the mandatory institution known as school. To abolish age-discriminatory store policies (”no more than two high school students in at one time”). To extend the rights of medical consent to all people old enough to wish for or object to treatment, regardless of age. To stop punishing parents for their minor children’s crimes. To abolish the draft. To ease restrictions on younger workers, and stop employers from viewing young employees as a liability. To allow people under 16 to get a job without adults bellowing, “Child labor!” To guarantee to every American the right to practice the religion she or he wants to and express her/his mind without her/his parents having her/him arrested for “insubordination”.

Age-discriminatory laws run a wide spectrum of enormity. At one end are age restrictions of things, such as drinking alcohol, smoking weed, or gambling, that the majority of Americans today believe are morally wrong for youth to do. Then come other status crimes like teen curfew laws. Then come laws like the laws in America preventing under18s from voting (even though Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Austria, the Crown Dependencies, Scotland, and Malta already allow 16-year-olds-to vote; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_age#Chronology_of_lowering_the_voting_age_to_16 ). Then come the oversteps of strict parents and Skinneresque faculty at K-12 schools, trying to prevent boys from wearing earrings, or censor the school paper because the principal doesn't like the angle of a particular student-written story or editorial. At the far end are stories of teens being abducted from their homes and taken into gulag camps simply because they have parents who don't like their nonconformity. Teens having their most beloved possessions destroyed or thrown away by their parents. Teens having to drive over state lines into states that will vaccinate them, lest they die before their eighteenth or even nineteenth birthdays because their parents refuse to let them have a vaccine . . . and also the less lucky teens who died already because a state legislature decided a parent's wishes trump a teen's concerns. 16-year-olds who have been seeking emancipation for a long time and then get kicked out to house by their parents (to their initial delight), only for the parents to then lie and report their child as a runaway, and having the mendacious parents rather than the truthful teen believed because of pervasive ageist attitudes and stereotypes, vitiating the minor's eligibility for emancipation. Gay teens undergoing the atrocious conversion therapy. Parents who take their 12-year-old sons to get circumcised against their sons' wishes. (And judging by their "Being a minor is only temporary!" argument, ageists seem to believe the boy's foreskin will magically regenerate on his eighteenth birthday.) If, when you hear the phrase "youth rights violations", you think simply of "You have to be 21 to drink", think again.

The title of this blog came from the R&B singer Aaliyah, who was born at the beginning of the Millennial Generation in January of 1979 and succumbed in a plane crash in 2001. In 1994, at the age of 15, Aaliyah released an album titled Age Ain't Nothing but a Number. Aaliyah lived her life to the fullest, not kowtowing to ageist laws and attitudes, and it was a good thing she did, because her life lasted only 22 years. I like to believe that if Aaliyah were to read my blog today, she would be proud of me for making the case for youth rights.

The seed of this Tumblr blog was planted several months ago, when a member of the NYRA Youth Rights Discussion Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/NYRAyouthrights/ told us about the Tumblr blog he had started on the topic of adult privilege (as analogous to male privilege, White privilege, straight privilege, etc.). Even though this blogger was an adult himself, he was swamped upon posting his first entry from people who wrongly assumed he was a kid who was upset because his parents wouldn't buy him an iPhone.

It is common among Gen-Xers (born 1964-1978) to be unaware that it's normal for Millennials (born 1979-2004) -- even the ones in our twenties or thirties, or who turned 40 this year -- to take many pro-YR positions, such as suffrage for 16-year-olds or restrictions on parental authority. These ignorant people assume that anyone starting a blog about ageism and ephebophobia (the fear of youth) must be "some kid", and that their concerns must be about positive rights (entitlement), rather than pressing negative rights.

Underlying this ignorance is a big myth surrounding generations that states every generation follows the same lifecycle as the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1957) did: they are innocent as children, then turn into wild, pot-smoking, socially liberal teen-agers who argue fiercely for youth rights, then go on being young and idealistic until they have children of their own and settle down . . . to then become "responsible", socially conservative adults who considered their younger selves to be irresponsible and misguided, raise their own kids strictly, start claiming "marijuana is illegal for a reason", and oppose youth rights. Or so the narrative goes.

But not every generation in Anglo-American history has followed this lifecycle. Take the Silent Generation (born 1925-1942), for instance. They began as Shirley Temples and Alfalfas amid the Great Depression and World War II, then spent their teens being a low-crime generation, despite all the Blackboard Jungle concern about juvenile delinquency and gangs. They married young. During the Postwar Era of 1950′s America, some of their members were beatniks, or invented rock-and-roll, or crusaded for the Civil Rights movement (after all, Chuck Berry and Martin Luther King, Jr. were Silents), but more often they kept their heads down, being grey-flannel-suit fathers who focused on their careers instead of activism, or barefoot-and-pregnant mothers who focused on being the perfect housewife. William Manchester wrote of fifties-era high school and college students: "Never had American youth been so withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous -- and silent." They were indulgent parents, however, raising the Baby Boomers to the tune of Dr. Spock. Then they hit 40, and had their "midlife crisis", realizing they had wasted their youth being so un-rebellious. They started riding motorcycles and growing ponytails in middle age, and during the Vietnam Era, they generally raised their Baby Boomer and Joneser (born 1958-1963) kids permissively. It was a Silent, 1932-born Ted Kennedy, who proposed amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to lower the voting age to from 21 to 18 at a national level, and argued in Oregon v. Mitchell that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment meant Congress could pass voting-age-related legislation at a federal level.

The "all generations are the same" myth notwithstanding, there is another, competing big myth prevalent today. This myth states that today's youth are "the worst" ever. Older Americans often indulge in saying that the Millennial Generation is the worst generation ever . . . or at least was until the Fifth World Generation (born 2005-today) came along. Memes posted by Boomers and Xers on the Internet say that when they were growing up, youth respected their elders, parents spanked their kids without fearing CPS, the spankings did no harm, and children freely "drank from the garden hose". Do they even remember the accusations during the sixties that teens had "no respect for their elders", "no respect for authority"? Older generations like to stereotype Millennials and Fifth Worlders as generations of Eloi, genetically attached to their smartphones, phones that are smarter than they are. Mark Bauerlein titled his book on Millennials The Dumbest Generation.

Are Millennials really the worst, dumbest generation ever? Nope. As sociologist Mike Males wrote in an LA Progressive article : "Imagine that a time-liberated version of vigilante George Zimmerman sees two youths walking through his neighborhood: black, hoodied Trayvon Martin of 2012, and a white teen from 1959 (say Bud Anderson from Father Knows Best). Based purely on statistics of race and era, which one should Zimmerman most fear of harboring criminal intent? Answer: He should fear (actually, not fear) them equally; each has about the same low odds of committing a crime." From 1982 to 2012, crime rates among African-American youth plummeted: property offenses declined by 51%, assault declined by 59%, robbery declined by 60%, rape declined by 66%, and even murder declined by 82%. And even though Donald Trump said in 2017 that "The murder rate in our country is the highest it's been in 47 years", the murder rate in America has in fact been halved since its 1991 peak. Far from the fabled heathens who have no morals because their parents didn't spank them, Millennial teens and twentysomethings, whatever their race, have too many moral compunctions to murder, rape, burglarize, or assault someone or set fire to someone's beloved belongings. Sadly, the stereotype that today's youth, especially boys and especially African-Americans, are "superpredators" persists, and has cops and security officers shooting and killing Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray. People often support their fears by using the thinnest of anecdotal evidence: “Look at Columbine, they were teens!”

And "kids have no respect for their elders"? So what. Just as Boomer youth were right in questioning their homophobic, pro-war elders from the Greatest Generation (born 1911-1924) during the Vietnam War, today's youth are not necessarily in the wrong for speaking out against a parent, uncle, teacher, principal, coach, or psychologist-they-were-sent-to-after-being-diagnosed-with-ODD when said elder tells them that boys shouldn't grow their hair long, or that it's "inappropriate" for two girls to kiss, or that only paranoid alarmists believe in climate change, or that George W. Bush must be followed, right or wrong, or that kids must never express disagreement with adults on even as subjective and trivial a matter as whether the weather today is nice.

And the accusation that Millennials and Fifth Worlders are stupid? Co-champions were declared at the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2014, 2015, and 2016, for only the fourth, fifth, and sixth times since the bee's inception in 1925. Then came 2019, when the spellers were so good that Scripps ended up with an EIGHT-way tie! Word lists got increasingly harder; the winning words from 1935 to 1941 were "intelligible", "eczema", "promiscuous", "sanitarium", "canonical", "therapy", and "initials", while the winning words from 2007 to 2013 were "serrefine", "guerdon", "Laodicean", "stromuhr", "cymotrichous", "guetapens", and "knaidel".

Other ageists listen to media frenzies over teens eating Tide Pods and snorting condoms. The moral panic over these "trends", however, has turned out to be a tempest in a teapot. Reports of being poisoned by laundry detergent pods were actually down in 2018, at the same time the media hype over this alleged teen fad was spiking. The trend stories were trend pieces reporting on previously written trend pieces, with acts of detergentophagy less common than the media would have their unwitting dupes believe. As the Washington Post wrote: "There's just one small problem, however: Those headlines were wrong. The only thing viral about the condom challenge right now is the moral panic about the idea of teens doing the condom challenge. In a matter of days, word spread from a single local news report to a small army of local and national publications across the world, all warning about a challenge that, in 2018, barely exists." As a Snopes page discusses, claims to fake "teen challenges" have been around for a long time. Sorry, but real youth are not as dumb as urban folklore makes them out to be. The media is simply getting more ephebophobic.

A common misconception among ageists is that the reason youth rights activists who are older than about, say, 25 still support youth rights is that they are pedophiles. The fact of the matter is that most adult youth rights activists are still fighting for youth rights because they faced some instance of ageism, or a repeated barrage of instances of ageism, during their childhood and/or adolescence that scarred them for life.

I am a young adult, soon to be middle-aged. I had many run-ins with, and undeserved attempts at discipline and sociaLIESation from, my parents, teachers, school administrators, psychologists, psychiatrists, and random adults in the neighborhood as a child, teen, and college student. I was also the victim of nonconsensual medical treatment, as I'll open up about in later blog entries.

When I was in kindergarten, the class learned the song "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly", of which I was horrified. I starting scraping my nails down my throat and sticking them out of my mouth whenever I heard the words "spider" or "goat". Over the next two years, the "purging" ritual I was developing went down to my groin, and more words (and objects!) were added from ages 6 to 22. Other words were dropped over the years.

Little did I know at age 6 that I was developing what I call "logaesthesia", or word-tasting. When I hear or read one of those terrible words like "scxxt" or "whxxps", I get the sensation that I have swallowed the word. It's as if it's inside of me, slumbering in my intestines and attracting intestinal slime. To hear or read a word is to take in. I can never read an article without feeling as if I'm taking a drink of that article's waters, feasting on a repast of bread, beef stew and almond roca from the article. The same with listening to conversation. The words, further, have specific tastes when I eat them. When I hear the word "whxxps", for instance, I immediately taste whipped cream. The whipped cream is there right inside of me, its cold creaminess sitting in the front seat of my pants. Would you like you have whipped cream in your pants? That's what it feels like to me. The word "mxss" tastes like oatmeal. "Scxxt" tastes like cooked carrot, like the carrot in pot roast. "Jxggle" tastes like red hots -- the candies -- while "jingle" as well as "t-ngle" taste like those tiny spherical hard candies you put on cupcakes. "Xll xver the plxce" tastes like pasta-ey soup, a soup like Spaghetti-O's perhaps. And "ice xxxxx", of course, tastes like ice xxxxx.

And it's not only the words that make me purge that have a taste. Many of the innocuous words do too. For instance, "trump" tastes like sautéed mushrooms. "Doodle" tastes like macaroni. "Kentucky" tastes like fried chicken. With my logaesthesia, I am a person to whom words do more than convey semantic meanings. To you, "tale" is just a word for a story, but to me it conjures up the taste of lasagna, the pasta in lasagna with a light sauce on it. Even names can have tastes to them: Greg tastes like chocolate Easter egg, while the name Kevin tastes of ice xxxxx cone and Tiffany of lemon meringue pie.

To avoid coming in contact with these words, I don't watch television, nor do I go to the movies. I avoid coming into chatrooms as much as I can, too. Logaesthesia affects my life when it prevents me from doing certain things such as these. I also used to suffer while surfing the Internet and had to copy-and-paste a lot of posts from the Net into Notepad and use Find & Replace on them. Now I have a Greasemonkey filter that replaces the offending words.

The object triggers in logaesthesia also affect my quality of life. To avoid coming across things that make me purge, such as spiders and cobwebs around my parents' house, or plastic silverware in restaurants, or Winnie the Pooh and Spider-man garbage in stores, I have to close my eyes, or at the very least cup my hand in front of my eyes so I only see the aisles in front of me. It makes it hard for me to make my way around a store when I can't allow myself to look around, and sometimes I even bump into shelves. I can't push shopping carts or wheelchairs when we go into public places, unless we're going to someplace where everything is safe, such as See's Chocolates.

I often go into rooms alone so I have a place to purge where no one will see that I am purging. I used to purge in public, but eventually the rituals got so deep into my groin that I had to unbutton my pants and couldn't do it in public anymore. I am not prudish about other people seeing me, but I am afraid that other people might tell me my behavior is "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable" if they see me purging, so I need to hide my purging to save my fragile soul.

Because of my condition, teachers and other adults who had convinced themselves that I was masturbating, or even who insisted it was "inappropriate" even if it wasn't really masturbating, because of society's taboo against what they called "putting your hands in your pants" (ooh, how I hated that phrase) have tried to socialize me, talked down to me, and then told me I was wrong for contradicting an adult when I defended myself. All the "socialization" I received in high school, all the being forced to do things, all the fascist comments that my behavior was "inappropriate" or "socially unacceptable", haunt me to this very day. I still think back weekly to run-ins with authoritarian teachers that happened during my school years, triggered by the logaesthesia or other, non-logaesthesia-related events, causing me to yell, bite myself, punch my skull, and punch my abdomen as if slicing open a watermelon. If I had only been given the chance to stop going to school, to live away from my parents, to move to Berkeley, I may have been able to get away from it all before too much damage was done.

It doesn't help me much either that I have never heard of another person having logaesthesia. OCD? Yes. Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia? I've met a few such people online. But the two in synergy? I've never even read of it. It attests to the extreme rarity of my condition that I was the one who had to coin a word for it. And I feel lonely. People with ADD, Asperger's, social anxiety, Alzheimer's, or conduct disorder are a dime a dozen, especially on the Internet. But me? I really know the meaning of being lonely. Even the Ehlers-Danlos "zebras" have found each other on the Net.

Let me tell you more about myself. I am writing a rock musical about Millennials, called The Bittersweet Generation, and had an alternative band called Red Cilantro during my late teens and early twenties. I have a collection of music on my iPod that includes such artists as Nirvana, Third Eye Blind, Smash Mouth, Fastball, the Beatles, Pink, Sia, The Naked and Famous, Florence + the Machine, Gotye, Enya, the Cranberries, the Sundays, Of Monsters and Men, Shaggy, KT Tunstall, Avril Lavigne, Hole, Michelle Branch, Lady Gaga, M83, Muse, Ingrid Michaelson, Bastille, Depeche Mode, the Weeknd, and Xymox, and listen to my headphones when I am out and about to avoid hearing purge words. I do my hair like Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, and always wear a turtleneck, khakis and sunglasses. I love trying new foods and eating old favorites such as lasagna, biscotti, sushi, Chinese food, Taco Bell, spice drops, ravioli, manicotti, rice crackers, cranberry juice, challah, suman antala, dolmas, quiche, pomegranate juice, Brussels sprouts, banh mis, enchiladas, rambutans and piroshkis. When one of my friends was diagnosed with cancer, I tried to get everyone we knew to pray for her. I like spending time with my friends, both male and female, whom I love to a degree more typical of friendships between two females than of male-male or male-female friendships.

Another abnormality I suffer is a sensation I call That Feeling. I will be in the middle of an activity, or just lying down, when all of a sudden I feel as if spiders are going to fall down from the ceiling onto me. I begin constantly looking for spiders on the ceiling, and checking my own hands for specks of dead spider that may have gotten on my hands from handling objects -- again and again. I feel as if my eyes are going to cross. It feels as if I am using 110% of my brain. I notice every object and sound around me equally, and have a hard time telling my surroundings from my own thoughts. My eyes can't make sense out of the pictures I see online. This has been happening to me since 2009. I'll call my caretaker and tell him, "I've got That Feeling again", and he'll know what I mean.

I am cismale, bisexual, Jewish, deist, a beatnik, ENFP, 4w3sx, Virgo, Californian, anarcho-syndicalist, bearded, anosmic, and childfree, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes. I was born sunny-side-up with a single umbilical artery. On Simon Baron Cohen's tests, I got an empathizing quotient of 32, a systemizing quotient of 17, and an AQ of 24.

I've participated in, and read, many debates on the voting age, the drinking age, parental authority, school dress codes, medical consent, the youth rights movement as a whole, or just the whole concept of taking kids seriously -- I've seen them on Internet fora, on the comments sections of news websites, and in the emails I've received. And every place youth rights issues have been debated online, I've seen certain very shoddy and fallacious arguments against youth rights regurgigated again and again. If you're active in the youth rights movement, or even if you just read the comments sections at the Washington Post, you've probably heard them all: "Being a minor is only temporary", "You can wait", "16-year-olds will vote like their parents", "Young people think they're immortal", "I supported youth rights when I was younger but then outgrew that position", "You'll change your mind when you're older", "The only adults who still support youth rights are pedophiles", "If 16-year-olds are deemed incapable of signing a contract, how can they be mature enough to vote?" (the de jure fallacy), "My house, my rules", "Emancipation will solve everything", "Kids aren't oppressed -- they don't have to pay bills!", "Teens were eating Tide Pods a week ago", statements beginning "Society has decided . . .", and the red herring question "Bah, what about child labor?" Many of the posts in this blog will be centered around focusing on a certain argument and refuting it.

Then there are the scientific claims, published even by respected scientists, that claims teens have immature, underdeveloped, etc. brains, which first became trendy during the nineties. In a 2007 Scientific American article titled "The Myth of the Teen Brain", psychologist Robert Epstein exposes this as junk science. As Epstein points out, the studies that examine adolescent brains, teen-age pathologies, and teen angst do not distinguish cause from effect. Teen-age ills are caused by the restrictions on youth and segregation of teens from adults that got started in the early twentieth century. Teens in preindustrial societies do not show high rates of crime, and spend most of their time with adults. They do not feel teen angst. When Western-style schooling and television are brought to these societies, the adolescent members of these now Westernized societies begin to exhibit delinquency and teen angst. The Inuit living on Victoria Island, Canada had no problem with juvenile delinquency until their community was Westernized in the eighties, and by 1988 they had established their first permanent police department now that the worms had escaped from the can. Epstein also points out that brain imaging studies show only a correlation between age and brain anatomy, not a causal relationship. While the orthodoxy in the 1970's was that the brain reached its adult state at 18, and in the 1990's the line changed to "The brain isn't fully developed until 25", research in the 2010's now reveals that a person's brain in fact continues to develop and change for her/his whole life.

It's enlightening to see the kind of junk science that was used in its own time against women's suffrage, as in this recent article in the Atlantic. Note that William P. Sedgwick, an outspoken opponent of women's suffrage who claimed voting would be bad for women's brains, was a reputable professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But all of that will be delved into in more detail in my blog entries in the weeks, months, and years to come. I've been writing about youth rights and ageism for more than two decades, and I do believe it is high time I had a blog on it. I have a moral philosophy I call bixochromatism (which in a nutshell states that the freedom to be in control of one's own decisions is more important than making what people tell you is a "good" or "wise" decision), which I will discuss in future posts. In the meantime, you can read my essay, 10 Reasons to Support the Youth Rights Movement, at http://khemehekis.angelfire.com/10reasons.htm , or even browse the website of the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA) at https://www.youthrights.org/

In solidarity,

Savegraduation

#youth rights #ageism #medical consent #voting age #baby boomers #generation x #millennials #fifth world generation #myths about youth #logaesthesia #aaliyah #silent generation #teen crime #national spelling bee #politics #hot topics

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