by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

In my last post, I noted in passing that one possible reason for keeping kids under constant adult supervision has to do with the number of human predators living amongst us. If the media is to be believed (although the media's penchant for sensationalism makes belief harder to accomplish,) there are more and more predators--serial killers, pedophiles, rapists and slavers to name but a few--running free amongst us every year. It would be a foolish parent to leave their little prodigies unsupervised for even a few minutes. The thing is...I do believe that there are more of these dangerous individuals every year, and that it would be almost criminal to leave a small child or a female child of almost any age unsupervised.

Now we must begin to wonder why there are seemingly so many of these monsters out there. Well, one reason might simply be a matter of numbers: while the actual percentage of the population who are predators remains faily constant over time, the fact that more and more of us are living in a static space makes it more likely that there are predators in your neighborhood. However, other nations also have more people living in the same space, yet they don't seem have the same problem. Or, if they do, it does not receive the same notoriety. (Note: they have other problems...like people who like to take school children hostage or explode bombs at random.) This leads me to believe that there is something in our culture which creates predators.

I don't know what it is that makes it unsafe to leave our children alone to be children. I don't have any pat answers; in fact, I'm stumbling in even forming the questions. All I know is that there is something fundamentally wrong here, and we need to begin to focus on this rather than the current administration's focus on exporting "American Democracy" to the rest of the world. When we get down to the basics, it appears that our socio-political system is, in large part, based on predation. Capitalism is "tooth and claw" with a thin veneer of "civilization" grafted on; a system which encourages the predators to feed off the herbivores. What bothers me the most about our messianic drive to bring the rest of the world into our "fold" is that our attention is directed out, and the internal problems get neglected. This has to change.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005