I realize that I often say that this or that is what is wrong with America, but today I've been working on a theory that I think has serious merit, rather than just random baseless conjecture.
Today a story has popped up on my Facebook feed in multiple locations, about this douche bag "internet prankster" who is getting parents to agree to let him creep on their daughters on Facebook so he can trick them into meeting in person, proceed to have their parents ambush them, sometimes after "mock" kidnapping them with ski masks.
This is it right here. This is what's wrong with America. Living in a state of such constant paranoia that you are willing to let someone mock rape your daughter to prove a point about trust. And that point? Never fucking trust anyone(especially not your parents?).
I immediately thought of Arrested Development where the one armed guy always helps their dad teach them lessons by pretending to get his arm ripped off, but this one is actually way worse and isn't a fictional situation on a comedy show. This is real daughters getting tricked by their parents into thinking they're about to be raped, all out of this paranoid delusion that everyone you meet online is a crazed "sex pervert".
We live in a culture of fear. It starts with indoctrinating "stranger danger" into our children at a young age instead of teaching them how to correctly decide on the right people to trust. We are so inwardly focused and paranoid that it no longer takes a village to raise a child. In fact if anyone in the village even looks sideways at our kid we give them stink eye and drag our kid somewhere else. The idea of other parents helping us is insane to us, and yet we feel the need to force others to parent under our ruleset. Parents getting fined and losing their kids because their 10 year old kid was left in a running car with air conditioning on and why? Well what if the car dies and then it gets hot in the car and the kid is too dumb to get out and the parent also takes an hour longer in the store...
What if.. what if.. this is what we base our entire lives on. We see so many negative news stories that we assume it's going to happen to us if we don't keep our kids in constant eyesight they're gonna die immediately. The vast majority of kidnappers and molesters know the kid, they aren't looking for kids on Facebook. Why? Because they would get caught in five minutes if they were that fucking stupid.
Are there people out there who want to hurt you or your kids? Yes. Is it likely they're gonna proposition them on Facebook? No. Is living in constant paranoia going to prevent bad people from doing bad things? No, but it is allowing them to hurt you without them even having to be there.
Constant fear is in all of politics, in both sides of the news, it's everywhere. It has to stop. Fear is survival, but community is stronger. Human community started around family and growing villages. We put our fear aside to embrace others and come together for common goals. Our village has gotten so damn big that we have begun to fear within it.
We have to stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment