The Honest Courtesan

I’m glad I grew up at a time when kids spent as much of their off-time as far away from grownups as possible and recognized adult interference for the killjoy menace it is.  One of my primary activities as a kid was finding places where adults either couldn’t or wouldn’t go – under houses, clear spots deep in huge blackberry patches, inside huge culverts under the railroad tracks, way up in tall trees deep in the woods, etc.  It wasn’t that I was trying to do anything nefarious; I mostly just wanted to read in peace, or look at interesting bugs, or explore, or play some sort of make-believe game with other kids, and was not interested in any of those activities having a big wet blanket thrown on them by some well-meaning busybody who didn’t understand what I was doing or thought it was VERY IMPORTANT to tell me that if I fell in the river, nobody would see (an actual cop told me this while I was waiting for the ferry with my bicycle, when I was about 14).  And guess what?  I survived anyway, despite the absence of coaches, monitors, babysitters or other adults acting in loco parentis.  In fact, I thrived; I learned how to do for myself and more importantly, think for myself, and I figured out at a fairly young age that when anyone demanded obedience, belief or trust because they had an Important Title or were simply bigger than me, rather than for some reason they could logically explain, that it was usually because they had no sound reason, and therefore were not to be trusted, believed, or obeyed.  Adults who treated me like I had a brain and took the time to actually explain themselves to me were an entirely different matter, but those were few and far between and I still remember them fondly all these many years later, though all but a few of them have since departed this plane.  But I’m honestly frightened for the future when I look around and see an entire generation of kids who have been treated like toddlers all the way to university, and like small children after that; these are not people who are going to be good at doing or thinking for themselves, but rather people who seek “authorities” to believe, trust, and obey.  Which I reckon is probably the reason this pathological coddling has become not only normal, but enshrined in law and enforced by cops, bureaucrats, and other functionaries of the increasingly pervasive State.