Friday, March 14, 2014

The Slippery Slope of Child Exploitation


Three people knocked on my door at 10:18 this morning: two grown men and a four-year old boy. The boy was presumably brought along to provide assurance that the two men wouldn’t rape me or try to steal my tea towels.

Man:  Hi, I know you were not expecting us today.
Me:  No.
Man:  We wonder if we could talk to you to dispel some of the myths about Creationism.
Me:  Would the first myth be that it’s total nonsense?
Man:  Um, well….
Me: Then god no. Goodbye.
Man: Thank you for your time.

WISIMH:  I miss intelligence. And to bring a child along as part of this sad parade makes me want to call Child Protective Service to see if they could intervene and save the boy; although stifling a child’s curiosity is probably not a crime. I suppose his presence was more than assurance against rapey behavior. Perhaps it was even more than part of a program to brainwash the child into mindless acceptance of daddy’s crazy.

His presence also prevented me from unleashing a profanity-laced rant about how an inexcusable ignorance of obvious and provable scientific facts, when combined with a blind determination to stake out a position based on inferior intellectual acumen, leaves no room for your child to develop his intellectual capacity beyond the point where he follows you around to make old ladies feel safe when you show up at their front door. For shame.

And then I realized I made my daughter sell Girl Scout Cookies and I owe her an apology for pimping her out for what I still think is a good cause. But thinking about exploiting children to promote their parents’ questionable agendas then brought me a PTSD flashback circa 1958 when my parochial school made me sell subscriptions to The Catholic Standard for prizes like glow-in-the-dark light switch plates with the BVM on them. While I never labored in a Bangladesh clothing factory, or participated in a beauty pageant as a child, I feel their pain.

That upset me more than that those crazy people who knocked on my door this morning. Who will think of the children?

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