Suffer the Children

I’ve never liked children. Don’t get me wrong, I wish them no harm, but ever since I had to endure being among them all the time I’ve had little truck with their whiny, needy ways.

Children need to be taught to speak, to eat, to learn when to be quiet, to wash their hands and to wipe their arses. They need to be directed to think, to pause, to consider and to weigh up the consequences before they otherwise act on base instinct. They yearn for direction, soaking up like sponges, the lessons you teach them, so it is little wonder that the Jesuits said ‘give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man’.

Their loyalty to parents and those in loco parentis is fierce to the point of devotion. Hitler and others knew this and their uniformed, junior not-so-secret police became forces to be feared. In the developing world children are working for their living as soon as they are able and this is not at 18, 21, 25… as in the west (or never, if their calling is politics or popularity) but at 5, 7 or 10. In the developing world, where manpower is all they’ve got, they are valuable, essential economic units, but in the west they are often an economic drain.

The west tells itself that they are an investment; Tony Blair was so enamoured of this Ponzi scheme that he accelerated the rot that really set in when John Major granted the polytechnics university status overnight and gave the impetus to what we see today; an unemployable morass of lumpen supposed ‘graduates’ in disciplines with no economic worth. Oh they often find paid employment, in the arenas of equality and diversity and other risible disciplines, but they bring nothing to the table and their pay is inevitably from the public purse.

But it’s worse than that because, having given them the illusion of a higher agency than the ‘uneducated’ they imagine that their naïve, inexperienced sensitivities are more valid than others, especially the now despised ‘old people’ who are somehow in cahoots with malign forces to ‘rob them of their future’. This sort of rhetoric is used by the climate lobby, the race-baiters and now the corona virus alarmists. It’s as if, so sheltered, so protected are their lives,  they need the scare; like kids at a campfire telling ghost stories.

Well here’s a scare for you: Who are most likely to attend mass gatherings, where they jostle, embrace and otherwise indulge in physical contact: children or adults? Who are least likely to actually engage in effective personal hygiene; children or adults? Who are most likely to put themselves in harm’s way, no matter the warnings: children or adults? And who has the actual knowledge or understanding to keep themselves safe; in short, who has survived the vicissitudes of childhood to emerge as useful human beings? As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, what’s the point in having kids?