GOD SUFFER THE CHILDREN

I am a child. I last a while. You can’t conceive of the pleasure in my smile. You hold my hand, rough up my hair, it’s lots of fun to have you there. I gave to you now you give to me. I’d like to know what you’ve learned. The sky is blue and so is the sea. What is the colour when black is burned? What is the colour… You are a man, you understand. You pick me up and you lay me down again. You make the rules, you say what’s fair. It’s lots of fun to have you there…
Neil Young, I Am a Child

Look. Listen. In either a calculation of supreme arrogance or one of spineless incertitude, Stephen Harper has just announced his proposal to overhaul the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA). Either way, this is a gutless move, in the ilk of a purse snatcher or perhaps a savage drunk who beats his dog for barking. Yes. The champion of family values is showing the same crooked, sneering cynicism that is smug and dangerous, cowardly and brutal, and deserving of the wholehearted contempt of the nation. Now, I am no stranger to cynicism. I like it. It, I think, is one of the higher pleasures and it is not for the faint of heart. But neither is it for the heartless. Enter Stephen Harper. In a nut, lowering the age at which a youth, no, a child—and let’s not bandy words about here, because the whiskey is running low and I am feeling raw and vicious in this night both late and cold—can be sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14, is a proposal designed to capitalize on all the base and reactionary tendencies of the dumb and brutal, the simple and the resentful, the blind and the fearful. Further, its built-in concession to the people of Quebec, the people who would, and I hope still will, flay the moral skin off the Conservative Party and pummel Harper’s veneered face come election day, is nothing short of a base campaign promise that, beyond allowing the justice system to become two-tiered, threatens the fundamental concepts of a federalist nation. But that is another issue, and the long and the short of it is that I don’t even care about those things right now. No. If Harper and his supporters continue with their worn out agenda and proposed legislative muggings, I will be only too happy to migrate to Quebec, pull up the drawbridge when I get there, and swear fealty to Gilles Duceppe and all that is holy in his party.

But the night grows longer and colder here, and the shadows are just a little darker and who knows how long the bolted door will hold—so I will get straight to it. Harper’s proposal is most deeply cynical because he has once again drawn children into his sights and like any bully, believes that a thrashing of the weak will impress upon us that he is a firm, decisive man who believes in justice and the values of the family.

So first I ask you, since when is anyone justified in drawing a line between the people who have family values and those who don’t? Since when are any of us outside of the family values community? After all, I have parents and even siblings. I have aunts and uncles and cousins. Once upon a time, I had grandparents. I have children. Am I not a man of family values? I suspect if you examine your own lives, you may ask the same. Yet, there is a group of people who have declared some ideological and moral ascendancy, a kind of ‘divine right of the religious family,’ that qualifies them to tell you and me about values and what it is to be moral. And in this case, they are telling you about the value of our children.

And this is what is most depraved about Harper and his acolytes. His proposal does not reveal justice, punishment, or even revenge. No. This is about the degeneracy of a society that has systematically devalued its children and a man that while, in his sweater by his fireplace, with his children whose names one suspects he can’t quite remember, seeks to turn on our nation’s children with a loathing that is nakedly irrational and shallow. Yes. There is a loathing of children at the root of this gambit and it has grown like a death flower, sickly and cruel, and if it is not burned to its very roots, it will poison us all insidiously and eternally.

The problem belongs to us—the adults, the rational, the sane—but see what we have done. We have strung our children between two solitudes; parsed them out between the beautiful and the dark. We have fetishized their innocence and bemoaned their cruelty. We have denigrated their intellects and capitalized on their ignorance. We have infantilized them and sexualized them. They have been idealized, commercialized, marketed, bought, sold and traded—we have made them commodities, every last one. Children have become our hope and our bane, and we have shuffled them like cards, playing each one like we are guilty sharks at the table. We have praised them on the screens and at the dinner tables for their manners and their ability to parrot us, and damned them in the classrooms and in the streets for the pain and bewilderment of puberty and experience. We have cajoled, demanded, and threatened them to be like us and barred them from themselves and their identities. We pick them up and hold them aloft for the slightest of their achievements and plunge them into cold pools of ostracism for the slightest of their flaws. We have longed to be them and we have laughed at them for the transgression of not being more like us. We have cocooned them and fed them medicine and told them that they are unaccountable, and we have beaten them and exposed them and held them accountable for all. Children have become our glory and our shame, and for that we have made them pay. In short, we have worshipped them for everything we wish to be and damned them for all that we are.

And so it is the greatest temptation to thrust from us that which reminds us of our own guilt. And no, I am no idealist nor is this a Pollyannaish dream. I am aware of the depravity and the blackness of some of our young offenders, our child criminals. I know that they have stabbed, cut, shot and beaten and more. I know this like I know the evil depths of any man’s heart. But I also know a little about the biology and physiology of a child and about the statistical probability of a child committing a heinous crime, of a child being rehabilitated, and of a child being destroyed in an adult penal system. More importantly I, and many of you, am well acquainted with the blind stumbling of the adult, of the crippling suffering of the adult intellect, of the bewilderment of the adult mind, of the doubtful and precarious existence of a fully formed adult, and the despair of the long and inevitable adult journey into the night. In this life, I know something about chance and loss and anguish. And I have had the benefit of so much more opportunity, experience and time than any child I know.

So when I hear Stephen Harper so brazenly and coolly target our children and declare that these children, the same people he would deny sex education and so much other adult information, worthy of adult justice and the adult penal system, forgive me: forgive me, if I ask for children a second chance that I suspect most of us would beg and even kill to have.