How to Lose Students and Alienate Community

In the Albuquerque Journal this morning, there was an article discussing the new smoking bans on the university of New Mexico campus. Here's a map of the designated smoking areas with perhaps the best one-sentence summary of the issue. Initially, it is easy to sympathize with the college - in an ideal world, no one ever dies of lung cancer from second hand smoke, and that's a noble aim. But noble aims go pear shaped all the time.

When I was a high schooler, I helped engineer and pass a ban on smoking at UU youth conferences in my district. I'd lost a grandparent to lung cancer not long before. I was no fan of smoking, and high school conferences had previously had a problem of an exclusive community of smokers existing. That in turn led to people who wanted to spend time with their friends either breathing a lot of second hand smoke or starting smoking themselves, both of which are far from ideal for a religious youth conference. On top of it all, UUs tend to have a high ratio of asthmatics/those with breathing problems, and smoke itself was a hazard for them. So many of us moved to pass a ban by majority vote. We succeeded.

What happened, then, was a lot of destruction. Con-goers who smoked would come with their addiction, but being high schoolers, without the income to have nicotine gum or patches instead of cigarettes. Or they would sneak off to try and calm their addiction so they could be present for community, and we'd ban them from coming back. A few youth, in the middle of high school, just stopped coming to cons outright, feeling unwelcome and hated by their peers. It was against the spirit of the community, and the values of the religion, and the ban remains to this day. It is by far the most lasting decision I had made as part of that community, and it causes harm. What it doesn't do is get people to stop smoking. Our noble aim failed utterly.

The ban didn't actually address any real problems. It was a prohibition, and it attempted to excise a behavior. Had we been concerned about the health of the asthmatics, we would have kept smoking outside and away from entryways. Had we been concerned about the health of smokers, we could have provided nicotine patches for them, and let them still be part of our community. And had we cared for the whole of the community, we would have enacted a policy by a system of consensus, not a majority vote, and certainly not by a handed-down ruling. We did none of this, and instead shifted problems around. We lost people, we made others feel uncomfortable, and we violated our own principles.

The UNM smoking ban is well-intentioned. But it is a frustrating prohibition forced upon legal adults, and it goes beyond necessary restriction (like 30 feet from entryways) to become an obsessive nanny state policy. And it might ultimately have the desired effect, but I still feel that it shows a disregard for the capacity of adults to make personally responsible choices. Part of giving people freedom, and giving people responsibility, is giving room for mistakes. Here, I think, it'd do well to quote Lux Alptraum:

And this is, perhaps, the crux of a progressive discourse: to be able to recognize the reality and rationale of bad decisions, while still pushing forward with an idea of what we all should be doing, of what our best decisions look like. Because it’s only with the knowledge of what we should be doing, and why, that we have the ability to stray safely — to make those mistakes and live to regret them (or not regret them, as the case may be).

In order to be rational people, we have to have that range of decision making. Forcing people's decisions simply doesn't work.

Airing my own Dirty Laundry

I've always been fairly vocal and political, so it is probably unsurprising that some of my teenage opinions found themselves in the local paper and are now online, in a nice sort of permanent-record way. So, in the interest of full online disclosure, here's the article.

Now, I stand by my 16 year old self. I've said many times on this blog that I believe in youth rights, that I think the voting age should be lowered, and that youth free speech matters. And I say this well aware that this is my example of youth free speech:

At the other end of the spectrum is Albuquerque High School junior Kelsey Atherton, who not only refuses to say the pledge, but stands facing the opposite direction. Sometimes he says different words or makes additions to the pledge. When it comes to "under God," Atherton says "under god/s, under goddess/es, or lack there of."
Atherton says he stands backward because he is angry about Bush's re-election and the war in Iraq. "Absurd" is the word he uses to describe the war and the government's handling of Hurricane Katrina. He makes additions to the pledge to focus on what he sees as a narrow interpretation of God. The pledge should have either no religion or more inclusive language, he says. He even goes so far as to compare it to fascist chanting.

There are explanations for all of these; I'll go briefly through each one.

1. "Under God/s and/or Goddess/es or lack thereof". I'm Unitarian. I have always been aware of a plurality of beliefs and belief systems, so the adoption of a formal procedure in public school to honor a very narrow interpretation of God, perhaps more broad than the Abrahamic Deity but not terribly so, is offensive as it alienates. It excludes the diversity that we as a nation cherish and celebrate, so that's why I tried to be more inclusive with my coverage of religion in the pledge. ALSO - it throws the meter of the pledge way off to say it, which helps highlight the fact that even "under God" throws off the pledges meter. "Under God" is a Cold War edition to the pledge urged by the Knights of Columbus as a way to further distinguish the US from the secular philosophy and government of Communists, specifically the USSR. The Cold War is over; if we are to still have a pledge, we don't need it to contain that.
2. We don't really need a pledge. It is a weird national ritual, and it seems like the kind of thing we as a nation make kids do because they are too young to question it, and powerless enough to not object to it. While it isn't actually a bad thing to say (I have a copy of the original, pre-"under god" version in my room), I think it is a bad thing to ask people to say when they don't know what it means. That, to me, makes it fascistic - it asks for unquestioning devotion to a symbol of a nation, and then to the nation itself, does so with a divine mandate, and it is as a matter of course done nationally by children who can get in trouble for not joining it. That's disturbing, and it is kind of what kings do. We as a nation were founded on loyalty requiring consent - we left a nation that had abused our loyalty, and we fought a war with them because they were surprised we'd questioned the arrangement. Ritual, unexamined chanting does not have a place in our democracy.
3. Protesting the Presidency of George W. Bush. I've never denied my partisan identity, and I will stand by my belief that George W. Bush is among the worst presidents this nation has ever had. While I disagreed broadly with most of his policy decisions, Iraq and Katrina stand as failures that go beyond policy approach. The Iraq War has a long litany of problems - foremost in my mind is how destabilizing and unnecessary it was, and how poorly planned it was. As for Katrina, it was the exact kind of natural disaster that we as a nation should have been able to handle. I sincerely think presidential neglect played a part in the destruction, alongside many, many other factors. So that's why I felt the need to have a symbolic protest. But the question will come to my choice of the pledge as forum for protest.
4. The Pledge in Public schools is almost-tailor-made for petty dissent. It is short, daily, and overtly national. It's done during homeroom, which is a dead time in the academic day anyway. It is done amongst a group of peers. All of these facilitate the use of the pledge as a way to express a political opinion, with a minimum of effort, to one's peers (among whom one's opinion is important), without causing any substantive problems. I did it because I was upset (as many teenagers are), but also because I was upset politically (as I can be), and because I really, really needed to show that I was intellectually not on board with the leadership and actions of my nation. And that hurts, to care about a nation and feel so alienated from it's conduct that even joining in a morning ritual becomes hard. That's a political opinion that matters, and I'm pretty sure that the pledge is as good a forum as any to voice it. It did exactly what I needed a symbolic gesture to do, and it helped me keep my head through the other inanities of high school. That, I think, is reason enough.
   

And so it's out there and acknowledged. A political young adult was a political teenager. And while I deliberately try to be less aggressive, alienating, and partisan now, I think my actions as a youth were justified, were appropriate, and played a valuable role in shaping my present political identity.

Watch This

I'm not one to post briefly, but I'm in the library, trying to write an essay about Iran, I can't really think of anything clever and witty to elaborate upon this with.

The video can be found here.

It's good, it's really, really good, and I kind of just want it spread everywhere. Iran is the nation to watch this coming decade, and this video gives me hope. That's about all it needs to do.

(Sex) Education

The Bedford Hillsian has a great little piece up about sex ed. Inspired by a rather frustrating radio show (though the host fact checks, which is awesome), blogger "the unbeatable kid" brings in that most stalwart of sex ed defenders: Dan Savage. I reccomend listening to both Dan Savage's bit, and then the whole radio show. Make sure you have time for the second one; it's rather long (50 minutes).

The debate is the whole abstinence debate, with a decade of implementation and studies to match it.

And it's an interesting conversation, between intelligent concerned adults with different perspectives and different data. What's interesting to is not so much the disagreements, but the agreements with qualifiers. "No parent disagrees with abstinence, they disagree with abstinence only" and "Abstinence programs do teach about condoms; they teach how condoms aren't very effective" are my two favorite qualifiers.

The immediate things that bother me: 1), abstinence programs aren't allowed to encourage condom use, and 2), there is a desire to present information about condoms with an emphasis on the flaws and shortcomings. Regardless of my stand on sex education, my general stand on presenting information to youth is that teachers shouldn't lie to them. For a humorous take on disinformation, here's a cracked.com dressing down of other pieces of disinformation targets at youth.

I had rather unpleasant experiences with abstinence-only sex education in middle school, so I am rather grateful that I was able to partake in a comprehensive sex ed program offered outside my school. The strengths of that program are many - it addresses the emotional and relational issues of sexuality, it isn't exclusively hetero-normative, and it covers STIs and contraceptives with an eye towards accuracy. More than that, however, it does a remarkable thing - it trusts that youth, given accurate information, will be able to make informed decisions about their own lives.

To restate: it trusts that youth, when allowed to, have the capacity for rational decision making.

This is huge, and this is one of the big things missing from sex education in schools, and from the debate over sex education in general. And really, it's missing from education a lot of the time - the PSAs linked to above all trust in fear and trust to force youth into acting appropriately. And frankly, that's undemocratic and unAmerican.

If we want better decisions made, and if we want essential freedoms, we as a people have to do 2 things: make sure that accurate information is provided, available, and encouraged (while making sure that people know how to call "bullshit!" when they see it), and we have to trust people to take that information and act as best they are able.

Youth and Play

Like many of my posts of late, this one is inspired by a link found on boingboing. The boingboing post concerns the fact that "go out and play" has become something lost to the American middle class, and that we are robbing children of childhood while depriving them of the rights of adults. In that post, commentor Cristovir says:

An interesting observation: in the history of the world, only recently have we had the phenomenon of adolescence -- everything we think of as "teenagerdom," particularly moodiness, rebellion, and impulsiveness. Some psychologists, albeit a minority, believe that adolescence is an artifact of having the rights of a child while expected to have the responsibility of an adult, and that if anyone, no matter what their age, had that mismatch in lower control and higher expectations, they would act more adolescent. I wonder if we will see adolescence creep at its borders, slowly expanding as we exert more control and less freedoms on both young children and young adults?

In many of my posts, I advocate both greater youth empowerment to go along with greater responsibilities. This flies in the face of previous impressions of what children are capable of, and I know it. The assumption that childhood and adolescence is nothing more than a sea of incompetence out of which and adult meges is a flawed perception, and I think that youth are more than capable of responsibly shouldering many adult tasks (holding a job, being actively engaged in politics), and that they should be rewarded with adult rights (the right to vote, the right to drink). I've a high opinion of youth, and seeing the great requirements already placed upon them (tight schedules, opppressive homework regimens, multiple extracurriculars, and in many cases jobs as well), I think youth are ready to rise to the challenge of being active and engaged citizens.

But maybe I've been wrong. The reason youth rights sounds absurd to many is because they remember childhoods full of play and self-development and independence, and they remember how yotuh and children experimented with these things. Yeah, youth did stupid things and made mistakes, and yeah, occasionally badthings happened. That is what happens with risk taking. There is risk involved. But the value gained from that, the degree of self-sufficiency and the learning involved are both essential components of civilization.

I've linked previously to Free Range Kids, and I'm going to do it again. It's a nice complement to philosophies of youth empowerment, and it hits the problem from the other direction. I see the imposition of adult responsibility and life on youth as needing a counter in the form of recognizing youth as competent and worthy of adult rights. But the problems of adolescence, "that mismatch in lower control and higher expectations", can be fought at in other ways. We can secure childhood by given kids more control over there lives, and letting them have that control within the context of being kids.

(Sidenote: In September, I will have a pulpit editorial delivered in some form at the UU church in Albuquerque, and it hits upon these themes. If I can get the audio to work, I'll upload it to this post before then. Edit 8/28/2008: this is the link to listen to the 7+ minute long pulpit editorial.)

Human Dignity and Institutional Failing

I've written about my job before, and in the interest of full disclosure: I no longer work there, and this is a blog post inspired by that exit. That out of the way, let me move on to the meaningful, and explain the title of this post.

My job was child-herding, and the daycamp felt like it was little more than an attempt to warehouse children. This was not the objective of the daycamp, and this may well have been an exception particular to the program outlined by the organization, but that doesn't change my impression of the experience. To back this up, I'll give you some numbers:

35-50: The number of kids enrolled and present at the daycamp, in a given day
3-5: The minimum and maximum number of staff present on site at a given time.
1 for 15: The legally required ratio of adults for children under care at a given time.
2: The number of areas at the site we could have children present in; this excludes the bathrooms. The spaces available were a gym and a parking lot.

The circumstances laid bare are daunting, and while I have many years of experience working at summer camps, this was a system far removed from what I was familiar with. The low numbers of staff required an emphasis far different than any work I had previously done with kids, and it was an emphasis I was uncomfortable with.

With 15 kids to a counselor at all times, and more at mealtimes, the most essential role for a counselor to be playing is that of disciplinarian. During game time, this means addressing every single crisis in full before being able to focus any energy on getting the group playing a game. This leads to downtime and the potential for more crises, but since crises are immediately dealt with, the kids who suffer through the longest wait time are the good kids who wait patiently, bored out of their skulls. At mealtimes, this emphasis means that I had to shift from problem to problem, trying to get a solution before another problem arose. We resorted to collective punishment more than a few times, and I knew this was not the right job for me when kids complained about the loss of freedom during a silent lunch and I boasted of how much nicer it made things for the staff.

This job struck against the very tenets of youth empowerment and affirmation of personhood. It wasn't that the people hired didn't hold these views, and it's not because the kids were a special breed of unruly (which they certainly weren't). It was a failing of the institutional set up, a problem of too few staff and too many kids, of training that focused on counselor-parent conflict, and had no emphasis on mediating problems between kids. We were not given an impossible task, but we were given a task that was almost impossible to execute in a way that reflected my core values.

Confronted with this reality for the second time, I left.

Justice among Children; The Playground's Social Contract

"In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice."

-Charles Dickens

I've been working at a daycamp for many weeks now, and the absolute hardest part of the job, the part that one day had me in tears, is the conflict between my espoused principles and what my job requires. This isn't kill-people-for-money big, but it is be-disempowering-after-years-of-youth-activism big. The crux of the issue is that, in providing a structured environment, it means denying kids options, and there is very little empowering about the structure I have to put in place.

My visceral, at-the-moment reactions to the moral quandary, as phrased in twitter messages, were "Games aren't play - they are ten thousand little justice issues", "The only way to survive my job is to become everything I hated about supervising adults. Asshole is my new job title", and "I'm in the wrong line of work.". It was, as I've mentioned, a trying time (this is at least the third time I've tried to post about it). But I think I'm wrong about most of what I said then, and I've a bit of perspective now to try and make sense of things.

1. "Games aren't play - they are ten thousand little justice issues"
Play, as best I've gathered from a childhood and time spent at three different camps (one as camper, CIT, and counselor; one as camper and CIT; one as just counselor), is a safe context to understand the workings of the world. Some of it is the physical aspects of play - how do I throw the ball, what feats of coordination can i do now? But a lot of it is more than exercise. Games are frameworks, small social arenas with their own special rules, dynamics, and elements of chance. Playing a game, kids understand what behavior is allowed, what isn't, and what of the grey area can be gotten away with. This is why games raise justice issues, and why those issues are so important. If kickball, with a half-dozen rules, isn't fairly enforced, how are rules in society at large supposed to function? If the kid who cheats gets away with it, and the kid who gets hurt causes the end of the game, what does this mean for how to act in the future? Will cheating be encouraged? Will injuries be played down, so as to avoid the negative social consequences of ending a game? Kids may not explicitly express all of these thoughts, but they are going on, and they affect the child in a profound way.

There was a child who thought that physical harm was an appropriate consequence for him to bring on a child who cheated; while obviously it wasn't, it was an epiphany of what justice and fair play meant for that child. Play is 10,000 justice issues, but it should be; it's a relatively same consequence to explore human interaction, and to figure out the limits of acceptability.

2. "The only way to survive my job is to become everything I hated about supervising adults. Asshole is my new job title".

I'm going to respond to this with a quote by the most classic of moral compasses: “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” - Niccolo Machiavelli

Not that I want to be feared; that's a terrible thing, and scaring children isn't anything like just or empowering. Still, feared and loved in part constitute respect, and the warning against being only loved is a warning against being a pushover out of kindness. No one wants a pushover; for an obscure historical reference, the first Partition of Poland took place a generation after the Polish nobles collectively removed power from what they felt was an oppressive king. For a more relevant example, look at Reagan vs Carter for an example of stubbornness and uncompromising language triumphing over appeals to diplomacy and negotiation. Those in positions of power, it seems, have an obligation to act in ways that those they have power over will not like. (This is a key component of the argument against even having power structures). A power-structure free world is hard to do, however, and while the institutions I most cherish aim to expand the number of people who hold/exercise power (or consensually surrender it), they don't abolish power structures. Power structures, for lack of a better term, get shit done. And part of that involves receiving criticism for actions taken. This is morally reconcilable with who I am so long as I make sure to hear discontent and dissent, and factor that into future actions. The institution as is doesn't have a large empowerment component, so my turning their input into actions is the only way (that I can see) that I can honor the kids inherent worth and dignity, and a commitment to the democratic process.

3. "I'm in the wrong line of work."
I don't think I am, not entirely. I don't like the moral quandary, and I don't like the work with children I've had most recently (the daycamp, tutoring in various forms in New Orleans), but there is plenty of work with children that I enjoy (UU Kids Camp, Appel Farm, the Model UN conference Tulane put on for New Orleans High Schoolers). And my passion in life is power dynamics, an interesting set of which I deal with every day at work. That's fascinating stuff, when I get the chance to abstract it later. Direct work with children, and participant involvement in the dynamics I'm studying, may be the wrong thing for me. But that is far from certain, and the opportunity to be an observer in a capacity such as this greatly strengthens what knowledge can be obtained.

It's not perfect, but already I'm bouncing around theories. Without thinking, I've even worked my summer objective (study social contracts) into my general understanding of what my work is. It's not perfect, but it's a doable thing. And for those still wondering about my mental health, I think I'll be okay.

Hypocrisy 2

Last time I blogged, I was talking about the hypocrisy of an education program. The program struck me as painfully familiar, which it turns out it was. A good friend of mine from our La Amikoj days was out at a youth conference the day they tried this program at his school. As he says:

They made sure to recruit the kids who the administration knew. Most of them were in the same classes though. So there were a bunch of classrooms that had 3 of them, and a lot more that had none. Lots of people crying. I don't think they even told all the teachers. It got really bad because people started text messaging parents who knew them.
It was perhaps one of the most twisted things I have ever heard of perpetrated on our school campus. I know lots of people complained. But they never publicly apologized for anything (that I know of).
According to my girlfriend, it was set up (at least in part) by our student senate. And it was the principal who delivered the message. I don't think the police had much (if anything) to do with it at our school.

This is disempowerment, and it's a little sick and a little funny that the student government had a major hand in setting it up. It is particularly bad when youth appointed to protect youth betray that trust.

Hypocrisy 1

I'm going to start off this post with a link from boingboing. It's a story about how some authority figures (police, a school administration, and some teachers) stage a traumatic event (several students died this weekend in drunk driving accidents) to teach kids a lesson (don't drink; don't drink and drive). It's absolutely horrifying, undermines the people's worth, treats them as pavlovian dogs, is heavy handed and disempowering in every sense possible. It is all the failings of the nanny state in one - a "we know better than you, which gives us freedom to act in horrible ways" attitude met with teenagers inherent understanding that every part of the scenario is wrong, that this authority does not in fact know what is best, that the authority has lost all legitimacy through its ham-handed conduct, and that authority as a rule can no longer be thought to be acting in anyone's best interest. It's a perfect storm of what not to do, and why not to do it.

O How Beautiful, These Foreign Shores

Today in church a pulpit editorial was delivered, and it was a rather eloquent telling of the "Found Faith" story that is so integral to my denomination. We are, after all, a religion of converts, with numbers like 90% thrown around to describe how many Unitarian Universalists have their origins outside the faith. We are, it seems, on the verge of an exponential takeover, and listening time and again to the triumph and the revelation the accompanies the discovery of this non creedal faith, the momentum seems inevitable.

But the momentum isn't there. The 90% converts number was around when my mother was a youth raised in the church. While individual congregations grow, and some grow quite nicely, the vast majority of UU churches are small, and fission seems to be at least as common a trend than expansion. Of course, I'm basing that statement more on anecdotal evidence than on something like solid fact.

Closer to solid fact, we have this article from the latest issue of UU World magazine. The article does not detail the converts' experience, nor does it talk about the disparity between large and small congregations. Instead, it gives two numbers that would seem contrary: "675,000 adults in America broadly identify as Unitarian" and "The UUA’s 1,018 congregations in the United States counted just over 158,000 members". From this alone, it appears that we are shrinking. To underscore this, a survey among readers of UU World (who have to be members of a UU congregation) "showed... that only 12 percent were raised Unitarian Universalist". But this is all muddled - UUA congregations still attract a significant number of converts, and the faith is convincing enough for 500,000+ non-members to identify with. So what's going on?

The obvious point, and perhaps the most meaningful, is that the UUA is not meeting the needs of all Unitarians in the US. Certainly, it is meeting some needs, and enough needs to warrant its continued existence. And surely, their may well be many self-identified UUs who have no need for an such an organization. But between these two groups, we have a bit of a diaspora. It's a bit like the situation with YRUU, actually.

The trick then is to determine whether the current institutional structure is serving the needs of those who belong to it, to consider changes that can be made to reach out to those who are hesitant, and to acknowledge that one institution cannot be all things to all people. YRUU is often the first time that youths, en masse, re-prioritize their time away from Sunday morning RE to other commitments. It's an entirely appropriate time for a re-evaluation. Duncan, in the comments at YRUU UUlogy, says

Part of the conclusion that many people have reached (read: Ministers/staff) is that the entire MODEL of the youth group as it is largely practiced is not sufficient and should be scrapped. They believe that cons encourage youth to only attend cons and youth stop going to their churches. They think that too many youth leave after Coming Of Age, and they believe it is because YRUU groups don't meet a wide enough set of needs.

I think in my experience as an advisor a lot of youth leave because A)they had a deal with there folks that after CoA they are not forced to go B) other demands such as theatre or sports C) with other demands sometimes Sunday mornings are the only one in which people can sleep in. And not about the youth group.

And this is the second point I want to make here; this is why I opened with the converts experience. As the Coming of Age teachers at FUCA are fond of saying, "at the very heart of our seven principles is 'A free and responsible search for truth and meaning'". I cannot posit that all of the self-identified UU diaspora are the non-attending children of Unitarians, but I can safely say that some of it is. Because church, even an open and free church, is not for everybody all the time.

And that's the third part. We have in this nation the "Immigrant Experience" as a cultural narrative, and it is increasingly the dominant one. Not immigrants as in pilgrims, but as immigrants after the US was founded, who entered this country knowing what it was, without having been present for the formation. It's an interesting narrative, and a valid one, but it has complications of it's own, creating dissonance between those who acculturated into things like white privilege and those who can trace their heritage back to the very beginning when things like privilege were codified into law. This is not to say the UUism has nativist sentiment or a burden of guilt, but that sacred narrative, that powerful experience of how much better this is than the state we willingly left runs into trouble when youths, raised in the church and without the experience of conversion, find flaws in their parent's land of opportunity.

This is another narrative, the dual identity of our nation, our faith, and our congregations, and it's a complicated muddle. YRUU is only a part of the experience, but I think it's an important piece of UU identity, at least among convert teens and 2nd (or later) generations of UU youth. And odds are, a good many of us will take our free and responsible search for church and meaning within the denomination, provided that's allowed.

Another Youth Rights Quickie

First, Britain, where children sitting on steps warrants legislative consideration. Found here, which came from here, but the original article (and important comment thread) is here. I'm just going to say that making steps hard to sit on is ridiculous, and the motive is ageist. This can't possibly need further debate.

And this comes from a blog full of angst, which draws it's inspiration from this and this. Few issues are black and white, but legally sanctioned corporal punishment for kids? Absurd. Harmful. Detrimental. Backwards? Certainly, if major nonprofit childcare organizations can move beyond it, without the benefits that parents have in behavioral policy, we can move beyond this question in regular contexts. C'mon guys, you can give this up, no really.

Two Quick Things

The first is an excerpt from Cory Doctorow's article on the risk of rare events:

The rare – and the lurid – loom large in our imagination, and it's to our great detriment when it comes to our safety and security. As a new father, I'm understandably worried about the idea of my child falling victim to some nefarious predator Out There, waiting to break in and take my child away. There's a part of me who understands the panicked parent who rings 999 when he sees some street photographer aiming a lens at a kids' playground.

But the fact is that attacks by strangers are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. If your child is assaulted, the perpetrator is almost certainly a relative (most likely a parent). If not a relative, then a close family friend. If not a close family friend, then a trusted authority figure.

And yet we continue to focus our attention on the meteor-strike-rare paedophile attack instead of protecting our children from the real, everyday dangers they face from the familiar. This has the twin effects of making our children less safe, and of making adults less free, because we are all subjected to scrutiny on the grounds that we may be hunting children.

The second thing is Budget Hero, which is an awesome game that's been keeping me from more regular summer blogging. It's awesome, no really.

Five Quick Musings

While being trained to be an XCORP daycamp counselor, my mind wandered a bit. Here's where it ended up:

• Social Contracts & Youth: Unlike the social contract that is formed by consenting adults at the moment of codification (in, say, a constitution) or with implied consent (via immigration), youth age into an existing social contract. This partly explains the tendency of the young towards discontent in any and all systems, but there's a bit more to it than that. Youth transition into citizens, at which point they take on the burdens and are granted the rights associated with citizenship (can vote; must pay taxes and become eligible for military service). The citizen/state social contract is clear at this point, but the prior contract of non-citizen youth residing in a sovereign state is more anomalous.
  

• Consent Politics, as Regards Sex: there's an editorial cartoon that ran yesterday in the Albuquerque journal that bothers me fundamentally. I'll be writing a letter to the editor about it later, but the point for now is that it looks favorably upon the quaint and hetero-normative polygamous cult, while frowning upon two adults engaging in BDSM. The trick with all this is that the quaint cult raped girls below the age of consent, and that adults engaging in BDSM do so consensually. I frown upon any demonization of consensual sex between adults (taking into account the condition that some decisions cannot be made by sane people, and so are invalid; "Rousseau also argues that it is illogical for a man to surrender his freedom for slavery"), and things that condone rape are, to put it lightly, evil.
  

• Consent Politics, as Regards Governance: Social Contracts, as established, are between consenting adults, and later are between consenting adults and their institutions of governance. How does this contract apply to those unable to consent, either by youth or by some other standard of being mentally unfit? How is mental fitness determined, and how do definitions that have standards of mental fitness explain those standards?
  

• Nanny State: I'm going to be working at a day camp, and fresh from a semester heavy on political science there is a striking contrast between how rules work for adults and how rules work for children. The structure, guidance, and explanations that make day camps and childcare and schooling work for young children would be rejected in full if forced upon adults. The rules for such institutions hinge upon the accepted fact (which I have no intention of challenging) that adults know what is needed to keep kids safe, and that adults have as an overriding concern the safety of children. Everything is secondary to this fact, but there is leeway - safety does not mean forcibly keeping kids away from everything scary; I've advocated quite the opposite here before. And camps that are nothing but knee protectors and padded walls would be no fun. But it does mean that, when safety comes into conflict with things like the freedom to act of children, safety takes priority. Adults hate this in their lives, as angst about smoking bans in bars (for this generation) and mandatory safety belts in cars (for a previous generation) prove. But with children, rules are different, and especially with children, the obligation of a caregiver is towards the safety of another adult's child, which will be enforced by the state.

• State Allocates Responsibility: This came up partly during an episode of Boston Legal, and partly during a discussion over the cardboard gun fiasco. I was happy to see the student suing the school, as everything that was done seemed to demonize him, way out of proportion to an incidence that (I feel) needs no response, and has a kid screwed by horribly planned zero-tolerance policy and poorly executed APD action. Suing to me seemed appropriate, but Lia felt differently. She argued that the student had been at fault for making a stupid mistake (walking around and playing with the cardboard gun as though it were a gun), and that the police and school were also both at fault for how they handled the incident (poorly and with over-reactions everywhere). Rather than arguing which side was more at fault, her point was that the situation could only be rectified by all sides admitting their appropriate faults, accepting appropriate consequences, and then moving on, once everyone was in right relationship with each other. The legal system in the United States does not operate in this fashion.
• Responsibility means liability means fault, and to claim responsibility is to accept the fault of an action, and especially the cost of that action
• Having clear lines of responsibility allows an organization to punish the wayward individual and to operate in a legally safe bubble.
• Admitting fault in any part of a case is close to admitting fault in all of it, and makes it much easier for the other parties to foist their guilt onto the admitting party
• Day camp counselors exist in the legal limbo of protecting other people's children, who are sort of legally anomalous (sort of citizens? guardian law might evolved from property law? responsibility of the state to the point where they will punish abuse but not to the point where they will actually provide the day camp?), while working for a private employer (but a non-profit one), and all of this is overseen by a government. If a day camp counselor screws up, that makes at least 3 outside sources to which they are responsible.
• This is the real reason why I never want to go to law school, despite living and breathing politics.
  

Free Range Children

I haven't much time for this, but these two Boing Boing posts, which comment on this article and this blog, are pretty awesome in the affirming-the-humanity-and-capability-of-youth sort of way. I'll talk more about them later, but if you want to get ahead, enjoy them.

Student Walkouts and Youth Responsibility

Here is an article that fits the standard mold of youth rights advocacy. The setting, as almost always, is school. The students are all protesting against a detached governing body, and they are protesting because they feel they have no other way to guarantee they are heard. The author of the article invokes the American tradition of civil disobedience, using the standard examples of the nations founding, and the more curious example of Douglass MacArthur. I have not read exactly this article before, but it rings true, has a pleasant familiarity to it. Or rather, it would, if it wasn't dealing with an intelligent, informed populace making reasonable demands and being unfairly punished for it.

And this is partly the problem. The article paints the youth as sympathetic, and by all rights they are. This screams of injustice, and calls for a more meaningful forum to be created to so that those attending school can air their concerns with those who work at the school and those who create and implement school policy. This is a call for more youth autonomy, protections for the students when they take the political action available to them, and more valid forms for youth political action. There is no reason to want to deny those rights to these youths. The article is brilliant in it's design that way, and this "look, the kids are doing what we want responsible citizens to do" approach is pretty solid.

But there's a flaw. I'm not saying that we should look at these Long Island students and their civil disobedience as anything less than the ideal of youth political participation, and they are fully justified in their aims, and would be fully justified in receiving the rights they could ask for. That is good, and positive. Nothing wrong with that. My problem lies elsewhere.

Advocacy movements start with the rights for well-behaving citizens, and move on to include the rights of those who err. Jean Six was a big deal not because it was about granting rights to people whose conduct showed a worthiness of rights, but it was about granting rights to people simply because they are people. If the legal system exists only so that the dominant culture and appropriately-behaving segments of other cultures get full protection under the law, then justice has failed in being blind. Likewise, I like this article, I like this story, and I like what the students here have done, but I want the rights extended not just to them, but to all youth.

For these students to be truly satisfied that their opinions matter, they'll need earlier citizenship and to be able to vote in local elections while in high school. If they don't get both the protection of citizenship and the right to vote (hopefully the full right, but local voting would suffice), they will still be subject to the decisions of the principal without recourse (except through parents, which is disempowering). This is big, as the disciplinary action is what prompted the editorial, and the disciplinary action is what comes across as fundamentally unjust. Dissent is vital to democracy, and it's okay for dissent to fail, but for people to be punished for dissent is absurd and undemocratic.

But I can say this, from my position of trusting youth with the responsibility to vote and to be full citizens, and I can point to an example like this, and say "this is why we need change, so that these youth can be acknowledged as the upright citizens they are". This people are comfortable with, and can agree with. But these same rights, rights that let youth live their fullest as participants in a democratic society, won't be brought up the next time a youth stands accused of some crime. When the media hits upon the next youth tragedy, and they mention the decision to try the youth as an adult, they won't say "because we have acknowledged that youth, whether committing crimes or acting as democratic citizens, can take adult responsibility for their actions". Youth are responsible adults when guilty and there is no thought it put into that. But they are disenfranchised kids when participating in democratic society through the only means left available to them.

This article is necessary, because we need to hear the good stories to make people comfortable with youth rights and youth responsibility. But we need this perspective as a constant in discussions of youth.

(full disclosure - I was informed of this article by an assistant editor at Newsday)

Forgotten Unitarian College Kids

It turns out BUUYA is a pre-existing acronym, which has something to do with Boston. Another term will need creation to meet the need, but until I hear a good one I'm sticking with it.

Not to replace the term but to further enhance the vocabulary of discussion, I've heard (and will soon be adopting) a new term that, as far as I know, originated among Vancouver UUs. The term? "Forgotten Unitarian College Kids", or the simple and abrasive acronym, FUCK. Because this segment of the faith is clever and bitter like that.


And, maybe, just maybe, there is some real hurt behind this, some feeling that bridging is more like being thrown into the Bering Strait, and the process has all the deliberate guidance of the vast, uncaring sea. YRUUs change, if it isn't demise, is surely something radical and will be more like reincarnation than resurrection, and so will be necessarily different enough to help air the issues that are tied into this. Ministry, while it can be effectively compartmentalized into "Youth, Young Adult, and Baseline Adult", needs to be a continuous thing, and having clearly demarcated bounds may only be harmful without proper structures to accompany the clear metaphors of ritual. Bridging should be to somewhere, and young adult community just doesn't feel like the proper drop off point for the 18-22 year olds. This is the question and the gap addressed by the FUCKs. Abrasive, but it sure warrants change.

BUUYA

The above is not a typo. It's an acronym, a new one created (as far as I know) by Meghan McHenry. It stands for "Born Unitarian Universalist Young Adults", and I think it is brilliant. UUism is currently rife with young adults, terminology and speculation abounds at what would cater to the recently converted, the belief.net discoverers, and that whole group of people who discover Unitarian Universalism. These are people who fall in love with the faith for principle number 4, "A free and responsible search for truth and meaning". These are people seasoned by other religion, and perhaps burnt out on outside traditions. These people are essential to the faith, of course; this is a religion of converts, and one that doesn't really proselytize. But "young adults", as a term to describe such individuals, is fundamentally flawed. It excludes the very simple reality of those who find the church before they are 18, or those who are simply brought up as the native children in a religion of converts.

BUUYA as a literal term ignores the former of those groupings, so I don't expect it to become a huge deal in the intensely politically correct and subtext-centric terminology of UUs. It does address a need, however, and until I find a better term, I'll be using BUUYA as the catch-all for the post-YRUU Unitarian diaspora. This is a group that isn't really addressed by current Young Adult structures, groups, or culture, and this is an already existing gap.

I should clarify something - this isn't supposed to be nativist sentiment or backlash. This isn't railing against the inclusion of others into a system I was born into. And this isn't an attack on the structures that exist that are serving a need of N(new)UUYAs. It's also not an attempt to polarize the discussion. This is, however, an attempt at labeling. I think the discussion could use the term, and I think that if the problems of YRUU, Young Adults, and the diaspora are to be addressed, it'd be really good to have a vocabulary that allows for the full debate.

There are problems that "being Young Adult friendly" doesn't address, and there are problems with conceptions of "retaining youth". The issue is complex, and for all the categorization and labeling that can be done to look at this big picture, the issue of those raised UU staying with the church goes back to that 4th principal - it's an individual search, and we as a faith need to be just as happy and grateful and catering to those who choose to stay as for those who discover UUism.

Youth Rights: Voting Ages Elsewhere

While reading Persian Mirrors* for school, I came across the fact of suffrage in Iran granted at 16 years of age. This fact is thematically tied into the ban on birth control and the call for more soldiers issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in the early 1980s. The call worked, and Iran's population went from a modest 35 million to 65 million, but the war with Iraq ended, and the religious authorities in Iran scaled back the prohibitions and controls, going so far as to approve vasectomies. Still, that's a solution for latter, and doesn't deal with the huge age imbalance in the nation. Iran's population is young, very, very young.

For comparison's sake, 1/4 of the Iranian population is below the age of 14, while only 1/5 of the United States population is. That doesn't appear to be a big disparity, but lets add that to the fact that the Iranian median age is 25, while in the US it's 36. This shows a disparity, but it isn't a disparity that easily translates into an explanation for Iran's voting age being 16, while the US (and most of the rest of the world) have suffrage set at 18. This is a cursory overview, as I think the full survey will work much better as late-college political science research.

But, the overview - going from the CIA world Factbook's list (which is pretty dang handy), the most popular option for voting is universal suffrage at 18, followed by universal suffrage at 18 with compulsory voting. The youngest voting ages are universal suffrage at 16 in Austria, Cuba and Iran, with suffrage for employed 16 year olds in Slovenia. Several nations have requirements of adulthood, without ages specified. Other nations have compulsory voting only for the married, or younger voting for the married. Still other nations have caps on compulsory voting at an old age, and make voting voluntary after that. We have a few nations (notably Japan) where suffrage is only granted at 19 or 20. And then, we have one interesting exception, found in many nations - soldiers (and sometimes even police) are forbidden from voting.

This list challenges my previous speculations about what entitles an individual to voting rights. Dying for one's nation seems to warrant the right of consent in government, but many nations specifically feel that those doing the dying shouldn't have the say, and so citizenship cannot be defined by potential for military service. Brazil has voting as compulsory for persons between 18 and 70, but optional for those 16-18 and over 70, which is an interesting twist on whose voice gets to be heard. Nonspecific adulthood is an interesting proposition, and it'd be interesting to see how a loose standard is applied in the daily exercise of politics. Some nations have education requirements, or education requirements for a specific gender (looking at you, Lebanon). And most interestingly, marriage as a requirement, which must be the result of the family, rather than the individual, seen as the essential component of society.

It's all very interesting, and at my present state I think that's all the interpretation I can offer. I'll hold that my previous criteria for voting as citizenship hold in the US, but it's pretty interesting to see how the question has been answered elsewhere.

~

* I can't really recommend the book, as it is too much a spoon-fed bipolar dichotomy aimed at separating Islamic government from Iran, and at explaining why the current Iranian government both isn't really Iranian and why it falls short of the universal standards every nation should abide by. By universal standards, I of course mean those of the enlightened west, and particularly the United States center-left. Not that the book doesn't have selling points (it was interesting enough to get me to write this tangentially related post), but it doesn't let other cultural standards be meaningful, and it treats a 1,300+ year old religious tradition in Iran as temporary and unessential to Iranian identity. Read Persepolis instead.

Youth Rights Interlude

Reading BoingBoing, I found this post, about an 8th grader, by all indicators respectable and law-abiding, getting in trouble for buying candy from a student. Going further into that blog's archives, I keep finding more and more absurd stories about rights youth are being denied. Seriously, this goes on and on, and this is only what I've found in five minutes. Bear in mind, the blog I'm pulling these links from is not a blog about youth rights. Its about civil rights, plain and simple. Youth are just denied them, or have restricted, trial versions that do them little good.

It's absurd, and this alone is enough fodder to consider a change in legal attitudes. The bakers dozen of links says more than enough, but a few points worth making. These rights are all civil rights we believe adults should have, and several of these posts focus on state interference against the parent, in a way puts that lets the state supersede parental authority in matters from education to curfew laws. Rather than parents having the state to back up on for curfew laws, parents who set their own curfews find out:

...that it is also unlawful for parents or guardians to knowingly or by inefficient control allow their children to be in public places during the prohibited hours.

There's worse in there, more gross violations of the human dignity of parents, and refusal to respect the humanity of youth. The home is a heinous place for governmental authority to overstep its bounds, but this happens elsewhere.

Or there are other things, which have large implications against the principle of academia. In one post, we hear about a student banned from student council because:

it [a lower federal court] believed she could be punished for writing in a blog because the blog addressed school issues and was likely to be read by other students."

That's one of the happier ones, of free speech being quashed and the quashing being contested. There's other horror, at least as bad as that, and it ranges from clothing violations to suspension for doing the right thing to something akin to gulags.

I'm not advocating the vote be extended all the way down to the youngest of children (in this sample of stories, that's grade school). I am, however, in favor of extending civil rights further down, and if that cannot be done without some extension of the vote to youth (16 or 14 being the target goals), then the vote should be extended, and citizenship besides should go at least that far, conferring not just human rights but American rights on our nations youth. The alternative is, at best, frustrating, and at worst it is terrifying.

Youth Rights Post 2: Citizens at an Early Age?

My last Youth Rights post was all premise, and at best it succeeded only in explaining why 18 year olds can vote. That's a good thing to know, but it doesn't readily translate into why people younger than 18 should vote. With luck, this post will clear that up.

The definitive factor that granted the vote to 18 year olds was military considerations, and the notion that a drafted army can only draft citizens. As such, drafted soldiers have the vote. As do volunteer soldiers, with the exception of 17 year olds who can legally enlist with parental permission.

Fighting and dying for the nation, then, is not enough for an individual to have earned the vote - they have to face the possibility of being drafted against their will. Going back to the vote as consent, this means that people who could be drafted/have been drafted will be able to remove that consent, by voting for politicians opposed to continuing war. All straightforward, all restatements of what I said last post.

However, the draft as last written excludes over half the population by gender requirements. Debating a new draft that includes women is not my goal, nor is it a major concern for this post. But this gender requirement does mean that other factors must be important for full citizenship besides eligibility for military service. Some of these issues are mentioned in the previous post, but this time I'll consider each and the role it plays in citizenship.

1. The Drivers License

This isn't something granted exclusively to citizens, or granted as part of the "turned 18 - now a citizen" process. In fact, some states (New Mexico, for example) grant drives licenses to illegal immigrants. Drivers licenses are earned by requirements that vary state to state, but most include 3 requirements: being a certain age, passing a written test, and passing a road test. The latter two test necessary knowledge, the written test being on conventions and laws, and the driving test being on actual driving ability. The age requirement isn't a strict assumption of competence - in New Jersey and New York, it's higher (17 instead of 16, last time I checked) to help address the density of the population, and to limit the number of drivers on the rode. In New Mexico, a provisional license can be had at 15 and a half, and Western states in general have lower age requirements - partly less population density, partly the early age at which people enter into employment (and accompanying poor public transportation systems. The point here is that competence at driving alone can be assessed as early as two and a half years before citizenship is earned, and people can be subject to traffic laws that they can't vote for politicians to change. People willingly enter into this, as the benefits of being able to drive under existing laws outweigh the downside of not being able to repeal traffic laws they are subject to, but it also leads to some legal anomalies, like municipalities that make it illegal to talk on your cell phone while driving, but only make this illegal for teenagers.

2. Rights in School

Teenagers in public school have reduced free speech, as has been ruled in the Supreme Court, but they do still have rights to free speech. This shows up periodically, with clothing choices or political protest (or hugging, apparently). This is a right enshrined in the US constitution as the first amendment, and it is especially important in academia. Discourse and free thought, the underlying aims of free speech, are essential to citizenship, and to an informed electorate. However, the right doesn't just safeguard speech deemed appropriately valuable for society - personal expression and individual differentiation are also covered, and many legal cases for student rights revolve around either the intellectual value of the student's action, or on how constraining the students action would only serve to make more free speech, especially the valuable free speech, difficult or impossible. Teenagers' free speech is more subject to rulings based on the value of that speech, but this shouldn't be seen as detrimental to youth rights. Rather, it is a beneficial scrutiny, one that time and time again has validated teenage expression. The scrutiny is, however, a test that is rarely applied to citizens in the public arena (although the test is extended to teachers in the schools).

The point of this free speech would be meaningless if society thought teenagers opinions didn't matter, and if this free speech wasn't seen as a precursor to engaging in public discourse latter in life. There are other examples of "training-wheel rights" granted to high schoolers, the most notable one being student government, but the bigger issue at stake in youth rights and education has more to do with education theory.

Public education is provided at taxpayer expense as a social right. The trick, however, is figuring out whose right that is. Is it the parents who have the right to send their children to school, the child who has a right to attend school, or the adult who has a right to have gone to school as a child? Citizenship rights in regards to public schooling focus primarily on the former and the latter, as they deal with adults. The actual people in schools, students, aren't the people the school system is designed to serve. Parents want the kids to have an education that meets their goals, and the adults who graduate from public school want to have had an education that is valuable to them. These people, parents and former students, will vote in local elections and for school board members based on their past experience of public schooling, based on their children's experience as best they know it, and based on the detached criterion of tax concerns (not all that detached, but often far from the students minds). Students unhappy with how they are being served by the public institution they are legally obligated to attend can complain to parents, can hope that their schools student government has some form of meaningful power, or can at a specific age (in New Mexico, 16) exempt themselves from the system. They have some rights in this situation, but the big problem is that the only way for an individual to formally deny consent to this process is to opt out of the system. It's not an exact comparison, but it's like disagreeing with municipal authorities and then moving away. In the US, we value working for change instead of running away from problems, and its a bad system that has running as a primary recourse. Teenagers, as participants (and mandatory participants) in the public education deserve some say in how that institution is run, and in a way that makes the teenagers being educated at least as important a constituency as the parents of small children, and as adults who had been educated.

3. Rights to Work

I don't have the numbers, and I'm hesitant to trust the NYRA's numbers at face value, but regardless; lots of teenagers hold down jobs, for lots of reasons, and it isn't primarily summer jobs. Youth work, some of them very hard and as a matter of survival. Teenagers traditionally get low paying jobs, with minimal required skill sets, that see lots of turnover. This isn't an objection to the system - the jobs are in theory aged out of, and teenagers will always be willing to work them. It does mean, however, that there will always be a significant amount of teenagers who are taxpayers, and that these taxpayers can't vote. These taxpayers are operating under reduced rights, and they will have to age into a position where they can seek redress from politicians. Not the biggest of concerns certainly, but this is a nation founded on strong belief in the rights of taxpayers as citizens.

4. Rights of Youth and Rights of Parents

Lots of rights can be seen as conferred to youth through parents, and this is a huge gray area. The debate stretches back to conception, where rights of baby/fetus and mother are argued in regards to abortion. Not delving into that here, the general trend is more and more government acknowledged freedom for the child as they age. Children can (again, using NM as my example) be legally left alone at 10, and at 12 can be left alone in charge of other children below the age of 10. At 14-15, with parental consent, they can apply for workers permits, and parental consent is a requirement for most activities at school, up until the teenager is either old enough by judgment of a ratings board (movies, shown at school or elsewhere) or is 18 and can sign their own forms. Even donating blood for those younger than 18 requires parental consent. A lot of this is trust placed with the parent in knowing what is best for the child, and judgments are made on behalf of the parents right to parent. Rights to parent are lost at times, usually in unpleasant circumstances where the governments obligation to protect the child supersedes the parents right to raise the child (this is why child's services exists). Children can also remove themselves from having a legal guardian through teenager emancipation, which is a concerted effort that secures some rights of the parent onto the child, but more importantly denies those rights to the parent.

This whole topic is a big, messy arena, but the key points to get out of it are that 1) parents have a right to raise their children into functioning and independent adults, 2) that the government has a right to remove a child from its parents authority if the government can justify doing so is in the interest of the safety of the child, and 3) teenagers can remove themselves from parents legal authority, provided they are willing to go through (and know about) the whole process of emancipation.

Conclusions

This is a huge topic, trying to reverse engineer citizenship rights so that they apply to youth. We have clear examples of citizenship conferring a right in the form of draft eligibility and the right to vote. Voluntary enlistment at 17 with parental consent limits military service as the domain of the voting citizen, so we must look at what is involuntary. This doesn't help case 1, where a drivers license is obtained from a voluntary process. That case does, however, allow us to examine rights that are earned through the completion of specific tasks; merit-based rights, at a rudimentary form. Public school attendance is involuntary to a point, but attending school doesn't confer rights. This can then be seen with education for children as the right of the adult that child will be, and as the right of the child's parent. The rights of the child as they attend school are still worth considering, and if one believes that schooling is the right of the current student, the case can be made for giving current students the right to vote. Tax-paying is involuntary, and workers who have to pay taxes are almost always entitled to a say in how those taxes are spent; teenage workers being an exception that I feel is worth correcting. Lastly, we have the rights of the parent in conflict with the rights of the youth, where the interests of government, the parents, and the youth itself are all involved. Here, granting citizenship to the youth would lead to a transformation of the dynamic, and may well be seen as infringing upon the rights of the parent.

Youth rights are a difficult concern, and I've tried here to tie youth concerns into the fundamental concerns of citizens, especially the right to give and withdraw consent to and from government. This approach is lacking in many areas, and places all its emphasis on youth as fulfilling the roles and obligations of citizens without receiving the rights. Still, I think this is a valuable concern, and that youth rights must, at its core, be seen as expanding citizenship.