On the Cruelty of Children

And so let us speak, for a moment, about the cruelty of children.

Children are cruel. 90 pages of shit. Children jab at each other with all the same lances, sharpened, new, antlers, full speed, no mercy, armed with the weapons of physical and psychological torture, children can and will use these weapons to form alliances and launch attacks against enemies real and imaged, their only flaw is their inability to process the consequences of their actions, for they do not have the means, cognitive or experiential, with which to make sense of cruelty or pain; without a full understanding of consequences, children gleefully engage in blood sport whose value is judged by the entertainment it brings to the torturers. The depths to which children can go are only circumcribed by a fear of punishment, thus crimes that can go undetected will continue apace. But the force that one child can inflict on another is often mitigated by the group that flanks him, disappating the most hurtful jabs because the tribe will protect its own. The tribe member will survice with his psyche in tact because he has people around him to tell him that he is okay. He is protected, and the statements made for the purposes of inflciting pain and distress can be easily erased with a proper change-of-subject.

The lone child is defenseless. He has no group to fall back on – no means of reinforcement to find acceptance after the knife has been slipped.  He has few options. He can join a group and save himself; he can become hypersensitive or he can become a iceberg.