Published in the Laissez Faire City Times, April 2, 2001 and, in a shorter version under the title "Our Children Won't Thank Us", in the Ottawa Citizen, March 27, 2001, p. A-15.
I did not always hate children. I spent a large part of the last quarter of a century enthusiastically caring for my own children, with the money that the government kindly left me. I worked hard so that they did not have to attend public schools, taught them what is right and wrong and, à la Thoreau, which kind of so-called "laws" are only worthy of disobedience.
Now, it seems, children are born with social insurance numbers on their foreheads, medicare cards in their mouths, and cell phones in their diapers with direct snitch lines to the tyrant. Consider how frequently our liberties are taken away in the name of children. I am not only talking about the child pornography witch hunt, which will intensify with the Omnibus Bill tabled in the federal Parliament.
Remember the Liberal election propaganda, which shamelessly used child pictures to lure us into the Brave New World. For the sake of our children's future, we should renounce our traditional liberties and trust Big Brother.
Or consider the new tobacco health warnings. Two little boys implore us, with their innocent faces of would-be Liberal voters: "Don't poison us." Nasty parents! Here come to the rescue the nice bureaucrats and politicians. They adopt laws allowing them to send their praetorians after us if we smoke in the wrong places, open "smokers only" restaurants, produce cigarettes without broadcasting their propaganda, and so forth. Kids are hired to snitch on stores which sell cigarettes to youngsters without demanding the ID papers that are not supposed to exist.
The best of all children's worlds is still to come. Two Canadian public health experts are proposing that parents who smoke in the presence of their children be reported to authorities. The idea of licensing parents before they are allowed to raise their children has been circulating in academic circles for two decades. Unthinkable idea? Our grandparents would have said so for most of the laws now on the books.
Think about what we have done to protect children from drugs—taking the lead from the mother of all Big Brothers, the U.S. government. The war on drugs has been an excuse of choice for monitoring financial transactions and strengthening border controls, with sniffing customs dogs, and human thugs to open our mail.
Or consider gun control, another statist cause into which children have been drafted by their surrogate parent, the State. More and more intrusive gun controls have been successively justified by the necessity of disarming criminals, of preventing honest citizens from using their guns in self-defence, of preventing individuals from harming themselves and, of course, in the name of innocent children. These controls have transformed millions of Canadians adults into daily criminals, and hundreds of thousands into something much worse: contented form-fillers.
Or, let's indeed come back to the child pornography witch hunt, under which parents cannot take nude pictures of their children without risking that some busybody call the State's praetorians. I agree that there are rather nasty specimens of mankind out there, and that the actual sexual exploitation of real children must be prosecuted. But this is not a reason for creating a Porn-Police State against virtual sins.
In the meantime, overly-protected kids, raised in smoke-free environments, shoot or stab their little classmates in the government's schools.
What kind of society are we building for these children? A society where people will be either rulers, criminals, or life-long children. Remember what Alexis de Tocqueville, 150 years ago, forecast about the democratic societies of the future: "Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood."
Thinking about it, instead of hating children, we should hate those exploiters who use them as tools to enslave us. There is no place for hate, but only love, in the New Age? We must love tyrants too? I submit that this would only amount to an intergenerational transfer of hate. For when all heaven has broken loose, and our children or their children wake up, they will hate the political child exploiters of today. The rest of us won't escape the blame: our descendants will hate us for not having stopped the nice tyranny while there was still time.