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What’s Been On My Mind
by
Alice C. Bateman
February 10, 2003
There are always ten things on my mind at once, it seems, but a predominant thought stream right now concerns our children. More specifically, the morals and values of our children. And I’m talking about almost any of them above the age of eleven.
I’m appalled at the way we as a society have left our children to flounder in a morass of sexual tantalization, instant gratification, automatic abortion if they ‘make a mistake.’ The mistake is ours, the parents, the adults, society as a whole. We have let our children become a tribe of fornicators, provided them with birth control, counselling, abortion, and maybe patted them on the head and said, ‘it will be all right dear, don’t worry.’
We should certainly worry! We should worry very much! What ever happened to old fashioned values? To morals? To children saying no to sex? To parents not allowing their children to have sex? Of course we all know there are situations where the hormones just take over and the mind is lost – but why are we allowing our children to fall into those situations so easily? Why are one out of every two pregnancies ended by abortion? I’d bet a lot of those statistics are comprised of unwanted teenage pregnancies.
What sort of message are we giving our children if we tell them that it’s all right to murder their own child to ‘solve their problem?’ How many of the Ten Commandments do you think that might contravene?
This is making me a little angry right now, so if I sound that way, it’s because I am. I’m watching perfectly good upstanding people, people who could make a good deal of their lives, wasting themselves in sex or drug or alcohol related thoughts, discussions and activities. We seem to have forgotten to make it clear to our children that this is the time of their lives, while they are growing, going to school, learning, that they should be excelling, pushing themselves to do and be their very best, to establish a firm foundation for the adult selves they will be in a moment.
How and what can we tell them now that we as a society have presented them with the wrong things? That we do care about them, that we don’t want to see them becoming parents while they are still children, or carrying the guilt of murdering their own babies? Is it too late to turn this tide?
When I was in school, during the sixties and seventies, maybe one girl would become pregnant during a school year. Now, it feels like I have to ask my daughters which girls are not pregnant, which girls have not had an abortion – and to find a virgin walking the halls of most schools above the elementary level? Few and far between, I’m very sure…
When I was in Grade Eight, our school bus driver said something about birth control that has stuck with me ever since – he said, ‘girls, what you should do is take that little pill they’ve got now for birth control, and just hold it between your knees.’
How can we teach our children now that there is life beyond and outside of the pursuit and conquest of the opposite sex? That love and sex are not equal in the equation? Now that all of the North American media they are subjected to glorifies these pursuits? Sex is a basic animal act; love is an all-encompassing state of being that will survive with or without the act of sex.
Our media glorifies the ‘conquest,’ the ‘score.’
And what do we do with the results? Murder them, scrape and vacuum them out of their young and traumatized mothers, and use them for medical research.
Sometimes this world we live in disgusts me completely.
<*:0(
Alice
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