yeah, i'll exercise my intellect with you!

You said: We adults now pretend that children are our equals, but we are vastly more removed from them than ever before in every meaningful way. In the adult world, children are objects more than ever before. They are almost a different species; less adults in miniature than human larvae. Why suppose they love us? Why on earth should they? But that's just my impression. I'm sure it's different among the boy-wives of the Azande, and I hope the armchair anthropologists among us will challenge the confessed littleness of my unimagined life. ==== i think there are two sides to that reason why young DUDES love us. (Let's not forget that they have not been as thoroughly indoctrinated into The System as most of us have, thus they are not as STUCK in ONLY SEEING SURFACES, etc.) One side has to do with our having been (up to Rollback/Backlash times) persons who COULD LIBERATE them from their coerced indoctrination into this koyaanisqatsi-STUCK Society. (An indoctrination which denies their organic intuition/dream/purpose as it "mines" and "makes us into a fuel to run Their System"; not "our" system, notably, but the empire of death and maiming and so on.) Another side is the side that knows the young DUDE from a young age and where said people are drawn together in affinity, we become friends. They see our fairness and know (in their hearts) our kindness. And trustworthiness. If imperfectness. Where such imperfectness is also intervened on when such OFs (older folks) play/work in concert/solidarity/reciprocity with a larger meaningful village/community that accepts and recognizes the value of acknowledging the FULL HUMANITY of young DUDES (and grrlz); we liberate each other TOGETHER. And the larger community helps "keep tabs on" such relations depending on their concerns!! This is an ideal, btw. Where DUDE lovers are more liberated themselves, not typical at all in the current EuroPEON-centric suicidal society (that does not know that it does not know), i suspect. But WORTHY of being granted space to grow!! So....to go into my usual pattern (heh) : What we're up against, as my analysis leads me to see, is an empire working overtime to try to protect what it believes are its "Interests" against all comers. And will scuttle fellow empire-believers, namely those "weak enough" politically, in the process. Especially when its VERY "paranoid" ways of perception seem endangered (which is perpetually; "we" just didn't see such off-balance clearly 'til it began happening to us). Do we choose to be on the side of those whom seek to liberate humanity from the grip of this 'Leviathan' as it has been called? Or do the Inner Commands so long planted in us keep us chained to perpetuating this hellish stupidity?? (i do see a clear division here, one that cannot be "unified" except by trickery. One, the patriarchally-challenged (and trickster-stuck), the other, finding mutually liberatory approaches to life. In an ongoing process of OPEN DEMYSTIFICATION of all "technique".) (but i digress) "Alien values are implanted into the lives of the people, precisely through the children; alien, not merely in the sense of foreign or exotic, but alien to humanity: a commerciogenic identity is formed. At first it was partly resisted, but with time, it became more and more acceptable, until it has now become a major determinant on the lives of the young, displacing all earlier forms of acculturation, other ways of answering need, other ways of being in the world. This process of forgetting, beyond recall, but perhaps not quite beyond reclamation, is a form of colonialism far more effective than that which held so much of the world in thrall in an earlier empire." ----Jeremy Seabrook in 'The Metamorphoses of Colonialsm'