God bless the children

Increasingly we hear reports of children doing terrible things. Children as young as First Grade are committing crimes one would think wouldn't cross the mind of a child. Children with guns, children who murder, torture and steal. Children who who have been robbed of their childhood.

Last evening while watching a young girl weep because nobody understood her and I was enraged. I felt sorry for her. The rage was directed at the adults in her life, particularly her parents. WHY did they do this to her?

There's a pervasive attitude that childhood is a time for play and indulgence. The idea that childhood is the training ground for adulthood is completely lost. Our children have one shot, and one shot only at a decent life. Childhood is the "classroom" for our future adults.

Childhood is where you learn respect for authority, compassion for those less fortunate, honesty, integrity, self control, diligence, where they learn HOW to be a functioning adult. Collectively our society has completely lost the understanding that feeding, sheltering and watering children isn't enough. They have to be taught. The most important lessons a child learns are the lessons of what is right and what is wrong. They must learn how to distinguish right from wrong and how to build their character so they have the strength to choose right over wrong, AND for the right reasons.

Evil legislators are now working full time and diligently to make sure that the hands of parents are tied legally by attempting to enact legislation to prevent parents from disciplining their children. No thinking person considers that a well timed spanking is violence. No rational person ranks spanking with beating and abusing a child. Such people are either insane, or evil. To rob parents of their tools to discipline their children is a moral crime that either demands that the perpetrator should be on medication or deserves a time out in the State Penitentiary .

When will we stop this evil child abuse by refusing to teach and discipline our children. Society at large seems blind to the fact that we are reaping what we sow by being forced to build more and more prisons and to have a larger and larger police force.

In the meantime it's the children who suffer. They suffer all the way into adulthood and lead miserable lives because they weren't given the tools while they were children to have the strength, self possession and knowledge to lead themselves in productive happy lives as adults.

We treat our children worse than we treat our animals.