What does our culture really think of children? I mean really think of them.

It seems pretty schizophrenic, to be frank. When I traveled to Guam, I was struck by very different attitudes towards the youngest of young people. Children were to be protected and many natives said that flat out - that children were the center of the culture.

There were anti-abortion stickers on trucks driving through the area. Websites with users  talking about their travel experiences said that, despite its faults, the island was a good place for children to remain children for the proper duration.

When I lived with my parents briefly, I got told by a relative who is related that it's not socially acceptable for children to live with their parents at my age. There were personal layers to that even being said to me but when I looked around, it seemed pretty damn normal. My best friend, along with his brother, is living with his parents. Another bestie from California is living with her mother - a mother who she really loathes.

 Another friend had a pretty affluent family in Western Washington. I met this friend at church, he dresses well and works. Yet he "lives outside" ("homeless" is not how he'd describe himself) - he can't afford to live in urban Seattle. The church we went to has a good social network in it - that is usually how people join - but you can only expect so much out of such things sometimes.

All of those friends found themselves in positions in which adulthood was not all it was cracked up to be. The model for adulthood that our parents had themselves struggled to fit in to is almost barely applicable now.

Most cultures value family because poverty makes community and family necessary. Our culture is used to so much wealth that that wealth could stand in for a lack of family. Without that wealth, we literally don't know what to do. The cold and sick approach that most of us have towards one another and our own families has begun to show itself for the cold corpse it is.

I think those of us who realize how bad our interpersonal relationships are have a responsibility to try to change it. That means compromise. It means maybe looking at the old way other cultures did it. (Native Americans are very similar to the Chamorros I mentioned early in my article:)

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The role of children plays a significant role in the subject matter of most of my writing here at Dagblog for the last year or so. These mass shootings ooze with our schizophrenic notions of children. Alot of outrage occurred after children were ripped apart by bullets fired by Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary - but that was abuse of children that may simply have been more than the level of abuse we had long grown used to in this society.

Child abuse has everything to do with these mass shootings. As I laid out in "The Killer Profile," these murderers fit a pretty solid description. They all experienced a solid level of neglect that led to them losing the emotional connection with others that keeps all humans civilized.

Take a peak at this video:

Why would children be put on medication known widely to cause such horrific side effects? It may be - and this is the harsh reality - that their parents never really loved them. Perhaps they felt an obligation to have children and, once having them, didn't really care enough to take the full steps to actually raise well adjusted young adults. I mean gosh - drugging little Johnny in to compliance sounds so much easier than doing all those exhausting things your parents did for you.

Maybe many of them really did believe there was something called a "chemical imbalance" and that this imbalance was real in their children's brains despite "chemical imbalance" being invented and marketed as a catch phrase at the same time a new class of psychiatric medication was being marketed to a new generation of consumers.

Whatever it is, we are seeing the results of the dehumanization of children every single day with these massacres. It's easy to blame inanimate objects like firearms or say these murderers are "natural born killers" (as artappraiser said in the aforementioned "Killer Profile" article) or blame heavy metal and industrial music or blame video games or blame violent movies or blame rap music or blame knives or blame cars (which the Guam murderer Chad De Soto used to injure several Japanese tourists) or blame the sidewalk. None of those wild explanations for what is happening make any sense and people often make no sense once they know they are wrong about everything.

We're taught in mathematics class to solve all problems by isolating the common denominator. It seems as if many people, in their extreme case of societal denial about the causes of these daily massacres, are trying to solve a series of problems, all the same common denominator - antidepressant medications, with numerators that are completely different. It's the exact same sort of thinking that caused the problem in the first place. Remember what Albert Einstein said about that?

You can try looking at the mirror backwards forever but eventually you will have to face your reflection. These atrocities are the reflection of a very sick society.

Additional: NCD posted this in the comments section:

And you didn't mention that the USA has the highest rate of child poverty of 35 developed nations excepting only Romania.

Wealth doesn't stand in for family in the US.

Almost all other developed, and even many undeveloped or developing nations have the common sense to (1) mandate paid maternity and paternity leave (2) provide financial subsidies for families with new children and (3) give all children free medical care, and free dental care until age 18.

The fact is this country does not have national policies that would lead one to believe that it places a high value on either children or families.

Indeed. The very way people value one another isn't thought out or coherent in this culture at all. It's almost like we don't value humanity.