Children's Rights

 I'm starting to become convinced that our society is...like this because we don't view children as full people. They have no rights. They have no vote. They're forced to attend unsafe schools. They aren't able to make decisions about who they are as people. They aren't able to advocate for themselves and buy themselves respirators during a pandemic. They're completely dependent upon the adults in their lives, but the adults keep telling them "no, you're not who you say you are" "no, you don't deserve to feel safe from gun violence because adults deserve their machine guns" "no, you don't need these life saving vaccines that's MY decision as YOUR parent because I control you."

If we treated children as full people and ensured every child had their needs met regardless of their parents job status or immigration status or any other arbitrary measure, we would have a completely different society. 

Y'all might think I'm silly, but in the beginning of this pandemic (and still today) people said children weren't being harmed, weren't spreading disease as much as adults (have you MET children), and they just needed to be in schools. Period. They didn't clean the air in the schools or guarantee sick leave for the parents or ensure kids could stay home as much as they needed without absentee issues. They didn't provide information on which PPE was best for which situation. Our public health basically said "you do you, get the vaccine and good luck." But they didn't mention very loudly that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission or long term conditions. It's to reduce severity. And how many kids never even got it? How many kids have had no protection whatsoever the entire pandemic? Just facing illness after illness while their parents or caregivers tell them that's normal.

Here we are 5+ years later and hundreds of thousands of children have lost their parents, grandparents, and caregivers. Millions of children have suffered from multiple infections of a disabling, deadly virus. They've watched as people sicken and die in wave after wave of unmitigated disease spread. Do you think children don't grieve? Don't see the world the adults have built for them? Don't see how mistreated they are?

As someone who remembers what it's like to be a child, I'll tell you right now that they absolutely see everything and they remember. Just the way I remember being told in elementary school that I had to take 5 minutes showers and recycle in order to save the ecosystem meanwhile the adults who were giving us that messaging were destroying entire ecosystems with full knowledge that the damage could have catastrophic.

When you look at our society through the eyes of a child, you see how flawed it really is.