xeleriac

giving more thought about how to distill the concept of privacy for children so that it can be made into a storybook has compelled me to reflect upon my own experiences with privacy as a child.

in doing so i must confess i was surprised to realize that i was raised with very little privacy from birth to about 16 years of age.

holy shit, i think to myself. that can't be healthy, can it?

the house i did most of my growing up in with my mother, father, and brother was not conducive to privacy. i had to leave the house to have more than a night's sleep worth of privacy, even then all the bedrooms were sandwiched next one another with only drywall and a bit of fiberglass insulation between each space.

time i spent out of my home was spent in the General Daycare/Workforce Training Camp commonly known as school. aside from an actual prison or a detention center i could not think of a less private place to be as a child. with the exception of bathroom breaks, this kind of institutionalization required that i be under constant supervision by staff, or in the ever-present company of my peers, lest i be seen as a loner or suspicious malcontent.

so schooling is actually where privacy goes to die.

now how am i supposed to describe these discoveries in a children's book? i guess that's the noble challenge.

we must also realize that parents in industrial societies are conditioned to mistrust a child or teenager who wants unsupervised play.

notice how i haven't even mentioned the involvement of the web and computer technology yet.

i had the good fortune of growing up largely without the web, so at least that dimension to my privacy was not part of the equation.

so the whole song-and-dance of industrial society serves not only to discourage privacy, but to deprive the individual of it on a systemic level: at home, at “school”, in the workplace (unless it is a solitary job), in prison.

when seen through the lens of power differentials, spiritual warfare, and the neofeudal paradigm we now find ourselves in, it is plain to see that the elimination of privacy for the individual, and the gradual criminalization of it, is a high priority to the criminal class firmly in control of govts, multinationals, and nonprofits worldwide.

after all, civilians who don't have the time and space to enjoy their own company and kindle an inner life are completely helpless, disempowered. thus they are no threat to this thousand year Reich we have on our hands.

i'm starting to think a children's book about this all might be more important to the mothers and fathers themselves than the little ones...