INTERNET PREDATION

Unless you've been sleeping under a rock you've got to be aware of all the internet predation going on. It seems there's a news story about it nearly every day.

The appearance of this so-called crime falls right in line with something I have carped about for years: we create our own problems, mostly with our words, our language.

Newsflash: Every time we create a law we create a corresponding crime.

Crime is coming out of the woodwork because we have created the laws which engender it. Crime does not exist in nature. We create it with our words. It is a man-made thing.

Newsflash: Childhood ends at puberty.

According to the laws of nature, a fourteen-year-old girl (in most cases) is not a child. We have turned them into children with our man-made laws (with our words).

This does not make it so, except in a strictly legal sense. A man-made law does not make a person a child. Only nature does that. A typical 14-yr-old girl is a young woman, in spite of our man-made laws.

We create our own problems.

I really don't know what is behind the decision to set the age of adulthood at 18. Maybe it's got something to do with the public school system. I do know that it is completely at odds with the laws of nature, and it cannot be wise to operate in a manner that is so completely oblivious to such perfectly natural forces.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that puberty doesn't happen overnight. You're not a child one day, and then - poof! - as if by magic, when the sun rises on your 18th birthday, you wake up an adult.

Nature is not quite so discreet, except perhaps in the grainy world of quanta. In the larger macroscopic world things happen more gradually, continuously.

I saw a stat the other day about the number of people in America who are incarcerated. It was something like 1 out of every 134 people. I couldn't help but wonder how it compared to the same stat in 1960. So I looked it up. The graph below is what I found.

Check out the year 1960 and compare it to 2003. It depicts a dramatic rise in the number of people incarcerated, over three times as many!

When I look at a graph like this, the first thing I wonder is whether or not people have really changed so much in 40 years.

Somehow, I don't think so.

Newsflash: Society has changed, not people.

We just keep running our bullshit mouths and making more and more bullshit laws. People are the same as they've always been, for thousands of years.

I also wonder, if incarceration is so unquestionably on the rise, how far it can go. Is there some limit? Surely there must be. It couldn't get to the point where 1 out of every 20 people were in jail. Could it? Would there be enough free people left to supervise that many incarcerated?

If nothing else (getting back to the internet predation thing), we should perhaps take a second look at the way we determine what exactly a child is, and correspondingly, an adult.

Personally, I don't think it should be tied to a number, like 18 or 21. What is so wrong with staying in step with Nature (with a capital 'N')?

When a child passes through the cycle we call "puberty" they should be considered an adult (as Nature decrees), regardless of the chronological age they have attained.

If we did it this way, nearly all the arrests of adults for preying on children would be wiped off the books. That little piece of nonsense we call statutory rape would also go away.

This course of action would be such a reasonable thing to do that it's not likely going to happen soon. People are not reasonable. They're emotional, especially when it comes to their children.

But if they're so emotional about them, why don't they spend more time watching over them, doing more to make sure they can't get into situations where they might be preyed upon? Why aren't parents made somehow liable in these instances of (man-made) crimes against their children?