Innocence Lost...

not mine, of course. No, actually in a way, exactly. Ira Glass wrote a piece in Sunday's New York Times magazine (not the current one, this is from an old email to Mason) on Howard Stern and censorship and he was saying when he asked someone who had spearheaded some of these FCC letterwriting campaigns what harm was done to children by seeing a second of Janet Jackson's breast or hearing Howard Stern talk about anal sex. His reply? It destroyed "the innocence of childhood." There are so many problems with this way of thinking and what it says about us being a nation of overgrown titty-babies, but leaving all that for another day and another conversation, can I say for the record that having my "innocence of childhood" destroyed was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I don't think the words 'innocence' and 'childhood' are understood very well in this country. Children are not innocent, they are just misinformed. Parents and teachers are not trying to maintain their innocence, just their ignorance.

What in the hell is the "innoncence of childhood" supposed to mean? What is the loss of innocence other than becoming an adult? And am I the only person around who seems to know that children don't just lose their innoncence out of nowhere? Say a dirty word and a child is suddenly craven and dirty, his mind teeming with all manner of horrible thoughts. No, that comes with a chemical onslaught in puberty and either they don't know what to call their feelings and run the risk of misdirecting them or mislabelling them, or they do get an idea of where it is coming from and what to call it. Have all these idiots that worship Genesis (thankfully not the band) not realized that innoncence (as in "loss of innoncence") = stupidity? "Things aren't the way I thought they were...wah wah wah!!!" Shut the fuck up and grow up you idiots. So what? More stupid people grew up in stupid middleclass homes and had comfort and enough other comfortable people around to keep believing that that was the norm, the way it was supposed to be and so they all cry like stupid babies when things don't go their way. Thank God they are here to try to impress their fucked up suburban picket fence idea of how things are supposed to be on the rest of us who are willing to face the world and try to make it function as well as it can for as many people as possible.

Destroying the 'innoncence of childhood' = wake up call about what the world is really like

but all things concidered, children who saw Janet's boob didn't get a wake up call or have any innocence destroyed; they had something funny to talk about and silly questions to ask other misinformed kids. They have an excuse to see who knows the most words to describe breasts. Any parent who finds their child troubled or horrified by seeing this part of a body should look at themselves as the ones who have given their child this terror and fear. If you want to teach your child that something is bad, how about violence?

Anyway, innocence has never been anything but a stupid excuse and a weak one at best. As far as innocence and other stupid concepts like it are concerned, I say bombs away.