Well, my brother is going to have a baby. Biology will be surprised

Of course its all going on via the conventional arrangement (I [hope never to literally] imagine) - we won't be trying any controversial new science in clan 'Hippy; well nothing more controversial than a little Whisky distillation and the occasional foray into the world of comedy explosives (Comedy of the: `You have to laugh, otherwise you'll cry` variety!!).

What shocks me most is that I'm looking forward to having a little bast- err sweet, darling, innocent little baby in the family; and being the sprog of my only Brother (who I know far too well for me not to get worried about all this ) the nipper stands to inherit some scary kind of genes. He/she will probably be zooming little RC cars around by their 3rd birthday, and from then on we can but shut out eyes and hope for the best

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How children behave; what society at large expects adults to do in their own lives; how people learn everything they ever know and while they are children they may not comprehend or appreciate what they have learnt until they test it out for themselves; how society at large expects of adults in response to all of this - this post contains many things, largely what annoys and irritates me about the broad topic of `children`.

Now this is about to get serious, sociopolitical, and very opinionated (as if it were possible to increase that, here ) - my previous (i.e. before the news of wee babby was announced) and still logically superior opinion on the whole family fandango is: Kids = Bad.

Oooh, risque...

My theory comes from both a global and a very personal perspective, and skips out all the inconvenient middle-ground occupied by most of the populace that is centred on some barely-imagined set of colloquial constraints and curtain-twitching `ethics`; I speak of the slow-minded and unthinking people of `The Community`, as Terry Pratchett allows his Samuel Vimes character to call that part of society that naysays joviality, organises (invariably worthless & self-plumping) local events that patronise the location & people in question, gossips about everyone elses damned life, and generally makes up the `they` in every "They say it can't..." and "they wont like it..." piece of social rhetoric.

`They` are a basically a bunch of unimaginative twats, and unfortunately they make up the vast majority of the human race.

I'm gonna have my work cut out, selling this one...

Another of Pratchett's sparks of genius is the phrase (regarding a mob of `public-spirited citizens`) "The IQ of any one person may be quite high, but the I.Q. of a mob is the square root of the number of it's members."

This neatly illustrates the background to my global perspective on children, and that is that we have too many of them already, too many by far.

Half the kids in the world live in poverty and sufference, and 50% of the other half have problems of their own sufficient to see that they will never have children themselves.

We are in a unique position as a species to produce just one offspring & actually hold onto and preserve them; about one child per family every 20 years or so; and be able to care for them and both of their parents financially and medically for their whole lives; in `developed countries` at least.

A lack of appreciation on the part of adults (or; People Who Know Better, apparently.) of this when they have half a dozen kids, or decide to have kids when they have only just taken out a huge mortgage, or any other idiotic time is deeply shocking to me, and my Brother & his fiance are a case in point as they have a not inconsiderable mortgage to pay off already, and raising a kid could, basically, really *fruitcage* them up financially for the rest of their lives.

So why do it?

I guess its the urge to have kids, to pass on their bloodline and have the only kind of immortality available to a creature that ultimately has to die; satisfying pretty much the 1st, 2nd or 3rd most important and urgent human desire depending on whether you talk to a gourmet chef, a mother of 12, or a narcoleptic

Well guess what - yet ANOTHER Pratchettism (perceptive bloke, that Pratchett) that is relevant here is a quote from Death himself, regarding that humans spend half their lives "MISTAKING THEIR INSTINCTS FOR EMOTIONS" (he just talks like that, its not caps-abuse). Which for me sums it up perfectly: "I want a baby!" "I really feel that its right to have a child now" etc. etc.

No. You. Don't. (almost always)

You almost always feel nothing in the sense of the emotion; to feel something in response to events and people. No, what you are almost always doing is just being another animal.

Instinctively all animals (Mr. & Mrs. Homo Sapiens included) want to breed because over millions of years the desire to breed in members of all successful (and we're quite successful...) species has caused those members to become far more likely to produce offspring, so by and large, and by degrees, almost every one of us has ended up with the desire to breed built into us at an incredibly deep level.

We feel nothing. We just act out of instinct (again, almost always).

So the global picture is one where - to paint it a happy picture with bright shiny colours of a sensible and even distribution - we should all get this desire to breed in check & under control, and choose instead to not be kowtowed by our genes and do the sensible thing and raise fewer children in the best possible way available to us.

Personally, however, I just hate kids 'coz they're damp and noisy But it goes deeper than that.

Children are podgy little sacks of selfish self-obsessedness, with an overly-large head stuck on top that generally emits either screams or snot, or in worse (but unavoidably common) cases, sicked-up food. And thats what their heads are for; 'cause they sure as *fruitcage* aren't for thinking yet

Thats what gets me about kids on a personal level, the selfishness. I see no beauty in innocence and naivity, as so many other people do. I may be a clinical bas***rd but I see important things that simply haven't been learned and understood, basic, obvious things that are there not for some mealy-minded, little-hitlered mob-mentalitied reason, but for the sake of a baseline of behaviour for all people to acknowledge, and for those who step over that line to know the consequences. The most literal example that springs to mind is Not Killing People.

I think we can all agree that this is a good basis of behaviours, even most religions (despite their faults) have got this one down pat (unless you listen to certain extremists, who really should have been taken away and locked up in a small room with a metal chair by now, with a nice warm helmet & shackles on and some handy rubber underwear.) and some structure as to WHY you shouldn't go around killing people is a good idea too.

Something about them not killing you and how nice that is, that sort of thing (this again merely illustrates that people have to learn things at first from a selfish point of view, thus underlying the very best and very worst of human nature in one clean strike).

So take, for example, the killing of James Bulger. This was a big case & a big crime when I was younger,: 2 schoolboys took a toddler from a shopping centre and onto a railway line, threw paint into his face, kicked hm in the ribs, hit him with bricks and an iron bar until he was dead, then laid his body across the traintracks - after weighing what was left of his head down with stones in the hope of covering their crime with the next train - and ran away.

The children were 10 years old; James Bulger died when he was only 2.

Those were 2 kids who didn't learn this basic lesson, and they did all this to see what it elt like and would happen once they had done. A powertrip, an underlying abusive urge, a sense of boredom and a joke taken far too far, whatever it was these were kids, and these kids had done evil of the most unsettling kind.

Innocence?

Not from where I'm standing.

I see blind selfishness, and I see it in lesser ways in all children.

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Of course thats only about 0.0001 of the children on the whole planet who would (indeed have) done things like that, but its one of those surface signs of an underlying will to do what we as a society call `evil`. If no-one had told us all to do the right thing by other people, wouldn't we all just turn out like this? Maybe, and its a chance I would rather not take too often and by having so many children so often the people already in this world are kinda edging towards the worse side of the odds as with each child that arrives the ability of the rest of society to properly raise all the children slightly decreases, which isn't gonna be helpful, not helpful at all.

Back to the personal view though, what sums it up for me is that children basically aren't real people. This goes for kids up until the point where, through the magic of adolescence, they realise for the first time that they ain't gonna live forever: as far as I am concerned that is when children become real people, and those real people have responsibilities for themselves that they can at last understand in relation to their future, not to mention the responsibilities that they may have towards other people.

Of course, responsible adults mutilate and murder people too, and far more often than 10-year-old English schoolboys. And they do it in a far worse way - they plan it and they enjoy it even when They Do Know Better, but in their case the full extent of the law applies to them and that lovely metal chair with the dainty tin cap and rubber pants is one possible repercussion of any evil they may do - and they are aware of that consequence too.

Conversely the children who do commit evil, just not to the extent of James Bulger's murderers (usually), are often well aware that they cannot be touched for crimes they commit purely from selfishness as long as they don't actually kill anyone, generally they can do whatever their tiny minds like.

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I'm hoping that my Bro and his fiance can do the job right, I'm hoping for a little kid about the place (only metaphorically when I'm not visiting them) that isn't a snot-ridden little ball of Want that demands things and gets them, I'm hoping the little bugger will grow up with a sense of responsibility and a sense of pride in their place in the world and all that idealistic stuff; but mostly I'm hoping that they, whatever (sex) they may be, will become someone who realises their dreams, and that they aren't the kind of kid that lives in their own nightmares