empty-movement:

betterbemeta:

I think that kids protesting in the USA threatens something deep in the country’s neoconservative mindset and I think kids should keep doing it even if it feels like they don’t have the power to threaten or place much practical pressure on adults. In comparison to like, a labor union withholding their work until demands are met.

If any kids are reading this, try not to freak out, but adults are farming you. Especially if you’re white, but not always. Right-wing conservatives have a thing for ‘the family’ not just as a dog whistle but as the crux of their strategy and EVERYTHING that makes them mad ties into it: 

• They support sexist division between men and women because men need to be able to dictate how their wives will vote, and they assume that any children raised in that environment will grow up and be right-wing, too. 
• Religious conservative movements like quiverfull even attempt to have as many (white) babies as possible in order to out-populate other demographics and thus control politics. 
• The right wing rages out at birth control, not just for religious reasons but because it gives people the option to not have children, to not proliferate the state they want.
• Right-wing elements despise any form of gender expression or sexuality other than white straight people because to them, ‘degeneracy’ is a dead end for their political spread. 

Fascists love this stuff too. Fascists are the end expression of the attitude that politics is biological and that your body– and children’s’ bodies– are the means to further the State. If that sounds invasive and horrifying, it is.

Adults, especially conservative adults, see children as investments in the future but only in the sense that their kid will be their minion doing their will when they are an adult. That two conservatives will become three, or four, or more– and then in the future the children will express the parents’ will long after those people are gone. Conservatives dread public schools because they do not want any form of education to interfere with the ‘education’ children get at home– they also dread children going off to college and ruining that mechanism, too. Anything kids learn that decreases the chance they will be exactly like their parents is a risk to them. It is why private schools and homeschooling are primary conservative tools to ‘protect’ children from the potential of their own education.

All this has the added side effect of leaving any demographics who can’t get a sufficient education under these conditions in the dust, under-educated, and a perfect fit to be their children’s future menial workers or even slave laborers in prison or otherwise. They are too impeded to shape policy and better their prospects.

Not every right-wing person is actively aware of these ideas embedded in their political environment and there are many center-left or even far-left leaning people who are not aware of them either and unwittingly enable the strategy.

But kids speaking out scares shocks and offends right-wing lawmakers and pundits. Because most of them saw kids as theirs. They thought that the responsibility to use kids was theirs and political awareness was imparted in the family sphere, not in the public sphere that school exists in. They don’t get up in arms when the families within the Westboro Baptist Church raise kids to hold BURN GAYS signs, and they idealize the concept of obedient children. They have been farming kids like a crop and can be shocked when their harvest seems to turn against them, or that it was made of actual people, not livestock that upgrade to personhood when ‘good’ children become ‘their’ adults.

It is a deep wound to their psyche and I want kids to keep inflicting it. It is maybe the most powerful thing kids can do before they can vote. Even if on the outside, it seems like kids can’t hold the right wing hostage, they can. They can hold its mindset hostage and disrupt the very core of what it thinks is under its control.

Important enough to reblog even though it’s only Utena in feeling.