Sacramento wants daytime cerfews..
You know, we wonder why kids act like animals. It seems pretty obvious. If society treated you like a cross between a criminal and a small child, would you be all that keen on society? Would you really feel like being a part of it?
Kids have a right to exist. They have a right to go outside. Why is it cool to subject teenagers to laws that parallel the harshest of police states.We are talking about arresting normal, otherwise law-abiding citizens for walking around in broad daylight. We are talking about making anyone who appears under eighteen identify themselves and justify their existance to police on demand. Godwin help me, I can think of a few other situations where a certain class of citizens were required to carry papers and show them on demand if they dared to walk the streets.
This is disgusting. Not too long ago, teenagers often went out on their own to start their families, careers and to build a life for themselves. Teenagers are inexperienced but fully sentient beings who are capable of making decisions, and deserve to be treated with respect for their growing autonomy. When we treat kids with suspicion and derision, they notice. I can think of a million reasons why a kid would be out during school hours. They may be home-schooled, or maybe they are sick and have to go to the doctors on their own. Maybe they are on their lunch break, maybe they got their period during class and snuck off to buy some tampons. Who cares? That is between them, their schools and their parents. But now we are going to treat kids like parolees? Now we are going to tell them that they arn’t even human enough to go outside on a sunny day? Fuck that!
I was a teenager in Sacramento. That place was the most anti-youth place I know. Teenagers could expect to be harrassed in public places because they might scare off shoppers from the suburbs. The cerfew laws were strict and bizarre. Venues that catered to youth were so regulated that few entrepeneurs cared enough to open them, and those few that did open- purely out of the owners charity, under 21 events are rarely profitable- were shut down quickly or scared so badly with the threat of having their liqour licence (and livelyhood) pulled that kids had literally nowhere to go and nothing to do. The very very few events that allowed them would get overrun and unruly, and kids would go to places they did not belong and were not welcome (the farmer’s market was hip for a while) out of sheer desperation. Everywhere we went it was made plain that we wern’t wanted. Everything we loved was shut down, converted to over-21, or reworked to unfriendly to youth.
Besides being unfair, it as simply ineffective. Do you have any idea how many kids get pregnant in Sacramento? Do you have any idea how many nights we spent at home sneaking off sips of our parents liqour and finding all kinds of trouble to get in, when we would have much rather been out and about at a concert or something having fun? Would you rather be smoking B-grade pot and making out with a pimply faced teenager, or out someplace having fun? Bored kids stuck at home turn into sex-having, drug-taking kids stuck at home. Disrespectful and needlessly restrictive laws turn kids into people disillusioned and unresponsive to police. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
The older I get, the more clear it becomes just how much the nation hates youth. They are the last opressed group that cannot vote against or even really speak out against their opression. Our attitude towards youth is a shame and discredit to our country.