You Don’t Know how it Feels to be Me: On a kid’s right to privacy and my time spent in the library as a child.
Welcome to April's edition of Weaver's Deep Thoughts. This month comes super late in the month, whereas I normally aim to release an edition at the beginning of the month. Reasons? Busy. Super busy. And every time I think I'm going to have time, something comes up. And so, here we are. The end of April.
At the beginning of April, I had an idea of what I wanted to write about. Then, the month wore on, and I developed another idea. When I sat down to write it, I discovered that first idea. Whoops. So, this edition will cover two topics. We'll be thinking about how young people deserve privacy and I'll be reminiscing about my time spent in the library as a kid.
Leave the kids alone.
At the end of March, Utah passed two laws concerning kids and social media use. You can learn more here.
A few items of note from that law I wish to cover:
- Social media sites will need to get parental consent for minors to use their sites.
- Social media sites will be forced to allow parents to access their child's posts and messages.
- There will be a curfew for minors, as social media sites will have to lock them out of their account from 10:30pm to 6:30am.
Growing up in an abusive home and learning a lot as a church leader for years, in my experience, most adults ignore child abuse, don't believe it, do nothing about it, think little about it, actively allow it, or just generally don't give a shit about it. So, count me as not surprised that these laws are big, sweeping abuse-enabling pieces of legislation. They were written by adults after all.
There’s been a lot of discussion about parental rights these days and little concerning kids’ rights. I’ve seen parents who rule their kids like dictators, controlling every aspect of their lives. These and other laws are giving those types of parents more power over kids who are growing up in a home with parents who disagree with their opinions and choices or inflict abuse on them. These types of laws are government empowered enabling of abusers.
Forcing children to get parental consent to sign up for social media sites will result in either more abuse, those children lying to get into the website, or those children choosing to avoid those sites. When I was young, had these laws passed, and given my parents unfiltered access to my ICQ chats or emails, I would have just quit using them. Not because I had done anything wrong, but because I wouldn’t have wanted all my words scrutinized and potentially used against me. And that would have cut me off from friends and family I stayed in contact with through those mediums. As a teenager, I leaned heavily on my email correspondence with a friend and these laws would have ruined that relationship because she lived in Utah, and I lived in Missouri. Email was a way she and I could have very private and personal conversations away from prying eyes. I’m a big part of who I am because of those emails, I can’t imagine who I’d be today if I’d had to cut her off.
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The curfew bit of these laws is a bit strange to me but point back to enabling abusers. If parents already must consent to their children having access to social media sites, and can review their posts and private messages, what purpose does a curfew serve? It serves the purpose of shutting kids out of having private conversations with their friends during a time when the parents might not be able to actively monitor their activity. It’s a way for the government to pat an abusive or controlling parent on the back and say, “It’s OK, we have your back, get some sleep.” It’s weird, creepy, and an insane overreach. Again, if kids are in abusive homes, they need to be able to reach out to friends or whoever. And sometimes that happens at night, after the chaos has died down. Or sometimes that’s when chaos is happening, and they need help.
The politicians who passed these laws will tell you that it is all about mental health; that kids are having mental health issues because of social media. If only there was a way to provide healthcare to these kids through some sort of government program that didn’t force families to shovel over piles of money to insurance companies and healthcare professionals, so they could get the help they need. If only there was some way to help trans youth, so that they weren’t forced into situations that cause severe depression and sometimes death. If only. These types of politicians are always eager to point the blame at others, they seldom point a finger at themselves and recognize the harm they cause. And that’s what these types of nonsense laws will do -- they will cause harm. Kids are going to lose their right to privacy and in the process find themselves targets of unfit parents, again.
Libraries, my dear Watson!
Every now and again I think about my time spent in the local library in Rolla, Missouri, as a child. When I do so, I usually think of a specific time or period I spent in that library. Recently though, I read a post which gave me pause and I thought about all my childhood experiences in the library as a combined experience and what that meant to me as an adult. Or, how that might have shaped me.
The post in question is a Substack Note from Charlotte Clymer, here.
Clymer says, “I wouldn’t be a writer today without public libraries.” And that really struck me upside the head. Would I be a writer today, if not for libraries? I don’t know. Maybe not. But it did make me pause and think about all my experiences on a continuum or as related, instead of separating important moments of time.
The kids' books.
It started in the kid’s section of course, reading plenty of books and checking out more to read. We were homeschooled from early on; I wouldn’t go into public school until my freshman year of high school. Visits to the library during the week were common for us. I wish I could give you a figure of how many times we went per week or in total, but I wasn’t paying attention at the time. I was simply happy to be there.
Rolla Public Library was in an old red brick building on Main Street of downtown Rolla. It wasn’t big, but they packed in as much as they could. The oldness of the building was always intriguing to me as a kid. As I recall, it was erected in the 1800s, but I might be remembering that wrong.
While I read a lot from the kid’s section, I was mostly interested in getting in my quota for Pizza Hut’s Book-It program, so I could get a free personal pan pizza. I don’t really remember much of what I read during this period, I just read a lot.
The VHS collection.
At some point, my siblings and I discovered a VHS collection that the library had. We began checking out all manner of things. It was an odd assortment of old movies and documentaries. The tapes that made the most impression on me at the time were Alfred Hitchcock films, Universal monster movies, and the old Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes.
My siblings and I all enjoyed Hitchcock and Universal monster flicks, but I was on my own with the Sherlock Holmes films. I recall one time I watched a Sherlock Holmes film that one of my brothers walked in. He watched for a few minutes, and then stood up, and said, “I don’t know how you can watch these. They’re so boring.”
The Universal monster movies were my introduction to horror, as I recall, starting with Dracula and The Wolf Man. Dracula was OK, but I didn’t feel much for it. It wasn’t until I watched The Wolf Man that I was hooked. I remember being fascinated by how the monster in the movie was a victim himself. It added depth to it, as opposed to Dracula which felt very black and white.
The History section.
As I started to graduate from kids' books, I remember looking through the more grown-up fiction books, and not being interested. What I did find interesting was the non-fiction section, namely history. I don’t recall everything I read, but I do remember going through quite a bit of American history and film history. Where my historical adventures really took off was after discovering our Cherokee heritage.
As a child in a family of six, that’s four of us kids, I was the only one with a tan. My siblings would all burn up during the summer, thanks to our Irish heritage, but I’d just tan darker and darker. I started keeping count of the number of times I sunburned, which was rare, and never severe. I remember feeling awkward at a certain point in my childhood because I looked so different. My brothers and father all parted their hair on the same side, I parted on the other. My skin was darker. I started feeling like I wasn’t part of the family. My brothers would sometimes poke fun by saying that I was adopted. I started getting a bit of a complex over it. So, when our parents told me about our Cherokee heritage, including that we had an ancestor who walked the Trail of Tears and survived it to raise her family in Oklahoma, I finally felt like I belonged. And so, I began checking out all kinds of history books on American history as it pertained to the different native tribes. You can imagine that over time that became a point of frustration and sadness, because white settlers and early America straight up committed genocide against the indigenous peoples.
Parting thoughts on libraries
The original Note from Clymer was in response to an author that considers it wrong that they pay for public libraries for them to lend out his book for free. This sort of argument is old. Incredibly old. I’m 39, an old millennial, and I can tell you parents have been complaining about paying into public schools since I was a kid, even though they homeschooled. These arguments miss the point of paying into public services like schools and libraries: it’s not for you. We are paying into it as a society for everyone, and yes, in many cases for others. Same goes for social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and so on. We pay into it for the betterment of our country and the people in it. If it helps, think of it as dropping money into the basket on Sunday, you may not need that money ever, but your church and its people will. If it helps, I suppose we can say a god told us to pay taxes, which, Jesus did, so there’s that. From Mark 12:17, “And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they marveled at him.” I personally do it because it’s a good thing to do.
Also, did the library contribute to me becoming a writer? Yes. I would say so. It contributed to my reading habits, my love of history and research which are handy tools in the writing kit and got me hooked on certain genres -- I’m currently writing a detective series, after all.
Music!
This month’s song is titled You Don’t know how it Feels by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Give it a spin... for the kids.
Credits:
- Cover photo by namo deet on Pexels.com
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