oloriel | May. 14th, 2005

When I drove home from doing the grocery, they were playing a German song, "Kinder an die Macht" by Herbert Grönemeyer (roughly translatable as "Give all power to children"). In this song, he basically sings about how much better the world would be if children ruled it, because they're innocent, chaotic, not calculating and so on and because everyone would be free and happy then.

Uh.

Back when I was a girl scout [yes, that one time, in scout camp...], we had this anniversary camp once. All age groups, plus a bunch of cub scouts from our French sister city and a bunch of venture scouts from a Swedish group we were friends with.
After a visit to Schloss Burg, a castle (THE castle) around the corner, the younger ones got to make medieval clothing and wooden swords and suchlike.
Afterwards, and without anyone's doing, they established a very strict "political" system amongst themselves. They had knights and hoi polloi. They appointed a king who made the laws, and to whose wishes they bowed (literally. Knelt, in fact.), and whom they addressed in the plural maiestatis. Very quickly, they had a bunch of rules, and rather severe punishments for those who broke them (suggested, moreover, by exactly those who would have to bear the punishments themselves). Eventually, the grown-ups had to forbid it and dissolve the "kingdom", because you try to explain to some kid's parents that their son got whipped because he did not bow fast enough or low enough or whatever. It won't help much to tell them the kid wanted it himself, will it?

Now perhaps that was a particularily masochistic bunch of kids, but at any rate, that summer pretty much destroyed whatever illusion I might formerly have had about the innocence and pursuit of freedom in children. Honestly. Adding that my six-year-old cousin wants to be Sauron when he grows up, and that children in general can be rather cruel little tyrants, I am pretty sure that giving all power to children might, in fact, be a Very Bad Idea indeed.
...

They were also playing that new Backstreet Boys song, "Incomplete". You know, of course, that this now demands a place on my soundtrack of my life 2005,