WelcomePrivate Property
In my lowly societal status as my parents' child. I had no private property, not even my body. This "simply went without saying", like the first 3 of The Abrahamic Ten Commandments.
The only thing that was truly mine was ptting up with them. I was not around at my childbirth to struggle against them chopping off the end of my penis. They were not jews, but this was what they did for whatever or for no reason. the one thing they should have removved brom my body, a large nevus ("mole") on my chest, my mother just impotently told me to not pick at it even after a small piece of it probably hd fallen off it and it had bled slightly. (Fortunately a doctor at college got rid of this enemy in my flesh before it bacame a melanoma, but not before fear of it had done lifelong mentally and emotionally crippling damage to me).
Let me once again adduce indisputable evidence that I had nothing that was mine except maybe the interior of my body starting a couple inches past my anus on the one end and my nasal and oral passages a the other end (my mother did not stick her fingers down my throat or up my nostrils). As a teenager, When I came home from school, she swqu=eezed the acne pimples on my face. She forbade me to squeeze them because she reserved this for herself. There were also the anal enemas when I failed to produce an approved quantity of feces in a given timespan. In addition to that there were the coerced bi-weekly haircuts and more. My body was not my private property. Years later there wa a song on Sesame Street which did not apply to me (quoting from imperfact memory):
My body's my body,
No one's but mine.
You've got your own body.
Let me run mine.
Anent private property in material objects. Small things can have big meaning. When I was in maybe 5th grade, the Welches' Grape juice came in cartons of 6 6 ounce bottles. each carton looked like a little house. You could send away for a maybe 6' by 6' little sheet of paper that looked like a small town plan with streets and places to place the juice carton houses. I had this on my bedroom floor. It was a large bedroom. When my mother entered the room with the vacuum clearner, I wanted her to leave my little town alone. No! She had to vacuum the whole floor like Adolf Hitler had to march to Moscow (But I had no Red Army to resist). I had nothing what was not subject to her arbitrary expropriation without appeal or compensation. I had no private property in material things like I had no provate property in my own body. (Is it a surprise I do not want people touching my books or other possessions today?)
Have I made my point or do your just think that I was being a disobedient child and "who did I think I was" or now think I should have been? The nursery is a maximum sceutity prison wher the guards used to be able to do anything they wanted with impunity but now they have to be a little more careful to not leave marks on the child's body or else Child Protective Services might intervene which latter many parents still believe is a violation of their property rights. It was ater 1863 in USA and I had "masters" in school.
So what did these people accomplish? They hurt me. As for my "feelings" anent them? If somebody had told me they all had died, I would soon enough presumably have wondered where next meal was conming from and where I would sleep that night. Sometimes a house cat will knock an object off a table to watch it fall to the floor. At least my parents and teachers were subject to the law of gravity.
Education reform idea
"Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and 90 percent of what they teach." (Robert Ballard)
By high-school graduation, every child should be earning his (her, other's) living and be free financially to walk away from his parents if he (she, other) does not like how they were treating him.
This would not mean teaching "basic [low-skill] job skills", or skipping the sciences or the humanities in the educational curriculum. It would mean teaching with materials that did not just coerce the young person to vomit it back up in homework and tests ("Ashurbanipal") but which also built real life skills mastery.
Take literacy: Raading Charles Dickens does not conribute. Reading The New York Times does, including the news, science, business and arts pages. Learn French? Just stop talking English, period. The kid will quickly enoug learn how to ask where is the toilet and to order food to keep from soiling his underwear and starving. Not fun enough: Add Charile Hebdo. Not enough hours in a day? Stop wasting kids' time on varsity football. (I propose a lot of what goes on in school is mainly for the benefit of the adolts. It gives them a paycheck, and since they pobably don't like their own lives all that much, by picking on the kids they can at least feel lucky that they aren't students, like poor whites in the American South used to feel superior to blacks.)
Goodbye, mom and dad, it has been a displeasure knowing you but I don't have to take it any more. [Young person leaves free never to have to return.]
