The story about the Florida man who was acquitted on child abuse
charges last week for doing to a 7-year-old boy what had been
done to him as punishment when he was a kid got me to thinking
about the process of how people and communities change their
individual or collective minds. Slavery was once a way of life
world-wide. There was a time when few people thought twice about
children laboring in factories. The U.S. is still coming to
grips with developing a system that protects women from assault
by their spouses, ex-spouses, boyfriends or former boyfriends,
but at least there’s a collective agreement that abusing women
is wrong. And children? Well, somehow we’re still stuck in a
system in which they must endure trauma and suffering —
sometimes extreme trauma for months or years — before anyone
outside a family may intervene. And we haven’t collectively
accepted that it’s wrong to slap children across the face, spank
them, hit them or shove them. The logic escapes me….we allow
adults to do to children what i