Babies

I met two brand new babies yesterday, Matthew (2 weeks old) and Pierce (3 days old).  They are both beautiful boys with every wonderful potential ahead of them in life.  It will be up to their parents to raise them well and guide them to the best of their abilities.  It's a daunting task because those sweet babies have been born into a world filled with scary potentials, also.


When my babies were born in the late 50's and early 60's, our biggest fears were unplanned pregnancy and possibly alcoholism.  These days, the worst fear by far is that a child will be introduced to illegal drugs  or HIV.  Children and teens are terribly gullible about the evils in the world and these dangers are so far the worst parents have had to face.


Of course, the old standby, molestation, will probably always be a fear unless some brilliant government in the future makes a law that anyone convicted of molesting a child is jailed for the rest of their miserable life.


Raising a child means forever worrying about their safety.  They need to be taught about the dangers without terrifying them but it has to be an ongoing lesson.  It would be a blessing to all loving parents if the courts dealt with paedophiles and drug dealers with an iron hand, removing all of them from society.  Instead, the emphasis seems to be on rehabilitation which, for molesters, is a waste of time and tax dollars.  Evil such as theirs is a permanent contamination of their thought processes and cannot be changed.


It's truly beyond my understanding to look at the sweet innocent face of a child and want to be anything but protective and nurturing.  As I looked at the dear babies yesterday, I thought how their families would shield them from danger for as long as they can and, hopefully, rear them to an age where they will be mature enough to protect themselves.  Their parents will never stop worrying about them, though, because that is how nature made most of us.  We'll worry about our progeny until the day we die.