On 2005-05-04 12:43:00, Anonymous wrote:
"I think it would be prudent to ask Perri exactly how she felt."
I have no personal effect on anything that happens to Perri, so while I wish her well, as I wish anyone well who is basically a stranger and almost everyone who is not.
Because I have no effect on her, I don't really care how she felt. I wish her well, but how she felt is irrelevant to me, and irrelevant to the feelings of others.
She considers it not child neglect to deprive a kid of *shoes*. Her justification was, "It's not like we didn't have anything on our feet" and I think she said they didn't get outside much.
Well, not getting outside much is *also* child neglect. Kids need fresh air and sunshine and room to run and play, and lots of it. It's not a privilege, it's something they need to grow up healthy.
And another adult who was in Cross Creek as a kid has said that what they had on their feet instead of shoes was socks or thin slippers.
But Perri doesn't consider depriving a kid of shoes to be child neglect.
Anybody who is playing with a full deck, as a citizen of the US of A, considers purposely depriving a kid of having shoes on the grounds that shoes are a privilege to be earned to be absofuckinglutely outrageous child neglect worthy of removing the child. And most people playing with a full deck would advocate not only child removal, but criminal prosecution, if someone had the resources to get a kid shoes or had someone else buy the kid shoes and wilfully deprived the kid of shoes for weeks or months at a time saying the kid had not "earned" them.
My conclusion is and has to be that Perri and the others like her who think this is okay are not, as of right now, playing with a full deck.
She was forcibly indoctrinated into a cult that demands its members, many involuntary, not play with a full deck in exactly that fashion.
So I remind myself frequently not to blame her for not having a full deck to play with.
But the fact remains that Perri demonstrably wouldn't know child neglect if it bit her on the ass, and so her vehement assurances that she neither was abused or neglected nor witnessed abuse or neglect are entirely worthless.
*Perri* herself is not worthless.
But her assurances about the absence of child abuse or neglect *are* worthless.
Because she demonstrably doesn't know it when she sees it.
And if you think it's okay and not child neglect to wilfully deprive a kid of shoes and define shoes as a privilege, then you're not playing with a full deck, either.
Timoclea