what is wrong with people?

i didnt know who jow paterno was until his name was all over the news (at least in PA).

i feel sorry for all the victims of pedophilia, but sorry too for the perpetrators, they are sick individuals with a horrible and very serious illness.

but i dont really want to talk about paterno, where responsibility does and does not lie in reporting abuse, that particular case at all, or  even about the abuse of children. i have been thinking specifically about our way of thinking about kids in regards to sex.

we live in a place and specifically a time when you cannot buy bikini bottoms without a top for a five year old because the expectation is for the five year old to wear a sexy top. what?

when i was a kid the boys and girls in my class would get dressed for gym in the classroom together. we would all strip down to our undies and put on our shorts and t-shirts. no one cared or made a big deal.

the camp i worked at used to have morning dips into the lake as a way of waking up. the dips were done in the nude. they stopped sometime in the 90's after finding out that someone across the lake was photographing the young naked children.

given the world that we live in, i am not suggesting that we still do naked dips at camp or use the classroom as a changing room for boys and girls up to 8 years old together. i'm saying that i think it's sad that we can't. that we are no longer able to give children that piece of their childhood that excludes self-consciousness in that way, sex in that way. kids should be allowed to just be kids.