Kids are up to no good! They're not turning into little clones of me! They're watching the communist tik tok and listening to weird music and doing gender and getting all fruity with each other!

No but really. It seems that a decent subset of American historical oppression is targeted at children as well as minority groups. That may be a controversial thing to say, and I'm not at all equating how awfully we treat kids to chattel slavery. Idk it's a half-formed and new thought but bear with me.

The history of this nation can in part be traced by the history of its attempts to subjugate and assimilate all populations. Everyone must adopt a specific and endorsed American way of thinking, set of morals, and inherent beliefs. From manifest destiny to policing "ethnic" hair into the modern age, all will be assimilated. And after generations upon generations of war, expansion, torture, eugenics, colonization, and forming a society of round holes were all square pegs who fall out are ground to dust, we're closing in on that dream of assimilating all. There will always be horrific racism against American-born people of Latin, Middle Eastern, East Asian, Any Asian, et. all descent, but many Americans do view the national population as a blob of varied ethnic backgrounds unified by core American belief systems.

But there are two intruders to this "harmonious" system. The first are immigrants. We all know how they have been and currently are treated; to go into much detail needs its own dedicated post. But they are from the outside world, not to be trusted, speak funny words and eat weird food, and are viewed with varying degrees of suspicion.

The second set of newcomers to this system are our own children. Younger generations have always mystified and confused the old, perhaps even since the dawn of settled civilization. They're different, and that makes them terrifying. Societally, youth and their culture is viewed as an existential threat. Few if any people consciously recognize this, so let's examine how children are treated and understood. I'm going to list out a sample of practices and attitudes that Americans use in relation to their own young. Pay close attention to the number of entries that depend on children having absolutely no say in the course of their own lives, or so little that it's basically an illusion.

• Residential schools. :amerikkka: had them too and in abundance. This was more of a cultural genocide than really anything to do with kids in the modern sense, but it perfectly exemplifies attitudes to both the foreign and the young. The right people need to be raising children. The wrong people (ethnic and sexual minorities, mostly) could instill the wrong values into kids after all.
• Child Brides (Someplace Under Neith). About half of the country still permits child marriage in some form or another. Children are coerced by parents and their pedophile "fiancées" into signing forms and abruptly being legally fucking married to a man two or three times their own age. The great state of Wyoming defeated a measure that would have alleviated this barbaric practice earlier this year. All over the country, any attempt to end the practice of child brides is met with massive opposition from the religious right. Religiously justified pedophilia isn't an issue for some faraway and "uncivilized" peoples, it's a massive problem right here at home.
• The overall criminalization of youth culture. Curfews and cops in schools and skate park closures and prosecuting children as adults (leading some literal children growing up, getting old, and dying behind bars). I'm not saying that closing down a skate park is as evil as a DA working to get a child sentenced to an entire life inside prison. But I am saying that all of these points paint a mosaic. Anywhere children act independently of direct adult supervision it's suspicious at best.
• Moral panics. Are your kids doing something weird? It's definitely Satan. During the '80s, there was perhaps no better way to keep your kids from having sex than playing Dungeons and Dragons, but it was actually Satan. Heavy metal? The men who sing it look scary and my kid is singing about fighting dragons or whatever the fuck, so that's bad. Hip-hop? Black teens are into it, and that's definitely double trouble. Graffiti is damaging public property and an indication that a kid might be part of a gang, so it's actually a felony to paint a fucking wall. Kids are using the internet, they're using phones, they're using myspace and facebook and tiktok and snapchat and smoking the Devil's Lettuce! It's all different and scary from what I'm used to and what I remember from my own childhood! Gotta ban tiktok, let's ban vapes, let's raise the smoking age to 21! We'll keep military enlistment at 17 or whatever, because what better way to mold your child into a weird and psychologically damaged machine that having them join the literal army?
• Speaking of, the absolutely fucking weird obsession American parents have over their kids' sex lives is revolting. Navigating our sex-crazed society is challenging, and even the most well adjusted child/parent relationship would present challenges in terms of how to best counsel and help the kid figure it all out. Most American parents are not well adjusted and loathe to think of their teenage children developing any sexuality at all. A large chunk of it is religious, of course. I think an under-appreciated factor is that if a kid is going through puberty and soaked through with hormones and wanting to have sex, it's unmistakable that they're almost an adult.
• The Troubled Teen Industry (The Last Podcast on the Left). Teens are moody, withdrawn, developing independence, and are really becoming their own people. Fortunately for the American parental control freak, there is an entire industry dedicated to pathologizing and "treating" the human maturation process.
• Children are basically parental property. It would always be difficult to codify what rights a parent has over a child even in the most enlightened society. America took the easy way out and decided that kids basically get nothing. With a parental signature, children can be married or become child soldiers as discussed above. Based on my anecdotal and personal, but deeply troubling, observations, it's basically impossible to get a court or judge to remove a child from any bad family situation. There is a deep, deep resistance to taking kids away from their parental/owner figures no matter how horribly they're being treated.

That's a sample. I'm sure many societies have many such issues with their kids. I don't know to what intensity some or all of this behavior is present elsewhere in the world. The overall vibe I felt in Germany and the Netherlands when I visited is that youth culture doesn't seem quite as smashed in and shoved into a play-dough machine as American at least.

I don't have a conclusion here really. This post was basically me talking to myself to try to articulate this feeling I've had for awhile. We spent decades screaming about Soviet brainwashing, even making movies about an allegorical alien race coming to steal our brains. We were really screaming into the mirror.