But they're just kids...

"A rash of burglaries is sweeping the city..."

"Latest crime wave involves gangs smashing car windows and stealing radios to sell at pawn shops..."

"A ninety-three-year-old man was mugged and beaten..."

What these disturbing headlines have in common, is that the perpetrators of these crimes are all under the age of eighteen.

Why does it matter? If an old man is beaten senseless, he is just as injured by a seventeen-year-old as he would be if the attacker was thirty-seven. Crime is crime. Evil is evil. And no one knows that better than career criminals who happen to have started early.

We are becoming a nation who is controlled by our children. In the very country that allows children to be slaughtered inside their mothers' wombs, we take a radically different approach the moment they are declared "alive." Now, we must worship them, cater to them, focus on them completely for the next eighteen years, or risk having them taken from us by an all-knowing and all-powerful government.

Your teenage daughter may attack you with a knife, shriek curses and foul names at you, run like a wild beast out of control...but if you lay a hand on her, you are a child abuser. A monster! After all she's a child.

Anytime someone wants more of your tax dollars, all they must do is put a pleading child on television, and you're a monster if you vote NO. "Do it for the children..." is the passionate plea. "They are our future." How original!

What about our present? Modern America has extended the idea of a responsibility-free childhood longer than at any other era in world history. At eighteen, kids are granted full adult status, which translated means "your parents can't do anything about it." Yet, few eighteen-year-olds are equipped to live independently in this complicated society we've created.

The reason they are ill-equipped is that they have learned that they exist to be worshipped by adults, entertained, their self-images to be airbrushed and babied by all manner of expensive curriculum, toys, and programs. Who would want to grow up and leave these posh conditions?

We are a nation being tyrannized by its own offspring. Kids without a conscience can steal, kill, and destroy and nothing much happens to them. The juvenile system is the equivelent of a useless "time-out." You think they don't know that? Let Dad take a belt to Junior Delinquent and it's Dad who faces jail time. Let the courts crack down on Katie Killer, and the bleeding hearts (who most likely have not raised children!) come out of the woodwork, shouting in outrage: "We must protect children."

I am seeing this situation rise at an alarming rate in people I know. Good parents, whose own children are taking over and they don't know what to do about it. There is no good recourse for parents who've done their best, but their kids caught on early. Scream "child abuse," and it's strict Mom and Dad who are caught in the net while Junior heads out to hang with his buddies, smoke a little weed, pop a few pills, smash a few windows. Ha-ha, good times. He's just being a kid...

What will it take for America to wake up? The same nation who would kill that child moments before his birth, now undermines his character development for the next eighteen years--and blames the outcome on lack of funding.

Until we start treating our children as valuable human beings with a conscience, and holding them fully accountable for their actions, we face a future of anarchy. If the parents can't or won't do it, our legal system must. It won't get better on its own; evil never does.