Yay! All is going as planned. Except that George Rowe the Dog, Poster Boy for American Values, woke up Christopher and me multiple times during the night leading to much tiredness. And he's at work. Blech. I'm tired at home.

There's an interesting if somewhat muddied by the scope of what it's trying to say piece in the Chicago Tribune by Clarence Page today.

I like this section, because it raises an interesting paradox that actually is present, whether we want to admit it or not:

And it is there that we find a paradox in the way our society regards choices and children. Jackson is being prosecuted and, in the media, persecuted because of our society's quite-proper impulse to protect children from exploitation. We don't give kids the choice to be exploited. They have to wait for that until they reach the age of consent, the age at which the state believes they are old enough to be held responsible for their own choices.

We know, after all, that young people are very impressionable. We know they want desperately to please their elders and role models. We know they often do things on impulse or otherwise that they later will regret for the rest of their lives.

Long before the USA was born, English common law held that no one should be executed whose mental state did not allow him to understand the severity of his own crimes. More than a technicality, this consideration draws the moral line that separates our system of justice from barbarism.

Yet, when it comes to holding underaged youths accountable for serious crimes, a lot of us don't just cross that line, we trample all over it.

And that's it for me today. Got to take a shower and get moving and all that.

earworm: "Papa Was a Rodeo," Magnetic Fields

random rec: CRUDDY, Lynda Barry (novel)

namecheck: Christopher "sleepy at work" Rowe