Projection is not sexy

As human being we project too often.  Perhaps it had not always been that way.  Maybe back in Jesus’s time young men didn’t blame their mothers because they can’t control themselves when they hit their wives.  Maybe when Virginia Woolf lived people were not so quick to place the blame of their short comings on others.  Maybe people were different than what we once were, or perhaps we’ve not changed at all and only time has.

However, when people place the blame on those that are in the limelight for the problems of our generation and children, we have a problem.  Though in a way it’s a bit of everyone’s fault if we’re really going to start point fingers.  Everyone and everything influences or affects us in some way or another.  Everyone. 

As an example, we cannot fully ignore a stranger in the room.  We cannot ignore the person walking in our exact path if we don’t want to collide.  We cannot forget trauma.  Our brains must go to snapping extents to do so if one is too shaken.  People develop severe memory loss, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and the list goes on.  When things jar us or change us negatively we cannot neglect the presence of it of the lasting affects.  However, all of these could be blamed on what someone else has done.  What things outside ourselves has made us in to.

We much carry this idea with Celebrities or modern heroes.  They do what they feel they must, what they know they can and what they can bare.  What they want.  Perhaps they wanted to be famous, perhaps they wanted to be seen or heard or understood.  Whatever the reason, people do not often asked to be placed somewhere as an example of what people should aspire to.  In the sense that people should do something with themselves.  Strive for happiness.  Make a living doing something they love and are good at.  They do not enter into their profession hoping people see them as people and want to be just like them.  At least no one rational and self-aware.

We’re all good people.  We’re all bad people.  Children should be taught this and should be cared for.  Children need good examples in their parents, their siblings and should seek good peers because of their upbringing or know when it’s time to let bad one’s go because of good communication and trust in their parents.

This is not the job of people that happen to have lights shined into every aspect of their carriers and lives.  Raising children to be wholesome people does not fall on the shoulders of other men and women.  Perhaps they should not indulge their own musings publicly.  Maybe there shouldn’t be degrading images of women plastered everywhere and characters that make men look like meat heads, charmless nerds or morons. 

But it happens.  If a parent is inadequate and children turn to images in media and their peers the responsibility still lies in the parents.  If children have no proper parents it’s the job of other loving authority figures to be morally upright.  Whoever is raising the child is at fault for any garbage that enters a child’s mind via television. 

We cannot rationally or fairly blame people for being what ever they feel is themselves, necessary or wanted.  We cannot frown on them and say that it’s their fault parents yank out their hair and teens are fucked and children are getting worse.

Role models are only role models when parents are not enough.  When teachers are not enough.  When peers fail and significant others fuck up again.  We look to others for something better because we look to others for someone to blame.  Perhaps if parents taught their children what they feel is truly moral or upright, to look to themselves and to take responsibility we’d find less disappointments and horrors molding our children.

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I want to stress this point.  Miley Cyrus is not responsible if your daughter grows up into a rebel.  It's not a dancers fault if your daughter grows up to be a stripper.  It is not the fault of a fireman with financial problems fault if your children looked up to him and now are in debt.  Nor is it a novelty rapper's fault if your son or daughter shoot someone.

It is not the responsibility of others to raise people's children.  The question is not whether they have an image they want to uphold or even who they are targeting.  Image is their own standard and audience can shift.  It is not image itself in question and whether or not they choose to uphold it.  They have no obligation to uphold any image, imagined or otherwise.  What is being questioned is whether or not they should hold themselves above faults and weaknesses for the sake of everyone else, especially children.

No.  Your children are not other people's responsibility, no matter how much publicity they have.  It's yours.