By BEN R. WILLIAMS
I’ll be honest: I can probably count on one hand the number of children I actually like.
Sure, they start out all right. But then they get a little older, and suddenly they’re constantly sticky and following you around and spilling Cheerios everywhere and sneezing flu germs directly into your eyeballs. Then they get older still and they’re sullen and moody and they form groups and point and laugh at you in Wal-Mart. I generally don’t want to be around children until they’re older, say 25 or 30.
Also, I have nothing to say to children. They can’t hold a conversation. They want to tell you about Minecraft and Fortnite and YouTubers. I have nothing to contribute to these topics. I struggled to talk to children even when I was an actual child.
Having said that, I can’t stand to see a child get hurt, either physically or emotionally. When I’m.watching a movie, nothing upsets me more than seeing a child or an animal in danger. The most emotionally affecting scene I saw in a movie this year was a brief part of a popular recent horror movie where a small child who’s been abandoned by the adults in his life struggles to use a can opener to open some soup. It gutted me.
They may be annoying and covered in germs, but children are innocents. They’re the most vulnerable among us. They have no personal agency. They’re entirely dependent on the kindness of their caregivers and the society they grow up in.
“Don’t hurt children” is one of the bedrock principles of human society. It is a core moral value. It’s the reason that people convicted of hurting children are often segregated from the general population in prison. Even murderers can’t abide people who hurt children.
And of course, our politicians constantly talk about building a better world for our children. They tell us that children are the future. If they don’t like something, they exhort us to please, think of the children!
And that is why it’s driving me absolutely insane that our nation has been given a litmus test to determine whether or not we actually care about children and we have failed it spectacularly.
The Epstein files have presented us with a choice: do we provide justice to hundreds if not thousands of women who were trafficked and sexually abused as children, or do we instead protect the wealthy and powerful men and women who abused them?
That really shouldn’t be a hard choice, and yet here we are.
Since the Epstein files first entered the public consciousness, I’ve heard the same refrain from Trump supporters: “Be careful what you wish for, your boy Bill Clinton is in there!”
Let me be perfectly clear: I thought Bill Clinton was a pretty good President, one of the better ones of my lifetime. Had I not been eight years old, I expect I’d have voted for him in ’92.
However, if evidence were to emerge that Bill Clinton harmed children, he can go straight to prison with the rest of these sick freaks.
I won’t have to throw out my Bill Clinton hat. I won’t have to peel the Bill Clinton bumper stickers off my car. I won’t have to tell all my estranged family members that they can talk to me again because my life no longer revolves around Bill Clinton. I do not believe that God Himself sent Bill Clinton to guide our fractured nation into the Promised Land. The amount of time I spend thinking about Bill Clinton is virtually negligible. I guarantee that I spend more time in a given year thinking about that episode of The X-Files with Charles Nelson Reilly than I spend thinking about the entire Clinton family combined.
Let me be perfectly clear: there is no individual, public or private, that I would not condemn if it were revealed that they sexually abused children. I say that not to signal that I’m some great paragon of virtue and morality. I say that because it is — or at least should be — a perfectly normal human reaction.
We all know why our politicians have struggled to keep the Epstein files behind lock and key. It’s because the files either implicate them, or they implicate the powerful figures who pour money into their campaigns. There is no third option.
But if you’re a private citizen who’s against the release of the files, it’s past time for a long, dark night of the soul.
History will look back on this period in severe judgment, and I don’t think it’s going to take a particularly long time to get there.
