@alexstacy such depth of thought and detail here! I admire your command of language and your thoughts flow well in this piece. Big ups to Ahva, Alais, StarTribe, and Taylor!

However one line really caught my attention and I feel I must beg to differ with it.

You said "You can either maintain that responsibility according to our standards or have your children taken from you and be required to fight to get them back."

On it's own, this to me is a frighteningly polarized statement. It is this mentality that leads to State ownership of children. It is the false collective of the day, but the collective as it stands. CPS is, as you said you are aware, far from functioning on the village level you spoke of. Abuse and manipulation of the system is rampant.

"Our standards"? This is an incredbly difficult thing to define, especially given the enormous size of the communities we live in. There are so many opinions of what a standard should be, and just because a majority comes to a decision doesn't mean it should be applied by force to everyone.

I thought of two examples that apply to either side of the argument.

First is the story of the fundamentalist Christian family that decided to forego uncontroversial medical treatment for their child and chose instead to pray over her until she died of a curable ailment. That would seem to be negligent and abusive and a place where the community might have done well to intervene. (Yet still there is the question of religious freedom, but we'll leave that one out for now.) In this case the community philosophy applies.

The other is the story of the rural family, living off grid and living directly off the land. In the city it is considered abuse to allow a 12 year old to do physical or manual labor, yet for the family it may be necessary and perfectly acceptable to teach their 12 year old to drive a tractor and plant crops and haul bags of grain. In this case the individual or property rights philosophy applies. That is their child and they need it to work for the family to survive, which in turn bears a sense of community in itself.

Either way, the child's destiny is controlled by a parent or a community, and the control constitutes a right or a claim, which is the essence of property. To take responsibility for something is like owning it. We hold each other accountable for our actions because we own ourselves.

So who gets to decide what constitutes neglect or abuse? My mother spanked me a few times growing up and to me (now) that is a margin of abuse. Should she have been stripped of her right to raise me because of that? Did that make her a bad parent? Of course not, but if we abide by a strict policy of allowing communal authority to override the individual (in which that particular community considered all forms of physical discipline to be abusive) then she would have been deemed "bad."

And as you said before you know of the corruption in the system at all levels. CPS is an enormous gateway to abuse. Foster care can lead to serious neglect, physical abuse, and is an avenue for child trafficking. Without a dedicated, personal, vested interest in a child it is easy for them to get lost. When it's your occupation and not your obligation to care for a child, the outcome can be very different. And statistically speaking children without dedicated mothers and fathers are more likely to end up on the other end of the system, in jail and dependent on failing social programs.

So while I totally agree that in cases of clear cut, provable abuse and neglect there needs to be some form of communal response, some kind of collective care and concern for the wellbeing of children(which are our future!), I think there needs to be some kind of balance betweent that and the individual parent or family. To say that abuse and neglect shoud be allowed to continue because "well, it's her/his/their child and we're never allowed to infringe on their family" is just as folly as saying "the community standards override the individual and you're not allowed to raise your children as you see fit."

There is something dearly precious about one's own children, about raising them in the best way one sees fit(granted that that doesn't include swallowing crackbags!) Read the title of this article to the mother in front of you in line at the grocery store and see how she reacts...

Your utopian(you know that word will never be able to be applied to the real world, right?)village is a wonderful dream and I think we may be able to approximate it on some level some day, and I agree it would be ideal and preferable to the massive and unaccountable communities we live in now(cities). I assume that the word village implies a smaller and more intimate community, one where you can have a real relationship with almost everyone in it. It is impossible to relate to everyone in a city, thus I believe that the bigger a community gets the more important individual rights and sovereignty become. When your community is more like a family it makes more sense to be beholden to it, to them and their standards.

JEEZ this just poured out of me, I hope it makes sense! I appreciate you so much Alexis, you are wise and beautiful and strong and I am glad to know you and commune with you. Please let me know if I missed your point or if I am off base. Thank you for sharing!