u/curseddotjpeg

People always say "Our society mistreats children!1!1 Children are the most discriminated class 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺" and you know what, this is an unpopular opinion on this sub, but I actually agree with this. What I DON'T agree with is the subtext of CHILDFREE people somehow being responsible for the suffering and oppression of children. It's such a chronically online assumption; childfree people are still very much a minority and a fairly new phenomenon. The people most likely to abuse and neglect children are not random hedonistic 25 year olds that work in marketing that give your children weird looks for throwing tantrums in public, IT'S PARENTS. Parents and people who aspire to be parents are very much in the majority and have the most proximity to children, and thus have the most power to abuse them (and cover it up).

The person who finds children soooo annoying that they want childfree flights and whatnot is also very unlikely to take a job that has a duty of care towards children (teaching, childcare etc...) so they're never in close enough proximity to cause harm to kids most of the time. You can argue that trying to exclude children from places is *discriminatory* and I guess it is to an extent, but they are not nearly as oppressive as those who are constantly around them. Those who are responsible for defunding education and child welfare programs, overlooking bullying at schools, committing acts of abuse and neglect etc... are statistically likely to be parents themselves.

This has been said repeatedly but childfree people are the ones who care about children the MOST because they had the sense to not bring them into a situation where they will likely be seen as a burden. Every child that is oppressed on the basis of them being a child has a parent that is responsible for most of their suffering. I am damn near antinatalist due to the suffering most of these parents inflict on their kids. Even the "smaller" acts of oppression as well; forcing children to finish their food even if they don't want to (ED and child obesity!), verbal abuse and damage to their self-esteem, "spanking" and other forms of physical punishment.

You are not automatically an ally to children just because you have them and I don't care what you went through during pregnancy and child-rearing either. Repeating "children are the most oppressed class" and "you are entitled to a childfree life not a childfree world" ad nauseam does not change that. You will always be a bigger danger to your children than even the loudest "child hater" will ever be.

Or maybe they're not bots and they're real people? idk it's hard to tell these days. It's not super obvious at first glance, but they really show their true colours in certain threads. The thing that was the last straw for me was a thread about how people on a global scale generally saw diversity as a good thing. It was actually an 8 year old outdated stat, I'm sure the rhetoric has changed for the worse right now, but the comments instead were arguing about how racial diversity is in fact the worst thing to happen ever. On an "optimism" sub. A gripe I've always had with that subreddit in general is that it's more "let's stick our heads in the sand guys!!! Nothing bad is actually happening it's all an exaggeration!!1!1 Ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears!!1", as opposed to true optimism which is FULLY acknowledging the bad shit happening in the world, but holding out hope that things will get better if we try. They pick and choose when to acknowledge when genuinely bad things are happening and use the optimism excuse to gaslight minorites with "nothing is wrong" and "its not that bad, stop complaining". But when it something that seems to be bad to THEM its apparently extremely important and pressing issue that just can't be solved unlessss 👀 *wink wink nudge nudge*.

In the diversity thread, London was bought up and you would think in an optimism sub, people would acknowledge how London is actually quite a safe city nowadays (compared to other major cities globally, at least) despite the multiculturalism boogie man, and how there are measures in place that are actively working to improve the city. Instead you had people fearmongering about the destruction of British culture (by the mere presence of ethnic minorities mind you) and how you'd get instantly stabbed to death if you set foot in south london. If they'd actually gone to London they'd know that its just like any other large metropolitan city: some good, some bad. Let it be a minority complaining about an increased presence of bigotry and violence directed towards them these days and these same people would immediately tell them that it's all in their head and they would've had it worse 50 years ago so its actually ok and just stop whining about it.

It's a shame because I would love more subreddits to break up the underlying doomerism present in a lot of left-leaning subs. I'm not interested in sticking my head in the sand when it comes to global issues, but a balanced perspective is nice too. Now I gotta deal with actual right-wing slopaganda about how they're enforcing sharia law and LITERALLY committing white genocide in greater London because of the Immigrants™ 🫩.