Response to "9-year-old pleads guilty in shooting death"

"He is completely rehabilitatable..."

Well, this brings up some interesting thoughts. In reality there is no way to know if that is true or not without trying rehabilitation. His crime seems to be like many crimes...I really don't care if it's adult crimes or kid crimes, by the way, since I prefer to view kids as younger humans and adults as older humans...the mandatory division between kids and adults seems unhealthy in some ways...as does the division between generations...but anyway, this was apparently a crime with a reason behind it. As opposed to a crime for the sake of crime. Was it a legitimate reason? Well, in the eyes of the murderer, yes. In the eyes of the law, no, since vigilante justice is only legal in the movies, and for good reason, since a reasonable-to-the-perpetrator excuse can be made for doing literally any crime. Even, "'cause it felt right." In this case, the criminal apparently sought to solve whatever problem he was having by removing it's source... apparently without thinking about the implications of doing so much...or maybe he realized that since he wasn't legally human yet (18, 21), he could get away with it without getting punished severely, and going to juvie seemed like a better option than his current situation anyway. It's interesting, our society's take on murder and the value of human life. We are extreme on both ends simultaniously. On the one hand, we see the ending of a life as a terribly shocking occurance that must be dealt with with the greatest possible degree of care, fear, and media hype. On the other, we kill foreign enemies of the government without remorse, as they do to us, we throw the lives of the accused and convicted in the trash and forget about them forever, and we could care less about how many people are dying in Africa at any given moment. Also our entertainment industry has a mysterious fascination with death. So much death and negligence that I don't even need to mention abortion (oops, I just did.) It seems we only value about the lives of humans we care about (our good, upstanding citizenry, I guess) and could care less about the rest. The plight of our prison occupants leads us back to the original comment that I am responding to. Rehabilitable? Surely this does not apply only to children. Unrehabilitable? Surely this does not apply only to adults. Rehabilitation simply is the process of getting the criminal to view things as the justice system views them...a justice system which tends to change it's mind on things over the years, I might add...since it's judgement is not anchored in anything greater than human reason. So some criminals will see the "error of their ways" and become conformist to society (if we give them a chance, anyway), while others will not. Also I feel that our society doesn't realize the importance of authority and the responsibility and accountability that ought to be attached inseperably to it...that is, regarding the placing of one human's will over another's or others', when all are legally created equal. So basically, to those who work in the justice system, please observe the golden rule above all else, especially to those who obviously don't deserve such treatment, for they are the the hardest to do so with but also the most in need of such treatment, and to those who believe it, keep in mind that you will be held accountable to God for your influence in the lives of others when your time to die comes. That's another interesting twist on the topic of death...everybody dies sooner or later.

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Born with a clean slate? Ok, it's time to ignore the old dead philosophers who did more thinking than was good for them and the airheads who don't take any time to think at all and use our own powers of observation to figure out the obvious:
a) humans are born with the "programming" necessary to recieve and interpret stimuli from all available sensory organs.
b) humans have a completely self-centered outlook on life upon entering the world, and therefore are inherently selfish until trained to be otherwise.
c) selfish ambition typically translates neither as "clean slate" nor "basically good."

(ah, it felt good to finally have an excuse to release that tidbit of wisdom into the thought pool)