A Legacy
''I cannot bear to see or even hear about children being hurt. That’s the main reason I became a teacher: I care about children. I always have. Not just my own children. All of them.
One of the most demanding and most rewarding professional roles I have fulfilled was to run a boarding house in a school. I was responsible for looking after the wellbeing and progress of 50 teenagers around the clock – about 150 in total over the twelve years I did the role. Of course they sometimes drove me crazy (they are good at that) but I always fundamentally liked them and cared about them. One of them once said to me, ‘The thing about you, sir, is that you don’t demand respect, but you command it.’ Treat children with respect and they will not only learn to be okay with themselves, they will also respect you.
I was lucky to grow up in a family where I, my brother and my sister were treated with kindness and love by our parents. They hadn’t been so lucky. My maternal grandmother was a toxic narcissist. My mother didn’t know that’s what her mother was when she was a child; she first heard the term ‘toxic narcissist’ when she was in her 40s. Then she read up about narcissism and suddenly so much about her childhood that had been confusing, disturbing, and traumatic made sense - finally.
It’s so, so hard for any child to realise he or she has forfeited the love of a parent without having any idea why. That child spends their childhood caught between trying (fruitlessly) to ‘win back’ the parent’s love and feeling angry at how they are constantly undermined and made to feel worthless. It’s a torture no child should have to go through. Just thinking that there are children suffering that deep pain right now makes me want to assuage their sadness.
My mother wasn’t broken by her childhood experience, but she was damaged by it. She said it made all the difference that her father despite his problems (he was an alcoholic) was a kind and loving man. I think he provided an emotional and spiritual lifeline for her, although tragically he probably didn’t realise the value of what he did, so devastated was his own self-esteem. My mother grew up determined to raise her own children lovingly, to let them know that they were wanted and valued. She gained strength from her terrible experiences, but her childhood also left her emotionally vulnerable and prone to depression for the rest of her life.
My father on the other hand wasn’t treated with cruelty, but he was emotionally neglected by distant parents. He never really believed in himself, and although he created a life that on the outside appeared fulfilled, with a lifelong marriage, three children and a highly successful career, he never achieved a sense of self-worth. Towards the end of his life he admitted he didn’t know who he was. It was as if all the years of striving to 'be somebody' had had no healing effect on that early void.
Perhaps it’s because I am aware of the legacy of deep harm a traumatic childhood can cause that I care so much about raising children to have healthy self-respect and a grounded sense of who they are.
I have experienced my own traumas, both as a child and as an adult. I have had close encounters with some extremely pathological people who seemed driven, perhaps unconsciously, by an overriding desire to hurt others, including children. I don’t need to explain these experiences here except to say that I have turned some very painful experiences of being abused into a source of strength and a capacity to love, just as my mother did.
My brother is different. He is a full-blown narcissist and I have cut him out of my life. I had to. He's a piece of work - very nasty in an insinuating way. Is it genes that determined this? Perhaps a predisposition: he was always a bit different and behaved as if the usual rules didn’t apply to him. It may also be nurture: my parents in their kindness indulged him. What determines that some people turn difficult experiences into strength, while others are corrupted by them? The only answer I can offer, which is at least partially true, is that we have a choice.
Which brings me to our present situation.
Having dedicated my professional life to the wellbeing of children, I am extremely troubled by the ways the governments in supposedly developed democracies are treating children. The social isolation that lockdowns have imposed has been catastrophic to their mental health. Now they are back in school I look at a class of pupils with their faces masked and wonder what society does this to its children. The incessant and to my mind deeply irresponsible fear mongering by governments and the media have taught a generation of children that just being around other people is dangerous. This has been done for a virus that poses no threat to their health, and minimal threat to the health of anyone who isn’t already clinically vulnerable. Have we lost our minds?
I am especially angry at governments' decisions worldwide to coerce children into receiving an unsafe gene therapy they could only call a ‘vaccine’ by changing the definition. The following is, I think, obvious. Giving healthy children a treatment for COVID-19 that is still in trial phase, for which there exists no medium or long term data on its effects, and for which there is known to be a range of serious, life-changing side-effects, is unbelievably irresponsible as well as ethically wrong. Healthy children do not need this treatment: they are at no risk from COVID-19. The argument that some governments use, namely that children should be offered this treatment to protect others, including teachers and older family members, is seriously flawed not only because it goes against medical ethics but because the ‘vaccine’ does not stop the children from either getting COVID-19 or from passing it on.
Governments world-wide are claiming that the unvaccinated are a risk to the rest of society. This is known to be untrue. The only threat of catching COVID-19 comes from contact with people who are sick, and there are many more vaccinated than unvaccinated who are sick.
One of the most striking and most interesting aspects of this whole bizarre world-wide lock-step response to COVID-19 is the fact that even though it makes no sense, people all over the world have apparently been manipulated into believing it with almost cult-like fervour. As someone has neatly put it, for the first time in history the failure of a vaccine is being placed on those who haven’t taken it.
Many millions of free people are being gaslighted by abusive governments, compromised scientists and media propaganda into thinking that freedom is something they need to earn by compliance. Freedom is not something we earn, or that our public servants 'grant' us if we do what they say. Even more scary is the pleasure some people seem to derive from advocating the imposition of harsh measures that are known to be destructive, and punishments for those who don't obey.
It’s obvious that the real reason why governments are making the patently untrue claim that the healthy unvaccinated are a danger to others is just to coerce them into taking the vaccine. Children in particular will feel under considerable peer pressure in school to take the jab since their choice about a private medical matter is being made visible to their friends.
It’s also obvious to me that there’s a wider purpose to the lie that this is ‘a pandemic of the unvaxxed’. This is a deliberate attempt to make an innocent group into scapegoats for the feelings of fear and anger that governments themselves have generated for months in the people it is supposed to be serving. This projection, by governments and by those who go along with it, demonises people for exercising their human right to choose not to be injected with an unsafe gene serum.
Of course, the reason why governments in the UK, the USA and elsewhere are so keen to vaccinate children even though they are at negligible risk from COVID-19 is partly about maximising profit. It’s also, as a member of the FDA was recorded saying when they debated recommending the vaccine to children of 5 upwards, a way to find out what side effects the vaccine has. The makers of the vaccine and the governments who are relentlessly pushing them know full well that children will suffer long term and sometimes life-changing adverse effects from them. The reported facts on the Yellow Card in the UK and VAERS in the US are shocking, and these incidents are certainly underreported. It’s also a fact that we don’t yet know what medium or long term damage this treatment will cause. Children are being used to experiment with this new treatment. To healthy minds the idea that millions of children might be exposed to serious harm for corporate profit is obscene, and signals a total amorality and absence of human empathy in those who think this way.
Consider this: at exactly the moment that adults who have been ‘double vaxxed’ as a route to freedom are beginning to think they have been duped into taking an unsafe treatment, and just when they might have spoken up in anger against the lies their governments have told them under the guise of protecting them ('If you get vaccinated you won't get COVID,' Biden has lied), the parents among them find themselves dreadfully compromised if they made their children have it too. If you have spent as much time with Narcs as I have, you will know that they exercise control over people in a number of ways, and one of the most insidious ways is by compromising them. They are capable of using a parent's loving instincts to protect their children as the way in. It’s how they think.
I have heard from a government insider that the ‘nudge unit’ are very pleased with the level of compliance they are getting.
I think back to my grandfather who, despite his awful family situation and his devastated self-esteem, saved my mother from being crushed by giving her love. He had the warmth, humanity and selflessness to step outside his own problems and make a safe emotional space for his distressed daughter. He enabled her not only to survive but to grow into a deeply compassionate adult.
I benefitted from this legacy as her son, which in turn feeds directly into the care I have given not only to my own four children but to hundreds of children I have taught and guided. What a beautiful legacy, born from choices this man made in a very difficult situation. That is a man to admire.
Despite his wounds, my grandfather was much more impressive than any of the so-called leaders we are currently cursed with. Those who are truly human and loving have so much more power than they know.
I believe this is what we must strive to do in the abusive situation we currently face: say No to being abused, come from our shared humanity, and choose from a place of compassion and mutual respect how we want to live our own lives.''
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I hope these words make sense to you, James.