I can remember as a child in the suburbs of Chicago, one of your first experiences with the freedoms of adulthood was the proverbial birthday party sleepover. For my eleventh birthday in 1986, with the recent advent of the VCR and local movie rental shop, the ceremonies centered around an all-night film festival. I suppose I was a stickler for the offbeat even back then, as my movie selections for the night were Faces of Death I, Faces of Death II, and Faces of Death III. The box covers explained that the series was apparently banned in 42 countries, and that was a good enough review for my friends and I.

From what I can tell, my group of friends wasn't a clinical case of forthcoming sociopathic behavior- we were , by all accounts, normal. And normal to us (and I would speculate all kids) was an innate desire to taste adulthood, risks and rewards alike. Our other hobbies at the time included stealing beer out of open neighborhood garages, buying cigarettes by convincing gas station attendants that "our parents were outside waiting in the car," and paging through a friend's brother's pornography collection.

While I did not keep tabs on the life choices of all of my friends as we moved apart and into real life, I know that some of them settled into 9-to-5 jobs in corporate America, some of them entered the military, and a few of them made a career out of selling and using drugs. You know, Americans.

I remained a resident of the suburbs of Chicago. Ok, I am less the typical suburbanite, and more the crazy neighbor who's house everyone skipped on Halloween (having four cats, no kids, and a not-so-subtle choices in paint colors helps solidify the effect.) Nevertheless, it gives me an excellent vantage point on American culture. While popular art is not grown here, mass media entertainment is not created here, and "hip" is not defined here- suburban culture often does serve a much more prominent role in deciding the landscape on which the rules of popular culture exist.

With each passing decade there seems to be an ebb and flow to our focus on "values" in America. While there has always been- and will always be- a wide spectrum of subcultures, each with their own definition of "values," the nation as a whole cycles back and forth in its approach to the overarching concept of "values." We move from a reactive stance (where people's wants and desires seem to steer "right and wrong") to a proactive stance (where we seem to want to impose "right and wrong" into wants and desires).

In America today, much like America of the 1950's, the core principles on which rights and wrongs are architected come from the suburbs and near-suburban rural ethos. And the greater part of the foundation of this ethos is children. The guise is often "protecting children," but indeed its much more complex- and much more profoundly problematic than that.

Throughout American history, more so than most every other culture in history, we've valued the protection of our children. From a physical standpoint, it makes all the sense in the world. The benefits of such shields like child labor laws, heavier punishment for the abuse of children, and the focus on children within the universe of disease prevention and elimination, are obvious and generally undebatable. But when it comes to the less tangible cultural matters, the line between reason and benefit becomes a bit cloudy.