By Tony Casson

On the subject of the viewing of child pornography via the internet, it is important to TRY to understand–and for many, I realize it will be very difficult TO understand, which is why I said TRY–to TRY to understand that in many, many of today’s prosecuted cases for possession of child pornography obtained via the internet, the behavior is not so much criminal intent as it is a moral meltdown of major proportions.

It is not so much a crime of predatory pedophilia that we should look up all of the perpetrators in fear as it is a lapse in decency and mature, responsible, moral behavior that we need to correct.

Common decency, common sense, and common law say, “Don’t do it!”. But as with stoves, some people simply do not listen. Obviously I didn’t.

Fans of the Al Pacino classic, “Scarface”, will recall the scene in New York where Tony Montana is driving a Colombian assassin around with the intention of blowing up the car of a “drug czar” who is a thorn in the side of the cartels.

Unfortunately, the target’s children are in the car with the target this day, and Tony wants to cancel. The assassin insists on going ahead anyway. Tony tries, to no avail, to reason with the man, so he takes out his gun and puts a bullet through the assassin’s head.

Tony turns to the man, who now has his brains and blood splattered all over the window, but is no threat to the children any longer, and says, “You stupid f–k! You don’t listen to me! Look at you now!”

Sometimes very bad things happen when you don’t listen.

The viewing of child pornography is a social tragedy of epic proportions on many different levels.

If we are to attempt to fix the problem, we have to try to develop an understanding of who is doing it, who it is affecting, and how and why it is happening in the first place.

The government is not handling this well at all. The money they are throwing at the problem, and the people they are throwing in jail, are having the net effect of someone peeing on a forest fire.

They are not doing nearly enough to stop the production of child pornography and the victimization of young children. They arrest pathetic old men such as myself, destroying homes, families, relationships, hopes and dreams, creating 10-times the number of innocent victims than they started with, flooding the penal system with statistics to show a concerned public that they are tough on crime and are protecting our families and society as a whole when the reality is they are having the same net effect as when they declared war on crack cocaine.

They will fill the jails with easy targets, present impressive statistics to show they are tough on these new menaces to society, but they will find out, as they did with the war on crack, that when you expend all of your resources on the idiot end-users, you have none left to really combat the problem itself.

Becoming one of those idiots is an embarrassing process, but I will tell my own tale because it is similar to others I have heard, and maybe parts of it are similar to someone’s tale who is reading all of this, and perhaps someone will step out and look at his life and say, “What was I thinking?”

A life is to be lived, and there are so many things to do that don’t require darkness.

Turn your lights on!