All children have innocence. As soon as you tamper with that innocence, the game changes.
I want you to think back to when you were a kid and try to remember what your biggest concern was. Hopefully it was something along the lines of somebody stealing your box of crayons. As a little kid, you began to notice things once your perfect view of the world was shattered. You realized that it was really crappy your dad lost his job or that people were living on the streets. You began to notice boys don’t just want to go out with you because you have a nice personality. You started to notice that things happen and you can't always stop them.
Innocence was truly blissful. It allowed you to cruise through life and not notice the things that made the world we live in today so hard. I remember when I used to think that couples waited until marriage to have sex and no one would ever pressure you about it. Once you got married, I use to think that you would stay with that person forever. I used to think that people waited until they were 21 to drink. I believed that people didn’t do drugs like heroine and cocaine. I once thought your friends were your friends, no questions asked. If you told someone you loved them, they’d say it back. I thought that you would get into the college of your dreams and get a job towards your desired career right after graduation and fall in love.
As you get older, your perfect child-like view of the world crumples. People have sex at 15, say "I love you" after knowing each other for a month and do drugs they bought from shifty dealers in alleyways. They start drinking at 16 when they went to a party where their "friends" pressured them to do it. Couples get divorced within the first 10 years of their marriage. Friends stab each other in the backs and ditch each other for boyfriends whose eyes drift a little lower than their girlfriend’s eyes. People leave each other no matter how many times they say they loved you or promised they never would.
This world we live in is far from perfect and as you get older, you start to realize that. But you can’t live your life focusing on the bad stuff. You need to focus on the blue sky, the clear ocean, a babies laughter and that really bad pun your friend just told you. Try not to ask so many questions that you really don't need to know the answer to just yet.
Everyone deserves to have a little innocence left in them. I hope to help save some of the innocence left in my two younger siblings and hopefully in other kids I come across. I even hope that my friends my age still have some innocence left in them. I hope this big, scary world won’t crush that innocence once they get out of college and face the troubles of real life.
Innocence is bliss and if you still have some, hold on to it for dear life. As often printed on shirts with Peter Pan on them: "Don't grow up, it's a trap!"
