Monthly Archives: June 2018

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Before I had children, I didn’t really think about children all that much. Sure, I knew they were out there, and that sometimes they were cute, and sometimes they were not so damn cute, but I pretty much thought about people having kids the same way I thought about people having pet chimpanzees. Some people had them, I suppose (for whatever bizarre reason), but that fact really didn’t affect me all that much. There would be long stretches of days when I would get up in the morning and go to bed at night without ever once having thought about either children or chimpanzees. (At least not until I read that awful story about someone’s pet chimp biting a woman’s face off, at which point chimps were definitely off the table.)

And then I went and had kids myself, and suddenly I started noticing that kids were everywhere. At the park, in the grocery store, running out into traffic—it was like I had been bitten by some radioactive mother spider and my mom-senses had been turned up to 11: not only was I now able to sense when my own kids were about to stick a fork into an uncovered outlet (this actually happens a lot more than you think), but when other kids were as well. I could hear a child crying from all the way across the park and instantly know that it wasn’t an “I-dropped-my-nasty-SpongeBob-popsicle-in-the-even-nastier-wood-chips” cry, but rather a “my-head-is-stuck-in-the-railing” one, and I, along with nearly every other parent in the park, would be off and running.

It didn’t matter if I didn’t know the child. It didn’t matter if I didn’t like the parents. Heck, it didn’t even matter if I didn’t like the child. There is just something about hearing a child in genuine distress that pushes every single one of a parent’s buttons. I’m sure it is biological—evolutionary, even—but knowing that the feeling is coming from deep in my lizard brain doesn’t take the feeling away. If anything, it amplifies it, because “primal” in no way translates to “wrong.”

Which is why I am at an utter loss to explain how any parent can listen to the audio recording of separated children crying in a detention facility and not want to fix this problem immediately. And, correspondingly, not be driven to despair by their inability to do so.

We used to all be in agreement about this. We used to be so horrified at the thought of a single child being separated from their parents that we turned every breakfast into a search party, with face after face staring out at us from the backs of milk cartons as we ate our cereal and drank our coffee.

“Have you seen me?” the milk asked us, and we responded by asking ourselves, “Have I? Have I seen them? What about that kid at the grocery store last week? He looked kind of familiar. Damn, maybe I should have been paying better attention.”

We worried about our ability to recall a face seen briefly in black and white at the breakfast table, and questioned the effectiveness of the whole enterprise, but never once did we ask “Does this child deserve to be found?” Never once did we turn the carton over, looking for answers to questions like, “But what if the parents don’t speak English?” or “What if they didn’t fill out the right paperwork?”

No. We saw the picture and felt the pain, the same way you can feel the effects of an earthquake that happened hundreds of miles away. Or at least I thought we all did. Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe there have always been parents out there who turned the carton to the other side, who could ignore the sound of somebody else’s child in distress. Maybe they have been hiding in plain sight all along, waiting for the right moment to let their true callousness out in public.

If that is true then I can’t help but wish that those people had opted for the chimpanzee route instead of the parent one, mostly because I’m afraid that such unfeeling parents can’t help but raise unfeeling children in return. And also because I like to picture those people getting their smug faces bitten right off.

Actually, I like to picture that a whole lot.

On May 26, Parkland survivor David Hogg and his fellow protestors lay down on the floor of a Publix supermarket in Florida in protest of the grocery store chain’s continued financial support of Adam Putnam, a politician who described himself as a “proud NRA sellout.” As the protestors chanted “USA not NRA” from their prone positions, store managers were forced to step around them in order to fetch groceries for the customers who could not maneuver their shopping carts through the sea of bodies. Within the hour, Publix had reversed its decision to support Adam Putnam, and announced that it would no longer make political contributions of any kind.

It’s hard not to be impressed by David Hogg. Even those who sneer at him must acknowledge that they wouldn’t even know who to sneer at if his words and actions hadn’t been so effective at provoking them in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Still, as impressed as I am by David Hogg, I can’t help but be equally impressed by his parents and teachers; because if there is one thing I am sure of it is that while this might have been Mr. Hogg’s first public act of civil disobedience, it was certainly not his first act of disobedience ever. In fact, I am positive that he has been practicing his disobedience for years, and more importantly, I am positive that some very important authority figures in his life have been willing to let him practice his disobedience on them. And for that, I would like to thank them for their sacrifice.

It’s not easy to raise a disobedient child. Oh, sure, it’s easy in theory. It’s easy to tell them stories about Rosa Parks, and Gandhi, and even the American Revolution, but there will come a time when you are teaching them to “stand up to The Man” where you will be confronted with the unwelcome realization that, to them, right now you are The Man. And that if there is ever to be any kind of chance for them to grow up to be the type of people who use reason, critical thinking and logic to stand up for themselves and others, then you are going to need to let them practice those skills somewhere. And unfortunately, the safest place to practice those skills is on you—which can be kind of hard to take at the end of a 12 hour work day.

It’s especially hard because most children don’t start their social justice careers by boycotting Nestle. They start by boycotting bathing, or wearing shoes, or something equally gross and infuriating. And it can be difficult, when faced with a trail of muddy footprints throughout your house, to not revert to the old “because I said so” argument when they question whether your need for them to wear shoes is really just you bowing down to the pressures of a society that is too far removed from nature. (Especially when they make that argument with their muddy feet propped up on the coffee table while playing Skyrim.)

Look, I’m not advocating for all out adolescent revolution: households run by children, with parents too fearful of the backlash to contradict them. That isn’t the way to raise productive citizens, (or even decent room-mates). But I do think that it’s okay—in fact, preferable—to have a child who questions your authority, and sometimes wins, then it is to have a child who is completely biddable. Because the day will come when you won’t be the one doing the bidding, and can you really expect someone to “Just Say No” when all of their lives they’ve been told “Don’t Talk Back”?

Our children’s childhood—if they have good genes, take care of themselves, and are a little bit lucky—will last, at best, only a fifth of their lives. Do we really want to set them up to be the guy who was “just following orders” for the bulk of their existence? I don’t think so. In fact, I think a little parental pain is well worth it if it means you get to be the one who has front row seats to seeing this world being nudged (or shoved) in a better direction.

Muddy feet and all.