Saturday, February 25, 2017

I believe children are the dystopian future



"We need to be allies to children. Children do not have the capacity to articulate their feelings, they do not have power over their own beings to come to the rallies...they are not in control of their own destiny. They need to see you, transgender children need to see you, transgender children, even those who are not out yet, need to see you, they need to know that you are there and that you will fight for them and that they can talk to you. Immigrant children, and children, I work with children, I work with children who are homeless in the city, I work with children who face food insecurity in the city, I work with children who come up to me every day and tell me they're hungry, I work with children who do not have a bed to sleep in at night and it is the last goddamn thing that breaks my heart that the one thing in this world that keeps these children going, their parents, they now fear will go away." 
The above is from a vigil the day after Donald Trump's election at Portland's downtown riverfront park. Children as political allies is somehow not controversial, at least where the epic struggle for bathroom equality is concerned.



The swiftness with which children have become props in the transgender rights movement demonstrates how little resistance there is, still, to cultural Marxism. Concern for children, real, feigned or imagined, naturally finds its way to the forefront of social manias such as the transgender fad we're experiencing now. It recalls the the satanic abuse panic of the late eighties/early nineties that reached its nadir with the McMartin Preschool trial. But in that earlier case concern for children was the catalyst; now it the putative concern for children comes not as a catalyst but as one component, of questionable validity, of a movement dominated and driven by grown men carving out their own grievance identity.

The trans movement's conspicuous concern for children seems of a different order than the earnest if naive parents and police who--perhaps sublimating broader, and I think legitimate, fears about children and modern decadence--were led to believe in a vast network of satanic cults operating out of America's preschools (whatever Pizzagate is, and it does look at the least bizarre, it probably doesn't lead to your neighborhood daycare), but, to the naive who actually think they're protecting trans children against some onslaught, perhaps it's no different.

Now that generation of kids who were the subject of their parents' coddling and concern in the eighties and nineties--coddling that did nothing, by the way, to halt our slide into decadence--are parents. The social milieu of the post sexual revolution has beaten out of them, as much as it can, any residual traditional morality or resistance to the miasma of popular culture that exists today (google searching the literature on moral panics yields an entire literature devoted to ascribing all of it to moral paranoia of the sexually hung-up in outdated Kinsey-ian thought-language) with the time-tested tools of ridicule and pseudo-scholarship. This started long before Reagan, whose election was in some part a reaction to social decay and as we see now did nothing to slow, much less arrest, its progress.

But you can't obliterate human nature; there's probably a genetic, biological component to a parent's concern for the moral behavior of children. Why would biology program us, amidst all this biological yearning to pass on genes, to be indifferent toward whether or not our daughters are sluts and our sons are gay? Where does a parent now, surrounded by propaganda demanding that feeling in his gut at the sight of psychological disorder is just his own psychological disorder? For the most part he smiles and pretends that nothing is wrong, all the while hoping it will not touch him, not touch his family, and that his children will be more or less "normal"--most people still are, after all--and, maybe even bear him healthy grandchildren.

But what do you do when the only place to sublimate your fear of a thing is in the service of that thing?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This sentence cries out to be edited:

"Where does a parent now, surrounded by propaganda demanding that feeling in his gut at the sight of psychological disorder is just his own psychological disorder?"

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