One of the things I've been cogitating about lately (that would horrify my nine-to-fiver fashionable suburban friends) is how much I hate kids. I realize I was one, at one time, but I can't stand them now and could barely tolerate them when I was one; they sicken me.
I hate the way they're rewarded and bribed for shrieking like animals on the bus and striking other passengers with their toys. I seethe watching them beg for hideous big-name corporate marketing dross in store queues. I hate their inexperienced sanctimony and brainwashed political correctness. I hate the way they whine anencephalically when you're trying to watch a movie. I hate their Nazi-like obsessions with athletes and athletic performance.
Apart from being the most voracious consumers of natural resources in the world, American kids are incredibly selfish; their eyes are soulless, clouded by messages from MTV sponsors and false inflations of personal worth from everyone from Barney to Dr. Laura. They're poorly-trained animals. Child life in America is protected by the most barfaricious neck-deep cesspool of prime-time sentimentality surrounding its necessity in our lives, a veritable tsunami of shit about how fulfilling reproduction can be as a career, how innocent and vulnerable children are, how wrong it is to expect the same things of them we would from any other people; how important it is to protect them from those perverted influences found in music and books, etc., etc.
In terms of kids, our culture has forsaken quality for quantity. Instead of raising a few independent thinkers, people who have something new or interesting to offer, we've bloated our wombs with fertility drugs and reaped a bumper crop of expensive livestock. And like livestock that is bred in increasingly close quarters, we must boost its sub-standard productivity artificially through the routine forced injection of elements that occur naturally in cultures mindful of their place in nature - such as self-esteem and respect for others. And like sickly livestock whose veins are bursting with synthetic chemicals, there is something very noticeably off-balance and unappetizing about these children.
All right, you have me; perhaps I don't hate children so much as I hate their parents. A hundred years ago and more, "family planning" didn't exist. "Ma's missed her monthly visitor again, looks lak we're gonna have another mouth to feed," and that was the end of it. It was normal for one of four offspring not to live to eighteen. They were mauled by animals, or dismembered by machinery, or fell down wells, or contracted diseases we've never seen in our lifetimes. Nature took its course, in short. So it made sense for parents not to expect much of a child, given that it had a one-in-four chance of biting the dust before adulthood. This places an essential responsibility upon growing people - the burden of proof that they're valuable or unique falls upon them personally. No free rides, do your own goddamned thinking, etc.
But now a well-heeled American kid's life is etched in nauseating detail from conception. Their resumes are begun at three. Their nursery schools have interviews and applications processes. They are never allowed on their own, lest they fulfill ecological demands that some of them die. They're herded to soccer, swimming and piano lessons in the obligatory minivan, like ponies strapped to an exercise carousel. They are all expected to become emperors and empresses, and are treated accordingly, despite the social impossibility of multiple leaders. It isn't too long before the parents see their own expectations as the child's personality, despite what that personality may truly be. Because when a child is planned and strategized in such micronic detail, it is no longer a human but a possession, a luxury item, a bonsai tree. Like their parents other luxury items, the children are upholstered in artifice, buffed and polished for ostentatious display. And soon the kids themselves are drawn to the fake and unfulfilling, addicted to it, requiring it to survive, like cattle on steroids.
Meanwhile, their poorer counterparts incubate in the gutter, where injections of pop psychology have little or no effect. Unplanned, unwanted and without the same aggressive sponsors to primp them for competition, they mature fertilized by a clear understanding of the real value of human life, and out of respect for economy, fulfill ecological requirements to kill one another.
