Mother Goose Stepping

Sylvia Shawcross

Here in the northern hemisphere winter mourns its way to spring with tears that sometimes freeze on the ground and crystallize on the white snow still high In the fields and along the roads. It has been a long winter—and do we welcome the longer days when every day seems long enough for us all?

Perhaps such later sunsets are earnestly celebrated now for those who live in the “other” narrative where life is beautiful mostly. The rest hardly notice. It is a place where children should be living—that beautiful place. It used to be that way. Once.

No matter what mad thing was going on in the world, the children played and laughed and sometimes cried. All that adult stuff was very far away and hardly more important than discovering tadpoles or playing hide-and-seek or scratching your name in the leftover winter frost on window panes. Never in cursive. They don’t teach that now.

And so it is time now to bring back child labour. It has to be, I’m afraid. Because those days are long long over.

If our children now can know the world is dying an environmental death without a future. If our children can now know how and when and what sex is all about before they know how to even count. If children can decide to mutilate themselves to the gender gods before they know what a pubic hair even is. If children can soon vote in most places at the tender age of 16. If they have nothing to learn now because ChatGTP will do that all for them. If they know what nuclear war is beyond hiding under desks. Then it is time to put them to work. They’re adults now.

Because they have no such a thing as childhood anymore. That was swept swiftly out the door with all the dust of yesterday’s dreams. Mother Goose was murdered in cold blood for being white. Cinderella kicked the Prince in the b*lls and went to the ball on her own. Black Beauty was murdered in cold blood for being black. Dr. Seuss was burnt at the stake for promoting eggs and ham instead of crickets and Nancy Drew has likely become a transgender vampire.

And the soft sweet innocence of tender minds learned fear and victimhood instead of courage for a world they wouldn’t have made if they had known. For a world they weren’t allowed to grow up in, but were mostly to learn not just to fear but to mourn and rage about. They were brought to a full boil in the heat of the sun instead of that sweet simmering anticipation.

And wasn’t life in games and videos so much more a place to be? If you wanted at least to laugh? Now and then. Instead of the endless political agendas they are forced to know and fight for? Who could blame a child for disappearing into a virtual world? For shadow-dancing with their friends on cellphones in the night? What does this world offer them anymore?

It isn’t as though parents don’t try. Don’t try to give their children a childhood but they are a small voice in a child’s very big world now filled with loud and insistent noise. A noise that drags them away… an evil Pied Piper world. The internet. The political agenda. The attention demanded for competitive emotional hurt. The placebo painkillers for the pain. The predators.

So let’s put the children to work instead of leaving them to such soul-destroying addictive preoccupations and emotional wranglings. They can do all the things the adults don’t want to do and robots can’t yet do. We’ll see soon enough what those things just might be.

What else are you going to do with these children? What purpose in a utilitarian world do they serve? Hope for the future? What can we say is hope now? Someone to love? Don’t be silly. Love is a construct. It is just as easy to hate. Certainly more profitable.

Ask the ones who spend so much time in victimhood hating in their belief in love and hating in their fight for equity and justice. They are all over the place and they are all the same. They bring hate almost to a new level in their sad screeching outrage as if to say “Look at me, I am here. I exist. Do what I say or I will die and it is all your fault.” They never knew love and cannot speak its real name. They will say it is never their fault. And it is in so many ways not their fault at all. If fault is to be laid.

It is just that the children know they’re missing something. They just don’t know what it is. It is a question of loss more than blame now.

But never mind all that. Winter is over here and the summer no doubt of our discontents will grow lush with the sunlight. Far better discontent than despair. Perhaps that is what the children teach us. We ourselves can’t teach them anything it seems. They cannot hear us for the noise.

Your earworm for the week:

Syl Shawcross lives in Canada.

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