July 15, 2022. The New York City Emergency Management Department releases a perky 90-second video instructing Gotham residents on how to respond to a nuclear attack. Get inside. Stay inside. Change clothes. Listen to the experts (Ha!).
I was eight years old when the Cuban missile crisis occurred. I knew pretty much nothing about it because my parents had the wisdom not to scare the crap out of a child about world events that the child could do nothing to affect. They appear to have been hostage to the archaic notion that they were the adults and we were the children. I wasn’t even allowed to pick my own gender. It was that oppressive.
Although we practiced “duck-and-cover” exercises in school (as if a child’s desk was going to protect me from a nuclear blast) I never thought that it might actually happen. It seemed to be some sort of ritual, like reciting the Pledge. Here’s a nugget of advice we were given at the time: “If you see a nuclear blast, don’t look at it.” Only later did it dawn on me that if I was close enough to see a nuclear blast, in about a minute-and-a-half it wasn’t going to matter whether I had looked at it or not.
Anyway, it never occurred to Mom and Dad to describe in precise detail how I was going to be either incinerated in a conflagration or slowly die of radiation poisoning. They thought it best to allow me and my siblings to have a childhood. If we went up in smoke we’d all be dead, but we wouldn’t have needed to live in mortal fear in the meantime. Otherwise, if the crisis didn’t happen, we wouldn’t have been subjected to pointless terror.
At the time, parents were supposed to protect their children. For my parents, this included protecting me from unnecessary trauma. Alas, the missile crisis was averted and my friends and I went on with the business of customizing our Stingray bicycles and getting injured jumping ramps in a shard-strewn alley.
Protection also meant keeping porn away as much as possible and delaying knowledge of sex and sexuality so we could be kids for a little while.
Not so, these days. Many parents of a particular political stripe appear to want to sexualize their children as early as possible. To ensure that the young souls will never enjoy the carefree freedom of childhood, they take them to Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library and enroll them in schools where everyone must attend “Sex Ed” classes, where they learn about every twisted type of kink and fetish, except the Missionary position with one man and one woman. And stock pornography in the school library.
These same parents apparently believe it’s fine to tell kids they are going to die before they graduate from high school due to global cooling/global warming/climate change/orange man bad. Maybe the idea is that because the kids are going to die soon, they should get in as much kinky sex as possible. Get a good freak on before being incinerated.
Next, they tell the young boys that they should either become girls or they are going to grow up to become rapists. They will not tell them that a trans woman might still have a we-we, and can still rape someone— even while wearing a dress.
Once the tykes are sufficiently terrorized about impending doom, they’re trundled off in the family fuel-sucking SUV to engage in protesting about issues they don’t understand instead of getting an “education”.
So how did I repay my loving parents for their calm wisdom?
I became David Hogg. I turned into a loudmouthed, ill-informed, adult-lecturing Socialist jerk. I was completely caught up in the hippie movement. This was around 1970 and “woke” was still a long way off. We didn’t need a revelatory moment to become insufferable— we simply knew we were smarter than the adults and never shut up about it.
When I see young people spewing Leftist claptrap these days, it reminds me of how wrong I was. I hope this next cohort wakes up as I did. But with these parents, they may not have a chance.