We think we are a youth culture. In truth we hate the young. We now force them into existence. Then we starve them. We starve their schools. A good number of us are trying to censor their learning-- circumscribing what they can know or think. We steal from their future by killing their planet. When they reach voting age we shut them out of our politics by offering them no choices and lingering for far too long at the reins. And then we blame them for the chaos that surrounds us.
And yet for ourselves, as we exercise, dye, style, and surgery ourselves to keep old age at bay, youthfulness is everything.
Youthfulness is one thing, eternal babyhood is quite another. For all of our fetishization of wealth and progress and growth-- ours is a culture stuck in babyhood. If you have the television on for 5 minutes you will be assaulted by baby talk, baby music, baby thoughts talking down to you from every corner of the screen. And that's just the ads. Cartoon mascots, doody jokes, bright baby colors, shiny objects, ludicrously fantastic baby messages trying to engage the infant part of your brain (and probably usually succeeding). Our news is content free happy talk. Our entertainment is hardly better-- super heroes, that same sickly sweet computer animation that has taken over our culture since the 1990s, loud brain-dead game shows and contests, shows fetishizing fame or sitcoms about stupid horrible families in the suburbs, or dramas about big boy jobs like policeman and fireman and doctor.
Television monopolizes our attention, but it’s only one way we maintain a baby’s eye view of things. Our culture is adamantly intent on remaining frozen in a mindset of object impermanence, ignoring what it doesn’t see. TV is passive but much of our willfully limited attention is actively engaged in activities like bookburning, legislating against behaviors we don’t want to tolerate, censoring ideas as if covering our eyes makes what we hate and fear disappear. It's reflected even in our technology. We think AI will be super human, but I’m afraid super human means super baby. Why does Auto-correct have no idea what you meant when you wrote "motherficker" by mistake? Because the people who designed it would rather not deal with the babies among their users who don't want anyone to acknowledge that bad words and bad thoughts exist.
The coming Presidential election as permitted to be seen on TV promises to be wall-to-wall baby talk, by and about a pathetic lineup of candidates from an atomically small number of parties and platforms trying to annoy us with wokeness and anti-wokeness long enough to keep funded until 2024. That either of the only 2 parties that are permitted to figure in our politics represents "the grownups in the room" is laughable on its face. But the "daddy"republican party is uncontestably the worst.
Babies don't understand and may need explaining to that when and if they grow up, in spite of every effort that our baby education system will make to keep the information from them, they will develop feelings in their uh-oh places that are no one else's business. Ron DeSantis or as I like to call him, Puddintane, doesn't want you to understand CRT because then you might understand him. It's the same reason the recently deceased racist, cretin and simpering homophobe Pat Robertson lingered to the age of 93 without learning a thing. And like a baby sitting in his spoiled diaper for 93 years, Robertson did not want anyone else to learn anything either. This is what conservatism and fundamental religion are- willful selective stunting of the mind, of possibilities for life on earth, of tolerance for the growth and happiness of people who are not you sitting in your used nappy for 93 years.
It is a pity that there is no hell because that is where Robertson would surely be, but the consolation for the ironic deliciousness of Robertson writhing in eternal damnation not being a thing is that in reality he has just ceased, and is thankfully finally yielding his material back to the universe where something else can now surely make better use of it.
Self-stunting is not restricted to the right. Far, far too many on the ostensible left think revolution is achieved by tattling and loud whining. All the spoiled babies of the left are whining to be heard over each other in the tiny corner of the playpen that mother twitter has reserved for them, outbitching each other as if that is the method for getting a diaper change. You can start to think the diaper is the only change we need to believe in if it would only ever come.
To ease the pain of our rash, we can go on pretending a revolution is coming to save us if only we could shut up the other loud left whiny babies surrounding us. On the right, we could believe that if only by our performative tantrums we could prevent others from learning and reading about possibilities beyond the ones that favor us and our position of exaltedness in the high chair at the head of the baby table we could stay there forever. We can keep pretending there is a caring loving god who rewards us for doing his will and cruelly punishing those who don't. We can pretend Burger King gives a fuck about us having it our way. We can pretend Pfizer's goal is our health. We can pretend ExxonMobil is "fueling the world safely and responsibly." We can pretend Santa Clause exists.
Or we can grow up, quit treating each other and ourselves like infants, respect our differences, give the reality we have made for ourselves a long hard sobering mature look and finally learn to take care of our planet, ourselves and each other together. Like grownups.
