You. Are. Stupid

Kevin Doole, staff

The intention of this editorial is in no way to reproach but rather to deconstruct and object to the inaccuracy of the phrase “to have a child.”

It is something that needs to change if we are to progress as a society.

People blandly state that they want to “have a baby” or “have children,” (similar phrases include “I want to have a sandwich,” “I want to have an ice cream cone,” etc). When people say they want to have a baby, they aren’t saying they want to be parents, they’re saying they want to add children to their collection of stuff.

For the more thickskulled readers, that is, most of you, I’d like to briefly point out that the underlying theme of this piece is that seemingly unimportant standards of language can have unimagined impacts on the way people think about things.

Let us start with a heartwarming example. Picture some lovely little pups frolicking in the unsoiled snow of the wild North. They hop and squeak, they roll, they coo and they bustle.

Approaches a majestic deer, rack towering overhead like the tapered brushstrokes of the Shodou master. It strikes a regal pose and gazes yonder. Clouds of white mist puff from its nose. Then through the cool calm of the mountain air leaps the mother of the innocent pups. She tackles the deer, sending a gory red spray across the azure of the sky. As the deer’s terrified yelps subside, the adorable pups approach, curiosity in their eyes; the wonder of a child is oh-so endearing. One plunges its head into the gut of the murdered deer and comes up with a gristly slab of intestine. Munchy-munchy goes the pup. “It’s delicious, Mummy!” it coos. So there we have an image, and action, and a result. It’s one life lesson of many to come.

Of course, humans enjoy greater safety and security than wild animals might, though we live in a senselessly complicated world. Instead of having few objectives like eat and sleep and reproduce and . . . eat, we have infinitely convoluted relationships with everything and everyone around us, and each individual lives in his or her own specialized world.

Take another example. Billy spends his day at school where he ignores teachers and gets up to no good with his peers. He comes home and turns on the TV. His parents yell “Do your homework!” and he complies, haphazardly scrawling out his math work in an effort to finish ASAP with the slightest possible amount of effort. He turns the TV back on. On a purely developmental scale, it’s really not the same experience as the pups; one is a lesson about how to survive in the real world, the other about how to do things dumbly.

I’ll even try to reach­ — let’s give Daddy the benefit of the doubt and pretend that he reads a book about raising children. He learns that he must spend time with his young pups to promote their internal development. He learns about promoting creativity. He learns about communication. So, on the weekend Daddy takes Billy to the zoo! They look at animals and Daddy feels so competent as a fatherly figure. He doesn’t realize that his son doesn’t get it. Billy watches the animals in the cages. He feels invincible. He feels superior. Things are as they should be: everyone is cared for and nothing bad could ever possibly happen. Billy is well on his way to becoming more useless fodder in the ever-indulging Facebook reality of North American young adulthood. Our offspring don’t learn how to lead fulfilling lives, they learn how to want to have things. And don’t even try telling me that those are unfair examples that were picked specifically to back up my own unfounded rhetoric. If you think about the life of an animal versus the life of a human, who would you imagine grows up with a better skill-set? Who do you think learns a whole lot of counterproductive life lessons?

Daddy is just like all of you reading this. Perhaps you try to take it in, but as soon as you put down this paper your mind will turn to other things. What will you consume next? A burrito? A coupon book? An action film? You see reader, you are quite dull. Maybe one day you will “have a baby,” maybe you already do. But when the baby gets to an age when he or she will need to start learning some important lessons, you will have already had a baby and be interested in moving on to other hobbies.

People these days want to “have” children. Care for children, teach children . . . not so much.

French Marxist theorist Louis Althusser reasoned that people become the authors and the subjects of the ideologies that barrage them in language and images every day. Please, allow me to dumb this down for you. I’m not in the least bit confident that you can possibly grasp the marginal complexity of the theory. So, when you see or read or hear something that is about you in some way, you feel a connection to it. You think “That’s like a me! Ooooooo!” You become the subject. Then, the image or language gives you an idea. You very soon forget that this new idea was imposed on you externally. You assume that it was an idea you made for yourself and hence it becomes another of your foolish beliefs. You become the author. Get it? Probably not, but let’s move on nonetheless.

As far as images are concerned, child-rearing is steeping in cutesy crap. Babies are cute things to have. People talk of the “terrible twos,” which to me implies that kids are cute until they develop the ability to communicate. Obviously people are drawing from Billy’s math homework lesson; things should be easy or else they aren’t worth doing.

The language of the greater masses of our society stops at “having kids.” “Harry, do you wanna have kids?” “Hey Bif, do you have kids?” “Let’s have a baby, Margot!” Nobody talks of improving the world by teaching their children to be positive, creative, worthwhile individuals.

If these are the languages and images that are commanding our ideas of what it is to make new people, then our parental role has obviously become entirely focused on ourselves. We feel that procreating should be something that we find fun and cute, definitely not something by which we should become inconvenienced.

Some of you may now be questioning the validity of this idea citing two other commonly used idioms: “raising children” and “bringing up children.” Without having to go into too much detail, there is one obvious difference. Having children is a very literal phrase with a concrete meaning whereas “raising” or “bringing up” children are in fact abstract conceptions. “‘To raise’? Guh? Wha? ‘Bring up’?” I can practically hear you trying to define it now, stupid reader.

Otherwise, and this is my opinion and nothing more, and I refuse to source it whatsoever, and at any rate don’t feel that I need to because — actually, as a matter of fact, I won’t even give my opinion. Let me just ask you, reader, how many parents do you think actually “raise” their children? That’s right. Few.

Now, of course I understand that there’s an obvious point to be made here. I heard you blurt it a while back: “Duuhhhhhh, that’s just a expression, DUUUUUH!” But words are important. It may be a single phrase, but when there’s only one such phrase that our entire culture uses for a single idea, it’s not crazy to assume that there are inherent schemas buried within. The phrase is pregnant with meaning, one might say.

People may also argue that learning how to grow up one’s self gives an empowering strength to young adults. Perhaps . . . not! Think of how much better people would be if they learned about how to be worthwhile. People sometimes say to “Have kids! It’ll change your life!” So, another of life’s lessons is having kids. That’s so confoundedly stupid and gets right to the root of what’s going wrong with our culture. Suburbs keep on expanding and people move further and further out of touch from one another because life is more about what we have than it is about what we do. Anyway, that’s another story.