It's Only Okay to Hit Children in the Brain with Ideas

Did you see the theme week? It's lies that we tell to children! Come along, and allow me to elucidate.

We lie to children. I, personally, do it out of a mixture containing equal parts of a desire to preserve some sense of childlike wonder in our increasingly dull world (Hey kids, did you know that the moon is made out of cheese?) and because it is personally amusing to do so (You're also adopted!). The lines between generational abuse and affection become so blurred that we are often unable to stop ourselves from perpetuating these vicious not-truths. I'd love to not be responsible for fucking up notions of the world, but I realize that I'm going to end up doing it anyway. It's a psychotic compulsion I have, to spin fabulous tales and make up lies that children below a certain age aren't cagey enough to realize for what they are.

There is little doubt in my mind that if some kind of codex were to be assembled of everything I've told to children under the age of five, it would read very much like how I wish the world worked. Real Life Example Tiem: When I was a wee sprout, my mother (who is 100% Slovak) would tell me that if I misbehaved, Baba Yaga was going to come out of the woods, kidnap me, and then either eat me or turn me into a sheep. The specific form of punishment was never specified, but to me, the witch became a kind of elemental figure, whose inscrutable ways were bulletproofed against my critical thinking skills. Why would an old witch care if I hid in the clothes dryer, and didn't eat my yams? Did she really like yams? Maybe she really hated them! All I knew was that I didn't want to be eaten or transmuted, and so I best do as my mother says.

My mother was at once abusing the trust I have in her (WHY WOULD MY OWN MOTHER LIE TO ME LOL) and perpetuating some aspect of her own youth (specifically, that of child-eating witches. Not recipes or children's rhymes, but child eating witches), inculcating old world names into a new generation. Which is kind of neat. Here is normally where I'd post some tripe about being able to believe small lies (Witches, Santa, the awesomeness of running around naked all the time) before we're able to swallow the larger ones (that our parents will never be disappointed in us, that everyone is willing to give us a fair shake, the awesomeness of running around fully dressed all the time). But I don't really believe that.

The differentiation between large and small lies is basically the taxonomy of different breeds of griffin, that is, you are making arbitrary decisions about something that doesn't exist. All of the lies that we tell to children are our little subversions from what others would have them believe - we know that what we tell them is untrue, but to them it is real, and so the lies live on. Baba Yaga has basically been replaced by the police, in my mind, as the abstract entity that will fuck my shit up if I step out of line. There's no big or small about it - maybe some notion of maturity (witches are cop training wheels), but as a certain past theme week will remind us, we are still plenty superstitious about the world around us.

It can be disorienting too. As technology (and hated science, hsss!) progress blindly onward, our understanding of the world declines. Actual history slides into the realm of myth, borders fade, and soon, we realize that we've always just been the same cavemen as we were before, still just as petty and biased and driven onward by the chemical prods of all kinds of conquest, just put into a suit. It could be said that the lies we tell to children are the only things that really represent us as human beings, as we wrap our hopes and dreams (and fears) up in stories and give them to our younglings as we sit, huddled and picking the nits out of each other's hair as we watch the campfire embers. Or Celebrity (now there's a generous definition if I've ever heard one) Rehab. Or mind reading enviro-helms. Or maybe some kind of controlled hallucinogenic nano-spores. In the end, though, we want some whisper of the things we only half-remember as children to continue onward, to propel the dreamy parasites of our world on into the future, so that we can someday look back at them on the edge of our twilights, and see what is best in our nature being forever youthful and energetic, never quite realizing that the phantom hag that lurks in closets and beneath old trees is really the fondest token of affection they'll ever receive.

Also, that they are adopted.