A tale of two childhoods

It's entertaining to mock young zealots but the bottom line is that the adults in this Boomer experiment have done a terrible disservice to huge swaths of young people.

Last Sunday, enjoying a lazy morning chatting with my husband over coffee, he told me a story about his childhood that I hadn’t heard before. If you will kindly permit it, I will relay his tale in order to contrast a traditional childhood with how we treat kids today.

Growing up in a small rural community in Northern Ireland, Brian spent summers on his grandparents farm. He and his brothers were free labour when school was out. He had told me about these times before, and the old farming ways they still practiced even though it was the 1980’s — practices I find absolutely fascinating because they are something out of another time: like storing the butter they churned in the cool mud of the bog to keep it from spoiling, cutting turf by hand, getting up before dawn to milk the cows, and eating cow placenta with porridge for breakfast. But last Sunday’s story was a new one. And it’s fantastic.

Actual footage of my husband’s old-fashioned childhood, when it was totally cool to leave a tiny child in a field with large animal with horns.

His grandfather, Brian told me, had one of those back-scratchers — you know the ones: long stick with a small plastic hand on the end of it. The boys were always trying to get at the back-scratcher and use it for their own purposes (AKA break it). Just as their grandfather had done with the placenta porridge, which, he told them, was a magical dish that would make the boys as fierce and strong as the “American Indians” that they idolised, the old man spun them a tale about this crappy backscratcher. 

There was a tree in the garden, called a monkey puzzle tree, that the boys knew well. This tree, the Granda said, actually had a real monkey in it when it arrived all the way from Africa to be planted in their Co. Tyrone garden. But this monkey caused a lot of trouble around the place, so the Granda had to hunt it down and kill it. The boys gasped. He had hunted down and killed a monkey? 

But there was more!

The little hand on the backscratcher was the hand of said monkey, their Granda explained. And that’s why only he was allowed to touch it. Young boys being the way they are, they thought through the facts and logic of this story and drew the most obvious conclusion: it was legit. The monkey puzzle tree had a monkey? Makes sense. The monkey was mischievous? Of course! Big strong Granda used cunning and bravery to kill the monkey to protect his farm: awe-inspiring and a little scary. It all checked out. Therefore: no touching the backscratcher. 

Upon finishing this charming old anecdote, Brian chuckled and went to get more coffee. And I went back to absentmindedly scrolling through my social media. On Twitter, I came upon a video which provided a snapshot of just how much intergenerational relationships have changed in the last few years — and changed for the worse. 

It was a video of a conversation between American academic Peter Boghossian and a bunch of student social justice warriors on a college campus. I watched the depressingly predictable interaction, in which Boghossian makes an objectively true statement (there are only two genders) and the group is triggered. The SJW’s are mostly young and female, and for all of their fervour they speak to Boghossian with quavering voices, like some of them are fighting back tears, or are facing a monumental challenge in simply talking to this man. This despite the fact that he is extremely respectful, almost submissive, throughout. 

One of the SJW’s who identifies as non-binary, tells Boghossian:

“I am gender non-conforming, I use they/them pronouns. Do you know what that means? Are you aware of the theory of social constructionism?”

He replies: “I am a gender studies scholar.”

Undeterred by this information, which should have telegraphed his seniority in this space, she then goes on: “I am much younger than you… I understand. Like, my parents are Boomers, they’ve had a really hard time understanding. So I’ve had to explain this to a lot of people of your generation.”

She says this, to the professor.

“When you say ‘there are only two genders, those two genders are just social constructs that we made up. You were assigned male at birth because you have a penis, I learned about sociology, I learned about gender as a social construct, and I learned that I don’t fit into the box, my gender is completely what I feel like in the moment, I’m not this one solid thing.”

Boghossian listens respectfully, but then refers to her as her instead of they. He apologises. The non-binary student says: 

“It’s a generational education that’s being done, if you want to educate yourself and want to change and learn, that’s great. I love that, and I accept your apology.”

I stopped watching the video at that point.

I’ve seen this clown show before and I don’t like it. Just a few years ago, Donald McNeill Jr., a venerable New York Times science reporter, had his career ended after interactions with similar little know-it-alls who had been raised to view themselves as the font of all knowledge. As one of the students who complained about McNeil told the Times:

“I’m very used to people — my grandparents or people’s parents — saying things they don’t mean that are insensitive,” another student, who was then 17 and is now attending an Ivy League college, told me. “You correct them, you tell them, ‘You’re not supposed to talk like that,’ and usually people are pretty apologetic and responsive to being corrected. And he was not.”

Can we just pause here a moment and really ponder the fact that a 17-year-old thought a highly accomplished and worldly middle-aged man who had worked on some of the most complex and heart wrenching stories of his day should be corrected by her; should apologise and be responsive to her; to follow her dictum? And she presents herself as so…forgiving of other old people when they are humble enough to be receive their corrections?

Dear reader, indulge me this quantum leap in time and space between rural Catholic Northern Ireland, in which hard labour and strict religious belief were the norm, and today’s American youth.

Surely I am not being hyperbolic when I say that this very ingrained attitude in today’s young people — that they know better than their elders — is disastrous for us all?

The lack of healthy boundaries between adults and children, teens and young adults that is now the norm in many rich, liberal, progressive societies has resulted in (at least) two concrete harms: the magic and innocence of childhood has been stripped away and replaced with demoralising and confusing ideology; and simultaneously, we have mistakenly given children the impression that they are in charge. But we haven’t actually trained them for anything useful, we’ve just filled them up with objectively bad opinions. 

Can we please finally admit the terrible damage we have done to the young people raised in this way?

Not to say that my husband’s childhood was idyllic. Far from it. But it had two key components: a freedom to adventure and a strict age-related boundaries. Adult world was adult world and kids world was kids world.  They were bound together by mutual responsibilities and affection.

If you had to chose between two invented narratives, which one would it be: the monkey’s hand, or ‘my gender changes every day”? 

Royal College of Nurses planned a Drag Story Hour for 0-7 kids. Because there’s nothing babies love more than fake tits and wigs.

Which is better for kids? The fables of the gender theorists and Drag Story hour for 0-7 year olds (see photo above)? Or summers doing chores around your grandparents farm and having a big, strong, old farmer tell you magical stories and trick you into eating gross but highly nutritious placenta porridge?

Deep down, which paradigm does the least harm: children being given physical, material responsibilities but also the freedom to roam, or a delusional thought system which demands we lie about what we see with our own eyes?

Deep down, which is makes more sense: a kid correcting a grandparent’s behaviour or a grandparent correcting a kid’s behaviour? 

There was much to criticise about the old way of rearing children. But one thing it did not do was invade the minds of children as a matter of principle, and elevate them to a status that they could not responsibly handle.

And while it’s entertaining to make memes mocking these young zealots, and easy for old conservatives to exclaim ‘back in my day!’, the bottom line is that the adults who have participated in this Boomer experiment have done a terrible disservice to huge swaths of young people. 

How terribly we have served these kids! Filled their minds with nonsense and filled their hearts with vanity and unearned pride. We have taken a massive shit on millennia of generational wisdom and we are actually PROUD OF THAT. These children, adult in body but not in mind, have had their innate human value and instincts hijacked, coopted, bastardised, commercialised and now fetishised — should we be surprised that they are a little nuts? 

But while they are mad at gender norms, or systemic racism, they really should be mad at the ghastly liberal parenting styles and globalist economics that messed with their minds and destroyed their financial prospects.

What they should be mad at is the fact that they have so few competencies, so few critical thinking skills, so little humility or understanding of the world, so many false assumptions that hold them back and hurt those around them. They should be mad that the overproduction of academic and cultural elites has left them without hope of realising the expectations inculcated in them. They should be mad at the vanity and lack of wisdom of the adults around them.