- Put your dirty laundry in the hamper
- Put your pillows & blankets back on your bed
- Throw out the trash
- Take the toys you got for your birthday/Xmas out of the bag you used to carry them up into your room and put them where they belong
- Oh, there's no room? Then pile up toys that you no longer play with so I can box them up and put them in the attic to be given to baby cousin later.
This has been going on most of the afternoon so far. They'll spend a couple of minutes "cleaning" (meaning hiding), then they'll come to me for more guidance.
"DA-DAHHHHH!"
"Yes [The Boy]?"
"I put all my clothes in my hamper. What do I do next?"
"Put away the new toys you got for your birthday."
[repeat ad infinitum]
Then it dawned on me. This is exactly how the government treats us: like children, who need (beg) to be told what to do every step of the way.
No one wants to take initiative or responsibility. We want to sit back, fat and happy in our rooms houses, and let the government tell us which toys to pick up next how to invest our retirement money. We can't - or won't - make the decisions we need to make to grow up into responsible adults.
And the worst part is, we're aiding and abetting this mindset seemingly every step of the way.
The media derided the Bush administration for coming into office with the mindset of "the adults are back in charge." They scoff, even now, at the button-down atmosphere of Bush & Co., preferring the laid back approach of Obama. It all fits together, the parent that desperately wants to be their child's friend.
But our kids don't need us to be their friends, they need us to be their parents.
And we don't need the government to be our friends, giving us everything we need to survive. What we need is a government that will, for the most part, leave us the hell alone. Sadly, enough of the American voting public wants a government that will pay our mortgage and fill our tanks with gas.
Without ever knowing or caring where the money is coming from to pay for the largess...
That is all.
4 comments:
Well-said, Jay!
The real difference is that parents want their children to move out to a bigger house and be more successful than the parents were whereas politicians want the children to move them into bigger offices and give them more success.
Well said, an interesting approach and you may have hit the nail on the proverbial head. :-)
My kids usually have the retort: "how LONG do I have to clean?" Apparently, we've told them on occasion that they had to clean for X minutes before they could play/watch TV and they've incorporated that into the normal routine for cleaning. Thus far, cleaning until it's, you know, CLEAN, is a foreign concept.
Could be why the house is never clean, now that I think about it...
Then it dawned on me. This is exactly how the government treats us: like children, who need (beg) to be told what to do every step of the way.
Um, not to put too fine a point on it Jay, but what took you so long? This move toward the government as uberparent has underlain the socialist/ progressivist movement throughout its entire history. Go back and look at the early history of socialism. It's all there. Socialism originated in Europe, a land that never outgrew its ancient system of authoritarian government. Socialists wanted to replace the old aristocracy with a new one, nothing more. They never shook off the ancient European concept of the government as the supreme secular authority figure. Fascism turned the State into the uber-father, while socialism tried to turn the State into the uber-mother (or uber-nanny), but either way you still had the government-as-parent meme. It's just as visible in the temperance movement of a century ago as it is in the porkulus bill today.
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