No One Likes Your Kids
No one thinks your kids are cute.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that we dislike kids. Or that we find your specific kids particularly objectionable. But speaking in the broad encompassing terms of greater humanity: your kids aren’t cute; keep them quiet; keep them somewhere that is not near us.
This is not a personal affront to your very own personal children, or an indictment against the existence of the child species.
A helpful way to think about this, is that children are, at the best of times, like salt. A little bit goes a long way. A spare dash of salt can enhance and elevate a dish to gustatory divinity. Too much makes garbage of a culinary masterpiece. Brief interactions with children are fine. While by and large abhorrent conversationalists, their ineptitude and general ignorance of everything can make them amusing. You can tell a child almost literally anything and have them believe you. Tell them that you met Superman whilst on your most recent vacation to the moon and they’ll ask you to sign a picture of Superman on their phone, because not only are children dumb and gullible, an unnerving number of them have phones these days. Indulge in quick banter with a child, but leave it at that. Sprinkle a pinch of salt, don’t pour on heaps of it.
And since children are analogous to salt, it then follows that no one wants to see pictures of them filling Instagram and Facebook feeds. Would you enjoy seeing photo after photo of salt? No. Same thing. Doesn’t matter whether it’s generic table salt, kosher, the iodized variety, seasalt, mined salt, rock salt, bath salt, that mildly disconcerting black salt, or even the beautiful and oh so trendy pink Himalayan salt. No one wants to see pictures of salt. Or your kids.
Also, you know the internet is lousy with creeps, don’t you? Why would you leave photos of your children, presuming you care about them, where creeps can see them? It’s a matter of safety and common sense. All children should wear masks in photos. And in public. Public is lousy with creeps, as well.
Much as no one wants to see your kids on our newsfeeds, we even less relish being subjected to their presence in real life.
A small sampling of the places that children should not be present: restaurants, the beach, movie theaters, parks, libraries, all stores other than toy stores, any home that is not your own.
Children are treated as though they are not uncouth and ill-mannered animals. That is a mistake. I know animals who’d mind their manners much better at the opera than any human child. Yet everywhere I go, signs make prejudicial denials of entry to dogs and presumably other non-human dependents.
We also, frankly, do not need more children. There are enough already. There are actually too many regular humans and far too many child humans lined up to replace them. We no longer live in a time when reproduction and propagation of our species should be treated as imperative.
The actions of our species in the past century or so have monumentally fucked up this planet. There’s little good that more of us would accomplish, and the likelihood of so much more bad. Best gift we could give to this planet and its other species at this point would be self-imposed culling, and crawling back into our caves.
The only class of person that may still do something of value on behalf of humanity are (my bias is showing) artists. In our industrialized capitalist society, the arts are seen as the most inconsequential, even useless, vocation. To that I say thee, bullshit. Everything that we know of lost cultures, of humanity’s endeavors and accomplishments, of ourselves and all we are, is expressed and preserved through art. No one gives a shit about a banker or a cheesemaker after they die. No one has ever given a shit about bankers. And while a cheesemaker is of course beloved and indispensable in their lifetime, once they’re gone, all their cheese eaten or rotted, no one cares. No one remembers. Unless an artist preserves the memory and legend of the noble cheesemaker.
The takeaway: it is more productive and less destructive to make art than children. But if you still insist, it is incumbent upon you to ensure they grow to be artists, or at least cheesemakers, and never bankers.