It’s hard to be a kid these days.
Your blue-haired teachers appear on Libs of Tik-Tok videos bragging about selling you into sex slavery, and people go “Ho-hum. How cute. Don’t judge.”
If you’re a girl, the federal government and institutions like Boston Children’s Hospital will promote “gender affirming hysterectomies.” And, of course, also on offer, depending on the institution, can be chest-binding or breast removal. For boys, castration can be a good choice. For either sex, chemical bombardments are highly recommended so that kids can be who they truly are—or what their pierced and tattooed peers, tenured groomers, and drag queen story hour counselors think they should be.
And, of course, if you’re a kid in a “progressive” school district, you might not have been to school for a couple of years. Instead, you took Zoom classes while wearing a mask. If you’re a white kid, you learned to do a daily act of penance for your privileged existence, perhaps by donating your school lunch money to the teachers’ union.
Given all this, you might think, if you’re a parent, that you need to have a sit-down talk with your progeny to discuss the birds and the bees, the Trotskyites and the transvestites.
And you would be wrong.
Our kids don’t need arguments, they need a childhood.
They need to have their healthy imaginations nourished and their innate prejudices in favor of truth, beauty, and goodness affirmed.
At some point, they will be confronted with the horrors of modern life. And when they are, they won’t need arguments. They will need the unshakable conviction of any sane and moral person: that the “transgender” ideology is evil, self-evidently false, and worthy only of incredulity, condemnation, and ridicule.
Arguments are useless when your opponent believes men get pregnant, women are indefinable, and contradicting these statements is “violence.”
And no, we should not teach our children to approach these people, or their “issues,” with “compassion” and “understanding.”
The enemy has taken advantage of normal people’s good will, using it to chip away at their natural resistance to leftist lunacy. All those little accommodations have taken their toll: everyone who said “gender” because it was more polite than saying “sex”; everyone who embraced feminism (even of the “equity” variety) not realizing where it led (to the abolition of women); everyone who smugly reiterated bumper-sticker logic (“love is love”) without recognizing that pedophiles waited in the wings.
We need plain-speaking common sense and fearlessness.
When it comes to protecting your kids, homeschooling helps; good Catholic schools can help too. But there is no escape: we’re all targets, all the time. Satan never sleeps.
But neither does God—and the library of Western civilization is always open, twenty-four hours a day, as nearby as the Bible on the bedstand, the Iliad on the shelf, the Odyssey on the homework table, not to mention Beau Geste, Black Beauty, and all the children’s classics you read when you were a kid, or better ones.
Insomniac? Rainy day cancel baseball practice? Old Hays Code era movies can entertain blissfully—and do more to affirm traditional morality than any earnest sit-down talk.
Golden Era television of the 1950s and 1960s is good too, for the same reason. Any child would benefit from a steady diet of Hopalong Cassidy, Leave It to Beaver, Wagon Train, and The Twilight Zone over the school library and its stacked copies of…well, you know.
If the “transgender” madness must be dealt with, best to do so metaphorically. Matt Walsh, with his Johnny the Walrus book, has the right idea. So, too, any books (or films) that uphold the eternal verities of male and female, courage and truth, fidelity and honor (as I like to think my own novels—The Old Limey, Armstrong, Armstrong Rides Again!, and Armstrong and the Mexican Mystery—do; that’s their point).
What we can best offer our children is hope, prayer, and beneficial examples—our own and those of generations past. We need to arm our children not with arguments but with examples of bravery, inspiration, and fortitude; because the day will come when the battle will be theirs, and they will raise up their own families and continue the war against the darkness that perpetually threatens to overwhelm us. For that task they will need not rhetoric but the most important of all virtues: courage. And they’re more likely to learn that from The Lone Ranger or Cheyenne than from a family conference.
[Image Credit: Unsplash]
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