A mother's rebuke

Monday 6/10/24

Why is it so important now for people to be crazy? I know that how we live now--and how we don't--and the internet and social media and the end of substance and value and our pervasive and near-total disconnection makes just about everyone mentally ill, but why do so many people act like being mentally ill is the way to go and as if they're celebrating it?

I observed this woman scolding her child the other day. A young boy--just a toddler. He had innocently put his hand on her shoulder when they were sitting side by side.

The mother says, "You didn't ask for permission to touch me, I didn't give you consent." You could tell that she said this to him often. To a baffled three-year-old who only knew he had done wrong but not why.

This wasn't a prowling, opportunistic Jeffrey Toobin with his David Remnick-approved fist in search of the anal orifices of female strangers while his wife and children are back home.

It was just a kid putting his hand on his mom's shoulder and being scolded and, after a fashion, shamed. The woman was ritualistically performing mental illness. In this case.

I thought about all of the insanity this kid will have to deal with. All of the stuff he'll have to move through later, which he probably won't, because that's not what people do. People are almost entirely products of environment. They don't rise up and over. Whatever is going on around them is what they become. Free will is now more of a theoretical thing than anything acted upon in human lives. Then there are the people he'll know, the family he'll have. For him to be right he'd have to get himself right. And people, for the most part, just don't do that. What they are becomes a part of what's around them, and the people in that environment.

The kid had obviously been rebuked in this fashion before, but it was obvious he still didn't get it. He hadn't touched her in some brusque way. More like, "This is mom."

People will contort themselves to try and defend anything, and I'm sure there are those who would go, "You don't know her trauma! She could have been raped or attacked," etc. It wasn't that. (Never mind by anyone who had been alive for like 1000 days.) It was someone who wanted to leverage performative mental illness against their child for power and props. Their three-year-old. Props from whom? The air. The voice in their head.