The personal is totalitarian
Nowhere and nothing is neutral
One of my kids came home from school the other day irritated by one of their peers. One of the more popular 4th grade boys was holding court on the playground, ranting to an audience of orbiters on topics including the Super Bowl contestants (he’s a Patriots fan and thinks the Seahawks are “trash”) and, of course, Trump. This 9-year-old boy had a surprisingly fully-formed opinion of our 47th President which he no doubt arrived at on his own after a thorough examination of the facts, unaided by his parents or the news media. You can imagine what those opinions are, and I’ll dedicate as much space to them here as they’re worth.
Our kids have in the past asked us what to do when their schoolmates bring up Trump or other political topics, because they don’t know what to say. Our advice is simple: tell them politics is boring and change the subject. Did you try that this time? we asked. Yes, but it didn’t work — his friends were enjoying the trash talk as much as he was, all of them reveling in that oldest of schoolyard pursuits: ganging up on a shared enemy. Our kids were the weird ones for feeling uncomfortable about the intrusion of boring grownup stuff into recess.
Fifteen years ago I would have said that it should be uncontroversial that a nine-year-old child shouldn’t have an opinion on national politics, and that we shouldn’t care what it was if he did. But the world has very clearly moved on. The kids think it’s normal to talk this way because they hear mom and dad do so constantly. They have the same opinions their parents do, as is only right and natural, but unlike in the possibly-imaginary rosy recent past, there’s less protective urge on the part of parents to shelter kids from this rancorous and unsavory aspect of the adult world, to guard their innocence, to let them be kids while they can. On the contrary, children’s involvement in political activism has been progressively normalized by every important institution in their lives, from the shows they stream on Netflix to the social media their parents consume to the lesson plans in their schools. It’s in the air and water.
