KIDS ARE NOT US or You're STILL Wrong Mykel's Blog Aug 2021

 

You're Still Wrong: Mykel's  August Blog... Kids are NOT Us

 

You’re STILL Wrong

or

Mykel's Blog for August 2021

I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise. --Wilkie Collins

In the past-- when conventional wisdom viewed parents as the paragons of virtue who could do no wrong, struggling to civilize wicked children who could do no right,-- psychiatrists validated the parents' claims about their children. (They still often do so.) Today-- when conventional wisdom defines parents as defective adults and potential sex abusers who can do little that is right, misgoverning innocent children who never lie-- psychiatrists validate the children's claims about their parents.  --Thomas Szasz

                                                                                  

Five-year-old you walks with mom through the Middletown shopping mall. You pass an ice cream shop. In the window: two rows of ice cream cones, six cones in each row. You wonder how they get them to balance… stand up straight on those tiny points… You recognize chocolate… the first cone… then something a little lighter… fudge maybe… then bright green… then darker green… spinach color. I know… you were never a fan of green. Me neither. 

The top row is a copy of the bottom one, except the top row has a strawberry… upside down… on top of each cone. 

You tug on Mom’s dress.

“Why don’t they melt, Mommy?”

“They’re not real ice cream,” Mommy answers. “They just look like ice cream. That way people will know what the store is selling.”

“Can I get a real one?” you ask. “One that’s cold and makes brain freeze?”

“Of course,” says Mom.

“Can I get two real ones? Five? Ten? A hundred?”

“You’re big now,” answers Mom, “five years old. You can decide what you want.”

You walk into the store. Mom speaks to the clerk. 

“We’ll take one...” says Mom, “of everything.”

“Okay Mykel” comes the off-stage voice. By now, you recognize it too. It’s The Literary Device… of course.

“What’s your point,” she asks. “I know you’re trying to prove something. What is it? Most parents are too indulgent?”

“Nope,” I answer 

“Capitalism makes fat kids?” 

“Nope.”

“Something about little kids’ ability to make choices?”

“BINGO!” I answer.

Your Daily Kos feed tells you that extremists are “waging war against Trans Youth.” What exactly is that war? On one side are people who think little kids shouldn’t be making big  decisions. On the other side are those who believe little boys and girl should have the right to decide if they get puberty delay drugs. Those drugs change the body’s natural system of hormones, delaying puberty from the usual 11 to 13 until 16 or 17 or later.

Imagine giving an 8-year-old the right to buy a machine gun. Hah! Even the extremists don’t think that. Ok, how about driving a car? Yeah, right. Even the Germans don’t think that. Eight year olds don’t have the right to choose to have sex or not. How long does sex take… 15 minutes if you’re lucky. But they’re “not mature enough” to make that decision. The can’t decide on 15 minutes of nookie, but they can decide on something that has repercussions for the rest of their lives. 

“Hang on, Mykel” answer the Literary Device, “why would someone want to have puberty delayed? So they won’t grow facial hair?”

“Nope”

“So they can sing in the choir without getting that operation?”

“Getting closer,” I say.

“Then what?”

“They want to delay puberty until they’re old enough to decide for themselves if they want to be a boy or a girl,” I explain.

“But, doesn’t puberty itself help with those decisions?” asks T.L.D. “I mean it’s the rush of hormones that picks gender… not some TV show you watch when you’re a toddler.”

“BINGO!” I answer. 

Wokedom calls laws banning medically unnecessary puberty blockers or hormones “anti-trans youth” laws. It should be up to the child, they say. But then why shouldn’t it be up to the child to have 100 ice cream cones? Or get diddled by Uncle Ernie?

Those who say Black Lives Matter is racist, know that the name doesn’t mean ONLY Black Lives Matter but Black Lives Matter TOO. They claim ignorance just to cloud the issue. 

Those who say Defund the Police means let criminals run wild, know that DEFUND doesn’t mean UNFUND.  It means REDUCE police funding to support social services to make the police less of an occupying army. 

Those who say denying hormone blocking medicine to children know it doesn’t mean anti-trans, but that children are too young to make ANY life-changing decisions for themselves. Every animal knows that.

You know those hump-anything pets that you have to brush off your leg? Do you have to brush them off puppies? Of course not! You see bulls mounting cows on every dairy farm with a bull and a cow. Do you see them mounting calves? No! NATURE has decided it’s best to wait for the hormones… for puberty.

ASIDE: There are societies where parents choose their children’s gender. When I visited Tahiti, I met some Mahus. The ones I met were all women born as boys. 

“What’s the story,” I asked a chubby Mahu sitting at my communal table at a Tahitian barbecue, dressed in a beautiful Pacific Island gown… hair adorned with a single bright flower.

“My parents already had two boys,” was the answer. “They needed someone to take care of the things girls take care of. You know. To cook, and keep the house nice. The boys have to cut the crops and take care of the animals. So they decided I would be the girl. Now I’m grown up and I want to get married... to a woman.”

“Will you change the way you dress?” I asked. “I mean, wear a suit or something?” 

A look of horror passed over my speaking partner. “I LOVE the way I dress and I can’t afford new clothes. And why would I change?”

So even in cultures where parents choose the “gender” of their children, that gender is only changed in clothing and tasks. The physical equipment remains the same, and the biological urges belong to each individual. [END OF ASIDE]

Oh yeah, one more thing. If we allow every immature kid: [NOTE: Maturity is AFTER puberty kicks in… delayed or not] to pick a gender it will DECREASE gender equality.

Every tomboy girl who likes sports and hates dresses… who goes through a phase of wanting to be one of the guys… who wears baseball hats and isn’t afraid to slide into home plate… will want to be a “real” boy instead of a tomboy woman. 

Every sissy boy who hates football... who likes to wear bright colors... who’s scared of bugs… and likes to jump rope with the girls… will want to be “real” girl instead of a femmy boy. 

Just think of how much beautiful diversity the world would lose without swaggering women and men in hotpants. 

So how… and when... does one decide? 

Instead of some arbitrary age, God/nature/biology invented PUBERTY… a natural separation between childhood and adulthood. There’s a reason both Romeo and Juliette were in their early teens. There’s a reason that Bar/Bat Mitzvah boys and girls say (at 13 years old) “Today I am a man” or “Today I am a woman.” Puberty isn’t random. It’s a signal. Nature makes the call. Let’s leave it that way. 

See you in hell,

Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

→ LGBTQRSTUVW+ will eat itself dept: The Advocate reports that there’s been a spate of anti-Boy Georgeism among the alphabet community. Why? In a brave stroke of genius, the singer asked his twitter friends to leave their pronouns at the door. Good advice in general, though I’m pretty sure the door wanted to be referred to as THEY, rather than IT.

→ The bats did it dept: As I write this, the first case of the LAMBDA Covid variation has hit the US. More spreadable, deadly, and vaccine defying than anything that came before. Yet there are still people who say, “naw, this is all natural. Just spread from bats to people in a Chinese wet market.”

There have been wet markets in China for hundreds or thousands of years. There is ONE virus research center in China… there for less than half a century… in the city where the current plague started. Oh sure, just a coincidence.

→ Build That Wall! Dept: The Huffington Post reports that seven Canadians were captured after entering Vermont illegally from Quebec by driving across the lawn of a library built in both the United States and Canada. They were returned to Canada under COVID-19 health rules.

The Haskell Free Library was deliberately built straddling the border in the early 20th century so people from both countries can use it. The entrance is in Vermont. Canadians were allowed to enter the United States to visit the library without having to go through customs..

Since the plague, the border inside the library has been closed, but people are still allowed to yell to each other from either side.

→ He ought to suck on this dept: The Washington Post reports Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been hospitalized. No, it’s not COVID. We know the mainstream liberal press loves it when non-masked, non-cootiephobic people get the plague. But this is something else… HICCUPS.

His have persisted for more than 10 days… They’re so intense that he’s been hospitalized while doctors try to figure out the cause. I say it’s the Omega Variant.

See you in hell, redux,

MB

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is. 

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com