Here at Mike The Pod we have a motto. Mike The Pod is me. Here at me we have a motto.
“Avoid Children At All Costs.” ACAAC for short, which when spoken sounds like “a cock”, two words you should never, ever utter together within earshot of children.
This slogan has nothing to do with me hating or liking children. And obviously, although it does make me nervous, there are numerous real-life situations where I am inevitably in the vicinity of them. Well, at least one situation, as in when I hit the toy aisle in Target to buy a Transformer. But the harshness of the motto is necessary for a different reason.
Children are impressionable. They don’t have the wisdom that adults do, because they’re children. By nature they can’t have wisdom. So, and this is the really important part, children believe whatever you tell them. And this means experiences that can potentially fuck someone up for the rest of their life, or even shorten it by a significant margin.
This is why parents and teachers are, in general, protective of children, not just their own, but all. This is why parents and teachers get cranky, in general, when they think that children are being exposed to bad influences. These bad influences mostly include various forms of media that are omnipresent in today’s society; an overly-provocative halftime show, a mature-rated computer game with live abuse via chat, or popular music crammed to the rafters with racial slurs. When people begin the act of raising a child, reflexively they tend to keep the child’s environment child-safe, meaning free of things that require either a legally-accepted age and/or the wisdom of adulthood; drugs, sex, and violence.
For all three of those things, there are hard legal repercussions, up to and including the appropriation of a child by authorities, and being required to keep a mile radius away from children altogether. I’ve known fathers who fear these consequences to the point of zero tolerance. There’s nothing wrong with this; in fact, I prefer it to hanging out with parents smoking weed when their kids are in the room. Even though there’s a 98% chance I got to hang with some tokers as a toddler, because my folks were cool like that and I was too young to differentiate the joints from cigarettes (which everyone fucking smoked in the 1970’s, even toddlers).
You see, I just exploited my own childhood to make my point. If I had a recording of that night when I might have been kissin’ cousins with cannabis enjoyers, I could know for certain how much influence it had on my 30+ years of experience with weed and other intoxicants. Hell, as I write these words, I’m high as a Georgia pine. I could blab all day about how my father’s near-fatal struggle with alcoholism had both good and bad influences on my attitude towards Mister Booze. He also introduced me to movies with obvious adult situations before I was old enough to get the jokes. This has sometimes resulted in struggles both socially and mentally, most of which continue to this day. Most of which you can read about on this very site.
Regardless of whether or not my life experiences are commonly shared, or if I’m peculiar and particularly naive, there are charges like “corruption of a minor” that are intended to strongly discourage sharing adult materials and issues with children. If you are sexual with a child, unless you’re a well-heeled elite, you will most likely be incarcerated and later shanked in prison. If you expose your own child to pornography, and are in turn exposed for doing so, your child will be taken from you. Worst or best-case scenario, depending on your preparedness and bank balance, you may have to flee your place of residence. Or your fancy honeymoon suite, as seen in the hilarious 1998 film adaptation of the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Slowly it dawns on Duke’s attorney that if it gets out that he gave acid to a confused underage girl obsessed with Barbra Streisand, most probably whom he also fondled, the pair of them are dead men before dawn.
Between the years of 1991 and 2001, from the ages of nineteen to twenty-nine, I consumed LSD roughly one hundred times, sometimes multiple times at once. I even sold it briefly; I quit when it dawned on me that although I was nineteen, I was still technically selling drugs to high school kids. I was friends with the dude who made the acid; oh, the tales I could tell about that guy and his hot punky girlfriend. Speaking of which; I have written both cartoons and text describing and based upon my trip and acid-related experiences. I can list you a dozen pros and cons off the top of my head, plus helpful protips. PROTIP: Cover up or hide all clocks and timepieces. Mirrors too, unless you’d like to spend the night watching your face melt off your skull.
All of this, not just the drug-taking but the writing output, was inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I’d read at the age when I could legally be sent off to war.
Another big effect on my childhood self was classic sitcom Taxi‘s Rev. Jim Ignatowski, partly because he was so hilariously embodied by the legendary comic actor Christopher Lloyd, but also because his knowledge of the drug world was intriguing to my curious growing mind. In my childish imagination, being on drugs was something that made you act silly and crazy, causing a massive uproar from the studio audience or canned laugh track. Taxi took place in 1970’s New York City, a known mecca for drug abusers and addicts, so it was only appropriate that drugs would be grist for the mill of a television comedy show. Less appropriate was the fact that I was enjoying this program before the age of ten, and like I said, the influence of this memory clearly took hold, because I’m telling you about it over forty years after.
Do you see how much influence I just delineated about being exposed to adult material before legal adult age? And that was just the drugs part.
Up until I was around thirteen, the corner sweet shop up the street from my house carried candy cigarettes, some of which had the means to make it look like you were puffing on the real thing. For example, a cigarette-shaped piece of bubble gum rolled inside actual paper, separated by a micro-thin layer of white powder, which you would blow out through the paper tube, simulating “smoke”. My personal favorite resembled edible lollipop sticks. All of these often-delicious items came in Wacky Packages-style “packs” for extra ersatz coffin-nail fun. (Wacky Packages themselves featured countless cigarette-brand parody sticker cards.)
Now again, there’s a legally enforced age limit on tobacco products, but if kids want to smoke cigarettes, they’ll figure out how to get their hands on some. Not for nothing does there exist a rite of passage known as “greening”; chain-smoking until literally turning green and puking one’s guts out. Depending on the person, this is either a test or a punishment.
In any case, I don’t know if any kids took up smoking as a result of candy cigarettes (although most of the kids who got greened certainly did), but again my example is biased, because;
- My mom smoked Marlboro Lights even after terribly stricken with multiple sclerosis, because no force on earth could stop her from doing so, even to the point where my dad devised hookah-like apparatuses to make it easier for her to do and to shut her up, because she had an addiction that no doubt worsened her MS and caused her premature death
- My mom’s constant smoking made our nice New Jersey 1903 Tudor house and my school clothes smell like absolute shit, to the point where I developed a socially-crippling allergy to cigarette smoke
- Once my mom had to be moved into a long-term care facility, she resided in a wing where smoking was allowed in the day room, so she would wheel her chair in there and smoke all day, and my Dad and I would visit, the experience was acid-etched with the olfactory memory of cigarette smoke diabolically mixed with the odor of warm urine from her bladder bag, making my allergy psychological on top of physical
So hey; crazy story comin’, I never picked up smoking cigarettes! In fact, I have been known to run away if enough people are doing it at once, and freak out when someone does it within my personal space. I can’t breathe it, you silly girlies! What do you want from me! (That’s another Pink Floyd song I kinda like!)
As far as the equivalent juvenile taboo goes, which would be alcohol, my favorite drink is rum & Coke. Not coincidentally, when I was very young, my dad was an advertising rep for Bacardi rum (and Coca-Cola specifically). My parents used to make rum cake for their lavish New Year’s parties, and it was so saturated with liquid Cuban gold that one slice would guarantee I’d be snoozing long before the ball dropped.
I started drinking at eight years old. For most of 2010 I drank four rum & Cokes a night as an experiment, during which time I received rug burn on my forehead from passing out face-first on the floor (with glasses on). One house I lived in had a keg fridge custom built out of a dorm cooler by a roommate with whom I have binge-drunk numerous times, including “Century Club”, where you take a shot of beer every minute for one hundred minutes and I punched out a bamboo lamppost. I got into huffing as a kid, but that was because the glue for the model airplanes I built smelled so good at the time. Otherwise, draw your own conclusions.
Of the things I’ve described that are toxic to children, violence is perhaps the most self-evident; obviously, domestic violence is specifically and legally punishable. Most moms frown upon their youthful offspring watching violent movies, and especially staying up past bedtime to do so. Since before you were born, there has been a ratings system for films that begins with G (for General Audiences) and carries on past RESTRICTED [R], which was intended to prohibit anyone under eighteen from attending. To give you an idea of how closely theaters follow that rule in general, when I saw 2003’s lukewarm Hannibal Lector prequel Red Dragon, a film that featured a naked Philip Seymour Hoffman glued to a wheelchair and rolling down a street while totally subsumed in orange flame, someone’s baby was crying.
There are also ratings systems for video games and TV shows, but in the case of the latter, nobody can understand them.
I’m gonna skip violence for now (besides once again I am biased, because I feel strongly about violence), and go right for the high hard one; sex. So prepare yourself for the ugliest of truthisms. Ready?
It is literally impossible for a child to understand their own sexuality until hitting puberty.
That includes understanding “gender issues”, because those are inherently rooted in which genitals you possess. It is literally impossible for a four-year-old girl to understand what it’s like to have breasts, and not only is it impossible for a six-year-old boy to understand why guys get a raging boner, but barring what I’m sure are rare exceptions, it’s impossible for them to pop one.
Before hitting puberty and developing genuine sexual urges, boys typically hate girls so much it’s a shopworn trope in newspaper comics from way back when newspapers existed. If one places this behavior in a more cosmopolitan context, this could cause one of the more gullible members of the neighborhood and/or community to blurt out a comment; something to the effect of a brief early window of girl-hating being an early indication of homogayness. I– that’s not a word? I made that up? Huh. I told you, I’m super high.
Growing up, I counted a few tomboys as friends, because they were fun to hang out and play with, yet they were still girls, which I started going crazy for sometime in the late 1970’s. Here’s the thing about tomboys that you may not know; they gravitate towards boys because they like boys. Tomboys get crushes on boys and beat them up or punch them. One of a pair of tomboy sisters that lived up the road from my childhood home took a wind-up robot I adored and smashed it on the street in front of me, maintaining eye contact as she did. Anyone can tell you that’s the act of a girl with a crush on a boy.
Despite this, in our current times of misinformation and depression, there exists a strong and loud contingent of people who believe that a tomboy is a future lesbian, or, worst-case scenario, a man trapped in a woman’s body who requires expensive elective surgery to be freed.
Okay, so, now an adult issue is in the mind of a child. That’s not good. That’s terrible. Like, I actually became physically nauseated typing that, pondering the years of stolen childhood, brutal heartbreak, and crippling chagrin that this theoretical child is guaranteed for the rest of her life.
Without personally experiencing sexual impulses, they cannot be properly understood. As I said repeatedly, it’s impossible for children. They do not have the necessary hormones, because they’re not mature enough for them yet. A child can only understand the idea of a sex change on the most childish level; a boy turns into a girl, or vice versa. That could be a funny game to play, right? Well children, if you have enough money and don’t mind painful voluntary mutilation, you can be the opposite sex for life!
Wait a minute- doesn’t the binary nature of sex changes (it’s male-to-female and female-to-male exclusively) conclusively prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there are only two genders? Which, by the way, are the only two genders I want taught about in schools?
Are you getting what I’m saying? I’m being very sweet to you about it, thank you very much.
Nothing sex-related should be introduced to children in public schools until they reach puberty. Nothing.
This means I don’t believe children should be exposed to sexual content in the home, either; especially not music videos. And for God’s sake, avoid anyone who pushes “puberty blockers”. They want to block puberty for a reason; so the impressionable and easily-influenced child remains forever. They’ll never question or regret a choice they made as a child (when they should have been having a childhood), even to their own physical and mental detriment as a result of that choice, for as long as they live. Because their natural sexual development was retarded or hampered by outside and/or chemical forces, they’ll never receive the hormones that ensure our independence from each other. They will need to be led in all their decisions, as a child must be.
Most tragically, as an adult, they will not only lack any sense of independence, but they will pretty much do whatever their idea of authority tells them to do. What to eat. What to drink. What to wear. What to drive. Who to vote for.
An adult who thinks like a child will look at politics through the eyes of a child. That’s why America is as ruined as it is. The country is overrun with men and women who think like children. They won’t vote for a candidate if they think that candidate is mean. They base everything on superficial appearances and nothing on real policy. Thus we have a generation that can be hypnotized as easily as an infant gazing at a shiny keychain. That means the most corrupt politicians this side of Ukraine can slide into high office like water off a dead duck’s back if they have the millions necessary to rub elbows with the right media superstars. Halfwits and naifs see that shit and eagerly play sycophant for indoctrinated grift-actresses like Greta and “AOC”, blind to the boldface hypocrisy in clear view. Christ, the both of these shrews literally pretended to be handcuffed in staged promotional incidents. One has obvious fetal-alcohol syndrome and the other looks like a braying donkey. Get a grip, you mincing millennial simps.
Even aside the confusion children will inevitably feel about the concept, drag queen shows are not appropriate for kids at all. Drag shows typically take place in gay clubs. What’s the first thing you see at a gay club? A sign stating that you have to be over the age of twenty-one to get in. Don’t kid yourself, it’s not the booze being served. It’s the fact that it’s a club where gay men come to meet other gay men, often with the express purpose of performing sexual acts in the bathroom or parking lot. Doing this with a minor results in a prison sentence. So guess what? They don’t allow any minors inside.
BTW- what was Police Academy rated? R, huh? Did that make a difference when it played on pay cable ten times a day, and the luckier kids at school knew every detail of it? I myself wasn’t permitted to rent it, not because of the blowjob-inside-a-podium scene, but because my dad knew that the comedy stank on hot ice. This was prior to Caddyshack II. We were all so innocent then.
Back to my original point. If drag queens are linked to places where gay men meet each other for the purposes of gay sex, which is typically the case, then I don’t want drag queens around children. That’s as plain and rational as I can make it for you.
Despite the fact that elective surgery is limited to adult ages, there are people who think that children should be instructed about trans people and introduced to they/their world. If the surgery can’t be legally performed on minors, then they sure as hell don’t require intimate knowledge of it. Case closed.
I keep my thoughts about trans people to myself as a general rule. By and large, trans people seem to be oversensitive and quick to enrage, for whatever reason. I do not offer further comment out of great respect for Wendy Carlos, the exception to every negative stereotype about trans people that exists. As credit where due, I also didn’t know that was Chaz Bono on Curb Your Enthusiasm until the closing credits. Mad respect, bro Bono.
See how complicated and effusive that was an explanation, and how I had to tread eggshells making it? That’s how complex the issue of trans people is. Far too complex for a prepubescent human being to fully grasp. Hence, it is relatively dangerous as an idea to put into a child’s head. You could sit up all night trying to explain it to them and they’d still never get it until they hit puberty.
Ergo, I don’t want children being taught about trans people. Let kids organically discover them face-to-face in public and give their honest opinions about what they see. A great many of you out there would be surprised at what you hear. In some instances, so would I.
If a school is primarily or completely comprised of black students, I see no issue with teaching them Black History. However, I feel that these children are being done a terrible disservice in the process.
As far as white children go, I believe they should be allowed to discover Black History organically. This would be simple, and would not require any “white-washing”. Unless we’re talking about kids from other countries, all the students, black, white or otherwise, are Americans.
Just merge Black History and American History, and admit that black people are too significant to the country’s development to segregate them by their race, and call it “American History” once and for all. The real reason being, the more a child feels connected to their community, rather than compartmentalized based upon their skin color, the better a member of that community they will become. You want to teach children to be racist, and discriminate by pigmentation? Tell them that the system is racist against one group and not another. You just put the idea into a child’s head that people are unequal based on race. You completely undid a child’s built-in belief that people are all the same inside, no matter what they might look like.
The next-to-final lines of the unfairly-blacklisted sketch show Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace are spoken by a young boy playing with other boys in his yard. The sketch begins around 9:43 of the following video. Do yourself a serious favor and watch it. Every word in it is germane to what you’ve been reading here. This I promise you.
“My mom says Donald Trump is a racist, so I have no choice but to believe her.”
We protect the innocent because they are just that; innocent. The world of children should be protected from matters that require an adult intellect. Their lessons at school should involve history, math, science, English, physical education, art, juvenile dance, and theater. The last three of those should be optional. You know, like schools have been teaching for the last couple hundred years. Once kids hit puberty, their parents and teachers can start filling them in on the birds and the bees and their various exciting combos. Before kids properly blossom, sex, drugs and violence are on the zero-tolerance list when it comes to the li’l folk.
I hope we’ve reached an understanding on this matter. There is only the thinnest of lines between education and indoctrination, and between mentor and predator. When your children are turned against basic family values, whether by seditious excuses for teachers or by the visual barrage of adult media, the family will not perpetuate, and that is what The Powers That Be ultimately want. The fewer of us there are, and the weaker we become, the easier it will be for the government to take away every last one of our rights and exert control over our lives and even our thoughts. The easier it is for them to enslave us. In small ways, they already have. Note the device you’re using to read this.
Do our world a favor and heed my motto. Unless the children are your own, keep your distance, and keep your sexual preferences and proclivities to yourself. I need you to promise me something. I need your word on this, as a good person.
Leave those kids alone.
You must be logged in to post a comment.