The childlike and the childish

I am lucky. I’m lucky for lots of reasons, but one of the biggest is: I’m lucky because I have an amazing kid. He’s a few months into kindergarten right now, and he’s without question the absolute best thing in my life.

I know all parents brag about their kid(s), and I fully acknowledge my own lack of objectivity on this topic. But he’s genuinely sweet. He’s a good friend. He listens. He cares. He’s polite, and mild-mannered. He’s loving and kind, smart, and inquisitive.

He loves learning. He’s filled with a wondrous awe at many things I’ve long take for granted, or never thought about at all. He finds such pure, simple joy everywhere he looks.

In particular, he loves animals. He can rattle off amazing facts about more sea creatures than I even know exist. He knows I listen to science podcasts, and regularly asks me to tell him what I learned from them, and if there was anything about animals in this one.

He thinks to ask questions that have never even crossed my mind. He’s given me a new perspective on the world—one that makes me realize a lot of things we take for granted actually don’t make a lot of sense. (Like how we say “fast,” “faster,” and “fastest,” but we don’t say “good,” “gooder,” and “goodest.”)

My kid is childlike.

It’s a wondrous, beautiful thing.

But my kid is also a human. And like any human, he’s not perfect.

Like any human, he can also be childish.

Lately, my son’s been really into playing soccer. (Or, at least, the closest game you can play to soccer inside, with the doorways on either side of the living room serving as the goals. We play with a small, soft, squishy ball, so as to minimize the collateral damage.)

He laughs and squeals as we fight for control of the ball, racing back and forth across the miniaturized field. He never stops moving, or shouting in delight, no matter how long the game goes. Rarely have I ever seen his energy supply exhausted.

When we play any game, my son really, really wants to win.

But sometimes the game doesn’t go his way. And sometimes, when that happens—not often, but sometimes—he wants to win so badly that he loses sight of everything else.

At times, when the ball goes through his goal, he’s instinctively filled with an indignant anger. “That didn’t count!” he’ll sullenly declare.

Or: “that wasn’t fair!”

Sometimes, even: “you cheated!”

The reasons he comes up with are, of course, silly: it didn’t count because the ball rolled through the bathroom door after it went in the goal; it didn’t count because it bounced back out again; it didn’t count because he called time out (but didn’t, actually); it didn’t count because he got distracted, or wasn’t ready, or—my personal favorite—because his leg was itchy.

Of course, none of those things actually invalidate what happened. They’re not against the rules. They’re just convenient “fouls” to call, to try to get a more desirable outcome.

So I try to teach my son how to be a good sport; about how things don’t always go the way we want them to, and how when that happens, we have to just deal with it and keep playing, even if we don’t like it.

The rules have to be the same all the time, for everyone.

Even if that means we lose.

Play is a learning opportunity. It’s about understanding how things work in a fair and just society, with rules and laws and more people who matter than just him.

It’s about understanding you can’t just change the rules or stop the game entirely when something happens that you don’t like. Because the game is for all of us; we’re all in it together.

The rules are for everyone, and there’s more to the game than just winning.

Again: my son is a good kid. Better than good. The behavior I’m describing here is just natural human tendency. He comes by it honestly, and I don’t doubt every other kid in the world does the same things sometimes. I also don’t doubt he’s already growing up and learning better.

All children—all humans, actually—struggle with this message.

By default, left to our own baser instincts, we are the centers of our own universes. It’s not hard to think of times in my adult life when I’ve screamed “that’s not fair!” or “that doesn’t count!”—inwardly, at least, if not outwardly.

I’ve mentally scrambled to find a rule that might have just been broken, to force things back to the way I wanted.

But I know deep down that if I did that, just like my kid, I’d be making that rule up, or enforcing it unfairly—not out of a genuine, sincere concern for the game or its rules, but just because it’s a convenient vehicle to help me get what I want in that moment.

My wife and I, like any good parents (I think we’re good parents), feel it’s right and necessary to help our child adjust his perspective, and teach him to think more fairly, more justly, and more objectively.

We want him to know the rules matter all the time, and not just when it’s convenient for him.

That the rules aren’t just for everyone else.

Life in America has long felt like a game played between adults and children; a game where one side respects the rules and is dedicated to keeping them, and the other is merely making up ad-hoc rules from moment to moment, for no reason but to help them win.

Those acting like adults want the game to be for everyone, and therefore, want the rules to apply fairly to everybody. This is technically how the game is supposed to work, but its rules have largely not been enforced that way.

I suppose you could call it childlike, this defiant willingness to believe in a better, more just version of the game we’re all playing; that we can achieve it together.

But today, I and many others learned, in a way very few actually understood or anticipated, exactly how utterly childish so many of the friends and neighbors we’re playing the game with actually are. How far they’re willing to go, and how much they’re willing to overlook, in the name of making the game go the way they want it to.

What petty, sullen grievances they care about, more than the weakening societal infrastructure we all share.

I found out in a new way that no matter what their team does, and no matter how obviously and flagrantly against the rules it is, millions around me genuinely and even proudly do not care.

All that matters is their team winning. Even if it destroys them. Even if it destroys the game itself.

The rules are for you; winning is for me.

For years, we heard about Joe Biden’s age and mental state on a perpetual repeat.

Trump and his supporters ensured this message permeated every form of media, on a daily basis: it is unacceptable for a man so old and so shaky in his speech to be President.

They beat this drum for a good long while, until: suddenly, Trump’s opponent wasn’t Joe Biden; it was Kamala Harris, a person dramatically younger and sharper than Trump.

Overnight, Trump went from being the youngest person in the race, to the oldest and most senile, both by a massive margin.

So, naturally, Republicans realized they’d be hypocrites to support a blathering old man, and immediately found another candidate.

I kid, of course. That didn’t happen. Nothing as sensible as that has ever once happened in the modern history of the Republican party.

Quite the opposite, actually: Republicans suddenly became proud of his advanced age. Some literally even wore adult diapers in support of him.

You see, when a Democrat breaks the rules, they generally resign, or are fired. The rules matter to those of us acting like adults.

But when a conservative does something that would be considered breaking the rules, the rules suddenly change.

And change they did. The national media which made age and eloquence the centerpiece of all political coverage for months on end suddenly just…stopped caring.

Even as Trump rambled unhinged nonsense night after night, few paid attention, no matter how nonsensical or objectively wrong it got. Whether he was making it up or so completely detached from reality he genuinely believed the insane things coming out of his mouth, nobody could tell. But it obviously didn’t matter to most observers. The argument never went the other way.

The perceived fouls of age and cognition were, quite clearly, never about age or cognition.

They were about winning.

We also heard about the border, incessantly and in dire superlatives—but by now we know it was never about the border.

We know this because despite Republicans insisting it was a disastrous emergency, they unilaterally shot down the exact border bill they were asking for. The “fix” they wanted was literally on the table in front of them, and they killed it.

Why?

To keep the other side from scoring a goal. (Literally, it was to prevent the Biden administration from chalking up a political win in an election year.)

No Republicans were even mad about it. None even cared, as far as I can tell.

The border obviously couldn’t have been both a crisis, and something that could simply be put off for another year or so; a proverbial can casually kicked down the road.

So clearly, the whole thing was yet another made-up foul, to make the game go their way.

The rules aren’t for us. The rules are for you.

I honestly have my pick of literally hundreds more examples of the goalposts suddenly shifting.

“Family values” is an easy one. It would be frankly difficult to find a man who embodies that ideal less than a serial philanderer and rapist on his third marriage.

So is “Christian,” for that matter; it’s hard to imagine someone less Christlike than a hot-tempered, hateful, spiteful, narcissistic, money-worshipping, power-hungry, egotistical bully who lies so casually it’s impossible to judge his grasp on reality. He’s the embodied inversion of everything Christians claim to believe, without even mentioning his vast collection of bigotries.

But it doesn’t matter. The Bible is rules, and the rules aren’t for them.

The term “garbage” wasn’t offensive when they used it against other people, but yet, it was horrifically offensive to use that word against them (a play familiar both for anyone who remembers 2016, and anyone who’s ever experienced the DARVO of an abuser).

Republicans were anti-Russia, until Trump was pro-Russia.

For that matter, most of them were anti-Trump, until Trump became the path to winning at any cost.

They claim to be pro-democracy, and deeply concerned about the integrity of elections. But somehow, the threat of a citizen casting a valid vote without a photo ID matters more to them than their own candidate staging a coup to illegitimately steal the entire election outright.

Harris won’t demand that anyone “finds votes” for her, or claim the election was fraudulent. She won’t do those things because she’s an adult, and she therefore knows those things are unacceptable and always have been.

But if she did do those things, of course, the people who tolerated and even cheered for them before would suddenly find them unacceptable in a way they didn’t when it was their team doing them. (In fact, they were very openly prepared to do those things again, had they not gotten the result they wanted.)

I have little doubt that if she had won, our news would be filled with the inevitable, childish cries of “that didn’t count!” and “no fair!” and “you cheated!”

But she didn’t win. And so it was all valid.

The rules did what they were supposed to do, in the childish people’s minds: the rules made them winners.

If there were such thing as a cardinal sin for conservatives, I imagine disparaging the troops would’ve been it.

That, or perhaps the (absurd) proposition of abolishing the Constitution. But he said them both, so they both stopped being grave blasphemies the moment they were spoken.

They don’t believe felons deserve to vote, but they believe their felon deserves to be in the White House.

When it was time for Obama to nominate a Supreme Court Justice nearly a full year from the end of his term, it was deemed unacceptably close, and they refused to allow the nomination. But Trump was allowed a nomination mere months from his exit, and his pick went straight through, no questions asked.

They shift the goalposts so much, they even got that same Supreme Court to declare that there aren’t goalposts for the President.

Somehow, against all logic and sanity, the President can do literally anything he wants, no matter what the law says—but, of course, that really only means their President. Our President can’t do a damned thing without somebody screaming out that he’s breaking the rules, and he will leave office with a great number of things he actually tried to do blocked by the very same people who insist the President is allowed to do anything.

That’s how much they believe the rules aren’t for them; the rules are for everyone else.

One of the many cruel ironies of the story is: we can tell it’s not even about the policies.

Progressive abortion referendums were on the ballots in multiple states; most passed, even in states where Trump (who of course actively facilitated the Supreme Court’s gutting of Roe v. Wade), won overwhelmingly.

My neighboring state, despite being deeply red, passed a very progressive minimum wage law, as did Alaska. Paid sick leave was included, and also passed in Nebraska. Yet Trump won all of those states, and is openly hostile to workers.

Classically Democratic policies like marriage equality remain overwhelmingly popular, and several were passed in this election—some, again, even in states that went to Trump, even though many of his supporters want to make anything having to do with LGBTQIA+ identities literally criminal.

Despite the furious bigotry on display, polls show us that in a vacuum, most Americans support trans people’s right to exist, and immigrants’ freedom to live here.

It’s clear to me most of us actually do like progressive policies.

A lot of us have just been conditioned to hate progressive people.

(This is a reason I believe we’re still underestimating the role of misinformation, propaganda, and outside influence in these outcomes. It’s also a reason I still have hope; the election is lost, but our collective values still hold. But those are both other topics for another time.)

So they go on, voting for the exact opposite of what they actually want, and in many cases, even against what’s good for them. Because that’s what they see as winning, and their version of winning is the only thing they care about.

Never mind the rules. Nothing is sacred. Nothing is shared, or belongs to all of us.

I’ve long since given up on anything ever being bad enough for Trump’s supporters, not just because the past several years have been a nonstop parade of egregiously escalating offenses, but because they’d have to actually care about the rules first. They’d have to give a shit about the other people they share this society with, who own it every bit as much as they do. They’d have to stop being the main character; stop believing the rules only apply to other people.

And if they were going to do that—if they were even capable of that—it would’ve happened a long time ago.

None of it makes sense. None of it is supposed to make sense. That’s not the game they’re playing.

The rules are for you; winning is for me.

We told our son, months ago, that a woman was running for President. We told him that if elected, she would be the first woman to ever serve as President.

He was excited for her. He wanted her to win. Not because he understands anything about politics, or because we indoctrinated him into our way of thinking; just because our son, being the pure, goodhearted kid that he is, recognizes it’s not fair when people are left out, and never get the turn they deserve.

He cried this morning.

We all did.