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 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.

That you can’t just change the rules when something happens that you don’t like. Because the game is for all of us; we’re all in it together.

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, just like my kid, I’d be making that rule up, or enforcing it unfairly.

If I did that, it wouldn’t be out of a genuine, sincere concern for the rules we’re all abiding by, or the game we’re all playing; it would just be because it’s a convenient vehicle to help me get what I want in that moment.

That’s why my wife and I, like any good parents, feel it’s good and 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, and that winning isn’t just for him.

It’s crushing and disheartening to discover I live in a country where half the adults around me still haven’t learned something I’m teaching my kindergartener.

Life in America has long felt like a game played between adults and children; a game where one side knows the rules and is dedicated to keeping them, and the other wants nothing to do with the rules unless it helps them win and helps their opponents to lose.

The adults believe in more. In better. They dare to dream, and envision our collective future in a definitively hopeful way. Maybe even childlike.

But today, I and many others learned, in a way very few actually understood or anticipated, exactly how utterly childish so many of our 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.

I found out in a way I knew before but never fully realized, that so many millions I share this society with believe no matter what their team does, and no matter how obviously and flagrantly against the rules it is, they 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 loudly exclaimed, on a daily basis, that it was 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, by a massive margin.

So, naturally, Republicans realized they’d be hypocrites to support Trump, 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.

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

And change they did. The national media which made Biden’s age and sharpness the centerpiece of all political coverage for months if not years on end suddenly just…stopped caring.

Even as Trump rambled unhinged nonsense night after night, few paid attention. Whether he was making it up or so completely detached from reality, nobody could tell, but it obviously didn’t matter to most observers.

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, as though it’s the most urgent threat our country has faced in the last century—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 win in an election year.)

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

It obviously couldn’t have been both a crisis, and something that could simply be put off for another year or so. So clearly, the whole thing was yet another foul, made up just to try to make the game go their way.

I honestly have my pick of literally hundreds more examples; times the goalposts shifted, the rules were different for the two sides, and the thing that was previously of crucial importance suddenly vanished from all public dialogue, or vice versa.

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, in exactly the same way Trump’s racist rhetoric wasn’t offensive, but Hillary Clinton using the word “deplorables” was.

Republicans were anti-Russia, until Trump was pro-Russia. Hell, they were anti-Trump, until Trump became the path to winning at any cost.

They were most certainly against election theft, and pro-democracy…until their guy tried to steal an election. We won’t see Harris demand that anyone goes and “finds votes” for her—but if we did, of course, that would suddenly be back to being absolutely unacceptable, after a brief hiatus that began the precise moment their team did it.

The proposition of abolishing the Constitution would have been the deepest, gravest conservative sin imaginable a few short years ago. But he said it, so it stopped being absurd and blasphemous and became acceptable instead.

They’re so pro-shifting-goalposts they even got the Supreme Court to declare that there aren’t goalposts for the President.

That’s how much they believe in “rules are for you; winning is for me.”

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. Trump won both 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, whose most ardent 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 taught to hate actual 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 even 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.

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 being the only ones the rules don’t apply to. And if they were going to do that—if they were even capable of that—it would’ve happened a long time ago.

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 their turn.

He cried this morning.

We all did.