[1082] Dead Kids

We're post-Thanksgiving where many are reminded of the family members they wish had died in the womb or gotten mercifully aborted. If you haven't heard the "joke" about fighting with the "conservative uncle" 4 to 10 thousand times by now, you're probably lost in the woods and better off.

I was listening to a boring article on who artists thank in their Grammy acceptance speeches. At the end, the author links to a Nail Horan music video called "Heaven." It's a good song.

The first comment says, "my son passed away 2 weeks ago and we came out of the funeral home and heard it in the car. . . .I cried my eyes out and thought it was my son telling me hes in Heaven ."

Of course they did.

This isn't the first dead child scenario in the last couple weeks I've been a party to. In one of my latest facebook pissing matches, a guy referenced his daughter dying of cancer and him getting an "undeniable" sign that she had manifested for him shortly after. On my ride home from the movie theater, I was listening to "If Books Could Kill," which was excoriating Mark Manson for speaking to the personal responsibility for your feelings you might have to take in the face of, you guessed it, your child dying.

The hosts were clumsily trying to side-step hearing any explicit advice from Mark's (lazy) reiteration of different philosophical or religious schools of thought. To be sure, it's unclear if Manson even knows what schools he was pulling from, but that's not the point. They ridicule him for "relitigating a comment on his blog" and proceed to assert a definition for trauma. Then they claim they don't believe you can take your pain and segway it into something else or change what you're feeling. The other host chimes in, "It's actually much better advice to give yourself permission to feel the way you feel." This is a separate concurrent idea on how you heal and "move on," not a competing one.

I can forgive two sides completely un and ill-informed about trauma-informed care with competing agendas and audiences. I can't help but notice how stark of an example this feels. It's these misalignments that get baked into the air-headed zombie-jokes about holiday fights. It's the pithy attitude we adopt alongside catastrophized language. The real opportunity is lost. Namely, when you're discussing dead kids, the chance to access how much you don't really give a fuck about them.

The most harrowing example of the dead kid theme has been watching "20 Days in Mariupol." How do you get the haunting sound of parents grieving over their dead children out of your brain? How do you wash the images of the blood and missing body parts? Well, there's a few ways, and they start with the idea Manson spoke to and the podcast hosts belittled. You accept responsibility for your feelings on what you're hearing and seeing.

What does that look like? What is the practical first step you take? Here, I've stood in active fascination and wonder about every parent. When you have your children, are you, somehow, under the impression they can't die? I ask this question in all sincerity, because it's the most "boring" fact I can land on when discussing the reasons for having children. Depending on how or whether you bother to ask and accept the litany of questions regarding the morality, responsibility, or fallout of your children says considerably more about you than you may have intended.

Do you want to "accidentally" find yourself in league with the most ardently irrational and proud conservative Christians touting the sanctity of life as they let mothers die and children suffer neglected indefinitely? They aren't taking responsibility for the death and destruction they cause because they aren't owning how little they give a fuck about anyone besides themselves and their narrative.

We treat dead kids as political footballs. We're ambivalent to how many of them die for preventable reasons. We don't care how many are in foster care. We don't care, after we've assumed the worst about a given family, what we do to their bonds or how we approach "helping" them. I'm lucky enough to have seen this first hand at DCS and then get to compare it to our cultural narratives and responses from different media and entertainment outlets.

Why did The Sound of Freedom get so much press? Because it was true? Certainly wasn't lol. Because anyone knows the statistics or cares about abducted kids? Definitely not that. I had to literally do the math in one of my addiction groups to explain that if what the movie and media outlets were reporting was true, it would be like 1 in 4 kids that would be going missing every year. I then asked the group members if they knew even one person who had a missing kid or could recall the last story about one. Crickets.

I can watch the horrors of war and remain "unphased" because it's not lost on me how fucked everything is. It's not and never a surprise. I can kick around baby heads in my brain and recognize those as "just thoughts" I don't need the veneer of horror films or speculative nonsense "news" to depict for me. We exist on that line of remotely cordial progressive evidence-based inching into the future and utter annihilation every single moment. You have to take responsibility for how that plays out in your own mind, or not. You can suffer under the illusion your children can't die and let it turn you into someone who feels noble for attacking those who speak otherwise.

If you cared about dead kids, or suffering kids, or kids under greater threats than you've ever experienced you know what you do? You get honest about what they need, and then you pay for those needs. You track and report on progress, and you punish people who undermine your effort. You accept what role you may have played, even just in your ignorance, in why some of them died. Your household probably employed the "There's starving kids in Africa…" idea for generations having never donated as you practiced waste and gluttony.

These mythical narratives regarding our own nobility and perspective keep things the way they are. If you believe, at any level, a bird landing on your shoulder or Nail Horan's latest belief-adjacent track is evidence of the afterlife, you're just doing denial work. You're justifying how little of fucks you give verses accepting it. You're not actually comfortable with yourself and the choices you'd have to make to do better. You're an addict for the bullshit. You're running.

I want one dead relative to unambiguously write something that has nothing to do with nature, religious imagery, or a song to indicate they are "somewhere." Give me any piece of evidence I can't find in a cliche Hallmark movie. It's like everyone's "haunted house" stories where no ghost can be bothered to indicate how scary or unresolved they are except in ways that suspiciously sound like drafty basements, attics, and house's settling or breaking down.

You are a monster, and that's okay, because you have agency. If you deny your agency, we all suffer the monstrous consequences of your behavior. You don't care about damn near anything but yourself. You don't work on things you "intellectually" know you need to, but don't feel particularly inclined to even see, let alone act on. You could watch Donald Trump shoot a child in the face in the middle of the road, and your brain would scroll past that as quick as the next meme. We'd keep on scrolling and scrolling until we're into Putin levels of fascism and Hamas levels of pride and certitude.