The US is failing its children
Plus: how isolation, stress and paranoia is making everybody crazy
There’s a viral TikTok currently making the rounds on Twitter of a middle-aged man having a bizarre meltdown on a plane to Orlando, Florida because of a crying baby. “You’re yelling,” a flight attendant tells the guy at one point, trying to calm him down. “So is the baby!!!” the guy yells back. “Well, you’re a man,” the flight attendant answers.
It’s an objectively funny exchange. Still, I’ve found it disconcerting how many people on Twitter seem to think that this grown adult man didn’t just make some points, but was completely justified in screaming and swearing at an infant (he refers to the baby as “that motherfucker”).
Asshole-on-a-plane incidents, as well as other erratic and antisocial behaviors, have all skyrocketed since the beginning of the pandemic. “What on earth is happening?” Olga Zhazan asked last year for the Atlantic. “How did Americans go from clapping for health-care workers to threatening to kill them?” From her reporting, Zhazan discovered a few possible explanations for why everybody’s acting so weird lately: we’re stressed out; we’re drinking more; we’re social beings who spent so long in isolation that we’re still feeling those negative affects. But “experts think human interaction will, eventually, return to the pre-pandemic status quo.”
A year later, however, when the majority of Americans seem to be going about their lives as if the pandemic is a thing of the past (it isn’t), everyday human interaction in this country hasn’t gotten any better. It seems, in fact, much worse.
Gun violence and gun ownership in the US are both on the rise. There were seven mass shootings this past Saturday, the most of any day this year. Nearly 1 in 5 adults in America has a family member who’s been killed by a gun. As I wrote in my post last month about the TikTok ban, child and teen mortality rates in the US have just experienced their highest increase in decades, largely thanks to gun violence.
I can’t stop thinking about Ralph Yarl, the Black teenager in Missouri shot by a paranoid old white man when he knocked on the wrong door, and 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis, shot and killed when she and her friends pulled into the wrong driveway in rural New York, and Payton Washington, a teenage Texan cheerleader shot after mistakenly trying to get into the wrong car, and Kinsey White, age 6, shot along with her parents and other family members when a neighbor was upset that a basketball had rolled into his yard. All of these children were shot just this week.
It’s terrifying, what Connecticut senator Chris Murphy in a speech on the Senate floor called “a dystopia that we've chosen for ourselves.” Though I wonder who, exactly, he means by “we.” Certainly Murphy’s fellow lawmakers at the state and federal levels are choosing the accumulation of ever more money and power over actually fucking doing something about the terror and violence visited daily upon our schools, our churches, our homes. But we, the American people, did not choose this. Children least of all.
The slaughter of 26 elementary schoolers and their teachers in Newtown, Connecticut was over a decade ago now. At the time my baby brother was sitting in his own fifth grade classroom half an hour away. That should have been our galvanizing moment, shouldn’t it? When we finally said enough dead kids? Instead, gun violence has since surpassed car accidents for the leading cause of death in American children.
The United States is failing kids. As the authors of last month’s study on child mortality wrote, “this increase in all-cause pediatric mortality has ominous implications. A nation that begins losing its most cherished population—its children—faces a crisis like no other.”
Kids are dying, more and at higher rates in this country than almost anywhere else in the western world: from guns, from cars, from drugs, from suicide, from abuse, from poverty. And the ones who do manage to survive their childhoods in America are increasingly deprived of essential resources, from education to housing to healthcare.
I was brought to tears a few weeks ago while watching little girls in Florida talk to the local news about all of the books being removed from their libraries: the best, most award-winning books, they said, leaving only “babyish” stuff behind. An astonishing 44 states have introduced legislation calling to limit the teaching of “critical race theory,” a term which Republicans (mis)use as shorthand for anything and everything that acknowledges the existence of systemic racist oppression. And so children of all races, all over the country, are being denied access to sacred texts: books that are entertaining, educational, and life-affirming—lifesaving, even. A lot of formerly suicidal teenagers, myself included, can tell you that books save lives.
Florida has aggressively cracked down on “CRT,” of course, and as was expected, the state just expanded its “Don’t Say Gay” law to cover all public education from K-12; it’s also banned gender-affirming care for minors. At least 12 states by now have banned some form of gender transition related care for under-18s, and 19 other states are considering similar legislation—meaning that countless parents have to put their children through the profound trauma of detransitioning or else attempt to flee their homes. My TikTok FYP has been flooded with videos of sobbing and terrified trans teenagers.
State governments aren’t planning to stop at the disenfranchisement and torture of trans children. Conservatives know that getting people on board with state control over kids’ transitions, or preventing kids from going to drag shows, are the easier sells—springboards to the ultimate goals of banning all forms of gender-affirming care, all drag shows, all public displays of gender nonconformity. We’re already seeing this play out in Missouri, which last week became the first state to announce restrictions on transition care for minors and adults alike.
Attacks on trans rights, like those on abortion, are inextricable from growing white supremacist anxieties about the declining domestic birthrate. The bodily autonomy of women, girls, and people of all genders is once again sacrificed at the altar of some hypothetical future Innocent Child who does not yet, and might never, exist.
Kylie Cheung in Jezebel this week notes how the Christian right “frequently adultif[ies] pregnant children,” who by becoming pregnant are now no longer children themselves but mere vessels, incubators, for the future Innocent Child. “Just earlier this year,” Cheung writes, “a bill in Tennessee that would threaten rape victims who seek abortions with three years in prison for ‘lying’ about being raped referred to child victims as young as 12 as ‘women.’”
Last month, the New York Times published an expose of a “new child labor crisis in America”—yet another terrifying indication of the ways the United States is “adultifying” its children. The Times investigation found that migrant kids are being employed around the country in factories that produce materials for some of the biggest companies in the world. Last month, young children were discovered working at a Tyson Foods factory in Arkansas (the second-largest employer in the state), and soon afterward the Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, signed a law allowing companies to employ minors more easily. Over the past couple of years, 10 states have introduced or passed legislation rolling back child labor protections that had been in place for decades.
I want so much better for children. Don’t you? Their mental health is in crisis. They are being denied access to the few public spaces available to them. They’re forced to work, to read what the state allows them to, to closet themselves, to carry and birth their rapist’s babies. All in the land of the free.
Our empathy for and solidarity with young people should be at an all-time high right now. And yet childism—what the late political theorist Elizabeth Young-Bruehl defined as "a prejudice against children on the ground of a belief that they are property and can (or even should) be controlled, enslaved, or removed to serve adult needs”—seems only to be on the rise. That guy screaming about a baby crying on his flight doesn’t care that little humans’ sensitive ears can’t take the cabin pressure. He wants the child, the issue, dealt with. “It shouldn’t be our problem when you can’t control your kid,” say all the horrible people on the internet who call babies “cum pets.”
If you’re not a big fan of kids, I get it. I am all for destigmatizing and supporting #childfree lifestyles. But flights are public spaces, and other people’s children have just as much of a right to occupy public space as any of us do. Babies have absolutely nothing to do with the fact of their own existence, and it’s absurd, as well as absurdly cruel, to punish them for it, or to expect and demand they be controlled into submission.
I’m sorry to say that the plane guy wasn’t the antisocial meltdown that disturbed me the most this week. No, that grim award has gotta go to all these men destroying cases of Budweiser in protest of the beer company’s partnership with trans TikToker Dylan Mulvaney. People are losing it, and it is fucking scary.
Conservative media, of course, just keeps ramping up the anti-trans, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-everything paranoia. Fox News may have had to fork up an astonishing $787.5 million for defaming Dominion Voting Systems, but they remain the most-watched cable news network in the United States. No one would be surprised to hear that the 84-year-old who twice shot Ralph Yarl in the head had in recent years gone “further down the right-wing rabbit hole.” The man’s grandson told the Kansas City Star that watching Fox News and OAN had “radicalized him in a lot of ways.”
I hope that, with this newsletter, and with my one little life on this earth, I can contribute to the cause of radicalizing people in a profoundly different direction. Because we don’t have to live this way. Kids deserve better. And us grownups do too.
Thanks so much for reading. I know this was another bleak one. Real dark days lately, huh?
I was devastated to learn the news earlier today that CEO Jonah Peretti is shuttering the BuzzFeed newsroom, where I spent almost eight years of my career. Dozens of my brilliant former colleagues are now without jobs. It’s just gutting.
I had a few freelance stories in the works with BuzzFeed that I can only assume aren’t happening now, which sucks, since I was relying on that income for the next couple months. (It doesn’t suck as much as losing your whole job, obviously!!! But it still sucks a little bit.) Now would be a fabulous time to upgrade your newsletter subscription. Just $5 a month! If you’ve valued my work in the past and/or would like to see more of it in the future, I’d be so enormously grateful for the support. I quite literally cannot do it without you.
xxSK