A New Gripe

I have a new gripe with Germans. To be fair, this is not so much a gripe with Germans as it is with yuppie mothers. To be even fairer, this is not so much a gripe with yuppie mothers as it is a gripe with one particular yuppie mother who walks up and down our street, praying to Xenu. Or something.

Have you ever seen a baby on an operating table? It is truly a tragic image. It juxtaposes the innocence and symbolism of life that is newborn baby with the bleakness and sterility of an operating room. It is pretty much an image that universally invokes sadness and a sense of loss or helplessness in seeing what is in its essence humankind's future undergoing the uncertainty that should be spared this cherished and lovable creature.

Now imagine that you could invoke those exact feelings in yourself and in everyone around you wherever you go!

That's right. I'm talking about baby carriages that look like operating tables. Yes, they exist. Don't pretend that they don't. I know they exist. I've seen at least two.

The first time I saw one, I couldn't help but stare. There was a mother pushing her baby child on what can only be described as a Star Trek crash cart. The infant child lay naked and uncertain of itself under a bright, white light as its mother, who was wearing all white, pushed the cart and stared expressionlessly into the baby's frightened face.

Okay, I'm exaggerating just a little. But that is exactly the image I had in my mind as the yuppie mother walked by.

Now, the way I see it, there are only three reasons a mother would push her baby around on a futuristic crash cart.

(1) She is expecting the baby to have heart failure at any minute, and this is a rather keen way to avoid wasting time as the paramedics transfer her baby from a normal carriage to a real crash cart.

To me, this first scenario is the least likely scenario. And that's because, as everyone knows, mothers don't actually like their children. Quite the opposite. What with changing diapers constantly, the whining, waking you up in the middle of the night, preventing you from having a proper sex life with multiple partners, and not to mention the boogers and snot and whatnot, you mothers really hate your children. So that's why, when you're pushing your mewling cabbages around in your fancy carts, you are constantly thinking of ways to push the cart in front of oncoming traffic and make it look like an accident. What you don't realize is that men also hate babies, and if you did it the rest humankind would congratulate you for your contribution to population control. Given this hard and undeniable fact about mothers, I very much doubt that this particular mother has thought ahead so much in order to save her child from possible heart complications. Indeed, with the carelessness of most mothers, I'm surprised children make it to the age of three.

(2) The second reason is Scientology. I am going to be very honest here, and say that I don't really know much about Scientology. I am also going to go out on a limb, and say that you probably don't know much about Scientology, either. As with most things, however, you and I probably know enough about Scientology to be able to make fun of it. So the crash cart from space is probably actually an Alter of Scientology. You see, only an all-American religion like Scientology would have a mobile alter, because America is the land of mobility. It could be that this particular yuppie mother pushes her baby around on an alter on the off chance that the world will come to an end, and she wants to be ready to sacrifice her own flesh and blood child so that her soul will be spared in the Great Purging (does Scientology have a Great Purging? Answer: ALL religions have a Great Purging).

Now this scenario is only slightly more likely that the first one. I actually can't imagine, after reading three or four paragraphs on Wikipedia, that any Scientologists are intelligent enough to think that far ahead.

(3) The third reason is by far the most likely of the three. I'm basically just revisiting the first scenario, but turning it on its head. You see, mothers really do loathe their children. However, because mothers are under the impression that the law would intervene if they outright killed their children, some mothers must resort to emotional scarring as a means of relieving their hatred and loathing. (As a note of seriousness, emotional scarring is NOT a crime in the industrialized nations. It should be. You may be thinking that we have laws to prevent abuse. No we don't. If we did, parents would not be allowed to tell their children that they will go to hell unless they do what their parents say. Religion would have been eradicated within a generation of the passing of such a law, trust me. Just look at all of the disorders and neurosis, and tell me that many parents don't practice emotional scarring as part of their daily routine). So what did this mother do? She put her kid on an operating table. How does this scar the kid? Well, for one, it will make the kid always feel comfortable on an operating table. Aside from developing a morbid affinity for operating rooms, the kid will probably become a hypochondriac as an adult. The crash cart carriage also has the effect of making perfect strangers look down at the child with the sense of sadness and helplessness, as discussed above, present in their facial expressions. The kid will only know those two emotions, and will come to expect nothing else from perfect strangers for the rest of its long, miserable life.

Happy belated Mother's Day, Mom!