"You had a great childhood if..."

Seriously?

...you had a great childhood." That's pretty much it.

See, it doesn't come down to whether you owned a pair of Nike sneakers with the "red swoosh" or whether you swam in a lake or had a bike with a banana seat. A good childhood is bigger than that, right?

I know this is obvious, but it doesn't stop people (especially my age -- early fifties) from posting memes about irrelevant conditions and crediting them with the sum-total of our experiences as children. Yeah, I, too, traded baseball cards with my friends, and it is a fond memory, but it wasn't a fulfillment of the Coleridgean ideal, like a child running through the Somerset countryside.

And parents. If I see one more meme about how "great" a dad is because he does something entertaining, I am going to bite my computer. Just as my unenthusiastic licking of colored and tasteless ice crystals labeled as "Sno-Cones" didn't mean my youth was a stateof euphoria, a dad taking cute pictures and letting his daughter paint his toenails doesn't make him a "great dad."

I know what you are thinking: "Duh, Chris. It's just a way to point out the cuteness or the nostalgia. No one really believes these outward shows are indications of quality."

Maybe not. But, as with all things we are repeatedly presented with, these posts tend to nudge us farther and farther into superficiality in our casual thinking.

Staying out and riding my bike "until the streetlights came on" is a fond memory. My independence as a kid, being out and playing pick-up baseball and basketball games with my friends in the summer is something I wish kids today would do more of. But, they are only components of what I remember as a pretty darned good childhood.

What's the harm? Well, it reduces thinking into a real reliance of conditions and possessions. It places importance on material things: toys, clothes, styles. It's just more hum under the music of life. Even our nostalgia is becoming superficial. We're training our kids to someday post a picture of an XBox controller that says, "If you had one of these things in your hands fifteen hours a day, you had a great childhood." We should be nostalgic for that night we talked until the sun came up, not that we had a shore house in which to do it.

It wasn't the house that made that night great. It's not the toenail polish that makes the dad great. It's not the sneakers that make the childhood great. Dig?

Sure, the cute dad is adorable. But we need to stop calling him a "great dad" because he and his daughter are squishy and lovable. Last I checked, people didn't become parents for credit; to be recognized. They did it out of love and dedication to the formation of a healthy child.

To go back, once again, to Hamlet, we need less "seeming" and more "being" and these memes are not helping. (Let's face it, the whole Internet culture is about seeming, isn't it? Maybe it is an un-winable war I'm waging here. I just saw a meme about how "sexy" a good dad is. Yuck.)

We get anaesthetized. Great dads and great childhoods don't come down to appearance. They are about soul.

Is Libel Still a Crime?

I was going to write this as a kind of Swiftian "modest proposal" but it occurred to me, the longer I thought about it, that I am actually more serious about this than I thought.

Libel is still illegal, right? Is there also a law against intentional dissemination of false information? What about irresponsible dissemination of bad information? There should be, if you ask me.

What I think is this: there should be a fine for anyone who either intentionally or irresponsibly posts information that is not true or that falsely attributes statements to particular people. The ripples one bad post can cause can be very damaging if related to serious issues. They can also invalidate decision making in terms of things like voting.

Sometimes, it is just a matter of a desire for faithfulness to history. Did Einstein really say what everyone wants to believe he did? It's too easy to put a quotation on a picture of the man and pass it off as truth.

But how often do we see memes of politicians with quotations under them (usually under an extremely unflattering picture) that they never said. The people that post these have no criteria other than the fact that they want to believe it because they already feel a certain way about the person in question.

Then ends do not justify the means when it comes to false attributions. I know it serves the purpose of a conservative to make us believe that a liberal said that he would vote for Karl Marx if he were alive; I know might bolster the liberal cause to make us believe that a conservative said that we should dig Burmese tiger traps to catch immigrant children and stop them from coming across the border, but, doing this is wrong. Period. It doesn't lead to discourse, it leads to brawling. It can even be seen as defamation in some cases, which is a crime.