The Unpopular Position

This country has a child problem. It’s not the children themselves, who after all will ensure the continued existence of human civilization if we can avoid a nuclear war, and serve as a source of high-protein food if we can’t. It’s the parents. Like the lifelong smoker who thinks his jacket smells fine, they’ve spent so much time with their children that they regard the presence of a shrieking, silverware-drumming homunculus as the default human condition. It’s not. The default human condition is loneliness, as any 32 year-old man who works out of the one-bedroom apartment where he lives with his stereo can tell you. As such, I regard the presence of children in restaurants, coffee shops and airplanes not as some sort of force majeure, but as a force vous douchebags, and I believe you should take responsibility for it. 

A bunch of assholes.

So does Southwest Airlines, albeit only kind of. Last month, they ejected a woman from a plane bound for San Jose because her two year-old son wouldn’t stop screaming. According to the flight crew, young Adam Root was shouting “Go plane, go!” and “I want to see Daddy!” so loudly that other passengers could not hear safety announcements. According to Pamela Root, Adam is a precious gift from heaven, whose tantrum surely would have stopped once the plane took off and it was, coincidentally, impossible to make them leave. Southwest has since apologized to the Roots and presented Pamela with a refund of her ticket, plus a $300 flight voucher, although Pamela still wants to be compensated for the portable crib and diapers she had to purchase during her and Adam’s extra night away from home. 

Root’s argument—and Southwest apparently agrees—is that her child’s behavior on the airplane is somehow not her fault. I suppose that’s true, in the same sense that it’s not my fault that my dog tried to hump your wedding cake; however, one is forced to ask who drove him to the reception. Adam Root presumably did not buy his own ticket to San Jose, and for Pamela Root to give birth to him, fill him full of apple juice, bring him on an airplane and then say its not her fault he started screaming is like bringing your boom box to a funeral and saying you couldn’t help it that “Poker Face” came on. Pamela Root is responsible for the places that Adam Root ruins, because Adam Root can’t go anywhere on his own.

Please store all yappy children in the overhead compartment, where fellow passengers won't have to hear or smell them.

At this point in the argument—and I have it often—most parents will say, “So, what, I should just stay home until my kid turns six?” It’s a rhetorical question, designed to expose the harshness of my position, which is why it gives me such pleasure to answer yes. You should totally stay home until your kid turns six, or get a babysitter, or confine your outings to Chuck E. Cheese until such time as your company does not include a person who loudly and compulsively announces his intention to poop. Is that unfair to young mothers? It would be, if I had impregnated them myself. But bumper stickers on I-80 notwithstanding, a child is a choice. Strangely, however, it seems to be a choice that, once made, erases all memory of what came before it.