So this afternoon, when my son came home from school, he was
dragging something extra. He threw his books on the kitchen table and flashed
me a smile, heading to the fridge. I hated to ask, but I really couldn’t
resist.
“Hey son,” I asked, “who’s in the sack?”
“Oh” he said, opening the fridge door. “That's just my
date.”
“Your date?”
“Yeah. For the prom tomorrow.”
“Huh.” I regarded the burlap outline. “She can breathe,
right?”
He threw me a scornful look. “Uh, I need her for the prom,
duh. She can totally breathe!”
“Hm. Did you ask her first?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did you ask here to go to the prom?”
He scowled at me. My son doesn’t think I am very bright
sometimes. “Uh, Dad, she’s like in a sack.
What do you think?”
“So you didn’t ask her?”
He shrugged, taking a long pull at a milk bag, then wiping
his mouth. “Nah. Sack’s easier.”
“And she just… got into the sack?”
“As if. This has been going back and forth for like a week.
First I told her I was going to take her to the prom.” He makes a face. “She gets
all ‘oh, that’s so inapproooproiate!’ So I tell her OK, if she doesn’t want to
go with me, I’ll just kidnap her cat. She’s all over that cat, it’s like her boyfriend or something. Still she says
no.” He shrugs. “So I take the cat. Still
she says no. Then I threaten to shave it. Nothing. So then I tell her I’ll cut
a paw off the cat if she doesn’t come to the prom with me. She bursts into
tears.” He purses his lips in a thoughtful manner. “I don’t get it. She doesn’t
care about the cat, then all of a sudden she does? Oh well. So now I have a date!” he finishes proudly. “All it
took was a little persistence.”
“I’m not sure that she does want to go with you, son,” I
say. I don’t want to upset him. He’s been a little high-strung lately. I guess
he really misses his mom since she went away recently.
“What do you mean ‘she doesn’t want to come’?” he demands,
gesturing at the prone sack. “She’s here,
isn’t she?”
“Yeah, but you kind of had to start… um…” I swallow.
“…dismembering her cat, right?”
“Well sure, but she chose that too! She could have just
agreed to come to the prom with me in the first place!” His face is turning
red.
I try to keep my voice even. Sooooothing. “But she’s only
here because you threatened her. Don’t you see that she was willing to have her
cat kidnapped rather than go to the
prom with you?”
He held up his hand. I stopped.
“Dad…” he said softly. “There’s no need to get upset. I’m
just doing what she told me to do.”
My heart chilled a degree or two. “What? She…”
He beamed at me. “Sure! She
says that the government is what the people choose, and I said no, that doesn’t
seem right to me, because the government throws you in jail if you break the
rules, and the people don’t get to set the rules. And so she goes into this
loooong spiel about how basically the government does make you do stuff, but
only stuff you wanted to do anyway,
but probably just didn’t know it. I try to talk about the force, the stuff you
talk about, dad, you know, the ‘bun in the room’…”
“Gun in the room,” I say involuntarily.
“Right, right, but she doesn’t want to listen! She says the
government has the right to force you to do stuff because you’ve chosen the
government. I said that if you’re a good enough person that you can choose a
good government, why do you need to have all these guns pointed at you?” He’s
getting quite worked up now. “But nooo, apparently we’re all just good people
who want to do good things but we still
have to pay off the ‘good’ government or we get dragged off to jail!”
“Right,” I say. Sometimes I wish I’d waited for a
Libertarian society to emerge before having kids.
He taps his chin with his finger, staring at the sack. “So
then I think: hey, what if she’s right? What if when you force someone to do something, it’s actually what they would have
wanted to do anyway? So you’re not really forcing
them, you’re just…” He sighs. “I don’t know.” Then he brightens. “But I do have a date for the prom!”
“Son,” I said slowly. “I know you miss your mom, but she’ll
be released in a year or so. And you can’t go around dragging girls home in a
sack…”
“Girls?” he repeated scornfully. “She’s not a girl! She’s my political science
teacher.” He leans over the sack, raising his voice. “And she’s
been telling me and telling me that my mom chose
to go to prison, so now she’s choosing
to come to the prom with me!”
I signed, and leaned over to untie the sack, trying to
figure out – not for the first time, and not for the last – how to explain the bottomless depths of
human hypocrisy to my son.