| SMALL
CHILDREN JUST DON'T GET IT
 Despite
all the publicity to the contrary, it is now clearer
than ever that small children still just don't get it.
It seems like everywhere you look these days,
you see small children playing with blocks, eating ice cream,
asking their parents to take them to ball games, running through
sprinklers, and all those other things that-- if you listen
to the recent pronouncements of some-- were long ago made
ancient history.
 Nowhere
is the faulty thinking of small children laid bare more clearly
than in the aisles of toy stores, where children as old as
four and five will often sit on the floor and hold toy airplanes
over their heads, waving them in a circle, as though they
were "flying." In groups of two or more, children in such
places will often hold mock "fights" using action figures,
sometimes even holding up the little toy figurines and making
noises like "Pyew! Pyew" and "Plllshhhh!" to simulate the
sounds of bullets and exploding hand grenades, respectively.
As if that weren't bad enough, small children
continue to run incorrectly. Adults, when they run, run with
careful attention to even weight distribution, and they run
very fast, without falling. Small children run spastically,
with their arms at their sides, and they run as much up and
down as they do forward; you can often hear their feet slapping
against the ground as they chase after something. And they
often fall down, seemingly for no reason at all, and will
look up at you with stunned faces once they have, pausing
for a moment before beginning to cry.
Children think sledding is fun. In fact, sledding
is a mere demonstration of the laws of gravity. They would
do just as well to push their sleds along even ground and
simply consider that, if the ground were to suddenly slope
downward, their sleds would follow without the additional
application of energy.
Here in Buffalo, children are everywhere.
At almost any hour of the day during summer, one can find
them in Delaware Park, running around in circles and chasing
hopelessly after dogs. From time to time one can even see
them on public tennis courts, standing next to their instructors
with comically oversized rackets in their hands, obviously
pained by the very concept of organized lessons. More frequently
than not, children in summer wear little shorts and t-shirts,
their carefully-tied laces a touching visual testament to
the parental instinct for care and attention.
What these children fail to understand is
that this editorial is going absolutely nowhere, that no matter
how hard we try, we can find no possible way to maintain its
faux-sarcastic tone long enough to keep it from collapsing
under its own inherent poverty of inspiration. These children
would do well to consider that this editorial was doomed from
the very start, that the ending was poorly thought-out, and
that, were he resurrected from the dead and chained to this
very terminal, Franz Kafka himself could not wrestle a laugh
line out of these last few paragraphs.
It is all very well and good for small children
to spend their days collecting Pokemon stickers and pulling
each others' hair. But in these dark times, with our country's
citizens laboring under the weight of a constant terrorist
threat, we all deserve a more satisfying end to this sentence.
While they tumble down slides and play on swings, a skillful
use of parallel structure continues to elude us, leaving even
this latest comparison stillborn on the page.
The thing about children is that most of them
are very small. You never see one dunking a basketball or
effectively pass-blocking at the NFL level. If you did, that
would really be something.
Is there still time for children to get the
message? We here at the BEAST think so. With the will to effect
change and the right amount of federal funding, we feel confident
that they are equal to the task of correcting this problem
that we have so far failed here to define. Will they manage
to take that step? That's not for us to know. One thing's
for sure, however: time will tell.
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