Every week columnists for our broadsheet papers have to come up with another offering. The easy option when inspiration runs dry: take some trivial event that’s happened to you – someone jostled you on the street, a shop assistant was rude, a car cut you up at the traffic lights – and write a “what does this tell us about the state our society’s in” article. Here’s Mick Hume in the Times today:
What happens when your children make friends on holiday and the other kids’ appalling parents want to be your friends too? Perhaps we have to stop allowing our offspring to run our lives.
They were words to fill any holidaying parent with dread. As our young daughters played on the sand with a German girl, her father turned to us and said (sorry, can’t do the accent): “Zo, vere shall ve all go togezzer tomorrow?” We had met barely 24 hours before, but now we were apparently inseparable. Since our children were getting on well, he assumed that we, too, must be instant best friends. So began a grim week of afternoons spent with people with whom we had little in common except the biological capacity to procreate. We happened to be in France. But wherever you holiday, chances are you have been there.
It is a symptom of the fact that our society is no longer simply child-centred — we have become child-obsessed. More than ever before, adults seem to be living out their lives through their offspring
No Mick, perhaps you have to stop your offspring running your life. Or, more accurately, perhaps you should learn how to politely decline the offer of friendship when it’s not welcome.
What does it tell us about the state our society’s in that our newspapers are full of such vapid nonsense?
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