Sometimes the best examples of the New York Times‘s increasingly delusional, anti-rational, anti-American and, let’s face it, anti-human-nature mindset are to be found not on the front page, where their slavish adoration of the Obama Administration continues apace, if somewhat diminished, but in the feature pages. There, their crackpot social theories and their chic cultural Marxism are given free rein to inject their slow-acting poison into the bloodstream of the body politic, with what serious consequences we can now all see after more than four decades of this nonsense. Which is why this piece, innocuously published in the Fashion & Style section, is so important.
If you want to encounter the smiling face of evil, read on:
A Best Friend? You Must Be Kidding
After all, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, the childhood “best friend” has long been romanticized in literature and pop culture — not to mention in the sentimental memories of countless adults.
But increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?
You read that right: the Times has just declared war on best friends. By now, nothing that emerges from that seething pile of maleficent animosity toward every decent thing should surprise us, but this is a new low, even for the paper that publishes Frank Rich. And it gets worse:
… the classic best-friend bond — the two special pals who share secrets and exploits, who gravitate to each other on the playground and who head out the door together every day after school — signals potential trouble for school officials intent on discouraging anything that hints of exclusivity, in part because of concerns about cliques and bullying.
“I think it is kids’ preference to pair up and have that one best friend. As adults — teachers and counselors — we try to encourage them not to do that,” said Christine Laycob, director of counseling at Mary Institute and St. Louis Country Day School in St. Louis. “We try to talk to kids and work with them to get them to have big groups of friends and not be so possessive about friends.”
“Parents sometimes say Johnny needs that one special friend,” she continued. “We say he doesn’t need a best friend.”
That attitude is a blunt manifestation of a mind-set that has led adults to become ever more involved in children’s social lives in recent years. The days when children roamed the neighborhood and played with whomever they wanted to until the streetlights came on disappeared long ago, replaced by the scheduled play date.
No, that attitude is a blunt manifestation of the timorous, fearful, feminized world in which the Times dwells and in which it would prefer we all lived. There’s a reason that the words “fears” and “worries” figure so prominently in the Times‘s headlines and have for decades now. It’s a world in which the hostile forces of “exclusivity” and “individualism” are always gathering outside the gates of the egalitarian, nurturing nanny state, ferocious, threatening Injun Joes from whom the helpless and the hapless must be protected.
And the cost? Only our liberty. To the Times and the lesser devils who orbit around it in this horrific rewrite of The Screwtape Letters, it’s a small price for their enemies to pay.
In recent years Timber Lake Camp, a co-ed sleep-away camp in Phoenicia, N.Y., has started employing “friendship coaches” to work with campers to help every child become friends with everyone else. If two children seem to be too focused on each other, the camp will make sure to put them on different sports teams, seat them at different ends of the dining table or, perhaps, have a counselor invite one of them to participate in an activity with another child whom they haven’t yet gotten to know.
“I don’t think it’s particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend,” said Jay Jacobs, the camp’s director. “If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child’s ability to explore other options in the world.”
This being a standard Times template, there are the obligatory few grafs indicating that there’s another side to the story. But you know where the writer’s and editor’s hearts are by how they choose to end the piece:
Schools insist they don’t intend to break up close friendships but rather to encourage courtesy, respect and kindness to all. “I don’t see schools really in the business of trying to prevent friendships as far as they are trying to give students an opportunity to interact socially with other students in a variety of different ways,” said Patti Kinney, who was a teacher and a principal in an Oregon middle school for 33 years and is now an official at the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
Still, school officials admit they watch close friendships carefully for adverse effects. “When two children discover a special bond between them, we honor that bond, provided that neither child overtly or covertly excludes or rejects others,” said Jan Mooney, a psychologist at the Town School, a nursery through eighth grade private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. “However, the bottom line is that if we find a best friend pairing to be destructive to either child, or to others in the classroom, we will not hesitate to separate children and to work with the children and their parents to ensure healthier relationships in the future.”
Who knew that when the Soviet Union finally collapsed, it would find a home on the west side of Manhattan?
Actually, we all did.
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