Brainwashing the brainwashed
The Daughter and Grandkids were up here a week or so ago.
Everything was grand – we were chatting away, Sir Fartzalot was out in the garden freezing his arse off and Puppychild was mooching around as eleven year olds tend to do.
Herself took a cigarette out.
"You're not going to light that Granny?" says Puppychild with a face on her like an old judge. Herself sighed and put the cigarette away [temporarily as eleven year olds rarely hang around]. She then received a stern lecture on the terrible hazards of smoking and how she would drop dead on the spot if she looked at another fag. I listened in amusement as I puffed away on my pipe.
After Puppychild had mooched off I raised an eyebrow to the daughter. She sighed and said that apparently they had started brainwashing the kids up at the school. She admitted that she was now terrified in her own home and had to sneak out the back for a surreptitious puff before her own daughter caught her. Puppychild has been indoctrinated into the Anti Youth movement and has eyes like a hawk and a nose like a bloodhound.
This leaves me with a problem.
I have no qualms whatsoever in taking Puppychild to one side and demolishing every argument that has been pumped into her little brain. I have no problem whatsoever in telling her that second hand smoking is a load of bollox and that cigarettes aren't half as bad as the Nazis claim.
But I can't.
You see, I don't particularly want her to start as she's a tad young. When she reaches eighteen or so then it will be up to her and I have no problem with that.
And if I demolish all the Nazis' arguments could I be seen as encouraging her? And even worse, would she start contradicting her teachers [or whoever is brainwashing them in school] and get herself expelled?
It's tough being a Grandad.
I really don't care if she nags the hell out of her parents and anyone else she meets [that’s their problem] but I can't have her bossing Herself around.
That's my job.
Her mum should be demolishing the brainwashing rather than letting the kid rule the roost. And it's fine to say that you shouldn't smoke until you're old enough but you and everyone else are not going to be harmed in the slightest by second hand smoke.
And if she starts contradicting the teachers, surely that's a good thing.
I'm having a bit of a rough time with her mum too. For some reason she never wants to talk about it. She probably just has me down as an old crank. She even insists on smoking outdoors when visiting here despite my shouts to close the fucking door because it's fucking freezing.
I discovered at an early age that one thing schools here wil not tolerate is anyone questioning a religion.
I tend to agree with Bucko. Youngsters are better off knowing the truth. I actually think that it would be better coming from you, GD, rather than from her mum, so then if she's in school and the teacher starts with the bullshit, she can pipe up with "well, my grandad says…..", and there's not much they can do about it. If her mum tells her, then the school may well want to 'have a word'. And I don't think she would necessarily rush out and buy a packet of Rothmans – she's still not allowed to smoke at her age, regardless of whether her teacher is right or wrong.
I've had this conversation (in a low-key way) with my grandsons, who are 11 and 8, when they were here last summer. I don't want them to be indoctrinated with false information and bigotry.
OK so. Time for a little bit of Elderly Wisdom. I like the idea of "my grandad says" – easy enough to slide off the hook there. Next time she calls to stay over I'll give her a few lessons! I might even let her have a loan of one of my spare pipes.
In all seriousness though, it really pisses me off that she is being taught that her grandparents are killing themselves. What kind of an idea is that to load on a child?
It's totally wrong, GD. Kids should categorically NOT be propagandised. I feel the same about all the business of teaching them that homosexuality is the norm. It's not the norm, and telling them that it is doesn't help anyone. I honestly couldn't give a twopenny fuck what people choose to do in their private lives, but telling kids that this is something to aspire to is just fucked up. Political correctness is a warped philosophy, and anti-smoking is part and parcel of the PC ideology which is being foisted on kids nationwide.
And it's wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
What he said ↑
I picked up my 9 year old Godson from his Catholic school a couple of weeks ago and when I asked what he'd done that day, he told me they'd had a lesson about how some people do things that are dangerous on purpose and some things are dangerous accidentally. According to the teacher, smoking is the former and secondhand smoke is the latter. He said that at the weekend, he'd walked past a man with a cigarette and he got some of the smoke in his mouth and swallowed it. He told me that he was now very worried about this, had it hurt him and did he need to go to the doctors?
His parents are rabid non-smokers, so I didn't feel it was my place to talk to him truthfully about smoking but, because he was so worried, I told him the truth about secondhand smoke to put his mind at ease. I'm sure many teachers probably believe every word they must teach but schools, via tobacco control, have absolutely no business scaring kids like this
This is exactly the kind of thing that infuriates me. Kids are being loaded with all sorts of needless worries – that their parents are going to die or that they might have caught cancer from a passing cigarette. Apart from loading worries on a child it is also wrong to encourage kids to hector their parents [or grandparents].
Sadly it's just another bit of evil from Tobacco Control.