Children & Other Wicked Things

Children. What do we do with them? But a few years before the renowned British author C. S. Lewis penned his famous series The Chronicles of Narnia, he stated matter-of-factly, in his book The Abolition of Man, that he did not enjoy the society of small children, quick then to state that he recognized this to be a defect within himself. Not a few of us are well pleased that this defect was curbed and disposed of. Two hundred years before that, give or take a year or two, Irish writer Jonathan Swift penned A Modest Proposal, his essay For Preventing The Children Of Poor People In Ireland From Being A Burden To Their Parents Or Country, And For Making Them Beneficial To The Public. In his proposal he suggests ways of cooking these children, thus making them beneficial indeed to the public, and perhaps especially to a poor public. Using some of Swift s satirical wit as a springboard, and not at all siding with the defective version of C. S. Lewis, I present to you, reader, a new travesty of stories that, without doubt, shall cause you to look at the society of children, small or otherwise, in a light wholly dissimilar to the one you have previously viewed them in. It is my prayer, though, that your proposal in regard to them be far gentler than that projected by our satirical Irishman. We were all children once. And some of us still are.