My 4-year-old twin sons didn’t want to go home the other night. They wanted to play with their cousins.
And because they were tired and cranky and little and it was way past their bedtime, they cried their heads off.
As they wailed, I considered their point of view. They wanted to run around in the basement and sweat and play a new game they’d just created. It’s called “Knight Attack.” It is one of those games that never stop.
“You crash your guy into their guy, and the good knight wins,” the black-haired one explained. “Don’t stop us, don’t stop us, waaaaaaaa!”
“Pleeeeze, Daddy, pleeeze,” wailed the one with brown hair. “I don’t want to go. I want to stay here forever. I don’t want to go home!”
Then he escalated the crying, from a loud wail into that invisible register we call Silent Cry.
Silent Cry is the devious technique of crying without making a sound. Tears may or may not flow.
This makes parents even more guilty than normal and therefore more easily manipulated, just as the kids want them.
Soon all the kids, including their cousins, were engaged in one form of Silent Cry or another. It’s the same thing every time. Ask my brother and my sister-in-law. If you have kids, you’ve probably been in the same situation.
They’re having such a good time doing all sorts of exciting things that they don’t want to go home.
What’s so exciting about home, anyway?
Home is where they have to go to sleep at bedtime. Home is where they are told to eat farina for breakfast. Home is where they have to pick up their toys and say their prayers, and so on.
So, I understand why they didn’t want to go home. And if you are a parent, you understand it too.
Think of your kids not wanting to go home.
Now, just imagine that a few loudmouth politicians and bureaucrats agreed with them and decided to intervene.
“You don’t have to go home,” the politicians say. “You can stay here with us and have fun! We’ll keep you from your father. This is for your own good!”
As a parent, you’d be properly outraged. You’d fight them with everything you had. You’d use all your breath to damn them for the beasts they are.
And say some big-shot former beauty queen TV reporter walks up to your kids and coos at them past a Vaseline-smeared lens and asks them whether they want to stay near Disney World.
Why didn’t she ask the kids whether they wanted candy and ice cream for dinner?
Such a scenario would be anti-American, right? Naturally, people would be disgusted, as if they had touched something rotten in a dark place.
Like in the case of Elian Gonzalez.
You know the story of the 6-year-old Cuban boy. His mother drowned trying to bring him here from Cuba by boat. Now the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida have their hooks into him.
The Clinton administration wants to return the boy to his father, Juan Gonzalez, in Cuba. But the Cuban-Americans–a Republican constituency–want Elian to stay. They make beautiful speeches about why the little boy should remain in the U.S.
They say that Elian’s mother died trying to bring him to America and that we should respect her wishes and that Fidel Castro is a monster and so the child should stay in Florida.
Even the presidential candidates are playing the Elian game. The likely Republican nominee, Texas Gov. George Bush, wants Elian to remain in Florida.
Bush would normally oppose bureaucrats getting in the way between father and son, but since the father lives in a communist country, family values can be flushed in exchange for Electoral College votes. He did say that character counts, right?
And Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, also pandered to Florida Cubans. “That we’re going to send that child back is very disappointing to me and very disturbing,” he said.
The likely Democratic nominee,Vice President Al Gore, was too afraid to make a call and risk losing any hopes of capturing Florida in the fall. So Gore waffled like the windsock he is and said something cowardly and politic.
“My position has always been that this is a custody matter for the courts to decide based on due process,” said the man who claimed to have invented the Internet.
They’re all playing politics of one sort or another, in the presidential pen and in South Florida.
After all the talk and politicking, there’s simply this:
He’s a little boy. His father wants him and is ready to come here and get him.
It’s time for Elian to go home.
