by TIMMY, Alternate Reality Kidz News Service Parental Tech Writer
Adults are weird.
I mean, they go to Church to learn to love their neighbours, then they call their neighbours very bad words which we're not supposed to know (but which, of course, every kid has heard a gabillion times) because they let their dog Bowser poop on their front lawn. They tell us, "You'll understand when you're older," even though they're older and they clearly don't understand. They pretend kids haven't heard bad words a gabillion times even though they're the ones who say them in front of us.
They accuse people of being petophiles.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, said, "Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-petophile. They just voted for #KBJ." Personally, I like the idea that Senators Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney love cats or dogs or turtles or ferrets or cockatiels or boa constrictors or green cheese or whatever other animals people keep in the privacy of their own homes.
Tucker Carlson, for another instance, said on Fox News that there were "more accused petophiles on CNN [than] Americans who died of the so-called Omicron variant." I sometimes have to watch CNN when my parents do, and I have never seen any of their anchors go on about how much they love their furry, feathered, slimy or tasty friends, but I don't think it would be a bad thing if they did.
Besides, I love Missy Pelican, the family toucan. The way he sits on his perch and won't come out unless we feed him a specific brand of sugary cereal...out of our hands...which, yes, get pecked to the point of needing bandages to stop the bleeding, is adorable. But some adults want me to feel bad about how much I care for Missy Pelican.
Weird.
A related accusation adults sling at each other is that they are "groomers." Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' spokeswoman Christina Pushaw tweeted that anyone who opposes the bill prohibiting public school instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity is "probably a groomer." Right wing talk show host Tony Katz said: "The reason the political right uses the term groomer is that they're not going to be told by the political left what they can say. The political left says anything they want, the political right says something, the political left says, 'How dare you?' The political right says, 'We're sorry.' Well now the right's like, 'No, no, no, no. We don't care. We're going doubly. We're tripling down. We're just gonna do it.'"
Do what, exactly? Not all pets know how to wash themselves - maybe their parents were too busy playing Yahtzee to teach them how. It happens in the animal kingdom. People who groom their pets are doing them a favour - why do some adults insult them for it?
According to Billy, my older brother, the word petophile is made up of "ophile," the ancient Celtic word for lover and "pet," the modern English word for pet. I'm not sure how this furthers our understanding of the issue, but mom said I should mention Billy more in my writing, so I hope you're happy, bro!
"It's like...they take random words and make them sound bad and then apply them to anybody who disagrees with them," explained adult psychologist Millicent. "It's like everything they were taught about playing nice with other children has gone right out of their heads - ZAP! - gone!"
Millicent pointed out that before accusations of petophilia were being thrown about, adults on the right accused others of being "woke." This was much more understandable: nobody likes to be roused from a good slumber in order to go to - UGH! - school. But compared to being called petophiles, being called woke seems like a good long soak in a hot tub with a rubber ducky and plastic submarine.
Why do some adults think it's okay to be such meanies to other adults just because they don't believe in the same things? "Something clearly went wrong in their psychological development," Millicent claimed. "Maybe...maybe they weren't properly toilet trained when they were young. Maybe they saw something on television that they weren't old enough to properly understand, and it traumatized them."
Could they just be meanies? "We don't like to stigmatize adults by labelling them," Millicent responded, "but, yeah, that has to be considered a very real possibility..."