Dispelling a Myth

Occasionally, I see weird stuff cross my Facebook feed, generally from people who seem incredibly obsessed with sexual items, gender identity, and children, to the point where I think they may have a mental illness of some sort.

One of the weirder ones that some local folks continually insist is happening in our schools it something called "furries."

Allegedly, this involves young people dressing up as animals, speaking only as that animal would, and using litter boxes.

Reuters looked into this in July and found absolutely no instances of this taking place in public schools, yet there is a segment of the population that insists this happens. The New York Times refuted it in January.

There is not a single legitimate news site that pops up that corroborates anything about this. While some might consider The New York Times to lean left, Reuters is, as best I can tell, one of the most middle-ground news media groups out there.

I certainly do not think it is happening in my local public schools, even though I see posts that insist it is. There are never facts involved, just hearsay (my friend said her friend said she saw it happen) and I honestly find the people posting these things can trip out mentally over practically anything - they are incredibly sensitive and easily riled up over any perceived slight that doesn't meet their idea of a perfect world, whatever that is.

I do not believe this is happening at all, except maybe in some cosplay somewhere (like pretending to be a superhero), and in the minds of folks who apparently need better things to do with their time.

But let's pretend, just for a moment, that this allegation is true. That all over the United States, we have a percentage of children who are dressing up as dogs or cats.

Nobody asks why this would be happening. Why would children suddenly want to be animals?

Might it be because we take better care of our pets than our children?

Perhaps they see momma kissing on the pup while she screams at the kids?

Or they see dad idly stroking the purring cat while he's looking at his smart phone, and then yells at the kids for distracting him?

If this is a constant in their world, wouldn't the children, at some point, conclude that the parents love the animals more than they love their children? Wouldn't they do whatever they felt they had to obtain their parents' attention and love?

And if this is the case, then don't we have a parenting problem, not a school problem? Don't we have here a perfect (though fictional) example of horrid parenting gone wrong?

But these posts never blame the parents, never consider what might cause this kind of action on the part of a child. The posts just announce their horror that the school system might be taking this seriously and adding litter boxes to the bathrooms.

As I said earlier, I think this involves a sick mental illness on the part of the protesting posters, who want desperately to believe this kind of thing is actually happening for whatever reason.

It is part of the weirdness we have going on right now - we have a subset of the population who literally are making up stuff to upset other people. These folks who believe these types of lies and fairy tales are living in an alternate reality, some kind of fantasy that I cannot pretend to understand. Nor do I want to.

Instead of simply passing on stuff as truth and being outraged about it, whatever happened to asking questions, such as why would this be happening? Or doing a little fact checking to see if it's real or just some strange thing someone's put out there to rile up nervous people?

What will it take to shake some of these folks out of their bubble, and back into the real world?