Little Red Headgames

At the risk of sounding anti-children—which, you have to believe me, I'm really not— I'm just going to come out and say it: I am tired of being manipulated by a stream of propaganda that exploits the utter cuteitude of sundry (and unsuspecting) small children.

In defense of my seemingly heartless position, allow me to explain.

I was recently driving down I75, the large thoroughfare that runs through Dallas and connects it to the myriad of suburbs that have cropped up over the years. The suburban sprawl of the Dallas area is remarkable, really—at this point there are practically suburbs for the suburbs. Cities/towns like McKinney, Allen, Richardson, and Plano have been absorbed into the unending fabric of the DFW metroplex, and it's difficult to tell where one ends and the next begins.

This is further complicated by confusing patterns in street-naming, obviously intended as some city planner's idea of a cruel joke. For example, while driving through Plano you are afforded three distinct options: you may exit at Parker, Park, or Plano Parkway. Oh but wait—Parker is closed, so you'll have to take Park to get to Parker. Or is it Park that's closed, and you're routed through Parker to get to Park? In all likelihood, you'll probably overshoot them both and make it all the way to Plano. Parkway. The road, not the city. You're already in the city. What?

As I was saying, I was driving down I75. Of course, to say I was "driving" would lead one to believe that I was clipping along at a splendid pace. In reality, I was edging along I75, squashed between an oversized minivan and a dusty Camaro with fuzzy dice swinging in the breeze. I had plenty of time to breathe in the mind-clearing aroma of exhaust fumes and reflect philosophically upon the crack in my windshield that seemed to be spreading, slowly but surely, all the way across the dash.

Suddenly, something on the overpass a few hundred feet ahead of me caught my eye. There was a sign on it, a large white sign draped across the bridge. It featured an adorable little girl, her blonde hair in pigtails and her eyes wide and wondering. Beneath the girl in large block letters was a message. It read, "PLEASE SLOW DOWN. MY DADDY WORKS HERE."

Here we have the newest tactic for making motorists obey the speed limits: heaping portions of child-induced guilt.

Some 5-year-old Ford model just made two grand for a one-hour photo shoot. Is her daddy really working ahead? Hell no. He's probably on Wall Street trading stocks and flirting with his nubile secretary who, incidentally, speeds like hell. But by god, this little girl is the symbol of a hundred little girls whose daddies really are working construction ahead. It's all hypothetical. And with that hypothetical daughter staring at me with those hypothetically pleading eyes, I'll be damned if I'm going to hit 80 with the crushing prescience that I might injure/ kill/throw gravel in the face of her hypothetical hard-hat-wearing father.

Modern advertisers are so damn sneaky.

I wonder if children know they're being used as such effective instruments of guilt. This brings to mind an incident that occurred at Amherst several years ago. The Little Red Schoolhouse—aptly named in that it is both little and red, and is also a schoolhouse—sits smack in the middle of the social quad. Not the ideal place for a schoolhouse to be situated, you say? A valid point. But the schoolhouse was actually there before the social dorms were built around it, and evidently the builder saw no conflict of interest between a diminutive schoolhouse where kids learn their ABCs and five large dormitories where older kids learn about LSD.

As was bound to happen, problems ensued.

The social dorms at Amherst are devoted to one primary principle: perpetual partying. In keeping with the P-theme, peeing is common, particularly public peeing by drunken exhibitionists. Not surprisingly, the brick walls of the Little Red Schoolhouse are often chosen as the ideal urinals, and a diverse artistic display of pee stains has enriched the wall for many years, adding to the history and legacy that is Amherst College. But in 2005, the playful antics of hammered college students took a decidedly more sadistic turn, and instead of peeing, there was violence: some rugby player, enraptured with his drunken machismo, took a slugger to one of the windows. A few days later, one of his teammates did the same. And the little children's dreams were shattered in shards of broken glass.

Within a few days, they had their comeuppance. The teachers at the Little Red Schoolhouse had devised a brilliant plan. A sign started circulating around the school, appearing on bulletin boards and stuck under dorm room doors. The sign was a simple piece of paper featuring a child's depiction of the Little Red Schoolhouse, a ruddy drawing in crimson and gold crayon with stick people with bubble eyes and big bubble tears rolling down their cheeks. The message, scrawled in heartbreaking child's handwriting, was simple.

“Please stop breaking the windows in our little red schoolhouse.”

Rip my heart out with a rubber eraser and fingerpaint it black.

A few weeks after the initial posters went out, some anonymous smartass from the socials decided to make his own set of posters in response. These circulated around the campus, too, to a chorus of smirks and closeted chuckles.

This picture showed a circle of devil-children running around the Little Red Schoolhouse playground, screaming and hollering and devil-dancing in infantile glee. In similarly childish handwriting, the mysterious defendant had written:

"Please stop waking me up at 7 am on Monday mornings. I'm hungover as shit."