FOXSYLVANIA

— As we enter Easter week, it would seem that Peter Rottentail made an appearance at past Easter egg hunts at Bancroft Park in Colorado Springs, causing that event to be cancelled because of some parents leaping over guide ropes to blatantly grab eggs for their children!  This avarice caused other children to go eggless while some raked in the eggs,  and kinda spoiled the supposed mood of the event.  We will bypass tempting economic and political analogies represented by this occurrence to state the seemingly obvious to the offending parents and their ideological clones elsewhere:  egg hunts are for kids, to paraphrase the great Trix Rabbit, who can teach us much about the nature of desire, frustration, and deprivation. –Wise, long-suffering Trix Rabbit!   One may learn so much from him, and profit from his instruction!   But I digress…

Things seldom get as distasteful and as thoroughly messed up as when parents seek to live vicariously through their children, expressing their greed and Alpha-male dominance needs through them.   We can see this mentality represented in youth sporting events where some parents convey the notion through action and word that yes, winning is everything!   Some even curse other child competitors, or get into physical altercations with other parents.  It’s a mentality that their child is the only one in the universe, or that in a world of supposed equality, some are more equal than others, remembering George Orwell.

I shall mourn the tainting of the humble and lovely tradition of the Easter Egg hunt, which was never intended to be an ego-invested greed fest.  Perhaps it is as worldly philosopher Homer Simpson once observed that we all want the same thing:  preferential treatment!