Cockroaches at the Table

Imagine an inter-generational pairing, a child and an adult, out in public enjoying each other's company on a special occasion. The adult is pampering, buying gifts, and the two are spotted eating out at a restaurant. Maybe it is a birthday celebration, maybe it's just the kid's last day of school for the year. Imagine public displays of affection, flirting, walking hand in hand, and then imagine that this adult has no legal ownership of this child, nor in any way are the two related. Now you cringe.

Society does not know how to deal with that. The kind of culture we have is not ready for that. They're confused about what kind of person would do such a thing as described with a child (a piece of property owned by someone else), and their reactions are confused, like someone who encounters an entirely new species, similar to the portrayal (in film) of an archetypal plot of clash of interests over a new discovery - be it an ancient city, a new scientific discovery, a new alien species, a new bug, a monstrous organism or whatever. What do we do with it?

Some want to destroy it, some want to contain it, some want to preserve it and let it loose, some want to leave it alone entirely, while some want to exploit it. You'd think CL's are as cockroaches to human dwellings as bugs in human form. They're seen as an infestation upon a healthy host, something that is inserting itself where it doesn't belong. What we see in reality does not match what culture impregnates in our imagination. The sentimentalism of the theatre inserts itself upon the realities of life, and the child and adult at the table are no longer a child and adult enjoying an evening, but a vermin eyeing down a useless lump of helplessness.

While people acknowledge that they cannot make the CL extinct, they want to contain them as much as possible, or at least the inhuman part of their own projections--born out of their own inner urges. Few people proudly profess their love and in doing so kill the urges, many denounce the few and let their urges run amok, calling cockroaches where there are none and ignoring the fat one on their own plate.