You remember the Paddington Bear you slept with as a child and the Easter bunnies strewn around the house every springtime and those pink cuddly animals on the dashboards of girls’ cars in Upper McInnis Lot. Are those fond memories? Do they make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
They shouldn’t. Stuffed animals may be some of the most urgently dangerous objects on the earth at this time. Unlike guns and hydrogen bombs, which merely damage people physically, they create harmful mental connections and distort the minds of many.
Stuffed animals do this through several mechanisms. The less important danger, which lasts a short time in the life of any given person, is that of utter disrespect for animals. When a toddler has had lots of practice throwing teddy bears and beanbag animals around, they have no reason to fear the real things. Nor do they have any reason to be “nice” to live animals.
My sister Gabrielle was a perfect example. At two years old, she had the habit of “going to pet the kitty.” But it never really worked that way. She had garnered a reputation with the cats and would quickly teach any new cats to show her the same distance. “Kitty doesn’t want me,” she proclaimed quizzically as they frantically bolted from her presence. This, a result of the stuffed animals Gabrielle had been taught by experience had no feelings, is clearly an undesirable situation.
But it’s not just animals which those teddy bears teach kids to disrespect: it’s people too. How do children (and occasionally college students) relate to stuffed animals? They treat them like people, people whose identities and self-images they can create. They tell stories about them and play make-believe. Harmless, right?
Absolutely not. This actually encourages a postmodern mindset in the little kiddies, teaching them that they get to define those around them. When they are accustomed to everything being a plaything, people are merely playthings too, objects which they can manipulate as they wish in order to gain pleasure for themselves.
It doesn’t stop at childhood, of course. Someday, the teddy-bear-addled will subconsciously see the people they meet as if they were stuffed humans and create in their minds new ways to see the world that are explicitly based on their own desires and perceptions rather than drawn from actual experience.
Stuffed animals are the ultimate blank slate, free for the maniacal artist to draw upon. And someday those insane little children will grow up to be the next generation of Nietzschean supermen, Hitlers imposing their will on their stuffed-animal-like subjects.
Still think that stuffed Tinky Winkys are just cute harmless little gay dolls? I didn’t think so.