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My bottle of cough medicine came in a box. I opened the box and the bottle was wrapped in plastic. I cut the plastic off and the lid had a fastener. I ripped off the fastener and the bottle was child-locked. I opened the child-lock and, 47 minutes after the process began, I took the medicine. Now I will put the child-locked bottle in a child-locked medicine cabinet. And my children aren’t even born yet.

Maybe we, as a society, need to analyze why we feel it necessary to secure our Tylenol and Robitussin like it’s 30 pounds of gold being transported via stage coach through bandit country in the 1870s. Are our toddlers really jonesin’ that hard for Pop’s heartburn medication? And if they are, we need to ask why. My cough medicine is a gross, gooey, neon mucus. It simply should not be appealing to any member of any species. Any pill I’ve ever seen is either a hard white or bright colored capsule. Again, no living creature should salivate at the sight of it. 

But our kids do because we’ve severely perverted both their appetites and their natural instincts by shoving candy down their throats from the age of two. Do you realize we are breeding humans to have a taste for inedible substances? What kind of a plan of action is this? Every creature in the animal kingdom knows not to eat neon or bright colored things. That’s the universal “KEEP THIS CRAP OUT OF YOUR MOUTH” signal. A freakin’ jungle rodent picks up on that alarm better than a 9 year old person. Something is askew when a tropical rat would pass up most of what your child eats on a daily basis. Something is just wrong with this whole picture. And it probably stems from the various highly unnatural sugar delivery systems you find crowding the checkout aisle in any grocery store. The other day I saw a kid walking through my apartment complex squeezing a tube of neon green candy goo into his mouth. It was both a color and a material that literally shouldn’t exist in this dimension of reality. Even a crow pecking at a dirty diaper beside the dumpster in the parking lot looked over at the kid like, “What the hell are you eating?” And what’s even better is that this child will go home and refuse to eat his dinner and his parents will be absolutely perplexed by that. “Gee, I can’t imagine why Junior won’t eat his meatloaf after we’ve worked for 7 years to foster in him a revulsion toward food that’s actually food”.

I’m not some sort of organic hippy. I’m just pointing out the fact that there is a downside to feeding our children a steady diet of bright colors and artificial sugar. A downside which includes their inability to discern the basic distinctions of “edible” and “inedible”. I imagine at one point our ancestors, by the age of 6, could distinguish between a poison hemlock and a wild carrot from 30 yards away. Now a 10 year old would likely walk right past a steak and gobble down a box of bright colored pebbles. I know it’s not the 3rd century anymore but I still think we should try to be at least semi-equipped for basic human existence. That’s all I’m trying to say.