Kids, cats and humility
I am looking at a copy of a Sunday cartoon that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of January 14, 1900. It is called “Woman’s Craze for Animal Pets Versus Babies — what we might expect in the 20th Century.” There are a series of cartoons of stylishly dressed ladies of that bygone and hypothetically happy era walking and cuddling various pets in various years; in 1901, it is a monkey, 1902, a leopard, 1903, a hippopotamus with a blue ribbon tied around its tail, 1904, an alligator on a leash, and 1905, a cuddly giraffe. And finally, there comes “The Rarest and most curious pet of 1920 — a real baby!”
Well, I’m not here to accuse JD Vance of not being original in his warnings of the evils of “childless cat ladies”, but it does seem that this issue has been around long enough to have been beaten to death by now.
The practice of pitting groups of people against each other for political gain is nowhere near new. I do have some advice for people who want to single out a particular group for criticism, make sure that the number of people who share your opinion is larger — a lot larger — than the number of people you are attacking.
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