Choice
Pete Mladinic
When
I was a young boy, how young, well,
I
was in kindergarten at 4, this was before
that,
I watched a sitcom, before that word
was
used, the TV show My Little Margie.
On
in the morning, I watched it so often it
became
part of me: Margie’s tight perm,
her
father’s pencil light gray mustache,
his
boss George Honeywell gray, gruff
behind
a big desk; the neighbor elderly
Mrs
Odetts’ turkey wattle neck peeped
around
a corner; Margie’s fiancée Freddie
Wilson
in a bow tie, innocent, showing up.
I
watched so I became all of them; they
became
me. I could’ve gotten up, changed
the
channel. I stayed rapt in Margie’s
foibles,
messes she’d gotten herself into..
I
was her, this exuberant brunette daughter
at
home in a high rise with an elevator
cushioned
chairs and an industrious dad.
At
home there, with them I chose to be.
I’m
well aware all kids don’t have a choice,
but
many do. So when I hear parents
in
Seattle are suing a social media outlet
for
contributing to their children’s mental
illness,
I think something’s bad wrong.
Like
me, many children have choices.
Still,
many, I realize, do not. Ones who do,
parents,
don’t blame TikTok or Instagram
for
your child mental illness. Children
with
no technology, there must be many
throughout
the world, in poverty
have
no choice, they are like animals.
Animals,
no animals, have a choice.
But
even the subhuman Jeffrey Dahmer
said
Don’t blame music, drugs,
porn
or my parents, I did it. Blame me.
