Mammas, let your babies grow up to be…

…anything…a cowboy, a soldier…something! Like the 1975 the country western hit, “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” being a cowboy wouldn’t be right for the modern woman’s boy either, but the rationalizations would be different:

1) Cowboys carry firearms (mostly in the movies), thus cowboys are bad (although liberal politicians and movie stars can have bodyguards who carry guns).

2) Cowboys mercilessly herd/brand animals, thus cowboys promote animal cruelty (just let them be free, free, free, like me, me, me—oh, all those old tattoos from when I was a flower child? They’re art, not branding).

3) Cowboys eat meat. The food chain/environmental/vegetarian complaint (‘cause cows are eating all the plants that people could be eating, plus they poop all over the place, sort of like liberals, who take from everyone else to pay for socialist fantasies and then leave their crap for others to clean up).

4) Cowboys drive pickup trucks. Again the environmental complaints (never mind that former 60’s hippies drove environmentally insensitive vans or old, polluting clunkers for years, and some still do!).

5) And worst of all, cowboys are usually conservatives! (Mom faints dead away when son says he’s a conservative rather than gender-confused.)

So this brings us to today’s point: Mothers, please let your children grow up! Let them be soldiers if that’s what they want. It’s not your life. It’s theirs. During past military call-ups, young men actually lied about their ages to get into service, so badly did they want to serve, but these days, all hell breaks loose if a woman’s offspring merely receives information about the military. “But certainly at 18, his brain is not fully formed,” she wails. What! Could a mother be any more condescending than to argue on that point? What was all that women’s lib stuff about anyway, if not choosing one’s own life path? But really, what is she afraid of? That the kid will decide something contrary to her narrow, indoctrinated thought patterns? That the military might actually make the kid grow up and not be dependent on her for his every waking thought? Let them grow up! Let them claim their adulthood, and let them do it long before you’re gone. When you do, you’ll finally grow up, too.