Spring
In the seventies a lot of young parents in The Netherlands moved to the country. They took the places of the farmhands and land-laborers who became obsolete due to the industrialization of agriculture. It was the spring of a new form of social society.
The idea was to raise the children close to nature with no television and schools with alternative learning methods. They could then freely develop their interests and creativity. This as opposed to the often strict and rigid upbringing the parents had to endure.
Babi Greenchild fared well in these surroundings. Learning to read and write at the age of four, she did both with a passion. She enjoyed drawing and learning crafts as well as making music. Horseback riding, taming wild cats and talking to the birds, the cows and the sheep; she saw the seasons pass and anticipated the beauty of the live ahead.
A secret garden
For a team to work successfully there has to be a common goal but the father of Babi had a hidden agenda and a different aim.
Buying a farm workers cottage at the end of a dirt road in a ribbon settlement, the goal was isolating and controlling his beautiful and very smart young wife. Despite some progressive talk, father demanded dinner at the table at six o’clock sharpe and it had to be old-fashioned potatoes, nothing modern or foreign. Coming home from his easy job as a civil servant, he was not to be disturbed whilst reading the papers.
Needless to say; he didn’t lift a finger in the house. Mother was there to serve his needs and the children were seen as competition. He demanded his piece of her when she was up half the night attending to a chronically ill child.
Killing spring kittens in front of his children was his idea of entertainment. Being a source of stress and chaos, ugliness and destruction, he sabotaged all good and loving care.
Blossoming
Not all children fared as well as Babi in these surroundings. Brat, the first-born who saw green with envy the moment his little sister was born, looked at his father as a role-model. He didn’t realize there was only void filled with unpleasantness to be found. Imitating an imitator doesn’t bring good results.
Reading the newspaper like it is a holy scripture prevented Brat from developing any insight. Every input that goes beyond the papers and tv news and amusement is met with anxiety, disturbance and then anger. Delusional ideas such as bombing Afghan women into freedom are defended with a hateful vigor as to scare opposing thoughts into silence. Amateurish attempts to gaslight go hand in hand with a compulsory conformism stifling every originality and creativity. Like bananas, a fruit that can’t reproduce itself.
But we know what they say; even an idiot has its use for society. Or is it the case that especially the morons serve their purpose?