Hello,
Today's
blog post will be short because I actually didn't leave a six month gap
in-between posts and am posting in the same month for (whoa) maybe almost a
full year. Don't want to go and see. Wait. Actually, in the interest of putting
effort into this small blog that no one reads (laughs unenthusiastically) I
will go look it up. Nearly a year. Last time was March of 2014. Wow. Such a
long time ago.
I
came home today and discovered that my younger brother had brought home a score
for the musical "BUGZ!" (Why the extra "z"? To be
"z"azzy?) which they are to perform at school in a month or two. I
looked through the lyrics and read things like "Picnic!/C’mon let’s have a
picnic/With lots of food that’s fun to eat/Going on a picnic can’t be
beat!" and "If someone isn’t kind/And friends are hard to find/You
just say never mind and be a lady" and then "But clouds
don’t stay forever/Rainbows do appear/So even though it’s stormy/There’s one
thing very clear/Things change/Things will change." Note that this is
"A musical play written for young voices." Also another note
that there is rapping in this musical. If it could get any
worse....
Either
way, all these happy and bright lyrics made me think about how children's songs
and musicals are always happy and upbeat and there is nothing that goes wrong
and everything is solved in the end.
And then I realized that there was
one exception to this rule (although there are probably more, let's forget
about that and say that there's only one so that the suspense is greater):
the Rock-A-Bye Baby lullaby.
Now, you've probably heard this lullaby so many
times - relatives singing it to you, you singing it to babies, on CDs
that your parents would turn on in the car because it was "children's
music." But I'll paste the lyrics here (at least the part we're concerned
with) to refresh your memory:
Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all
This song is about placing babies in treetops and waiting until
the tree breaks so that you can kill the baby by dropping it from the top of
a TREE. And mothers have been singing this to their children for so
many years....
Think about the innocent mothers, thoughtlessly singing this
song to their children, not realizing that they were promoting death and
the careless killing of babies. Think about the poor children, who, after
a long day of screaming and crying and eating (so stressful, believe me), are
ready to sleep until they hear this lullaby and think "Oh my gosh did my
mom just tell a story about killing babies?" (let's pretend that they can
understand any of the gibberish humans say). Traumatized babies
everywhere. It's going to be a big problem - a giant condition that no one will
be able to solve. Babies, coming into the emergency rooms at night, as
their parents freak out about how "they haven't been sleeping"
and how "they seem to have been in extreme shock" and how "I
don't know what to do I didn't do anything wrong I fed it exactly 8.41 ounces
of milk like it said to in the baby how-to manual help doctors help" and
the doctors will be confused because they've never seen this illness before and
they'll dub it "Sitipeelstnacseibabitis." (That's
"babiescantsleepitis" backwards with another "itis"
stuck onto the end.) (Pronounced
"si-tee-peel-st-nak-say-bab-eye-tis")
Moral of the story: Mothers, read the lyrics before singing
lullabys.
From,
Me.
