Rapunzel’s mom inspires our media and politicians?
Happy Mother’s Day to those readers who identify as “mothers”!
Conversation with a 10-year-old:
- Why do they tell us to wear masks and avoid crowds if we can’t catch coronavirus?
- When adults want children to do something for their benefit, one good strategy is to tell the children that it is actually for their own benefit.
- Like Mother Gothel in Tangled!
For readers unfamiliar with this epic retelling of the Rapunzel story, the senior citizen Mother Gothel (a witch who identifies as Rapunzel’s mom) keeps the healthy 18-year-old imprisoned by telling her that the outside world is full of danger and peril.
Look at you, as fragile as a flower
Still a little sapling, just a sprout
You know why we stay up in this towerThat’s right, to keep you safe and sound, dear
Guess I always knew this day was coming
Knew that soon you’d want to leave the nest
Soon, but not yetListen to your mother
It’s a scary world out there
Mother knows best
One way or another
Something will go wrong, I swear
Ruffians, thugs
Poison ivy, quicksand
Cannibals and snakes
The plague
(Lyricist Glenn Slater should get a prize for that last line!)
Although the typical Covid-19-tagged death in Massachusetts is of an 82-year-old with “underlying conditions” (more than 98 percent), our media tends to feature healthy young people cut down in their prime by the evil virus, an ever-present lurker in any activity that young people might formerly have enjoyed. The result is a remarkably high number of healthy young people isolating themselves out of personal fear, just as Rapunzel isolated herself voluntarily until shortly before the movie picks up her story.
