Santa's Coming Effect

Santa's Coming Effect
Santa's coming effect


It's a term I made up — meaning, total brain-fiction.
For one of the social phenomena I see, I've named it "Santa's Coming Effect."

Kids encounter fairy tales — from parents they heavily depend on for survival, or from preschool, or fairy tale books, or YouTube.

But then someone shows up — especially recently? — parents or equivalent guardians who keep restricting you and saying no (in the US case, it could be Trump) —
so how do kids react then?
They don't believe it, or they plop down and cry. Because they're not so much wounded by the fact that Santa doesn't exist — it's that a betrayal of their belief or memory has happened for practically the first time in their life. They're anxious.
During those young years, they learned something as a fact, especially a small hope or a candy-like truth they believed would benefit them — and the moment they realize it's not true, they fall into confusion. One of the few facts they hold disappears. And the one that predicted a good outcome is the one that vanishes.
And the child thinks: that fact was taken away. (Suddenly I think, in literary terms, that might actually be a fitting expression.) They never think they knew it wrong, or took it in through a wrong channel, or understood it wrong.
What we? need to be careful about: this phenomenon is not because the child's nature or heart is bad.

Coming back to politics — you shouldn't criticize them. You have to understand why they can only feel that way; otherwise they go crooked.
You might wonder, why should I care for them? But if you're not planning to round them all up and kill them, if you're not planning to leave this narrow country (physically or in terms of social networks), you have no choice. Not even as some grand gesture of goodwill or tolerance — you can just think of it as doing it for your own sake.

Let's come back to everyday life. Imagine you walk past some unknown child being abused. That child won't be a threat to you right now. But when that child grows up, their adult behavior could indirectly threaten me in old age. Or it could harm my own child, or further out, my siblings' or relatives' children.

Today's phenomenon stems from the trivializing or the "can't help it" attitudes of adults in the past.
I've drifted off the point, but I trust you understood what I meant.

Regardless of whether the information is true or false, don't blame the people who believe and echo and share fake news. They are not a social evil. They can't help being that way either.
Those who can recognize the problem just need to do what they can. Especially here — let's not use the nauseating word "consideration". Think of it purely as preventing misfortune that would come back to you. Sympathy should not be casually shown. Of course, if you're naturally merciful that's even better, but I don't expect that much when we're barely making ends meet. So you can do it too — if you can just recognize. In other words, if a thought of cursing them rises in you, that's exactly where you too belong.
So I've named the people The Santa Claus Syndrome, or the Santa's Coming Effect.

The end.



On a day when it was cold, but flowers had already bloomed along the roadside,
2019.02.13