You are special.

Last week Google ran an animated doodle in honor of Fred Rogers and his PBS show, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.  Rogers, who passed away 15 years ago, would have like it, I think. By all accounts he was a genuinely good and pleasant man. 

Everyone is over the moon about Fred Rogers these days, and why not? There's not enough great Freds in this world. And while everyone else is running around with their collective dress over their collective head, he was a very calm man who never got upset. What a breath of fresh air!

Reviving interest in Mr. Rogers was the recent documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, which premiered in June. The conservative and deep-thinking critic James Bowman loved it -- it got his coveted two-star rating, the highest he gives out -- but has some interesting thoughts about Mr. Rogers's TV show and the perils of Generation Snowflake that seem to want to tear up the joint:

The problem with teaching children that they deserve to be loved, even by strangers, the way God loves them — "The way you are right now,/The way down deep inside you" — is that they are being set up for huge disappointment when they find out that the world outside their family and the comforting parental figure on TV isn’t at all like that. I don’t believe, as I have said, that the Mr Rogers generation are all narcissists, but I do believe that they must live their lives shadowed by that disappointment and obscurely conscious that, if life is not what their childish selves, unwittingly encouraged by Mr Rogers, expected it to be, it must be somebody’s fault.
And might it not be that belief, even if unconscious, which is responsible for the enormous intellectual effort invested today in finding out new and new kinds of evil-doers to blame and thus to hate? Thieves and murderers may only be people who didn’t get enough of the Mr Rogers kind of love as children, but there are now whole classes of "deplorable" people — people supposed, out of hatred, to be "haters" and anathematized with the labels racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic or even fascist for no better reason than that they don’t believe the things that we feel sure must be believed in that ideal "community" whose non-existence is no barrier to our sense of belonging to it? Our universities are in fact well on the way to becoming just such communities only in real life. But they are communities built on hate, rather than love. I can’t believe that Mr Rogers would have approved.

It does seem a paradox that children raised in a generation as never before with the idea of unconditional love could be so full of rage and hate. Something seems to have gone off the rails. I grew up with Mr. Rogers, and as fond of his show as I was, I never quite believed it when he told me that I was okay just as is. I'm not sure I would have believed that from anybody. Which I guess is sad, but it didn't surprise me when the world often rendered its verdict and found me wanting.

On a related topic, I was flipping through the ol' CDs and came across my Barenaked Ladies albums. The Ladies, among Canada's greatest exports, are one of my favorite bands of the 1990s. They gave us some excellent pop music and showed really top-rate musicianship on their albums. "If I Had $1,000,000" is universally loved, and even Yoko Ono liked "Be My Yoko Ono" (although she too preferred "$1,000,000"). Many of their songs exemplified the snarky attitude of the era, like "The King of Bedside Manor" and "Never Is Enough" and the difficult to sing "Intermittently" (it sounds easy but it is not). But these pair poorly with the gooey self-pity of songs like "What a Good Boy":

When I was born, they looked at me and said
"What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy"
And when you were born, they looked at you and said
"What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl"
We've got these chains hanging around our necks
People want to strangle us with them
Before we take our first breath...

Oh, come on. I know it can be difficult to live up to high parental expectations, but -- seriously? Did these guys have any idea that there were kids growing up being told that they were useless, stupid, ugly, fat, clumsy, and weak? Those remarks are chains. It makes me want to reach into the CD and slap the band. But these Gen-Xers were prototypical Millennials in that regard, and being oh-so-sensitive to their own precious selves and so very nasty toward others is very much the key to today's crybullies, the ones that are destroying human rights to save humanity. And it's too bad, because "What a Good Boy" is a pretty song and very singable.

Fred Rogers knew there were an awful lot of kids who had truly bad environments, and he wanted to reassure them that they were not to blame, that they were okay and he liked them. As Bowman writes, "...Mr Rogers was teaching children to feel by teaching them the vital lesson that the 'love' enjoined upon us by Jesus [Rogers was a Presbyterian minister] wasn’t about feeling but about respecting people no matter how you felt about them. This stranger could not possibly have 'liked' all those millions of children in his audience as he claimed to do — not in the sense that we like (or dislike) those we know. But he could like them well enough to be able to reassure them that he had no designs upon them, that the things about them which they fear, which everybody fears, will make people not like them made no difference to him."

So did Fred Rogers inadvertently cause today's idiot children rampaging hither and yon? I have my doubts, as does Bowman. First of all, his show was about a lot more than reassuring children -- he would talk to adults about the things they did for a living, he would send the trolley to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, he would feed the fish and do other domestic chores. But I think his reassurance of children was misconstrued by less-gifted (shall we say) educators, who took his lessons to mean that you can't keep score in soccer games and you can't fail children who won't study because they might feel bad and nothing is worse for kids than feeling bad. We may have built up self-esteem, but that is no way to build self-respect, because kids knows the difference between a trophy for participation and a trophy for achievement regardless of what the dopey adults around them think. I suspect that our loss of respect for families and a culture that celebrates immaturity are both the cause and result of many of our ills. Mr. Rogers cannot be blamed for these things.

In fact, I wish we had more Mr. Rogerses in the world. I can't imagine he would pass a child in class who didn't deserve it, but I'm sure he would help that child understand the work.

Now, I must confess, as much as I liked Rogers's show, I preferred Sesame Street. Especially that cranky green creep in the garbage can and the blue cookie-sucking lunatic with the crazy eyes. Maybe that's why I turned out the way I did.