It’s Thanksgiving week, which for many of us means eating too much turkey and pumpkin pie. For others, it means getting into arguments with your Gen Z cousin who, in a fit of righteous rage, calls you a settler colonialist and storms out of the dining room.
Whatever your holiday may bring, we here at Honestly wanted to bring you a drop of delight from none other than the most delightful man on planet Earth: David Sedaris.
Sedaris is a humorist and author of many best-selling books: Calypso, Theft by Finding, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Barrel Fever. . . and most recently, Happy-Go-Lucky, which I had the privilege of talking to him about last December. It’s probably my favorite episode of all time.
What makes David’s writing so unforgettable is his ability to find something meaningful and true in the utterly mundane; the way he finds humor in the most horrific moments in life; and his commitment to the lost art of making fun of ourselves.
So for today’s episode, we are thrilled to have David here to read an essay he calls “Punching Down.” It is funny, it is frank, and fair warning, if you are a parent of small children, it might also be a little bit offensive. Happy Thanksgiving.
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Highlight of my week!! Laugh out loud and too true!
It was interesting that Sedaris connected the rise of misbehaving, zombie children to lower birth rates. I think the crucial question will be, how do these young humans un-zombify themselves? Where and when will it happen? I look around at many of my high school students, and see so many of them blissfully unaware of their immediate surroundings, and the happenings of the world. If we end a few minutes early, they all go right to their phones. Their heads tilt downward and their backs bend as one, like some strange prayer. Unfortunately, adults and children alike revel in the silence and the calm - it's certainly easier that way. There's no need to manage behavior when it's already being managed by a device, or, if you want to accept the worst of possibilities, by a communist country thousands of miles away. It's easy to know how to behave as an adolescent, too, if all you must do to appear normal and non-awkward is find something to look at on your phone. Still, how do our children emerge out of this ritualistic sleep-walking, which so many wander into almost as a rite of passage?