By David Bittinger

April 4^th, 2025

Children are often adorable. Childish adults are never adorable.

I’m lucky to have one of that former population in my life. My five-year-old grandson James is already a good reader, fortunate that his parents gave him early reading lessons and that he isn’t trapped in the school system of a cratering single-party city. His imaginative little songs are more enjoyable than songs featured on Grammy broadcasts now.

Unfortunately, 2025 America is better populated by that latter population: childish, tantrum-fueled adults, many of them tattooed and unhealthy-looking. Their favorite dialectical technique is mob chanting.

Demographic disclosure: I’m a Boomer (not a “stardust” or “golden” one) who —

— wishes America had sustained more of the values and behavior portrayed in Leave It To Beaver

— feels he didn’t quite deserve the advantages he had by coming of age when America was still mostly functional

— keeps trying to filter his baseball team through his sappy dreams over many decades (miraculously coming true only in 2005) and has trouble processing the 2024-based reality of The Worst Baseball Team Ever.

Granted, we Boomers minted the whine coin and still seem to feel the world should revolve around our generation. But in this century the grown-up nurseries are getting larger and louder.

In the name of justice, they form human blockades of roads, blocking drivers trying to get to their jobs. They complain that their degree in Sexist Capitalist Studies attracts no job offers. And they chant their hatred of a tiny country trying to survive on a sliver of land the size of Belize. (I had to look up the location of Belize.)

More justice: They also vandalize great works of art to publicize weather predictions that always turn out less accurate than those of The Farmer’s Almanac.

These arrested-development mob protestors have strong opinions on current events yet piddling historical knowledge. But they sure know how to chant. Three of their favorites (with translations):

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (Destroy Israel. Disperse / dispose of Israelis.)

“By any means necessary” (Paragliding murderers are a legitimate battle tactic.)

“Zionism is racism” (My professor at Columbia says Zionists are bad.)

You might want to ask one of them what they’re driving at. Then again, you might not.

Here’s the gist of a conversation I once had with one of the adult children who despise Israel. I started by trying to discuss with him some historical background of the conflict between Israel and its enemies. Our conversation was limited and impossible to transcribe, but it went something like this:

Me: Do you know the major alliances in World War II — which nations fought with the United States and which were our enemies?

Childish Adult: Sure. Wasn’t the enemy England? And we dumped their tea or something?

M: No, in this war England was our ally.

CA: So they changed sides?

M: Ummm . . . why do you hate Israel so much?

CA: Well, a guy in my dorm told me those people have too much money. You know, like the Rockerfellows.

M: Maybe you should read up on Germany in the 1930s and what happened to —

CA: I know, I know. The Zionists lost that one. A professor told me.

M: (Sigh . . . .)

The childish adults have another object of hatred almost as strong as the one they have for Israel: the threats posed by the new Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to people who work — or technically work — for the federal government. With fascinating elasticity, their declared boogie man here is the same guy who was their hero of woke environmentalism just a few years ago, Elon Musk.

What is Musk’s current sin against Woke-ism? Did he move on from producing Teslas to monster SUVs with gun racks?

No, he merely exercised a professional expertise he’d exercised before.

Musk, one of the most productive entrepreneurs in human history, forayed into the world of unproductive jobs when he bought social network service Twitter. First, he gauged the efficiency of Twitter’s staff of 7,500 desk jockeys and censorship editors. His “What would you say you do here?” inquiries weren’t comical like the ones in “Office Space,” but Musk did quickly make Twitter work more efficiently with a staff of 1,500.

The tightly unionized and entitlement-gorged federal workforce reacted to DOGE with more rage and legal machinations than did the staff of the movie’s fictional Initech. Their protests included splendidly embarrassing folk songs.

Why did DOGE give special scrutiny to the Department of Education? Maybe because its steady increase from a $56.9 billion budget in 1980 to $268 billion in 2024 has coincided with a disastrous period in American education. During that period, our country’s worldwide ranking in education dropped from 1st to 24th.

Oh, so that’s what they do there.

There’s another way to look at the childish-adult protests about these initial efforts to reduce the morbid obesity of the federal government. The United States’ debt problem is serious, even though it’s been treated for decades as a bookkeeping nuisance.

Maybe we should look at numerical digits, all 14 of them. Our federal debt — the amount we taxpayers owe to U.S. debt instrument buyers (including shrewd Chinese communists) — is above $36,000,000,000,000, moving by the second toward $37,000,000,000,000.

What are the adult-child protesters really raging about in the efforts by President Trump and DOGE adviser Musk? In effect, $36,000,000,000,000 of national debt is not enough, nor will $37,000,000,000,000 be. Even though the Biden Handlers Administration propelled America through hyper-inflation and $7 trillion annual budgets toward some form of national bankruptcy, they’re telling us now that $7 trillion annually (adjusted upwards annually) is not enough spending.

Spend more, retain every federal job and pension. More spending and debt, even more. Don’t consider what happened to the money-printing zombie of Germany’s Weimar Republic. Don’t consider what happened to Greece in 2007-08, when they were finally forced to reckon with the entitlement fantasies demanded by their childish adults.

The protestors are now chanting for the sacrosanctity of every federal position, however non-productive or counter-productive, plus the continued “work at home” euphemism. They demand even more billions spent by the Department of Education to produce more poorly educated students.

Humble suggestion to the government worshippers: Maybe you should try something more resourceful than more Trump impeachments, vandalizing of Teslas, harassing of Jewish students, cringeworthy folk songs.

Please consider reading some factual 20th century history, especially issues involving Russia and Germany. Consider outgrowing the allegiances they taught you in college.

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David Bittinger lives defensively in Packers country but still feels deep affection for the Chicago he moved from shortly after the kingdom of Daley The First. As a young advertising copywriter in Chicago, he was advised by the Tribune’s wise Managing Editor to write newspaper commentary. This good advice took 15 years to sink in. The great, open-minded Tribune Commentary Editor Marcia Lythcott published him a number of times. His op-eds were also published at the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and elsewhere. Today he posts articles on his seldom-visited website curveballcommentary.com and political poetry on “X.”  He’s remained a faithful White Sox fan since the Louie-Nellie era, but is now embarrassed even to wear that fine logo.