c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ To hear the Clinton White House tell it, they so consistently put children first you would expect them to have a Kiddie Menu for state dinners. From the start, the present administration has rationalized many of its initiatives as”for the children.” Only now are we coming to understand why this is so, and why childhood is such a recurrent theme in President Clinton’s work.

In fact, the president has not so much done things”for the children”as he has skillfully injected the populace with the serum of childhood itself.

You can overhear its action in the polled responses of citizens, who have come to think as children do, or who base their answers on childlike attitudes. Only this explains the magical thinking that, at one and the same moment, allows us to believe Clinton is lying about having an affair in the Oval Office but that he’s doing a great job there, too.

People who respond this way are explained by The New York Times as getting along so well they are going along for fear any change in the presidency would change their luck as well.”I’m not the biggest Bill Clinton fan,”one of The Times’ interviewees said recently.”But the results are great. People are working. The economy is good. There are jobs. I don’t think people really care about what is going on in his personal life.” That the country has placed a”Do Not Disturb”sign on its conscience is understandable if we remember it is characteristic of children not to delay gratification but to want what they want now. We don’t expect kids to worry about the complications or the moral issues that may be involved.

This administration has played to the boomer inner child very successfully. That’s what they really mean by doing things”for the children.” The poll results that puzzle many can easily be understood as the testimony of pacified children. Why even aspire to grow up and assume the responsibilities of reason and moral judgment when the milk is flowing like the Mississippi? What if mom and pop are Bonnie and Clyde, robbing banks and shooting at the police? What they do on their time is their business just so long as they feed us.

In such a morally becalmed country as America now appears to be, we are the children the administration has been concerned about all along. We’re the ones Clinton had in mind when he spoke in his State of the Union address of keeping class size small in the 5,000 new schools he wants to build, each with game-playing computers and playgrounds. It’s the slogan of his generation:”The one with the most toys wins.” We respond as we do because life in America is turning into a never-ending subsidized lunch program. In this culture, everybody gets an A in the hard subjects, and an A in conduct, too, because moral standards are suspended.

Life in Clinton’s America of the future will be like life in school. The schools are already far advanced as home substitutes, providing day care, health care and after-class safety. It won’t be long before children can live in schools full time.

And now we have an up-to-date sex education course, being conducted by the president himself. It has been morally neutralized and value free. It is designed for those children who bridle at learning self control. Indeed, it is perfect for those who never want to invest sexuality with fidelity, honor, or even self respect.

What the administration may have forgotten in all they have done to woo us into perennial childhood is that although kids may be easily distracted or bought of, they get sick of ice cream every day.

If the weakness of a gullible child is one thing, the enormous power of a little boy catching an adult in a falsehood is another, and it is as withering as a death ray. Children grow up in spite of themselves and begin asking questions about real rather than rigged fairness, and the difference between right and wrong.

Children only believe in Santa Claus for so long. They come to know the difference between adulthood and adultery. They finally tell their father they don’t want him to read the comics to them anymore. That is the day the president may rue treating us like children. The polls will be transformed on that day and he will finally be judged as an adult.

DEA END KENNEDY