NeoToddlerism: When People And Leaders Throw Tantrums

By Shlomo Maital

   A friend sent me this post, titled “The Rise of Neotoddlerism”:

“…activists spray paint Stonehenge, occupy US university campuses, block access to roads and bridges, occupy museums, and government buldings, storm sports events and movie premises, attack priceless artworks, desecrate war memorials and holocaust monuments.”

     Roots of this tantrum behavior lie, the author says, in the digital revolution, when smartphones made it easy for strangers to unite and mobilize around shared views. Protests grew..”but became more outrageous”.   “They are symptoms of cluster-B personality disordes – narcissism, histrionics, antisocial and borderline behavior. 

    Want change?  Forget years of political organization, door-knocking.  Just raise hell and disrupt things.  Dumbing down is happening in politics.  Trump labels Kamala “communist’.   Walz labels Trump “weird”.   Argument is distilled to one word.

    A pro-Palestine activist, Riddhi Patel, addressed a Bakersfield, CA., City Council meeting last April and told the counsellors, she would murder them, adding “I hope one day somebody brings the guillotine and kills all of you mother-F’ers”.  She was charged in court on 16 felony counts and sobbed unctrollably.

      All of us parents know that toddlers throw tantrums; their brains haven’t yet developed the ability to control impulses.  With time, they will. 

        Why then are our youths throwing tantrums?  How many pro-Palestine protesters are familiar with the 100-year conflict, the complex geopolitics, underlying the dispute – and the many times Palestinians turned down peace proposals? 

         Most of all, why are some world leaders throwing infantile tantrums?  Putin is angry at NATO and so decides to attack Ukraine, killing thousands of people.  And Trump—upset at having to defeat Kamala rather than Biden, purposely, intentionally, mispronounces her name,   KaMAla, is that a tantrum or what? 

          We deserve better.  We deserve youths who are trained in critical thinking and explore all sides of an issue, asking hard questions. We deserve leaders who debate policies rather than whether Walz was a coach or assistant coach?  We deserve better, when the New York Times’ fashion critic write two thousand words on what Kamala’s pants suit looked like. 

           Trivializing important issues is neo-toddlerism.  We deserve leaders, and people, who are more mature than toddlers and act like it.