Future Perfect

I think that parents SHOULD take their babies to fancy restaurants. Sure, you can say something like “it’s the community’s duty to care for a child” or “parents shouldn’t be excluded from public life” or whatever, but what I am saying is that restaurant-goers need to be punished. “Lillian is this a class resentment thing?” Maybe, but what you must understand is that I demand this for the fine-dining-class’s benefit. There is a tragedy at the heart of every dinner reservation that no restaurateur can solve. What on Earth could inspire more American-capitalist-Calvinist guilt than spending unthriftily purely for joy? How could you escape the superegoic accusation of conspicuous consumption while commissioning a piece of art purely to obliterate it? Eating out is an ethical nightmare—and yet! Simply add a crying baby to the becandled ambience and nobody’s worried about that anymore! As you leave the restaurant with your friends, or your coworkers, or your date, or your spouse of thirty years, or your date and your spouse of thirty years, or your novel, or the Times crossword, or the Intel Celeron desktop you stole from Walmart that you were doing your Genshin dailies on, you will be thinking about one thing and one thing only: THE BABY.