For some reason that defies logic and common sense, it has become fashionable among moms who drive their children to and from school to record videos for TikTok along the way, often giving free rein to those terrible rages that we are provoked by the trivial questions of day to day. Plunged as we are in an illiberal cultural war, last week the monstrous anger of a vegan mother went viral at the fact that her daughter's teacher -has at least two, because in another viral video she recounts the trauma of the day her other daughter tasted foie gras by mistake – told the class that for carnival they all had to dress up as fishermen.
The contingency of digital impudence that surrounds us wanted the tremendous celebrity in the video to coincide in the same week that a pre-adolescent recorded a video about the tremendous infamy of "LGBTI indoctrination" to which our children are subjected in schools. To add to the melodrama, the girl pleaded with viewers for help at the end of the video, as if she were kidnapped by a Raelian cult and about to be sacrificed.
Former congressman Ignasi Guardans took to Twitter, like a matador kneeling at a gayola door, to compare the conscientious objection of the vegan mother with the moral control exercised over their children by ultra-religious parents – although he was careful to mention the Jews Orthodox and Islamic extremists, but not the Christian sects that have become a vector of the American illiberal right, from north to south of the continent–, to conclude: “I respect the right of the mother to be a crazy believer, and I pity to the daughter, to whom I wish freedom when I can ”. Guardans charged handsomely – it would be missing more – for expressing that kind of Jacobinism that underlies the civilizing effort of enlightened republicanism.
But these two videos, basically identical, and the byzantine discussions that they unleash are viral because they touch one of the sensitive fibers that run through the contemporary. And the reason for its permanent relevance resides in the fact that, although the solution to these questions is quite simple, according to the values of the contemporary age, it will never fully satisfy, because, as occurs in all tolerant, plural and postmodern society, it is a provisional, mutable and transitive answer: the only answer is the convention.
Unlike consensus, the agreement requires the parties –in this case, parents and teachers, that is, individuals and the republic– to share the defeat. No one has to be completely right. The irresolution reveals intolerance, enemy of the civilized. If it is not resolved in this way, the republic will decide, which at the moment is not vegan, although perhaps a distant day it will be. Because we do not live in the forest and throughout the West, the State has the last word on parental authority. A piece of your children is not yours. That is what civilization is all about.
