Of Fruit Basket Upset and the Crazy Gender World!

We took two of our little granddaughters out to breakfast yesterday. They're five and two and love to hear stories about when we were little. So I told them about a game I used to play with my brothers and sisters. I was one of ten children, #4, and growing up there were always plenty of playmates around even if we were all siblings. We had a wonderful screened in porch where we could be as noisy and rambunctious as we pleased without bothering our parents. And one of the great games we played was called "Fruitbasket Upset." I wonder if any of today's kids have ever played it.

The way the game goes is to set up a line of chairs all facing the same direction, one fewer than the number of players. Each of us kids would pick a different fruit. I asked Anya what fruit she would like to be and she chose Cherry. I said I would be Banana. The person without a chair is IT and stands in front of the group about ten feet away. IT calls out two fruits, say Cherry and Banana and Anya and I would have to change chairs before IT could get to one of them. If IT called "Fruit basket upset!" everyone had to change chairs. Whoever was chairless after the melee was the new IT! Fun game.

It's strange how the mind works though. Since Sunday, when I blogged about the Genderqueer article in the Washington Post, I've been involved in a discussion in the comments section about different "genders." As far as I'm concerned it's all nonsense. There are two sexes, male and female, and all the rest comes out of the Twilight Zone. Gender is a linguistic term for identifying word endings in Latin and a handful of other languages not a trait based on how you feel about yourself. But Facebook recognizes 51 genders so, hey, I must be wrong. Everyone grovels before the Facebook god, right?

Getting back to how my mind works, last night I saw all the fruits in Fruitbasket Upset exchanged for genders. Instead of IT calling, "Cherry and Banana," he called out "Lesbian and Intersex" or "Genderqueer and Bisexual" or "Gay and Straight." The entire image in my mind gave new meaning to the term "fruitbasket upset!" I may never be able to think of the game again without laughing, although the gender theory travesty is certainly no laughing matter. But some things are so tragic and deviant that the only adequate response is to laugh.

I explained that to my oldest (who was sixteen at the time) when I had cancer almost thirty years ago. She heard me engaging in black humor with my friends about dying and it made her angry. She came to me crying saying, "How can you joke about it?" Obviously she was scared. So was I! I hugged her and said, "Honey, some things are so serious that the only way to handle it is to joke about it. Otherwise you'd cry all the time." When I said that to my daughter I was only talking about the death of the body. Today with gender madness we are talking about the death of souls. We can shake our heads with a rueful laugh; but we sure better be praying and fasting to drive the demons out and rescue poor enslaved men and women, the only two genders on the planet!