Emotional Support Animals: Snowflakes

 A fight broke out at a recent dinner party when I mentioned that "The Sound of Music" production by Ogunquit Playhouse at the Portsmouth Music Hall was marred by a sort of squeaking, howling coming from someone's "emotional support animal" in the audience, who seemed to want to sing along with various songs including "A Few of My Favorite Things," and "Do Re Me" and "Climb Every Mountain."

It was distracting, if not show stopping. When I declaimed that emotional support animals are a symptom of a snowflake society, and should be banned and their owners told to grow up and act their age,  I was roundly chastised as sounding like the host's father, which I was assured was not a compliment, and my wife added this was proof I am a bigot, harboring ill will toward the disabled. I became Public Enemy Number One.

But, of course, the animal had to be allowed to distract the 700 people in the Music Hall, because, Heaven Forfend, the owner might not have not been able to attend without that emotional support and security offered by that animal, which may have been a dog, or possibly a hamster with a robust baritone.

Not being smart enough to simply retreat into my non alcoholic beer, I added that some people are allowed to flaunt their fragility, their vulnerability, their need for their security blankets in public seems to me bad taste at best, and a sign of the impending collapse of Western Civilization at worst.

Why grown people, semi-adults, are allowed to drag around living security blankets, Pooh bears, or whatever is beyond me. I mean, suppose an adult woman carried around a stuffed bear and sucked her thumb in a theater or on a bus or an airplane? What would you say? But if that stuffed orangutan is in fact alive, a real animal, well then we should all smile and coo and say, "Well, isn't that sweet and wonderful?"

I cannot imagine Vladimir Putin would allow this.

Maybe that's the only argument for emotional support animals (ESA).

I don't need an ESA; I need a gun

But I doubt Volodymyr Zelensky would be very happy about any of that, given that he has an entire nation in need of emotional support, and the last thing they right now need is whimpering women, or men, who claim they have special needs above and beyond the ordinary, which entitles them to special consideration.

A turkey, not toilet trained, showed up for a United Airlines flight. What was its owner looking for? Attention? Fawning obeisance?

What if that passenger had brought along a tarantula to calm her nerves?

Everything from peacocks to tarantulas to geese have been claimed. In New Hampshire, you need a letter from a "licensed mental health practitioner," who, I would submit, should require a letter of his own to call himself that.

Who are these people who demand to be coddled and simpered over? 

And what do you think Donald Trump would do with this as a campaign issue?