During a recent grocery store run, I noticed a slender, blonde, thirty-something woman shopping with her cute four-year-old daughter.  There was a lot of playful interaction between the mother and her child.  Initially, it appeared to be a heartwarming sight -- something you might see in a TV ad that was produced by the LDS church and filmed in suburban Salt Lake City.  God bless America!

However, I live in a leftist college town and upon further encounters in other aisles I realized that the woman was trying not to be a nurturing mother, but her child's best friend.  They both were hyperactively scooting around the store, making shrieking sounds and giggling.  Furthermore, the child clearly was in charge of the interactions, not the mother.

Do today's modern families need no parents?  But if parents are indeed obsolete, how can we explain the juvenile Occupy Wall Street camps?  When responsible adults aren't present, such micro-societies inevitably degenerate into sloth, crime, and anarchy, just as Lord of the Flies predicted.

Could the Left's encouragement of OWS and other forms of perpetual childishness be part of the insidious Cloward-Piven government takeover strategy?  When parents abdicate their responsibilities, politicians and bureaucrats can rush in to fill the societal vacuum.  Just as the grocery store princess barked orders to her subservient parent, civil servants have become our masters.

Is it physically and psychologically healthy to anoint Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama as our surrogate mothers?  If we, as society's perpetual children, disobey our new authoritarian mother figures, are fines and imprisonment the best way to teach us to eat our vegetables?  I recall hearing that the Germans held similar views about the virtues of government child-rearing in the late 1930s.  How did that turn out?

Today's Peter Pan Democrats also seem eager to obey our new maternal overlords, but I remain unconvinced.  Perhaps I am a societal anachronism, because I think of the overlords not as mother figures, but as government princesses that simply need a good spanking.  Why not schedule that for this November.