Stay Out of My Genes

It's bad enough with cameras everywhere dictating everything we do via the cell phone, of late, our very centre of being is being spied upon. About the most personal thing we as human beings own, is our genes. Today's penchant, nay, obsession, is to examine much more than our innocent navels, it's to sneak into our genetic make-up to see if we, genetically, could hold statistically  some kind of unacceptable disease somewhere in our past history. What kind of nonsense is this? Oh it's not nonsense, the ominous creature called They, says, it's something important that we should know just in case we might have a certain cancer or remote chance of a deformity in our body or have a weakness lurking in there somewhere. The operative word is MIGHT. For some odd reason, we appear to put more faith into correlations than actual facts and reality as it stands. Why? I suspect it is our superhero bent that is encouraged by the film industry. The latter dictates just about everything we do and say and even think. It starts in us as infants when we are exposed to movies that model our morals and later, our fashions and manners and attitudes, our very language expressions. Movie and music stars are richer and more famous than royalty, and certainly far more influential. I recall my hairdresser who had a tennis pro wannabee daughter sending her down south to a posh tennis player high school. She might become one of the world's tennis stars. The kid begged to return home where she wasn't laughed at if she didn't have a Coach handbag or wear the top fad sneakers, not to mention how her hair was done and who did it. All this, she suffered, over and above playing tennis for hours every day. Now, babies are honed before they are born. They are peeped at with rays and needles poked into their little homes, tested for any kinds of risk and sometimes, sadly, ended before they take a first breath. For the satisfied modern parents, there are Sex Revealing Parties for the tiny human being seen in early pregnancy. And when they grow up sans a lot of things they are thought to have as allergies, they get nose jobs as pre-teens and boob jobs as high schools kids or diets that would scare a goat. Their parent need to brag of their perfect children. If they can't get same into the "best" schools, they are a failure. Every bit of food that goes into these super kids is closely controlled and their play time minutely planned to elicit the most educative venues and brand name environments.  And if all that isn't inhuman enough, now the parental genetic background is being exhumed and autopsied. Your ancestors matter. Apparently. I know of one perfectly seemingly "normal" family where the daughters learning that their grandmother died of breast cancer, seriously contemplate mastectomies. What have we become in this technological age? I suggest that rather than have babies, this sort of person might consider having a perfect robot built. It could have a brilliant computer  brain, a body that had quick and easy replacements plugged in if necessary and an emotional framework that withstood any kind of disease or attack or pressure of outside forces physically or mentally. It would be programmed for success in everything. Just dial in the profession you want it to follow. There would be no genetic harm because there would be no genetics. Furthermore, it could babysit itself which would be welcomed by all the poor exhausted parents like those who are "having a very bad time" with their kids around all day during the pandemic. With this kind of "child", they could lock it in the closet when they got tired of it. And forget schooling. Just buy the Oxford or Cambridge chip. Or look for it online.