Thoughts on Peanuts

"Wah wah wah wah wah wah..."

Recognize these words? These are the words of an absent parent.

How many times reading the comics, watching the holiday specials, or the feature movies, did you see an adult actually acting like one? Charlie brown is a child with serious emotional issues. I don't believe in antidepressants (not in a 'Tom Cruise whack job' sort of way), but by today's standards he'd have been on them from birth. Course given the side effects it probably would've ended in a murder suicide with Snoopy.

I highly doubt he even needed therapy though. A simple parental hand on his life might have done the trick. Where's his mother? She's a stay at home mom, but I've never seen her. Charlie's dad? A barber. Barbers do not work that late. I highly suspect him of sowing his oats on other fields. And by sowing his oats I mean sleeping with Linus's mother.

Honestly, how else could you explain the van Pelt mother's absence? A little boy has an unusually strong attachment to a blanket and no one but his sister cares. Speaking of Lucy, she cutely refers to herself as the happy winner of the title "World's Biggest Fussbudget." Meanwhile back at the ranch, everyone of us knows her to be a sociopath who beats on her brother, his friends, her friends, animals, and I bet if we were to see in her room at night when the lights go out, herself. I've often suspected Lucy is a self harmer. Most likely a cutter. She has all the marks of someone who's overcompensating for a lack of self esteem.

Even on holidays the van Pelts seem to have no interest in caring for their children. Lucy and Linus decorate their own eggs for Easter. They Make their own costumes for Halloween. And yes, they put on their own Christmas plays. It goes even further, because Lucy is a substitute parent for Linus, and Linus is a substitute brother for Sally. He's the one who drags her out into the fields at night to wait for his crazy delusions to arrive. The great pumpkin... I would guess the great pumpkin was a story his father told him one night in a drunken stupor. Sadly he's held onto it alongside his blanket, the only pieces of his tattered childhood left.

Pigpen wanders the streets dirty. He has a home, but he has no boundaries, and he has no one looking out for him. Everyone remembers the kid at school who was never clean. Part of you couldn't help but wonder how the parents could allow that child to go to school day after day as dirty as he was. Pigpen's house though is spotless, so I can only assume his parents are more concerned with the material things than with the love of a child.

All the kids in neighborhood are largely ignored by their parents. Well, except in the case of one kid. Schroeder sadly is in a class of his own. You think that talent came naturally so young? Clearly his parents are obsessed with turning him into a piano maestro, even if it's at the cost of his childhood. In the face of adversity, he's managed to play the most elaborate songs on a little more than a toy. It's like a modern day Rumplestiltskin, where he must spin gold from straw.

Yes, peanuts is more than a comic about silly antics from a boy and his dog. It's about neglect, self abuse, adulterous affairs, dissociative disorders, and also Franklin. After spending their lives being ignored, is it any wonder when an adult talks, the children just hear noise?