Can You Trust A Crying Baby?

It says something about the time in which we live where you can’t read a line like, “A video showing a baby’s emotional response to her mother’s singing has become an internet hit,” and immediately not wonder what the angle is. Like, whatever happened to that innocent era in which we could just bask in the warmth of a mother videotaping her child in tears and continuing to carry on with the behavior that makes the baby cry in the first place instead of cynically suspecting that there is something else going on, probably for profit, the way we do these days? As someone with a knee-jerk suspicion and generally low opinion of most human motivation, the fact that I know I am not the only one to greet such viral outbreaks with doubt and disgust does not, as you might expect, make me feel better about the world now that it has come around to my point of view. No, it all makes me very sad. And now I’m crying.