House of Eratosthenes

We are scaring our children to death. Have you noticed this? And we’re doing it more and more.

Last week of course it was Cho Seung-hui, the mass murderer of Virginia Tech. The dead-faced man with the famous dead-shark eyes pointed his pistols and wielded his hammer on front pages and TV screens all over America.

What does it do to children to see that?

For 50 years in America, whenever the subject has turned to what our culture presents, the bright response has been, “You don’t like it? Change the channel.” But there is no other channel to change to, no safe place to click to. Our culture is national. The terrorizing of children is all over.

Click. Smug and menacing rappers.

Click. “This is Bauer. He’s got a nuke and he’s going to take out Los Angeles.”

Click. Rosie grabs her crotch. “Eat this.”

Click. “Every day 2,000 children are reported missing . . .”

Click. Don Imus’s face.

Click. “Eyewitnesses say the shooter then lined the students up . . .”
:
I would hate to be a child now.

I don’t agree with Noonan on everything, and I certainly don’t agree with it all here. I see it as part of a much larger arc. People like to scare kids nowadays — in the second half of the article, she nicely covers this — because people have noticed, when children are scared by something, they have a tendency to blow money and votes on whatever crap you’re selling when they grow up. It’s a chance to step in and perform the vital values-instilling assembly routines Mom and Dad are supposed to be performing. Scare a kid for a couple of seconds, and then let that kid go home and masticate his evening meal with Mom and Dad all week long. Make it a whole year. At the end of the year, if you ask the child what’s important to him, will he comment on something he learned at home, or on something he learned from you?

You. Of course. You scared the crap outta him.

And so our politicians, advocacy groups, 527s, and just about anyone else capable of grabbing a spot on the boob tube, have figured this out. Therein lies the motive — as for how long it’s been going on, with nobody saying boo about it, you’d have to look to the options available to people who set out to scare our kids. Those options are limitless, because our kids are easily scared. This is a problem that’s been going on even longer, and Noonan doesn’t even begin to cover it.

The expectancy our kids have out of their day-to-day security — the expectancy their parents have — is sky-freakin’-high. It was not ever thus.

Since feminism came on the scene, shamed everybody, demanded equal-pay-for-equal-work, got it, and then went searching for some other things to point out to shame everybody again…we have been raising babies. Every childhood should be less and less threatening. Except when a child isn’t scared by his childhood at home, he learns little…then he goes out into the big scary world, gets scared by something, and learns far more from whatever scared him than whatever he learned in his “harmlesss” home.

So you see, it’s very simple. When we set out to make sure our babums can go from the cradle to the graduation podium never having been jolted by anything, it’s like parking a solid-gold plated Lamborghini curbside with the keys in the ignition. Parents make sure their kids are never ever threatened, in substance or in form. As a direct consequence, parents, whether they realize it or not, teach their kids very little. Mannerisms, mostly. Things like how to answer the door with the cordless phone pressed to your ear; very little about right-and-wrong. And so it falls to the outside forces to teach the kids what is scary.

Which means, their values. It turns out there is very little different between what’s-right-and-wrong, and what-is-scary. In a secular society that becomes antagonistic toward the notion of any kind of Higher Power, this fusion between right-and-wrong and what-is-scary becomes even more solid.

As a parent, I’ve been guilty of some of Noonan’s complaints. But — and I’m sure Noonan would be receptive to this, and if she isn’t then nuts to her — this is different. I’m a parent. That’s my job. I tell my kid what I wish someone had told me, when I was a kid, about what is scary or what should be scary. I do this, or someone else does; and if someone else does, that is a usurpation.

And it’s been a uspurpation going on unopposed for generations. Look around, ask a grown-up what scares him or her. What comes out next, nine times out of ten, is a regurgitation of exactly what’s been coming out of the idiot box during the insipid morning “news” programs. The bitter irony is, post-WWII, we’ve been struggling to become a scare-free society. Here it is deep into the next century, and other than the things that scare us, we think about very little except Starbuck’s and iPods. In a sense, we live to be scared from cradle to grave. And, in a society that has been laboring endlessly to be more and more sensitive…nobody cares. Noonan, here, melds her own sentiments with mine, in a delicious parting-shot. The final sentence to her essay is priceless.

So what’re you still doing here on a blog nobody reads anyway? Go!

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Noonan VSaturday, April 28th, 2007

Noonan V
Saturday, April 28th, 2007