Today's Playmates

The Playmates Of The Nineties


They’re real, metal and deadly. Guns. Our favorite playmates.

Buying kids guns to play with is part of our lives. It became very
popular in the 1940s when Roy Rogers and Gene Autry came into our living
room each week, shooting and singing. We built forts and picked
sides--every other person was the bad guy or the good guy. It was fun.

Then, came GI Joe. The little boys all over the US got their rifle and canteen and went to fictitious wars, fighting evil. It’s our history as a country.

The question flashes in our minds like a neon sign. Why did the guns get real? Why did the red on the chest and face of children become real blood, not dye? Why did the kids who got shot not get up to play again? Why did the causalities of GI Joe’s war become urban and not so urban statistics?

The answer is obscure, probably because it was insidious.

Kids don’t hate. Kids don’t kill. Kids don’t want to die. Kids are, well, just kids.

We heard that for years. We expected the occasional newspaper headline screaming about a twelve-year-old shooting a fourteen-year-old to be an anomaly. We wanted it to just be a hiccup in the Ozzie and Harriet view of life and children or just an isolated inner-city problem.

Ozzie and Harriet didn’t even live like Ozzie and Harriet. A friend of mine told me that once. She was right. When the constant barrage of exposes on child abuse, date rape, alcoholism, drug use, and abandonment became a daily visual diet, we as a society couldn’t hide behind Ozzie and Harriet anymore.

Kids do hate. Kids do kill. Kids do think the only way out of their emotional turmoil is death. Kids just aren’t, well, kids.

They’re people. Young people. They’re scared, confused and hunting for answers without enough guidance to find them.

I’m not a sociologist with many theoretical reasons for this 90's dilemma. I’m a
concerned human being reading to many stories about children killing children.

They should stop us all cold in our tracks.

You see. I think we are the problem. The most advanced society in the world lost track of our most precious commodity—our children.

We quit listening. We need to start listening, again.

As a society, with easy access of adult material to young minds, we are too busy to listen to their questions. We are so self-absorbed. We neglect to give our kids answers or options.

We put locks on Internet access--which children are more adept at than most adults. We put our pornographic material in our bottom drawer or under our mattress. We put our guns up in closets, under the clean sheets. We put on our Sunday best for church each week, but whisper with pride about our infidelities. We take our Valium and anti-depressants casually, telling our kids, “It helps me through the day.” We are a “do as I say, not as I do” society.

No wonder our kids are confused. No wonder they are afraid to ask questions. No wonder they try to find answers by themselves. No wonder they think they have run out of options--they don’t know what the options are. We forgot to tell them. We have led by example. A bad example.

We can’t fix an epidemic with one vaccination, but it's a start. Let’s take ten minutes today and listen to our kids, if they’ll give us another chance and the ten minutes.

Let’s apologize to them. They need to know that we care. They need to know we didn’t mean to ignore them. They need to know we are redeemable.

I hear all the time, this kid or that kid isn’t salvageable. They’re inherently bad. Don’t they learn from their society -- from us. Do we want to say that we are inherently bad? I don’t believe so.

But, if we, as parents, teachers, counselors and citizens don’t change the patterns of a generation, we won’t see the next one succeed. We need to listen. Not condemn. Not ridicule. Not demean. Then, one at a time, they may start to play again.

They may find fewer reasons to pick up a real, metal, deadly playmate and find one that
can show friendship, concern, happiness, and companionship.