[ Home | Contents | Archive | Post | | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Al
Date: 01 Jul 2004
Time: 04:31:48 -0500
Remote Name: 216.192.3.8
I read once about the idea that in the middle ages, there was no such thing as childhood. The death rate was so high that children under age six were not even named. That living all together in one big hut and bed meant there were few things children did not see or know about - from what their parents did to how food was hunted, killed, stripped, and dismantled. The close proxcimity of the family unit meant that as soon as their eyes were open they were exposed to all of life. They also had to quickly start producing enough assistance to family survival to cover the extra mouth they added to the pot. With the rise of the middle class, children were no longer required to immediately earn their keep, and the age of childhood where innocent was allowed to florish and remain untutored in the dark side of life began. Maybe with it also rose the published fairytale - when later generations of middle class parents needed to read and transmit the ancient teaching tales because they no longer remembered them. Up until 100 years ago most families still lived a harsh, reality based existence where everyone on the farm knew the chicken that ended up in the Sunday cooking pot or saw the butcher at work when their mother did the daily shopping. Now, with all the modern dangers that lurk and the easy access to all the knowledge of the horrors of the world, childhood (as defined as the age of innocence) is again shrinking - and not under the control of parents but by the remote control of the TV set. We have moved from a push to a pull society, from a dearth to a flood of information. It is no longer a parent who decides when a kid is old enough to learn about timely adult subjects - it is decided by the kid when he or she has the knowledge and ability (or the friends do) to find and access the information they want. I remember the big deal it was when the Childrens librarian let me graduate years early into the adult section and how carefully the main librarian took me around and pointed out good (aka tame and safe) reading materials and skillfully directed me away from other sections for several years. There is no one doing that now on TV or on the Internet. No watchful and informed information curator keeping an eye on things and putting some things out of reach, literally. Can kids be overstarurated, yes. But all of it is so removed from reality. I still think that if you take a kid at aged 10 (give or take based on the kid) down to skid row and let him or her see the real life effects of drugs and addiction - that you can educate them in a moment about the real consequences of a life choice that (whether we like it or not) is facing them. What I see as so scary is that the overload is so far removed from reality that the humanity and realness is screeened out by the TV, sanitized if you will. In movies and on TV, you see a one POV clip for a few seconds. In real life, you not only see the body falling, you hear the gun shot and a real human screaming in pain or whimpering a death moan, you smell the hot blood on the pavement, watch the shock of those around you. The experience of the horror is real, the physiological rollercoaster of the need to take cover and take action to help, the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness, the gut wrenching realization that it could so easily have been you because the person hit was only ten feet away. It is a full, five sense experience that shakes you to the foundations and can impact you for the rest of your life - instead of just seeing it as a well lit, well scripted visual play that anestisizes you and distances you from having to do anything but watch. We become so numb by the visual parade, and at the same time we seem to be seeking greater and greater thrills to get the full experience - whether in movies, more death defying amusement park rides, bungie jumping off of bridges in no danger of collapsing or parachuting off cliffs. The dangers of being kidnapped have been there all along - a smiling woman with a plausible story about being a family friend sent to pick you up on the way home from school. A simple yes or no decision of whether to get in the car. The door opening from inside showing a beconning hand and immaculate white leather seats that are too clean and perfect to be true. The dangers have always been there. Death does lurk behind black ice and flash floods and split second choices. So it is not the revealing of the realities that worries me. It is the exposure without the knowledge of what to do about it, the choices that lead to danger or safety, the relevance to our own lives and what to do about it. When our meat comes sanitized and all nicely wrapped in convenient supersize styrofoam packages, how do we connect with death? When everyone goes to die in sanitized hospitals, death becomes far removed from everyday life in reality. Is it any wonder that it finds itself then served up in another venue, and the fact remains that since news is now a business - they only serve what we are buying. The question might be why are we buying so much violence and images of death, destruction and mayhem? Is it the lack of the presence and reality of death safely handled in our own world that leads us to seek to understand it in another realm that offers distance and safety at the click of the remote - and yet that very remoteness leaves us unsatisfied and hungry for more because it does not deliver what we truly need an dcrave - understanding of death in all its forms so that we can understand its opposite - life? Just a few thoughts . . .Al