The Many Writings of

It is a deliberate act of will to write about something other than the cancerous political situation in the world. In a way I feel like I’m shirking a responsibility by turning my back on it and writing instead about anything else.

There are so many voices of every political spin that it doesn’t seem necessary to add mine to the steadily increasing din. There are others who are saying what I’m feeling, and saying it with greater authority. Rather than add to an increasingly polarized energy, it is of greater value to add my voice to those trying to bridge the great rifts between individuals, societies, and countries. The United Nations isn’t.

The trickle-down theory may be faulty when applied to our economy, but it certainly is a neat fit when applied to fear. In the really bad moments, it trickles down your pants leg. Apart from those really horrible lose-control-of-your-body-functions-and-scream-uncontrollably moments, there is the kind of fear that’s simply in the air, and it does indeed trickle down, leaching into our kids, a toxic mutagen in our societal corpus.

Having grown up as part of the ‘duck and cover’ generation, I am sensitive to the impact of long-term, ambient fear on children. I remember driving down Ventura Boulevard in the still-undeveloped San Fernando Valley with my family, staring out the backseat window at used car lots that had, overnight, been opportunistically and cynically turned into bomb shelter display lots. Rows of large, concrete pipes like little submarines, sitting on cradles in the hard sun, families milling about, climbing in for a look at the latest post-apocalyptic survival chic. Incessant classroom drills, claxons shrilling and teachers yelling that this was serious, huddled under our desks, faced away from the windows that would certainly explode and slice us to bloody bits when the nukes fell. Films, played at school and reinforced on the tv, stock footage that has become part of our genetic memory; mushroom clouds rising and spreading, homes disintegrating and combusting, fierce winds and fire storms consuming cities in seconds, the inhabitants incinerated in the time it took to blink, sleek black subs rising from the depths to the ocean’s surface and releasing terrible counterstrikes, Mutual Assured Destruction supposedly keeping the ever-present threat of total annihilation at bay; the palpable, rising anxiety of the adult world poisoning childhood, turning us into a generation of cushioned nihilists.

Nothing seems to have changed much in the intervening decades. I became a flower child, like so many others in the ‘60’s, partially because love seemed like a simplistic but viable answer to the terrible, permeating global paranoia of my childhood. We thought that, given half a chance, the power of love could and would heal everything. Oddly enough, I still believe that, but now I know that it has to reach its own critical mass to become an effective force in a world that, for the most part, seems overpowered by fear and fueled on greed and untruth. In the meantime, I see the undeniable taint of fear leeching its way into the souls of our children. As adults we inure ourselves to fear, condition ourselves to a certain level of tension in the gut, and as long as we’re not absolutely paralyzed we call that acceptable. It’s not. We might as well plow our fields with salt, throw cyanide down our wells and torch our forests.

Childhood, minus the penumbral glow thrown around it by adult memory, is a loopy trip through a strange and shadowed world, accompanied by fears that most adults barely remember, if at all. I feel fortunate to have finally grown into a large and fearsome-looking beast, as childhood was a time of smallness, weakness, powerlessness, and above all, fear. I had fearful fantasies, recurring nightmares populated with illogical terrifying blood-sucking beasts, fear of the dark, fear of noises in the night, fear of failure and humiliation, fear of kidnappers and child molesters, fear of physical pain and the regular beatings of the neighborhood bullies, and the faceless fear of hundred of nukes poised to devastate my home, a fear reinforced by the worried faces and hushed tones of the adults, the screaming headlines, the ominous pronouncements of the media. Childhood had been scary enough, and now I had to worry about annihilation, being incinerated along with my family in a conflagration to end all life. I would watch the newsreels of homes, flattened and exploding, and imagine my house being consumed, all of us inside, holding hands and waiting helplessly for the end. Since we hadn’t dug up the backyard and installed one of those Armageddon bunkers, we’d be vaporized along with our neighborhood. There wasn’t enough space in my head to hold ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and nuclear holocaust at the same moment. That obscene duality turned all the space between Wilbur the Pig and my possible future as bits of floating char into a strange gray landscape, full of static, undecipherable portents, and a constant constriction around my heart.

I remember looking at my parents accusingly, and demanding to know how their generation had made such a mess of things. I was nine. I knew everything. I had second sight, but no wisdom. I asked the same question again and again over the course of my teens, always sure that my generation would fix the mess left for us by our parents, and always, always blaming them personally for the world’s problems. In my brash naiveté I thought that our best intentions would eventually mend every wound in the planetary psyche. Maybe given enough time and sufficient numbers, it would have worked; the trickle-up hypothesis of love among the boomers got lost in the name-branding feeding frenzy of Madison Avenue’s discovery of it, and quietly died of an overdose in a seedy hotel room off the Haight.

I now see the same accusatory expression through which I took a bead on my folks occasionally pass across the seraphic face of my nine-year-old daughter. It is a mixture of fear and incomprehension, mixed with a hurt sort of wonderment that my generation and I could have allowed her and all her friends to be put in serious harm’s way in such a cavalier manner. She hasn’t found the words yet, but I can see the thoughts forming in her big green eyes. I see the clouds that shouldn’t be hanging over childhood moving between the sun of her spirit and the deep place where children hold their fears. At those moments, I want to apologize to her for the state of things, for everything that’s wrong that we didn’t fix, for the way we’ve bungled peace and love.

It’s easy to forget, clomping around the world in big boots, a large, strong and mostly competent adult, what it was like to be small and weak and scared and completely at the mercy of the big whackos who themselves often did bizarre things. There were a lot of rules you had to learn, rules the big whackos taught you that you must follow and then they broke them; but you, you had to follow them even if you didn’t know them and you were then punished for breaking them even though you didn’t know them. In retrospect, I’d have to call that a lose-lose situation. Some kids had a knack for figuring out the rules. It was like someone gave out rulebooks to a few really lucky random kids, and they had it knocked. I was not one of them. Duh.

Now I am one of the big whackos, and I want to tell my kids that I tried. I voted. I marched. I contributed, sent emails and faxes and letters, carried signs. She wants to know what good it is to save the whales if I can’t save her. She wants to know why I care so much about saving the planet that she might not be around to enjoy. She wonders, not illogically, why the adults are acting so uniformly deranged. And she is, somewhere inside her sweet and wondrous self, always afraid. That bothers me more than all the pollution, all the corporate malfeasance and corruption, more than all the terrorists lurking in potentia to do us harm. What an incredible gift it would be to our children to let them grow up without a blanket of debilitating fear swaddling them. What gifts could they then bring to our home planet? What sort of expansive lives could they then lead? We’ll never know. It’s already too late for them. We are now relegated to the existentially gymnastic contortions of damage control, knowing that the most effective measures have already been overlooked.

Last night, spread across our kitchen floor, were four cheap knapsacks and their contents; survival gear for an emergency evacuation. Maya kept looking suspiciously at the growing pile of water bottles, flashlights, batteries, socks and protein bars and finally asked if we were planning a camping trip. From the look on her mom’s face, it wasn’t going to be a fun trip, if that was the reason for the backpacks. We live in the immediate fallout zone of the Indian Point nuclear reactor. The state-designed evacuation plan has been evaluated as pitifully ineffective, so our backpacks might be as useful as a juju in the event of an unannounced attack. But for Liz, it was a way to control her fear, channel it into some sort of positive doingness, even though it might ultimately prove futile.

Maya, being precocious, factored the look of sad, angry determination on Liz’ face, and added that to the fattening packs on the floor, and slowly went very pale and quiet. How much do I tell her? How much shorter will her childhood be with this new, frightening, and basically useless information? If I don’t tell her the exact truth, she’ll find out sooner or later, probably sooner, and then she’ll know that I’m no longer a source of reliable information and trust will go flying out the window. If I do tell her the truth, without a lot of horrifying detail, I am robbing her of one of the greatest and most evanescent gifts of childhood; a magical sense of the world.

Well, you say, she has to grow up sooner or later anyway, and it’s better to know the truth as soon as she is capable of understanding it. Perhaps. It probably comes as less of a shock if the realization that the world is a not-so-lovely place comes in bits and pieces over time. You might argue that it’s all downhill after they find out the truth about Santa. I’m not so sure. As a father, it is part of my function to be a bridge from the home to the big world out there; to prepare the kids, cushion them sometimes, push them at others, but more importantly, to model for them a person who feels comfortable out in the world, someone who moves with ease and freedom in a vast and complex matrix of responsibility.

As with so many things, my choice comes down to a paradoxical eeny-meeny-miney-mo. I can either infect or inoculate my children, and the difference lies in my intent. Remember rule #1; kids learn from watching you, not listening to you. If you speak courage but model fear, kids learn two things; one, adults lie, and two, they learn to be afraid. They don’t know why you are in fear, but if the big whackos, the pillars of their safety, are afraid, they damn well better be, too. The choice is a paradox since it is inherently a lose-lose situation, but having been handed this dilemma, there has to be at least a less harmful option from which to choose. I have to sort out my own fear stuff, pry it loose from the bolus of mass emotion, wrench it away from the color-coded panic button, and focus on the small area over which I have some control. There is a choice here. If I simply react with ovine predictability, not only will my children be both affected and infected, but I will also be easily stampeded since my judgment has been so totally impaired by the constant exposure to fear-based manipulation. If I cede my individual ability to analyze and come to conclusions (even if the information provided to me is not entirely accurate), I then become a pawn of whichever voice shouts the loudest.

Do not make the error of believing that, just because children aren’t intellectually advanced enough to understand the current global pustulance, they are somehow immune to it or unaffected by it. We are doing far more than mounting a war abroad. We are creating a bunker mentality for our beloved children, and that is unforgivable.