Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, "Are They Going to Kill Me?"
By Frida Berrigan
Posted on December 22, 2015, Printed on December 22, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176085/
Fear? Tell me about it. Unfortunately, Im so old that Im not sure I really
remember what I felt when, along with millions of other schoolchildren of
the 1950s, I ducked and covered like Bert the Turtle, huddling under my desk
while sirens howled outside the classroom window. We were, of course, being
prepared to protect ourselves from the nuclear obliteration of New York
City. But let me tell you, I do remember those desks and they did not
exactly instill a sense of confidence in a child.
Dont by the way think that, from personal fallout shelters to fashion tips
for the apocalypse, adults werent subjected to similar visions of safety
so hollow as to inspire fear. A government-sponsored civil defense manual of
that moment, How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, was typical enough in suggesting
that men, in danger of being caught outdoors in a sudden attack, should
wear wide-brimmed fedoras, which would give them at least some protection
from the heat flash of a nuclear explosion. For women, as Paul Boyer
pointed out in By the Bombs Early Light, his classic book on post-Hiroshima
nuclear fallout in American society, stockings and long-sleeved dresses
were de rigueur for a nuclear event.
No kidding. That really was the prosaic 1950s version of the end of
everything. I can hardly believe I lived through such an era of
half-expressed, yet genuinely horrific fears, no less that from my school
years into adulthood I had recurring nightmares filled with mushroom clouds
and post-apocalyptic nuclear landscapes, or that I plunged with relish into
the era's pulp science fiction filled with survivor colonies and mutants
galore. In the style of parenting of that moment, most children, I suspect,
were left on their own to struggle with the prospective obliteration of all
life on planet Earth. I still remember how shocking and yet eerily familiar
it seemed when, on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy addressed the
American people, essentially informing us that we might be at the edge of
oblivion in what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. For many of
us -- I was then just starting college -- it seemed as if the secular
equivalent of prophesy was finally coming true and that we would all
momentarily be toast.
In those years, I cant remember a single conversation with my parents about
the nuclear drills at school (even though they obviously heard the same
sirens), or for that matter about nuclear war. (My best friend, then and
now, assures me that his experience was no different.) We lived, my parents
and I, in silence through the early years of what might be called the first
age of the apocalypse, that moment when the power to destroy all life had
fallen from the hands of the gods into distinctly human ones. We still live
in such an age.
TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan, far younger than I, had quite a
different childhood, as well as parents who couldnt have answered her
nuclear questions more bluntly or graphically, as she explains in this
websites last post of the year. The results, it seems, were no less scary
or unnerving than the silence that lay at the heart of what, in my life,
could truly be called the nuclear family.
I took my own path to Hiroshima and into parenthood as well, and so into the
eternally knotty problem of how to talk (or not talk) to your children about
the primal fears of our distinctly apocalyptic age. Up to a certain moment,
your kids have a kind of blind faith in your ability to know, a faith that
-- as I experienced many times and Berrigan describes today -- can tie you
in knots of authoritative lunacy on subjects about which you know next to
nothing or about which you are at least as unnerved as they are. How to sort
out such a world, whether for your own children, yourself, or the rest of us
is, of course, the question and the conundrum for 2016 and beyond. Tom
Kids Questions on a Lockdown Planet
Thinking the Parentally Unthinkable
By Frida Berrigan
"What did you do at school today, Seamus?" Its a question I ask him
everyday.
"Well," my proud preschooler begins, "we did not have a lockdown drill
today." And thats about as far as he gets in the art of storytelling.
Sometimes I'll get something about "bim" (gym) or how "Bambi" (Jeremy)
pinched him during free play. But the thing that preoccupies my precocious
three year old every single day he goes to school is the lockdown drill he
and his classmates had in their first month of school.
At a parent-teacher conference in November, my husband Patrick and I got a
fuller picture of this episode from his teacher. When the lockdown began,
she says, Seamus and his classmates were in the hall on their way to the
library. Amid the clangs, they sought refuge in the gymnasium closet.
Eighteen kids and two teachers sitting crisscross applesauce on its floor
amid racks of balls and hula hoops. Seamus, she tells us, sat on her lap
with his fingers in his mouth and cried the entire time.
"Does he talk about it at home?" she asks.
"Its as though nothing else happens at school," my husband replies. "He
talks about lockdown drills all the time."
She informs us that the drills happen about once a month, and that Seamus
remains easily startled long after theyre over, running for shelter between
an adult's legs whenever he hears loud noises in the classroom.
At that moment -- not exactly one of my proudest -- I burst into tears. I
just couldnt square my sons loving exuberance and confidence in the people
around him with the sheer, teeth-hurting terror of children being stalked by
an armed killer through the halls of The Friendship School. How, after all,
do you practice for the unthinkable? This is a subject thats been on my
mind since I was hardly older than he is now. I look over at him playing
contently with his sisters, Madeline, almost two, and Rosena, almost nine,
so proud to share his classroom with them.
"At home," I tell the teacher through my tears, "we chant 'Gun Control, Not
Lockdown Drills!' whenever he talks about them." And then I add, "It makes
me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the
big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons. He should be scared
of lockdown drills. They sound terrible. He shouldnt have to practice
surviving a mass killing episode at one of his favorite places in the whole
wide world." I wipe my tears away, but they just keep coming.
Our kids ask us all sorts of questions. Why? Why? Why? They are tiny
existentialists. Why is the sky blue? Why do people die? Why does grass
grow? They regularly demand that we explain the world to them. Good luck!
His teacher is so earnest and so young and I feel so brittle and so extreme
as I cry, folded into one of the small seats at a quarter-sized table in her
cheerful classroom. "I am sorry," I finally say.
"No, no, its okay," she replies with all the kind politeness a teacher
learns. "It is hard," she continues, "but this is real. We have to practice
for this kind of thing."
Thinking the Unthinkable
I wonder, of course. I know that so much of this is based on fears -- not
quite irrational but blown out of all proportion -- that have been woven
into our American world. My husband reminds me of how his parents'
generation had to practice surviving a nuclear attack by doing "duck and
cover" drills under their desks. I was too young to duck and cover, but my
parents were ardent anti-nuclear activists with no inhibitions about
describing to a child just what such a war would mean so I learned to be
terrified of nuclear war at a very young age.
I came to believe that the only thing keeping Soviet and American
intercontinental ballistic missiles from decimating our cities was the
activism, organizing, and witness of my parents and their small band of
friends and fellow travelers. We would stand in front of the Pentagon --
this was in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s -- holding up signs with
slogans like "You can't hide from a nuclear bomb" and the old symbol for a
fallout shelter printed below it. I was taught that there could be no
security, no safety in a world full of nuclear weapons, that the only way to
be safe was to get rid of them.
Imagine how I feel all these years later in a world still chock-a-block full
of such weapons. These days, I wonder why the fear of them has disappeared,
while the weaponry remains. Is that better or worse for Seamuss generation?
And what about our present set of fears? What about our twenty-first-century
whys?
Assuming there are more Adam Lanzas out there (and there obviously are),
that more gun shops will sell ever more implements of rapid-fire death and
destruction, and that more gun lobbyists and promoters will continue to
cling to this "God-given, constitutionally enshrined right," my son does
need to endure more lockdown drills.
The consensus of school security experts is certainly that the massacre at
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (only 80 miles from our
house), would have been much worse if the students and teachers hadn't been
practicing for exactly the nightmare scenario that struck on December 14,
2012.
But how can I explain any of this to my little boy when it makes no sense to
me? When it makes no sense, period?
Why? Why? Why? As a kid, I got an earful every time I asked that question.
My parents were comfortable exposing my brother, sister, and me to the
horrors of our world. In first or second grade, my activist parents involved
me in a UNICEF slide show about world hunger. We would go to churches and
schools where I would recite the script, full of sad (and still, sadly,
largely on the mark) statistics about how children throughout the world
suffer from malnutrition. I could tell you why kids were hungry all over the
world, since my mom had tacked on a conclusion to the slide show that lay
the blame squarely on the U.S. military-industrial complex.
My parents did, however, try to protect me from what they found most
fearsomely destructive in American life. We were not allowed to watch
television, except for the evening news (somewhat less hysterical than today
but no less bleak). Like any self-respecting American kid, I would always
ask, "Why no TV?" and always get the same answer. Because it teaches
racism, sexism, and consumerism, because it fills your head with wants,
because it gets in the way of your own imagination and creativity.
So instead of Knight Rider or The Cosby Show, we watched black and white
documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki projected onto our living room
wall. I couldnt tell you about the latest plot twists on Full House, but I
could tell you why nuclear weapons were wrong. Those grainy images of
destroyed cities, burnt skin, and scarred faces were etched into my young
brain by the age of five. My heroines were two young anti-nuclear activists.
Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia after the atomic
bombing. She folded hundreds of paper cranes as a prayer for healing and
peace before dying at the age of 12. Samantha Smith, a young girl from
Maine, wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov with a plea for peace. He, in
turn, invited her to tour the Soviet Union where she connected deeply with
young Russians. She died in a plane crash at the age of 13.
I wonder now about my childhood fears. They helped me support and believe in
the anti-nuclear work of my parents. But nightmares, morbid fascinations
with young martyrs, a fixation on the tick-tockings of the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock -- these are not things that I want to
pass on to the next generation. I guess Im happy that they dont know what
nuclear weapons are (yet) and its one more thing Im not looking forward to
explaining to them.
The questions are already coming fast and furious these days and they are
only going to multiply. We have to try -- I have to try -- to answer them as
best we -- I -- can. Its a precious facet of parenting, the opportunity to
explain, educate about, and even expound upon the wonders and horrors of
this world of ours, and its a heavy responsibility. Who wants to explain
the hard stuff? But if we dont, others surely will. In these early years,
our kids turn to us first, but if we cant or wont answer their questions,
how long will they keep asking them?
Why do we practice lockdown drills? Why do people kill kids? Why is there
war? Why are all those weapons, the nuclear ones and the assault rifles
alike, still here?
Why Do the Police Kill People?
At some preschools, its protocol to explain lockdown drills in terms of
preparing in case a stinky skunk gets into the building. No one wants to get
sprayed by a stinky skunk, do they?
Somehow, and I cant tell you quite why, this seems to me almost worse than
the truth. At Seamus' school, they don't talk explicitly about an armed
intruder, but they do make a distinction between fire drills where they
evacuate the building and "keeping safe from a threat" by "hiding" in it.
In the month since our parent-teacher meeting, Seamus has endured another
lockdown drill and our country has continued to experience mass shooting
events -- San Bernardino and Colorado Springs being just the most horrific.
While at breakfast, Patrick and I read the news about healthcare offices and
social service agencies turned into abattoirs, and yet we speak about such
things only in code over granola and yogurt. Its as if we have an unspoken
agreement not to delve into this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings
with our kids.
Still, its strange not to talk about this one subject when we talk openly
in front of our children about so much else: Iraq and Afghanistan, the
Syrian refugee crisis, hunger and homelessness, Guantánamo and climate
change. We usually welcome their whys and jump over each other to explain.
Patrick is much better at talking in a way that they can all take in. I
forget myself easily and slip into lecture mode (next slide, please).
After the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of
New London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we
took the kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to
answer all Seamus's questions. "Why do the police kill people?" followed, of
course, by "Are they going to kill me?" Then we somehow had to explain white
privilege to a three year old and how the very things that we encouraged in
him -- curiosity, openness, questioning authority -- were the things black
parents were forced to discourage in their sons to keep them from getting
killed by police.
And then, of course, came the next inevitable "Why?" (the same one Im sure
well hear for years to come). And soon enough, we were trying desperately
to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible -- for such a
young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well -- when it came
to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to our
little white boy why he doesn't need to cry every time he sees a police
officer.
And then came the next "Why?" and who wouldnt think sooner or later that
the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, Because its
nuts! And were nuts! I mean, really, where have we ended up when our
answer to him is, in essence: "Don't worry, you're white!"
And then, of course, theres the anxiety I have about how hell take in any
of this and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom --
the ridiculous game of "telephone" that he could play with all the new words
and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.
My stepdaughter Rosena was a kindergartner when Adam Lanza killed those 20
little kids and six adults in their school just 80 miles west of us. Her
school upped its security protocols, instituted regular drills, and provided
parents and caregivers with resources on how to talk to their children about
what happened. For five and six year olds, they advised not initiating such
a conversation, nor allowing them to watch TV or listen to the radio news
about the massacre. (Not exactly the easiest thing in our 24/7 media
moment.) They also suggested responding to questions only in the most
general terms. Basically, we were to sit tight and hope our kids didnt get
enough information to formulate a why.
Good luck on that these days, but sometimes I do wish the same for myself.
No news, sit tight, and pretend nothings going on. After all, like so many
of our present American fears, the fear that my kids are going to be gunned
down in their classrooms is pretty irrational, right? Such school shootings
dont exactly happen often. Just because one did occur relatively near here
three years ago doesn't mean pre-schools and elementary schools are
systematically under attack, yes?
Unlike so many people on this planet, we dont live in a war zone (if you
put aside the global destructiveness of nuclear weapons). And given the
yearly figures on death-by-vehicle in this country, my kids are unbelievably
safer in school, any school, than they are in the back seat of my own car
any day of the week, right?
Of course, theres another problem lurking here and its mine. Im not
there. My three-year-old son is having scary experiences and Im not there
to walk him through them. And then there are those lockdown drills and what
they are preparing him for. They couldnt be creepier. Theyre a reminder
not just to our children but to their parents that, after a fashion, we may
indeed be living in a kind of war zone. In 2013, according to the Centers
for Disease Control, 33,636 people were killed by guns in this country; in
that same year, 127 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
Some Questions Are Easier Than Others
Why is the sky blue? I have no idea, but it takes only a minute of Googling
to find out that it has something to do with the way air molecules scatter
more blue light than red light. Why do people die? Because no one can live
forever, because they get sick and their bodies get old and their organs
don't work any more and then we cry because we miss them and love them, but
they live on, at least until our own memories go. Why does grass grow? Well,
Google it yourself.
The problem, however, is with the most human of questions, the ones that
defy Googling and good sense -- or any sense we may have of the goodness of
humanity. And maybe, kids, we just have to wrestle together with those as
best we can in this truly confusing world.
And keep one thing in mind: the very same litany of questions our kids never
stop asking and that we struggle to answer, or wonder whether to answer at
all, is always running like some strange song through our own adult heads as
well, largely unanswered.
Why this particular world? Why this particular way? Why now?
Why? Why? Why?
Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog
for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being
Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New
London, Connecticut.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government:
Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Frida Berrigan
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176085
Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, "Are They Going to Kill Me?"
By Frida Berrigan
Posted on December 22, 2015, Printed on December 22, 2015
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176085/
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: With this post, TomDispatch ends 2015. Well
be back early in the New Year! In the meantime, let me just remind those of
you who are regulars at this website that there are still some days to go in
this truly bizarre year. Should the holiday giving mood hit you, dont
forget to visit our donation page, check out the signed, personalized books
available to anyone who gives $100 (or more), and help us get through 2016.
Again, a deep bow of thanks to all of you who already answered our year-end
appeal for contributions in such a spirit of generosity! See you soon.
Heres hoping for a few pleasing surprises from 2016. Happy New Year! Tom]
Fear? Tell me about it. Unfortunately, Im so old that Im not sure I really
remember what I felt when, along with millions of other schoolchildren of
the 1950s, I ducked and covered like Bert the Turtle, huddling under my desk
while sirens howled outside the classroom window. We were, of course, being
prepared to protect ourselves from the nuclear obliteration of New York
City. But let me tell you, I do remember those desks and they did not
exactly instill a sense of confidence in a child.
Dont by the way think that, from personal fallout shelters to fashion tips
for the apocalypse, adults werent subjected to similar visions of safety
so hollow as to inspire fear. A government-sponsored civil defense manual of
that moment, How to Survive an Atomic Bomb, was typical enough in suggesting
that men, in danger of being caught outdoors in a sudden attack, should
wear wide-brimmed fedoras, which would give them at least some protection
from the heat flash of a nuclear explosion. For women, as Paul Boyer
pointed out in By the Bombs Early Light, his classic book on post-Hiroshima
nuclear fallout in American society, stockings and long-sleeved dresses
were de rigueur for a nuclear event.
No kidding. That really was the prosaic 1950s version of the end of
everything. I can hardly believe I lived through such an era of
half-expressed, yet genuinely horrific fears, no less that from my school
years into adulthood I had recurring nightmares filled with mushroom clouds
and post-apocalyptic nuclear landscapes, or that I plunged with relish into
the era's pulp science fiction filled with survivor colonies and mutants
galore. In the style of parenting of that moment, most children, I suspect,
were left on their own to struggle with the prospective obliteration of all
life on planet Earth. I still remember how shocking and yet eerily familiar
it seemed when, on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy addressed the
American people, essentially informing us that we might be at the edge of
oblivion in what came to be known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. For many of
us -- I was then just starting college -- it seemed as if the secular
equivalent of prophesy was finally coming true and that we would all
momentarily be toast.
In those years, I cant remember a single conversation with my parents about
the nuclear drills at school (even though they obviously heard the same
sirens), or for that matter about nuclear war. (My best friend, then and
now, assures me that his experience was no different.) We lived, my parents
and I, in silence through the early years of what might be called the first
age of the apocalypse, that moment when the power to destroy all life had
fallen from the hands of the gods into distinctly human ones. We still live
in such an age.
TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan, far younger than I, had quite a
different childhood, as well as parents who couldnt have answered her
nuclear questions more bluntly or graphically, as she explains in this
websites last post of the year. The results, it seems, were no less scary
or unnerving than the silence that lay at the heart of what, in my life,
could truly be called the nuclear family.
I took my own path to Hiroshima and into parenthood as well, and so into the
eternally knotty problem of how to talk (or not talk) to your children about
the primal fears of our distinctly apocalyptic age. Up to a certain moment,
your kids have a kind of blind faith in your ability to know, a faith that
-- as I experienced many times and Berrigan describes today -- can tie you
in knots of authoritative lunacy on subjects about which you know next to
nothing or about which you are at least as unnerved as they are. How to sort
out such a world, whether for your own children, yourself, or the rest of us
is, of course, the question and the conundrum for 2016 and beyond. Tom
Kids Questions on a Lockdown Planet
Thinking the Parentally Unthinkable
By Frida Berrigan
"What did you do at school today, Seamus?" Its a question I ask him
everyday.
"Well," my proud preschooler begins, "we did not have a lockdown drill
today." And thats about as far as he gets in the art of storytelling.
Sometimes I'll get something about "bim" (gym) or how "Bambi" (Jeremy)
pinched him during free play. But the thing that preoccupies my precocious
three year old every single day he goes to school is the lockdown drill he
and his classmates had in their first month of school.
At a parent-teacher conference in November, my husband Patrick and I got a
fuller picture of this episode from his teacher. When the lockdown began,
she says, Seamus and his classmates were in the hall on their way to the
library. Amid the clangs, they sought refuge in the gymnasium closet.
Eighteen kids and two teachers sitting crisscross applesauce on its floor
amid racks of balls and hula hoops. Seamus, she tells us, sat on her lap
with his fingers in his mouth and cried the entire time.
"Does he talk about it at home?" she asks.
"Its as though nothing else happens at school," my husband replies. "He
talks about lockdown drills all the time."
She informs us that the drills happen about once a month, and that Seamus
remains easily startled long after theyre over, running for shelter between
an adult's legs whenever he hears loud noises in the classroom.
At that moment -- not exactly one of my proudest -- I burst into tears. I
just couldnt square my sons loving exuberance and confidence in the people
around him with the sheer, teeth-hurting terror of children being stalked by
an armed killer through the halls of The Friendship School. How, after all,
do you practice for the unthinkable? This is a subject thats been on my
mind since I was hardly older than he is now. I look over at him playing
contently with his sisters, Madeline, almost two, and Rosena, almost nine,
so proud to share his classroom with them.
"At home," I tell the teacher through my tears, "we chant 'Gun Control, Not
Lockdown Drills!' whenever he talks about them." And then I add, "It makes
me so angry that he and his friends have to go through this trauma and the
big men get to keep their right to bear assault weapons. He should be scared
of lockdown drills. They sound terrible. He shouldnt have to practice
surviving a mass killing episode at one of his favorite places in the whole
wide world." I wipe my tears away, but they just keep coming.
Our kids ask us all sorts of questions. Why? Why? Why? They are tiny
existentialists. Why is the sky blue? Why do people die? Why does grass
grow? They regularly demand that we explain the world to them. Good luck!
His teacher is so earnest and so young and I feel so brittle and so extreme
as I cry, folded into one of the small seats at a quarter-sized table in her
cheerful classroom. "I am sorry," I finally say.
"No, no, its okay," she replies with all the kind politeness a teacher
learns. "It is hard," she continues, "but this is real. We have to practice
for this kind of thing."
Thinking the Unthinkable
I wonder, of course. I know that so much of this is based on fears -- not
quite irrational but blown out of all proportion -- that have been woven
into our American world. My husband reminds me of how his parents'
generation had to practice surviving a nuclear attack by doing "duck and
cover" drills under their desks. I was too young to duck and cover, but my
parents were ardent anti-nuclear activists with no inhibitions about
describing to a child just what such a war would mean so I learned to be
terrified of nuclear war at a very young age.
I came to believe that the only thing keeping Soviet and American
intercontinental ballistic missiles from decimating our cities was the
activism, organizing, and witness of my parents and their small band of
friends and fellow travelers. We would stand in front of the Pentagon --
this was in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s -- holding up signs with
slogans like "You can't hide from a nuclear bomb" and the old symbol for a
fallout shelter printed below it. I was taught that there could be no
security, no safety in a world full of nuclear weapons, that the only way to
be safe was to get rid of them.
Imagine how I feel all these years later in a world still chock-a-block full
of such weapons. These days, I wonder why the fear of them has disappeared,
while the weaponry remains. Is that better or worse for Seamuss generation?
And what about our present set of fears? What about our twenty-first-century
whys?
Assuming there are more Adam Lanzas out there (and there obviously are),
that more gun shops will sell ever more implements of rapid-fire death and
destruction, and that more gun lobbyists and promoters will continue to
cling to this "God-given, constitutionally enshrined right," my son does
need to endure more lockdown drills.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1939293650/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1939293650/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20The
consensus of school security experts is certainly that the massacre at Sandy
Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut (only 80 miles from our
house), would have been much worse if the students and teachers hadn't been
practicing for exactly the nightmare scenario that struck on December 14,
2012.
But how can I explain any of this to my little boy when it makes no sense to
me? When it makes no sense, period?
Why? Why? Why? As a kid, I got an earful every time I asked that question.
My parents were comfortable exposing my brother, sister, and me to the
horrors of our world. In first or second grade, my activist parents involved
me in a UNICEF slide show about world hunger. We would go to churches and
schools where I would recite the script, full of sad (and still, sadly,
largely on the mark) statistics about how children throughout the world
suffer from malnutrition. I could tell you why kids were hungry all over the
world, since my mom had tacked on a conclusion to the slide show that lay
the blame squarely on the U.S. military-industrial complex.
My parents did, however, try to protect me from what they found most
fearsomely destructive in American life. We were not allowed to watch
television, except for the evening news (somewhat less hysterical than today
but no less bleak). Like any self-respecting American kid, I would always
ask, "Why no TV?" and always get the same answer. Because it teaches
racism, sexism, and consumerism, because it fills your head with wants,
because it gets in the way of your own imagination and creativity.
So instead of Knight Rider or The Cosby Show, we watched black and white
documentaries about Hiroshima and Nagasaki projected onto our living room
wall. I couldnt tell you about the latest plot twists on Full House, but I
could tell you why nuclear weapons were wrong. Those grainy images of
destroyed cities, burnt skin, and scarred faces were etched into my young
brain by the age of five. My heroines were two young anti-nuclear activists.
Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who contracted leukemia after the atomic
bombing. She folded hundreds of paper cranes as a prayer for healing and
peace before dying at the age of 12. Samantha Smith, a young girl from
Maine, wrote to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov with a plea for peace. He, in
turn, invited her to tour the Soviet Union where she connected deeply with
young Russians. She died in a plane crash at the age of 13.
I wonder now about my childhood fears. They helped me support and believe in
the anti-nuclear work of my parents. But nightmares, morbid fascinations
with young martyrs, a fixation on the tick-tockings of the Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock -- these are not things that I want to
pass on to the next generation. I guess Im happy that they dont know what
nuclear weapons are (yet) and its one more thing Im not looking forward to
explaining to them.
The questions are already coming fast and furious these days and they are
only going to multiply. We have to try -- I have to try -- to answer them as
best we -- I -- can. Its a precious facet of parenting, the opportunity to
explain, educate about, and even expound upon the wonders and horrors of
this world of ours, and its a heavy responsibility. Who wants to explain
the hard stuff? But if we dont, others surely will. In these early years,
our kids turn to us first, but if we cant or wont answer their questions,
how long will they keep asking them?
Why do we practice lockdown drills? Why do people kill kids? Why is there
war? Why are all those weapons, the nuclear ones and the assault rifles
alike, still here?
Why Do the Police Kill People?
At some preschools, its protocol to explain lockdown drills in terms of
preparing in case a stinky skunk gets into the building. No one wants to get
sprayed by a stinky skunk, do they?
Somehow, and I cant tell you quite why, this seems to me almost worse than
the truth. At Seamus' school, they don't talk explicitly about an armed
intruder, but they do make a distinction between fire drills where they
evacuate the building and "keeping safe from a threat" by "hiding" in it.
In the month since our parent-teacher meeting, Seamus has endured another
lockdown drill and our country has continued to experience mass shooting
events -- San Bernardino and Colorado Springs being just the most horrific.
While at breakfast, Patrick and I read the news about healthcare offices and
social service agencies turned into abattoirs, and yet we speak about such
things only in code over granola and yogurt. Its as if we have an unspoken
agreement not to delve into this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings
with our kids.
Still, its strange not to talk about this one subject when we talk openly
in front of our children about so much else: Iraq and Afghanistan, the
Syrian refugee crisis, hunger and homelessness, Guantánamo and climate
change. We usually welcome their whys and jump over each other to explain.
Patrick is much better at talking in a way that they can all take in. I
forget myself easily and slip into lecture mode (next slide, please).
After the police killings of Lashano Gilbert (tased to death in our town of
New London, Connecticut), Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, we
took the kids to candlelight vigils and demonstrations, doing our best to
answer all Seamus's questions. "Why do the police kill people?" followed, of
course, by "Are they going to kill me?" Then we somehow had to explain white
privilege to a three year old and how the very things that we encouraged in
him -- curiosity, openness, questioning authority -- were the things black
parents were forced to discourage in their sons to keep them from getting
killed by police.
And then, of course, came the next inevitable "Why?" (the same one Im sure
well hear for years to come). And soon enough, we were trying desperately
to untangle ourselves from the essentially unintelligible -- for such a
young child certainly, but possibly the rest of us as well -- when it came
to the legacy of slavery and racism and state violence in explaining to our
little white boy why he doesn't need to cry every time he sees a police
officer.
And then came the next "Why?" and who wouldnt think sooner or later that
the real answer to all of his whys (and our own) is simply, Because its
nuts! And were nuts! I mean, really, where have we ended up when our
answer to him is, in essence: "Don't worry, you're white!"
And then, of course, theres the anxiety I have about how hell take in any
of this and how he might talk about it in his racially diverse classroom --
the ridiculous game of "telephone" that he could play with all the new words
and fragments of concepts rattling around in his brain.
My stepdaughter Rosena was a kindergartner when Adam Lanza killed those 20
little kids and six adults in their school just 80 miles west of us. Her
school upped its security protocols, instituted regular drills, and provided
parents and caregivers with resources on how to talk to their children about
what happened. For five and six year olds, they advised not initiating such
a conversation, nor allowing them to watch TV or listen to the radio news
about the massacre. (Not exactly the easiest thing in our 24/7 media
moment.) They also suggested responding to questions only in the most
general terms. Basically, we were to sit tight and hope our kids didnt get
enough information to formulate a why.
Good luck on that these days, but sometimes I do wish the same for myself.
No news, sit tight, and pretend nothings going on. After all, like so many
of our present American fears, the fear that my kids are going to be gunned
down in their classrooms is pretty irrational, right? Such school shootings
dont exactly happen often. Just because one did occur relatively near here
three years ago doesn't mean pre-schools and elementary schools are
systematically under attack, yes?
Unlike so many people on this planet, we dont live in a war zone (if you
put aside the global destructiveness of nuclear weapons). And given the
yearly figures on death-by-vehicle in this country, my kids are unbelievably
safer in school, any school, than they are in the back seat of my own car
any day of the week, right?
Of course, theres another problem lurking here and its mine. Im not
there. My three-year-old son is having scary experiences and Im not there
to walk him through them. And then there are those lockdown drills and what
they are preparing him for. They couldnt be creepier. Theyre a reminder
not just to our children but to their parents that, after a fashion, we may
indeed be living in a kind of war zone. In 2013, according to the Centers
for Disease Control, 33,636 people were killed by guns in this country; in
that same year, 127 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
Some Questions Are Easier Than Others
Why is the sky blue? I have no idea, but it takes only a minute of Googling
to find out that it has something to do with the way air molecules scatter
more blue light than red light. Why do people die? Because no one can live
forever, because they get sick and their bodies get old and their organs
don't work any more and then we cry because we miss them and love them, but
they live on, at least until our own memories go. Why does grass grow? Well,
Google it yourself.
The problem, however, is with the most human of questions, the ones that
defy Googling and good sense -- or any sense we may have of the goodness of
humanity. And maybe, kids, we just have to wrestle together with those as
best we can in this truly confusing world.
And keep one thing in mind: the very same litany of questions our kids never
stop asking and that we struggle to answer, or wonder whether to answer at
all, is always running like some strange song through our own adult heads as
well, largely unanswered.
Why this particular world? Why this particular way? Why now?
Why? Why? Why?
Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog
for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being
Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New
London, Connecticut.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turses Tomorrows Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2015 Frida Berrigan
© 2015 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176085
