The other day I heard a local talk show host, bemoaning a recent case of child molestation involving a 14-year-old and a 5-year-old, wax problematic on how times have gotten so harsh for kids, that he wished we could return to a “time when kids could just be kids. Could be innocent.”
I wondered, twisted that I sometimes am, when exactly that was.
I’m not being rhetorical. I hear people go on from time to time about how kids used to have it so much better when they didn’t have all these modern problems with which to contend. Things like drugs, child molestation, abusive parents, absent parents, gang violence. You know, back in the day when Tom Sawyer was the model for rural youth and Little Lord Fauntleroy seemed to have been the model for everything else.
Everyone coinveniently forgets about Huck Finn. Who smoked and drank and cussed. Whose father was largely absentee, a petty criminal, and an abusive drunk. Who ended up running off with a slave as the only option out of a situation that could, in his estimation, get nothing but worse. We forget about him, and if we have romanticized Mark Twain overly much it would do to reread that book and pick out the life that Huck was clearly living, which was pretty awful. He was poor, underfed, undereducation. Compared with his buddy Tom he was what we’d identify as street trash. His denials about freedom notwithstanding and the humor prevalent throughout the book, Huck’s “idyllic” childhood was anything but.
And then we have examples like Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. Wonderful life.
I wonder when that period was, when kids could “just be kids” and what, furthermore, that really means.
For me, it seems to be a fantasy substitute, sometimes imagined about our very own lives, when we did not–in fact could not–worry about the things we worry about as adults. When the complications of wanting did not intrude to ruin friendships, bank accounts, or opportunities. When we still wondered what it was like to be with someone else, intimately, and the mystery seemed to exceed the actuallity. When we could pretty much do whatever we could get away with and not face dire consequences. When the most exciting thing to do would be summer camp or boy scouts or…
Are we really that desperate?
My father told me stories of having to take a baseball bat to school (in the Thirties) because some bigger kids always met him on the way to steal the nickle his mother had given him for lunch. When he was a teenager he ran with a gang called the Brooklyn Barons and he acquired a couple of scars from knife fights. My mother was sheltered and remembers nothing bad about her childhood except that they didn’t have a lot of money. My uncle, her brother, recalled getting beaten up regularly because he was a bit swarthier and everyone thought he was either Italian (dego) or mulatto, rather than Irish. Of course, once that was understood, it still didn’t do any good, because he was either Black Irish or Shanty Irish, no matter how clean his house might have been.
Three or four kids in my grade school smoked. One was a petty thief and as an adult committed murder, for which he’s still in prison. A classmate of mine (grade school now) had an older brother who was a heroin addict and I got to watch him go through withdrawal one summer.
I listen to the sanctimony of those who would protect children from themselves–as if somehow they are really not actually human beings, but proto-humans, unstained by the emotional confusions of adulthood–and I have to wonder what movies they think represent that curiously idyllic childhood they think was once real. I remember the original Bowery Boys, before they were transformed into camp, in movies like Angels With Dirty Faces and I ask myself “Idyllic?” Oh, but that was New York, and we all know how bad New York always was.
We kid ourselves about the nature of children so much that we forget to apply reason. We’ve been reacting, I think, against Freud, and even though much of what he said was in error, our counterreaction has become pathological.
I don’t know when that idyllic time was. I suspect it was true for some kids, in some places, at some times. But it was never universal, and seems to have been remarkable enough to become a kind of ideal goal which we have somehow miscast as authentic history.
On the other hand, there are days when I wistfully remember my own childhood. Not so much for the utopian elements (there were none), but for the simple fact that so much was brand new for me then. I looked forward much more eagerly, not knowing what to expect from what life had to offer. Now that aspect retains the patina of innocence, simply because all experiences were unsullied by disappointment. I wonder if perhaps people have taken that attitude of ignorant anticipation and translated it into some kind of innocence. It has nothing to do with the thing anticipated, of course. All those things, good and bad, licit and illicit, which by virtue of being there, before us, denied or allowed, offer the same potential for novel experience. Once experienced, we then begin the process of categorizing them into the moral slots we will carry with us for the rest of our lives.
But misidentifying the “purity” of innocent anticipation as some kind of innate innocence of “being” has led us as a society into a peculiarly absurd attitude toward children and childhood, and in the process gives us a distorted view of our own maturity.
So next time someone goes on about how wonderful childhood “used to be” ask them when that was? And then if they really thought it was like that and don’t they remembered being a little monster from time to time?
Remind them that kids are people, too. With all that that implies.
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