As a dad and granddad, I’ve been interested in how kids grow up for many years now. Surely I wanted my own girls to end up with a meaningful career, a house in a safe neighborhood, a trustworthy car, and enough food in the pantry to insure nobody went hungry. In addition to those concrete things, I wanted my kids and grandkids to grow up and older with a solid sense of community values.
I hoped fairness and honesty would be front and center values for my progeny. On the most part, I’d say they met my expectations. Sometimes I wish I could make an honest comment that would be accepted, perhaps even put into play in raising their own kids. There are times, however, I have come to accept that dad’s ideas are unwelcome. I don’t always like it, but I accept that my girls are now women and mothers of their own families and my thoughts/ideas/suggestions merely come from another generation whose prime time has come and gone.
Still, my heart hurts when I realize one of my most sincere dreams from the 60s -- peace -- does not rank high in either my daughters’ or their children’s hierarchy of values.
Around Grandpa Tom’s house it was made known summers ago that we don’t play with guns here. No ‘shoot ‘em up’ stuff on the Wii, either. Golf, tennis, and bowling are cool, but no shooting countless villains while storming, often, a bastion of goodness. Kids these days get a charge out of being big bad Darth Vader. They seem to forget he stood by as a willing apprentice while planets of (fictional) good people were destroyed in one fell swoop. Being the bad guy and wearing black is cool. I suppose Johnny Cash thought the same thing, too.
I do know that I ‘played guns’ when I was a kid, too. It was cowboys and Indians back then. And, yes, the Indians were the bad guys. Reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and teaching history for over a decade has changed that. I’m not so sure these days just who is the bad guy. Conservatives would probably condemn me for thinking it just might be us more often than not.
Still, I have held throughout my adult life that treating others with peace is one of my richest core values. And not just neighbors, students, or spouses either. Nature’s people deserve the same, too. Sure, I discourage squirrels from cleaning out my peanut feeder, but I have made a daily practice of offering bird seed and water to Nature’s People, even on days with freezing temperatures like this one.
Surely peace is a deep and complicated value that defies simple analysis. I feed birds, but how about my eating chicken and turkey? Isn’t raising critters for butchering a kind of brutality? Shouldn’t all self-professed peaceniks be vegetarians or vegans? Maybe. I tend to think that eating a balanced diet is the way Earth operates. I need not be ashamed of my meat-tearing incisors.
I have watched the 10-something boys use sticks and plastic golf clubs as rifles, firing away at phantom enemies, dropping them in great numbers. They even seem to enjoy being ‘hit’ themselves, tumbling into a heap of temporary death now and then. I suppose I did the same thing. I still give the ban on violence lip service, but I accept the kids are acting out something that is beyond my control.
Still, it hurts to know that peace does not rank a higher place in family values that I tried to instill as a young dad beginning almost forty years ago. I suppose all I can really do is model how it’s done through my own behavior. And trust me, I’ll continue to encourage kids to set out the model train on the basement floor and get creative with blocks instead of getting zoned out on Call of Duty or Halo. There are days it seems like a lost cause, though.
Today’s elder idea: If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
Mahatma Ghandhi
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