Liza Featherstone --------
Great essay. You've touched on a whole well of ideas I've been carrying around in my head for years.
What follows below doesn't directly deal with how to talk to your kids about war. We were fortunate our kid was born the year Vietnam was officially over for the US. Military toys were easy to avoid.
We were facing a different battle. How to raise a son who would never become a soldier.
I grew up in such a militarized society that it is difficult to describe what it's like, the mind set, the children's world, even down to the hair styles for boys. It was the age of the military crew cut. Almost all our games were military games. The movies were full of these themes. The comic books, the army surplus stores, the military was everywhere. All our fathers had been in the military. Lucky for me my favorite stepfather hated the Navy with a passion, and had a strong anti-authoritarian streak. His destroyer was parked in Nagasaki Bay so he got to see what nuclear weapons do.
The military mind was so ubiquitous it wasn't quite seen for what it was, until the day when we all faced the Selective Service System.
All along we had been prepared to become soldiers. Our games, our cloths, our bodies, our minds, even our empty and desperate sex lives, everything had been groomed in some way to make us soldiers.
I started to analyze all this when I was composing long philosophical letters against the war to the draft board. Then I could see it. I could see why I was sitting in my run down grad student apartment with my typewriter, paintings, and books. I was sitting there wearing a baggy hand knitted sweater, with shaggy hair, no underwear, bare foot, totally broke, in hippy revolt mode. Of course my war surplus jacket was laying on the couch. I was thinking about all those obnoxious gym classes. And, the theory behind Basic Training---break you down and reconstruct you to follow orders without question. I saw that it was essential to get kids early, just out of high school before they had fully formed or tested themselves in the world. I could see the same mind at work in Norman Rockwell's Boy Scout posters.
I was thinking about what mass education was really like, which was little more than a preamble to military hierarchies of obedience. Or both in relation to working in corporate-USA. How to achieve mass conformity and subordination. That's what was going on in these hollowed institutions of war and capital.
I think the answer to how to fight this mind set which surrounds kids, is to figure out how to be a non-authoritarian parent. I think it is the best assault against the military-industrial, capitalist pig, top-down authoritarian command syndrome-society we live in.
Since this THING, this military-police-state-corporate-machine whatever you call it is so ubiquitous, so much the fabric of the society, it is impossible to protect kids from it.
As parents we have to fight the battle with an entirely different class of psychological weapons. The whole US macho, masculinity, manhood ideal, or identity is constructed around the roles men are supposed to play in war and in capital.
I saw that battle as much more threatening than playing with military toys. They were pretty easy to avoid. I not sure I agree with the two early childhood authors cited. I tend to agree more with the ex-soldier's view:
``Asked about the possibility that preschool-aged children are too young to understand war, Meija, who is now active in Iraq Veterans Against the War, emphatically demurs: ``The other side doesn't wait. Look at all the toys, war-related games..''
The old saying make `love not war' has a lot more meaning and wisdom to it than it might seem. I can't quite unpack it this morning. It's not a very analytic thing so it doesn't translate well into words. For parents it translates into saying that lots of affection and enjoyment with your kids, goes a long way toward protecting them. I think of affection, enjoyment, even a certain kind of comradeship as weapons against the society of greed, hate and war.
There is also a lot of social wisdom packed into the teaching and teachers from the progressive education era in the 30s, and the red diaper days of the 50s that helps fight the capitalist individual fetish. I started to learn some of that wisdom under a great mentor. She later became a Head Start teacher.
The way this commie social wisdom works for teachers and kids is a lot of group or collective activities like singing, dancing, reading stories, sharing, sharing words and stories, the corny stuff Pete Seeger did. What's happening here is a social protection system built to keep the ego and social destructive `competition' shit down, and make your kids happy, enjoyable, and interesting to be around.
Cooperation feels good. It always has. Walking down the street holding hands. Gathering together to go on a field trips to the museum. In some mysterious way, competition destroys learning while cooperation enhances learning. Active cooperation and engagement between children builds up an inner trust of self as well as a kid solidarity. I think it does. It's just what I think I saw when our kid started school and was more often around other kids with teachers who tended to stress the collective stuff over the individual performance and competitive stuff.
In many education settings kids are set up to compete against each other in a hierarchy of who's best, who's smartest, who's fastest, who's good, who's bad etc. Nasty shitty stuff. We have a few winners and everybody else is a loser? This creates a whole classroom of sulking, guilt ridden, miserable, loser kids. Just think about the logic of A, B, C grades. Being average is third place?
The anti-cooperation models built into most of the latest `education reforms' pushed by the private think-tank industry is mostly about how to get back to the `traditional' schoolroom. These reactionary reformes are vastly more socially destructive than most people realize.
It probably seems like I have strayed a long way from thinking about how to tell kids about war. What I think is we don't have to worry how we tell your kids about war, if we already have their love, trust, and confidence. There are a couple of other things. Children protect themselves pretty well if they are well treated.
What I think the more cooperative based built-in social system does for kids later, is it gives them the confidence to stand up to the crowd when the crowd has a bad idea like, let's go kill Iraqis.
I want to end with this, because it is such a beautiful quote:
``Meija, who refused to go back to Iraq and served time in prison as a conscientious objector, told his daughter Samantha that he was going to jail because he didn't want to fight in a war. When she asked him what war was, he told her, `War is when you go to another country, you kill other people and they try to kill you.' She wanted to know if children, mommies and daddies get killed, and he said yes. `Why are you going to jail for not wanting to do that?' she demanded.''
Samantha, honey, that's a good question, but I have no answer. I've never figured it out. I don't know. Children love catching out grown-ups. So give them the honor.
CG