Hope and Hopelessness

Yesterday I took care of kids at an elementary school in Missoula. Kids today aren't all Christopher Robin and Huck Finn you know. Neither was I. They riddle their playground with imaginary bullets, they maim their friends with imaginary stop signs, they fight with their siblings over pointless disputes, they grab you and pull you and have no concept of respect. They tell you about who they killed in a video game, and they cheat against each other in imaginary games. I was killed with grenades, shot with lazers and machine guns, I was thrown out of a "house" a kid made because he didn't like me. But that's just the boys. Girls aren't angels, but at least they don't drink blood with their fruit roll up at snack time.

How can I have any hope when these kids are the building blocks for the future? The school is in the middle of the valley. I pointed to the mountain with an M on it that is visible from everywhere in Missoula and asked them if they knew what it was called. Not one of them could answer me. What are they learning in school if not how to play and live and participate in their environment in a powerful and meaningful way?

I couldn't have named any landforms when I was their age, but now that I'm older, being able to do so is one of my chief joys and it's essential for my concept of life.

I watched a kneeling kid get interrogated for information. When he gave the info, he was shot with a shotgun, the imaginary barrel pointing downward from the standing kids shoulder and aimed right in the kneeling kids face. It looked exactly like the front page of a Newspaper covering a barbaric foreign war.

Does this behavior belie great creativity in the kids? I believe not. Imagination, yes, but creativity is something that requires more than turning the playground into an arena where they are all simulating a video game. Do game developers realize that kids so young are being influenced by their work? These boys idolize strength, invulnerability, deadliness, violence. Where are the tricksters? Where are the stories of adventure and risk? Where are the children? They don't realize what they do, that when you kill someone, they don't stand up again in fifteen seconds.

There were two native boys. They were brothers. I wanted so badly for them to demonstrate what the white kids failed to. At first I was discouraged that they turned sticks into lasers and grenades like the rest, but there was also an element of reluctance in the way they fought. These boys were defending their base, choosing leaders for missions, and throwing bombs away from themselves rather than towards others. They included me, unlike the other kids, and wanted me to be armed so i could defend myself. I could tell from the way they talked that they didn't have the same concept of what bombs and lazers were for that the other kids had.
"That's a big bomb, it can shoot a lot of people."
"No the lazer sounds like, zhooozhoozhooo, and when you shoot someone with it, you both dissappear and then you can fight eachother."

They created spaceships out of leggos and gave me one. It had a chainsaw launching gun that could cut through anything, "Even metal." Though it wasn't a weapon exactly, though they said it could go through another ship, they never said it would hurt anyone.

Then when we played basketball, a younger boy who had bad manners was trying to steal the ball and get attention. The native boy let him play, even handed him the ball after a missed shot and encouraging him to keep trying even though it meant giving up his turn for a while. This native boy also had a football. It was taken away by a bully and then the bully punted it and it wasn't a very good kick. The native boy said, "Oops, nice try. At least it went really far."

I remember being a kid and my friends would want to play violent games where we'd have all sorts of powers and guns and technology and dinosaur pets and everything. I always disliked it. I developed a sense of nostalgia at a very young age. And i wanted out games to have some literary merit, some challenge. I thought it made more sense if my friend and i had different powers, and had to help each other. I don't know. i don't remember it that well, just images and feelings. But they all came rushing back on the playground. Feelings of regret, of just wanting to be left alone, of not belonging with other kids and feeling guilty about playing along with their games.