Playing With Bombs

Saturday morning we sat and watched the re-cap of events this past week in Watertown, Massachusetts. In the olden days, as kids, Saturday mornings we sat and watched Hollywood westerns and an occasional war movie as a pre-game warm-up. Then, outside we'd go to play war.

As kids, my brother and our friends and I used to love playing cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and war. We utilized everything from bow and arrow to small arms to fully automatic weapons, from tanks to battleships, fighters to bombers. It was not an infrequent occurrence that, passing within 50 feet, you would have heard the young vocalizations of gunfire and bombs going off on our property.

In spite of all that early exposure to guns and bombs and armed conflict, I am pretty much a pacifist. I'm of the opinion, given that killing people, invading their homelands, and setting off or dropping bombs has never brought lasting peace or a lasting sense of security, we probably do not really have our hands around an effective means of fashioning a secure and peaceful coexistence in the world.

So now, just days after the horrific events in Boston this past week, I hear Evan call out from the other room, "I only have there bombs!" He's playing Fruit Ninjas on an iPad. We've never let him play with toy guns but he loves his model airplanes, his fighter jets, B-17, B-25, and B- 28 bombers. Given the world in which we live today, it drives me crazy that we've provided him with even these toys. It is the destructive nature of the beasts that seem to hold his attention, with their bombs and rockets and guns. Suddenly, as a grown-up living in a world filled with threats and actions and a pervasive sense of fear and alert, it's not fun anymore. And it's hard for me to remember anymore just how far child's play is removed from real life events.

With Ev I can talk to him about real bombs, real victims, and real events. And, I like to think at least, he kind of gets it and he knows just how opposed we are to the use of guns as personal protection and war in general. But I worry about a lot of this country where people spend hours playing war games online, bombs blasting, guns going off, and bodies flying apart.  Maybe psychologists will tell us it's an important form of release; that fantasy disarms reality. I don't know. But I certainly hope it never gets us to the point where we look passively at events like those in Boston last week-- as well as the horrors that occur everyday around this planet populated by our scared and selfish humankind.  I hope Evan, and all of his generation, don't ever stop feeling an absolute sense of sorrow at our continuing need to kill and injure-- our utter failure as a species to live in peace.