This week saw a small and telling controversy involving a mural on the walls of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. The mural is big--400 feet long, 18 feet high at its peak--and eye-catching, as would be anything that "presents a colorful depiction of the rape, slaughter and enslavement of North America's indigenous people by genocidal Europeans." Those are the words of the Los Angeles Times's Bob Sipchen, who noted "the churning stream of skulls in the wake of Columbus's Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria."
What is telling is not that some are asking if the mural portrays the Conquistadors as bloodthirsty monsters, or if it is sufficiently respectful to the indigenous Indians of Mexico. What is telling is that those questions completely miss the point and ignore the obvious. Here is the obvious:
The mural is on the wall of a public school. It is on a public street. Children walk by.
We are scaring our children to death. Have you noticed this? And we're doing it more and more.
Last week of course it was Cho Seung-hui, the mass murderer of Virginia Tech. The dead-faced man with the famous dead-shark eyes pointed his pistols and wielded his hammer on front pages and TV screens all over America.
What does it do to children to see that?
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It's not only roughness and frightening things in our mass media, it's politics too. Daily alarms on global warming with constant videotape of glaciers melting and crashing into the sea. Anchors constantly asking, "Is there still time to save the Earth? Scientists warn we must move now." And international terrorism. "Is the Port of Newark safe, or a potential landing point for deadly biological weapons?"
I would hate to be a child now.
Very few people in America don't remember being scared by history at least to some degree when they were kids. After Pearl Harbor, they thought the Japanese were about to invade California. If you are a boomer, you remember duck-and-cover drills. The Soviets had the bomb, and might have used it. I remember a little girl bursting into tears during the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was in grade school.
But apart from that, apart from that one huge thing, life didn't seem menacing and full of dread. It was the boring 1950s and '60s, and the nice thing about a boring era is it's never boring. Life is interesting enough. There's always enough to scare a child.
But now it's a million duck-and-cover drills, a thousand alarms, a steady drumbeat of things to fear.(emphasis added)
Excuse me, again. Just posting this part made me start to leak a bit. . . . OK, it's stopped.
Where does one begin with such absolute moronism, cretinism, dumb-assism? Let's just take it backwards, shall we and highlight a point or two. First, as to that "one little thing", why it was just the fact that the US and the USSR monopolized the means for planetary destruction - and the leaders of one of those two superpowers refused to renounce first use of these little vehicles of megadeath, thus arrogating to themselves the destruction of millions of lives for . . . what, again? I mean, I grew up during the Cold War, and yes, the USSR was a terrible place to live, but remind me again why we held the world hostage to the least stable leader in office in the White House at any given time? Yeah, I guess compared to those halcyon days of 15 minutes from global annihilation, sitting around and waiting for the oceans to rise and our crops to whither is just . . . terribly . . . horrifying!
I shall skip over the middle portion, saving it for the main point here, because it seems to be Peggy-O's main point, and deal with the whole mural-thingy. I had not heard of this before, but perhaps one obvious point to be made (obvious to me, but I am a liberal, so "obvious" means something different to me) is that it is at a school precisely because it offers students an opportunity to learn about an historical event from a different perspective. I'll just let that hang there, because it seems that all that needs to be said.
As for the middle section, in which Ninny whines in high-dudgeon-worry-mode for the feelings of our children exposed to the horrors of our contemporary world, I would offer this observation. What she complains about as most horrific and scarring to those most tender among us is news and information we need to make serious decisions about what we are to do to survive our present epoch. Are we to deprive ourselves of this information because it might be possible a four-year-old somewhere might wake up screaming, "AAAGGGGHHHH!!!! The ice caps are melting! Saddam Hussein is still alive and will use his sarin gas on my pre-school!" Or, perhaps, do we use the judgment and discernment as adults to determine what and how much of this information we allow our children to be exposed to? What is age-appropriate and what is not age-appropriate?
Peggy Noonan wants us all to be infantilized. She would censor information because of the tender emotional state of children, of whom, it would seem, she is one as well.
Sorry, I'm leaking again . . . Gotta go.
