A few weeks ago, there was blood in Boston, and we were witness to it all.
Two homemade bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, spraying nails and ball bearings into a huge crowd of people, and causing injuries that are usually only seen in war zones.
The newspapers and internet were strewn with ripped flesh and severed limbs. TV and radio flooded the airwaves with death, mourning, manhunts and shootouts. We were bombarded with every grisly detail, whether we wanted it or not. And so were our kids.
Imagine what it felt like for them. We work so hard to make sure their lives are safe and benign. Wherever they go, responsible, caring adults look out for them. We feed them, and clothe them, and shelter them from harm. For them, life is predictable, protected, and secure.
So what happens when the world reaches out and steals away that sense of safety? What happens when it explodes, like a homemade bomb?
As parents, these days, we face that question all too often. Every few months, a new tragedy erupts into our consciousness. Bombings, shootings, riots and wars constantly intrude into our lives. And every day we ask ourselves how, and how much, to shield our children from these horrible events.
Some argue that there’s no point in hiding these things from our kids. After all, the world is a dangerous place. We do our children a disservice, they say, if we feed them a sugar-coated world. Instead, we should serve them the world as it really exists, and help them swallow and digest it as well as their tiny little stomachs can.
But for me, that just raises another question. Whose world are we talking about? The one we live in? Or the one that lives on the internet and cable news?
There’s no question that the world has changed since we were young, but the biggest change isn’t in the level of suffering and tragedy. It’s in our access to that suffering, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
These days, the line between news and reality entertainment has blurred until it hardly exists. What makes it into the nightly newscast depends on ratings, not on relevance to our lives. If it’s sensational or provocative, it’s newsworthy. In this age of cell phone cameras, every act of human cruelty or brutality is captured on video, and served up to us like another episode of Survivor: Planet Earth.
And it’s not just the big disasters. We get a steady diet of horrifying little ones, too. A woman drowns her own children in South Carolina? It’s on a thousand websites within an hour. A man abducts and kills a boy 20 years ago, but only confesses now? It’s on the front page of every paper as today’s “news.”
News, it seems, is just another product. And here in America, we like our products with a little pizzazz. We like it laced with emotion, so it jolts us a little and gives us a guilty thrill. And one emotion does that best of all – fear.
After the bombing in Boston, I read a quote from an expert on terrorism. He said that the goal of the terrorist isn’t destruction. It’s fear. As horrific as it is, terrorism is just political theater. It’s designed to get the maximum emotional response from the maximum number of people. If a terrorist makes you afraid, they accomplished their goal. They win.
And if they want to instill fear into an entire nation, what better target than the children? After all, the fears we acquire in childhood are like seeds in fertile ground. They take root in our hearts and grow with us. They change our view of the world, and dictate our actions as adults. They turn a single explosion into a wave that spreads through generations.
No, I don’t think we should feed our kids an artificial, candy-coated view of the world. But at the same time, we shouldn’t serve them a nightly news cocktail, laced with adrenalin and fear.
Life can be hard. But what makes it hard usually isn’t sensational or outrageous. We don’t have to bring a whole world full of tragedies and horrors to our children’s doorstep. The world will come to them soon enough.
Real life is full of difficult lessons that never show up on the news. There’s enough loss and disappointment and struggle in even the most ordinary lives. Let’s teach them how to deal with that. That’s what they’ll really need to know.
