Play time

I played with toy guns when I was a kid, sure. I wanted to play ‘war’ and shoot my friends to pieces from my comfortable perch behind the neighbors’ station wagon. We all used to raise eyebrows in sympathy when one of our friends had those parents who wouldn’t buy them a toy gun. It makes perfect sense to me now. Does that make me a boring old man? It sure as hell sounded ridiculous to me when I was a kid, though. Who knows which mentality was correct? Perhaps when I was kid there was less of a desperate effort at controlling all of my choices and actions as there seems to be today, it’s possible I was able to rationalize back then that whether or not you let your kid play with toy guns made little difference to their viewpoint on what real guns did. Maybe it actually helped give kids a sense of the danger instead of remaining sheltered to the point of ignorance. Maybe I was just plain stupid and wanted to shoot imaginary rounds at imaginary enemies without recourse to the dark reflection of reality that our games possessed.

All I know now is that I am disturbed by the sort of toys that are marketed towards children: highly realistic soldier figures dripping with weapons and military equipment, tanks and artillery pieces that look more like museum-quality replicas than toys. Fighter planes and bombers with little pilot action figures with titles like “Special Forces HEROES”, et al. I guess that’s the part that bothers me the most: the idea that we are teaching kids that it takes an automatic weapon and a combat attitude to make a man a hero. This country, especially over the last five or six years, is saturated with the poisonous idea that simply joining the army makes you a hero. How many young men and women will go and die in foreign lands for the vanity of a presidential administration and the greed of corporate titans? How many will have their lives ruined because they think that they’ll be heroes by lifting a rifle and pulling the trigger? So naturally I wonder how many children will grow up with this mentality, how many future soldiers are we creating?

The next thing that occurs to me is that nothing has changed, it’s just more intensified right now: We’re still marketing toys to our children that reinforce the idea that we should become a nation where the young women grow up to be baby-factories and home-makers, and young men become soldiers. The toy stores shelves are still festooned with toy ovens and cribs and strollers, ‘realistic’ baby dolls that shit themselves on command…and in the boys’ section it’s floor-to-ceiling planes and guns and combat knives (plastic, of course), hand grenades and military paraphernalia.

Of course the toymakers are out for a buck, I don’t fear some grand cabal of toymakers meeting in secret and planning to corrupt the lives of children on presidential edict. What I’m worried about is the atmosphere of children being poisoned with the thought, in part by the toys they play with, that it is a glorious fate to kill and destroy or stay home and make babies; that these are the best choices for them. After all, the value of play for children has been well known since the dawn of civilization. That’s how, for instance, lions teach their cubs to hunt and kill prey….just to make a point.

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