Friday Night at 8: The Kids

I watched Godzilla movies with my dad when I was a little girl and I didn’t know anything about the atomic bomb and World War II, so I drank up the radioactive born monsters and cheered for them because they seemed sort of likable to me.

In sixth grade I mentioned to someone that I didn’t really think people in the Soviet Union walked around with balls and chains on their ankles, they were probably just like us, and the next day when I walked into the classroom everyone yelled out “Commie!” at me … not really in a mean way, just school hijinks, and I laughed, too, I liked the attention and clowned around about it.  I didn’t know much at all about the Soviet Union or the United States, for that matter.

In another class, still in junior high, I commented that maybe the young people who went into the Peace Corps became radical afterwards because they found they had been lied to by our history books and our schools and communities, and that if they had been taught the truth about our role in the world those young people would have done a way better job in all those different countries where instead they ended up seeing a very different America than they had been raised to know.

I got the “love it or leave it” response from some of my classmates, which I met with the utter obnoxious scorn of a typical junior high student.

But I didn’t really know what went on in any of those countries.

So what was it that I did know?

Well, maybe the Godzilla movies were supposed to be a cautionary tale against the A-Bomb, but to me they told a different story, one about not being deceived by appearances.  That sometimes the monster wasn’t the ugliest or scariest looking life form in the movie.

As for the politics, that’s harder to figure out.  I was no more informed than any of my other lower middle class schoolmates, we were all savages who didn’t care at all about “current events.”  Yep, that’s what we thought of them as, and they seemed very alien to our concerns.

I probably picked up some of my notions from my older brothers and my father, who used to have long debates and discussions about intellectual and philosophical matters, and no doubt there was some politics in there as well.

I remember going to the library and looking in the card catalog (yeah, it was a while back) for books on communism and books on capitalism, finding none of the former and a whole lot of the latter.  I did a report on it in some class or other after also finding out there was some rich conservative family business who had pretty much a monopoly on textbooks in our schools and they censored so much that our history books were virtually impossible to read, stultifyingly boring.

That annoyed me.  It gave me a glimpse that I was being conditioned in some way and I didn’t like it one bit.  So I think that’s part of the reason I questioned the “conventional wisdom” of my peers and my textbooks and teachers at the time.

I don’t think it’s so easy to condition the kids any more.  They have the internet, but they also have online communities where they build up their kid cultures that may seem completely mindless to the rest of us but I believe they form their own “anti-conditioning” in those groups.

They are more technologically savvy than the grown-ups, so they probably have way better filters when it comes to the monumental crap our culture tries to feed them.

To be sure, there are conventional kids just as there are conventional grown-ups, and if our planet survives they will no doubt submit happily to any conditioning our culture cares to offer, and fear and attack anyone who tries to show them different.  That’s just human nature mixed with a usually bad culture.

But I think there’s a whole lot of kids out there who probably see things we would be interested in hearing about.

Just a thought.

A little lagniappe.  Here’s a kid (courtesy of YouTube’s Mailllo) from Greenpeace reading the grown ups the riot act.  It’s been shown on Daily Kos and some folks loved it, others hated it.  Love it or hate it, the kids are talking, all over the world.