Meditation

 When I grew up, I played with guns. 

Toy guns. Plastic replicas of all the weapons I watched the good guys shoot on movie and TV screens. 

At this time, there were the faint rumblings of what would eventually become a torrent of screams about violence on television and on film. There was concern being raised that having the Vietnam War piped into our living rooms on a daily basis with accompanying body counts and the sounds of helicopters and machine gun fire could have an affect on the young minds of a country trying to find its way out of a seemingly endless conflict in Southeast Asia. 

Somewhere in there, the war ended, as did the compulsory military draft for young men in the United States. Not surpsingly, right about this same time Hasbro Toy Company shifted their focus on GI Joes being war heroes to being Action Team heroes. They were no longer taking up arms against foreign nations, suddenly they were rescuing one another from giant rubber snakes and floating down the Amazon in tiny inflatable rafts. Another very noticeable change: these dolls, pardon me, action figures were no longer clean shaven. They came with a full head of hair, beard and mustache and their hands were no longer forever molded into a cupped left for supporting a rifle barrel and a pointed right finger for resting on a trigger. These little fellas came with Kung Fu grip, all the better for hand to hand combat with the aforementioned giant rubber snake. 

I grew up in the middle of this new wave of thinking, and though I was already too old by just a couple of years I can remember the appearance of the Joey Stivic doll. This was the first anatomically correct male baby doll mass marketed to a new generation of girls and boys to help them grapple with their nurturing side. I never owned one, but I can remember having impassioned discussions around our dinner table about why the likeness of Archie Bunker's grandson, the son of All In The Family's Meathad Michael Stivic, was a toy that should be honored and delivered to a new generation of more sensitive kids. 

Ours was quite the liberal household. This did not keep me from building model planes and ships used in war, nor did it keep me from growing up and having a very similar discussion with my wife about the guns we might allow our son to play with as he began to discover what his preschool teacher referred to as "power extenders." I felt trapped in a world that didn't want to force my son to play with dolls or to forbid him to play with guns. Guns that shot water. Or foam rubber darts. I wanted to have that elusive quality called "an open mind." 

I also wanted him to have "life-like hair" and Kung Fu grip. His room was full of Legos and action figures of all manner of super heroes. And a very substantial armory of Nerf weapons. The mock battles he simulated with his friends were not against foreign invaders but of armies of the living dead. He and his buddies created what they believed was their Zombie Apocalypse Plan. Even as a war raged on in the Middle East, he was less concerned about regime change than he was with having his brains eaten. 

There are still toy guns out there. I flinch every time I see a student of mine point his finger at one of his classmates and makes a slobbery sound like an AK-47. I try and dissuade them from killing one another, even in play, but I know that it's hardwired. They live in a world with unimaginable firepower generated via videogames. Their virtual world is far better armed than ours was running around the woods with sticks for rifles. These are the future drone operators for the next big invasion. 

I'm not sure if Kung Fu grip will make it easier to handle the controls.