I
want to bring to your attention a threat that is inherent in the
emphasis on “safe toys for children” and in the related campaign
against so-called violent computer games. I contend that not only
do these games provide useful real and simulated experience of the world as it is,
but other countries may be way ahead of us in
educating their children with dangerous toys thus leading to a threatening and
ever-widening "dangerous toys" gap.
What
a child learns when they are young stays with them for the rest of
their lives. Therefore it is up to us, as mature and experienced
parents of these innocent biped mammals to see to it that their
education contains the elements that they will need for a healthy and
rewarding life, if you call this living.
What
are these elements of a proper education? Well certainly there is
learning to read and write, learning certain social skills such as not
spitting in public, learning to keep themselves relatively clean and
tidy, not to chew with their mouth open, that sort of thing. Some
would include in this some pillars of a basic education such as the classics of western
civilization (Homer, Isaac Newton, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky) and the basics of managing hedge funds and real estate
development. Perhaps not all classes of society really need the
latter skills and education should be tailored for the different
classes. For example, the rich may have to learn how to manage hedge
funds but the poor how to avoid getting bitten by rats or how to find discarded but not completely decayed food to eat so that they do not starve to death, etc.
But
all of us, rich or poor, can certainly benefit from knowing that the
world is, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “a dangerous
place”. It is a world filled with things that can drop on you and
smash you flat, or people who will shoot you for a dollar, or people
who think that they are entitled to distort the political system to
get their way, or people who have beliefs that are dangerous to our
beliefs. All of these things and more are true. So what benefit is
it to educate our children to think that they do not exist? What is
the point of waiting until they are adults, or nearly so, to let them
in on the secret that they can easily kill themselves and others with
that car or that gun? Or to keep from them the knowledge that there
are rich and poor in America and that the poor have very little
chance of having a decent life or receiving justice? Why keep from
them the knowledge that as screwed up as this country is, they should
have a look around with their own eyes and see how other countries
are doing, some much better and many far worse. Or that people and
nations and political groups lie every day both to the public and to themselves, often with tragic or disastrous results.
And
that is what the campaign to eliminate dangerous and disturbing toys
has set out to do. To hide these brutal facts from our young
children out of the misguided notion that being sheltered helps them.
Sure it may avoid a few hundred or thousand injuries or deaths, but
at what cost? The cost is that our children do not have the first
hand experience that they need to understand the world as it is.
Look at how far ahead of us the children of Afghanistan and Iraq are. In America, misguided parents are horrified that “war toys” are
produced and sold. But in Afghanistan, pretty much every boy gets
their hands on an AK-47 by the time they are 10 years old and they are
not toys. In America, our children do not know what an ammo dump
looks like, let alone how to behave around one. But every kid in
Afghanistan does. And how many American's have a relative or
neighbor who is an internationally wanted terrorist? Precious few, I
think. By the time a boy turns 15 in Afghanistan, he has probably had many years experience smuggling opium over the border and killed at least one enemy of his tribe. This experience so early in life is priceless.
We
shoot our selves in the foot, so to speak, to think that this
pretense of a safe world that we construct for our children helps
them or us. It just leads to shock and dismay when our privileged
and self-entitled narcissist child has to face the real world. The shock
may lead to total collapse and psychological disintegration. That is
where this ill-considered policy leads.
But
by no means does that mean that we have to start selling war toys to
our children. There are other ways to get the ideas across that are
more in the areas of industry and manufacturing than in warfare. My
favorite is a toy my older brother had and which I loved. It was
made in the very early 1960s by Mattel and it was called VAC-U-FORM.
VAC-U-FORM
gave a child the ability to create vacuum molded plastic parts at
will. It consisted of a very hot heating element, a vacuum pump, a
contraption to press things together, sheets of thin plastic as
material, and various molds to use as templates. Think of it as a
3D printer ahead of its time.
The
smell of the melting plastic issuing obviously dangerous and probably cancer-causing chemicals
was the joy of every teenage boy. One could easily damage oneself on
the hot heating element, or on the melted plastic before it cooled.
Or with exacto blades to chop out the manufactured parts. There were
so many ways that a child could get themselves sent to the hospital
with an irate and hysterical parent accompanying them.
Now
that is the kind of toy that won the cold war. That is the kind of
toy that bred tough and realistic Americans who were capable of
manufacturing and surviving in this dangerous world. Its a toy that
would send parents of today screaming in rage at the
borderline-insane cavalier attitude of the toy designers towards
safety or the lack thereof, not realizing that these toy designers
were just trying to make America that much stronger.
I
hope that America will come to its senses and return to these
educational toys before it is too late. I could imagine a line of toy drones being used to find and disarm neighborhood land mines, for
example. Or toy drones used to find insurgents hiding in the neighborhood during a play guerrilla attack. What fun that would be!
The
future has so much promise if we just embrace it.
_______________________________________________________
Here
is a video from the 1960s showing the VAC-U-FORM at work
The
Wikipedia page on the VAC-U-FORM
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