PACIFIST GUIDANCE (PG):
WHAT'S TOO VIOLENT FOR KIDS?

An Activist Dialogue

Here comes International YouthPeace Week again, along with WRL's annual campaign against violent toys and playthings for children; yet--would you believe it?--we don't all agree about which toys'n'things we're against. So we're having another dialogue in the NVA's series of occasional discussions posing questions that are "controversial even within the community of nonviolent activists," as we wrote in our introduction to the series (March-April). Reminder: This is the NVA feature that requires your active participation. Join the fun; let us know where you put your foot down when it comes to kids and what they play with and see.
         PART ONE: "When the T-Rex Ate the Guy" by Murray Rosenblith
         PART TWO: Severed Body Parts and Buckets of Blood by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

Severed Body Parts and Buckets of Blood
By Judith Mahoney Pasternak

ONCE, LONG AGO, I hid something from a child because of its sexual content: a single issue of The Realist, Yippie co-founder Paul Krassner's groundbreaking, nothing-sacred magazine of savage satire and occasional muckraking.

It was the '60s, and "censorship" was the one of the dirtiest words I knew. But the longer I looked at the Realist's centerfold, the less able I was to imagine explaining to four-year-old Adam what Snow White, Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful, Happy, Dopey and a gaggle of other perfectly reproduced Disney characters were doing in the wickedly funny,and extremely explicit,double-page orgy. I stuck the magazine on a shelf that Adam couldn't reach.

I never did anything like that again,not because of sex, anyway. Violence, however, was a different story.

For a former movie critic, I have delicate sensibilities. When I was four, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs left me nightmare-ridden for months. (Yes, the same Disney Snow White. Coincidence? I think not.) At 16, I had to be carried out of a war movie when the cinematic slaughter of one youth after another drove me to hysteria-tinged grief. Decades later, in 1988, I stormed into the office of the Guardian Newsweekly, flung an outraged review (of Alex Cox's Walker) onto the new cultural editor's desk and said, "Didn't anyone tell you? I don't do gore!"

I imposed those sensibilities on my children, not on principle, but in automatic, visceral revulsion:

Reading to them, I skipped parts of books that felt distressing. In the version of Babar my toddlers heard, Babar's mother suddenly disappeared from the story; they never knew until they could read for themselves that she had died, shot by elephant hunters.

Sometimes I went further, interposing my own body between the kids and images I couldn't bear them to see,especially after graphic onscreen violence became the rule rather than the exception. One afternoon in the '70s, the coming attractions at a Charlie Chaplin children's matinee included a trailer for a movie called something like Buckets and Buckets of Spilling, Splashing, Spurting Blood. Death followed death, each one messier than the last, culminating in the flash of a guillotine and a grisly, dripping head rolling audience-ward. By then, the kids and I were out the door and on the way to the manager's office, where I threatened to sue unless he promised never again to screen horrors like that if children were or could be present.

After that, I was more censorious than ever (though the kids didn't appear to be traumatized, possibly because I had successfully blocked their view of the rolling head). Not long afterward, walking into a room where they were watching TV, I saw a sword swing, a severed arm flop to the ground and bright red fluid gush from the stump. Moving fast, I snapped off the set. "It was funny," they protested. "Ugh!" I retorted. Years later we discovered that I had turned off that ultimate sendup of cinema chivalry (and violence), Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

All that was many years ago. If my children ever needed that protection, they don't now.

Other people's still do though, or so it seems to me. A year or so ago, I saw Jurassic Park; I had no kids in tow, but there were many in the audience. As the film went on, I became increasingly distressed on their part, most intensely when an unattached, partly chewed arm fell onto Laura Dern's head. And when a respected colleague told me he was sending his five-year-old off with some buddies to see the Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World, I thought, "We have to talk."

This is that conversation.

Yet I confess that even today I'm not sure what all that sheltering accomplished. I suspect that entertainment consisting of graphic representations of violence coarsens children's response to the world's real violence, that when forced to choose between feeling distress and revulsion or developing a kind of moral callus, they opt for the latter.

But that could be nothing more than a rationalization of my own distaste for such imagery; I can't really know whether my children are better off for not having seen The Holy Grail, or even Buckets of Blood, when they were five. I do know that all three of them are good,and gentle,people (though they don't call themselves pacifists), but I can't know that they're nice because I stopped them from watching people dismembered onscreen.

What I'm left with, in the end, is the gut reaction I began with when I hid The Realist from Adam and marched Brian and Miriam away from Buckets of Blood. It's not anything an activist could call a principle.

But I still wouldn't take any child I loved to see Jurassic Park,or The Lost World.

[Nonviolent Activist Index]

September-October 1997: Indonesia Unraveling Disarmament: What's the Agenda? "When the T-Rex Ate the Guy" Severed Body Parts and Buckets of Blood Activist News Activist Review: Pushy Priests

[War Resisters League Website]

The Nonviolent Activist is published bi-monthly by:
WAR RESISTERS LEAGUE
339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012. (212) 228-0450, fax (212) 228-6193, e-mail:wrl@warresisters.org.