The Perseids

Are my memories of a childhood, lived with reckless abandon, all manufactured?

Did I invent that summer, 9 years old, when I slept under the stars in my vast desert back yard waiting for the Perseids without worrying about whether I would be abducted, raped, mutilated etc?

What a fucking great summer.

Did I really spend every waking moment of my seventh summer building a clubhouse in the woods, miles from home, without being beaten up or murdered by other children?

And is it POSSIBLE that I made it all the way through primary and secondary schools without being shot to death by my classmates? Or even worrying that I would be shot to death by my classmates?

Funny. My grandmother used to worry about how much more dangerous it was to be a child in my time than it was in hers.

At five years old, I hitch-hiked with two uncles in their early twenties from southern Illinois to northern Montana and back. It took us a month. I could tell you some stories from that one. Can you imagine allowing a child of five or ten or even fifteen to hitch-hike today, regardless of who was with them?

Is the world really that much more dangerous or filled with insanity now than it was thirty years ago? I mean let's look at the facts. 1978. The hippies had been largely replaced by the druggies. We stayed in a commune for part of the time we were gone. But this was hardly the tie-dye and flowers commune you might picture from 1968. All that remained of the flower children by '78 was sex, drugs, drugs, sex and the occasional firecracker lobbed at the social workers by the children of the left-over flower children who went totally unsupervised most of the time. Trust me on this one, I lit the first fuse. It wasn't a communal place in the 'to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities' kind of communist thinking. It was more of an 'I am so fucking stoned I shat my pants and didn't notice for two days' kind of commune. It gets sadder every time I remember it.

So what is it about now that makes the mother of my children fear to let them out of her sight? What has changed? When my daughter turned nine she and her brother couldn't even play in the front yard of their house without adult supervision because someone might swoop in and make them disappear forever. When will she be able to sleep under the stars, waiting for the Perseids?

I think it must have something to do with our information addiction. How many times did you check your Twitter today? Your email? Your Facebook? How many times did you hug your kids or tell them that you love them?

My daughter pointed out to me the other day that hers is the first generation raised from day one with total immersion in information the scale of which was never before imagined. That got me thinking. The constant plugged-in state is completely normal to them, not the neato innovation the rest of us are still amazed and/or frightened by. They are taught to read and write and love and hate by the internet. Their friends are mostly virtual. Their interactions are synthetic, sanitized and without consequence. Much of the time they're not able to draw a distinction between Fred Rogers and Fred Kruger until it's too late. They're all just teachers to a child with no guidance. And before you yell at me about home-schooling and web-nannies, no I'm not talking about YOUR children. I'm talking about OUR children; that sad invisible majority with two working parents and time on their hands. What we are left with is a nation with more technology than sense. The current parental generation doesn't see the looming problem because it's still new to us and not fundamental to our way of social-life. The next generation doesn't see the problem for the opposite reason; it's a normal and welcome part of everyday existence. The classic image of the TV babysitter has evolved into the internet surrogate parent.

And believe me; the hypocrisy of using a blog to complain about the internet hasn't escaped me.

So if the internet is our scapegoat for overloading and depersonalizing the minds of our children, let me ask you this: how many school shootings were there before the advent of television, or more specifically 24-hour news? Now that Fox News (may their knives chip and shatter), CNN, MSNBC, al Jazeera and a dozen others bring us live coverage of every massacre and bombing, often as it happens, there seems to be a lot more of them, don't you think? How many eighth graders would come to the conclusion that taking a gun to school to kill that bully is the best course of action without a little help from a perfectly coiffed anchor explaining exactly how the Columbine pair got their guns easy as you please at the local gun show, and then meticulously explaining how they arranged the blood bath which followed? That was a really long sentence. I hope you weren't reading aloud.

A hundred years ago murderers pretty much had to come up with their own ways of killing people. How many copy-cat killings do you think there were in 1910? With the current state of the art, you could slaughter a house full of people and within 24 hours everyone in the world has seen pictures of the corpses covered with a thin sheet. They'll read the vivid description of how you butchered each member of the family, along with a time-line of the evening's events, and how the nation mourns the loss, and how much poor little Cindy loved horses and hoped to someday save the rain forests of Honduras. Within 48 hours, half of the internet users in the world have seen leaked photos of the corpses with no thin sheets covering them on sickpics.com, and within a week some jerk has started a Facebook profile devoted to you and how cool you are. It gets 250,000 hits in the first day of operation and you have three marriage proposals. It's standard operating procedure now for the judge to make sure the killer doesn't profit from selling his story from prison. Ain't that somethin'?

So is our world more dangerous now than it was twenty years ago or are we just seeing more of the bad things? And are we seeing more of them because we really need to be informed or just because of a vicarious mass bloodlust we've acquired? Is the combination of young minds conditioned to learn from the television and internet merging with the steady stream of death and destruction on 24-hour news to create a geometric progression of suffering?

Now, don't get me wrong; I'm not saying we should forsake technology. I'm just trying to point out the price of that technology. Sure I think it's great that I can get any information in existence instantly and without ever having to put on my pants, but it's not just the 'normal' people who are utilizing these tools.

What we must realize, as a society, is that every useful tool can be misused; and will be. Columbine, Virginia Tech and the endless stream of Columbines and Virginia Techs to come are the price of our real-time stock quotes, instant messaging, MASH re-runs and 24 hour news channels. Is that a price you're willing to pay?

I guess my parting question is, if the world really is so much more dangerous now than it was when I was a child and that world was so much more dangerous than when my grandmother was a child, what hope is there for my grandchildren?

Will the Perseids ever fall again?