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What do we tell our kids about these images?
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A woman in Mumbai last week
In this postmodern world of Internet and 24-hour conglomerate news media outlets, there is nowhere a teenager cannot visit, no limit to his/her exposure, unmonitored on a cellular phone, to the world’s horrors. A corrupt police sergeant beheads someone in Tijuana—the kid in Atlanta knows it, sees it, dreams of it. Terrorists overrun Mumbai with guns and grenades—junior high school students cope with the pictures of it, from Santa Monica to Times Square.
There has always been evil in the world; it’s just that now it’s broadcast live, via satellite, in high-dimension color, and hyper-repetitively—our perception of it is thereby keen and multiplied and unimaginably overbearing. If CNN and Fox and MSNBC were telecasting during World War II, there would have been even more of a general gloom in 1944 than there is in 2008 about violence and inhumanity. Even Hitler didn’t have a web site; today, every bloodthirsty mufti has one.
Unfortunately, the omnipresence of media has emboldened Islamic terrorists and so we have a metamorphic cycle of terror and television. A kid today can revisit 9/11 at any time on her laptop, or he can, at leisure, study the autopsy photos of President John F. Kennedy’s murdered body.
Years ago, my elder daughter woke up, terror-stricken, in the middle of the night. Like any youngster, she had succumbed in her dreams to the constant barrage of unspeakable images that assaulted her from television and video. Holding her and kissing her trembling head, I heard her gasp: “I’m afraid somebody is going to kidnap me and hurt me. I’m afraid somebody is going to shoot me with a gun.”
How do you respond to a child in this situation? You look directly at her so that she can see the most important thing in the world: Your face. You listen to him as he pours out his emotions. Let the poison drain out. You wrap your arms around him and let him stay a good while, because very adult-like fears have turned this teenager back into a child this night. You don’t depend upon a surrogate, a teacher, or a politician to comfort your offspring with the parental love and comfort only you can give.
And then ask yourself how well you really know your child—has your own preoccupation with career, power, and vanity left him or her too reliant on a cybernetic substitute for you?
Talk about the terror in India with your family now; CNN can get them the information but only you can provide the knowledge.
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