Every now and again my belief that people can be reasonable runs smack into the evidence that we sure as hell aren’t rational. We can lay out in advance what the “rational� choice is, the choice that makes the most sense given circumstances, needs, opportunities, and so on, but there are points where the human brain just refuses to follow that script.
I’ve noticed a blind spot I have when it comes to kids, and it’s no surprise that it’s grown since I’ve become a father. Thinking about kids being hurt, deprived, suffering in any way makes me recoil, sometimes physically. I had a particularly vivid case of that today that still has me shaken up a bit. I’m trying to sort out a whole bunch of emotions, but I keep coming back to this lizard-brain impulse I have that You Don’t Mess With The Kids. And I’m trying to figure out why I feel so strongly about it. I mean, I know why I feel that You Don’t Mess With MY Kid. And I have a lot of intellectual support for a general You Don’t Mess With Anyone position. But somewhere, I think I have a belief that childhood should be a happy, relatively carefree time – not just from big stuff, but from as many of the little heartbreaks and disappointments that life throws at us, and so anything that interferes with that is some sort of extra heinous offense.
And I don’t even know how much sense that makes. I mean, I don’t want to coddle anyone, leave them unable to deal with disappointment. And as they get older, kids certainly have the ability to ostracize and torment each other without any of us grownups getting involved. So the idyllic vision of childhood that I keep in my head probably doesn’t even exist, so why should I get so worked up when it doesn’t pan out in reality?
Then I think about the hugs I get from my daughter, affection with reckless abandon. I think of the story that Peter King wrote last week about an Army sergeant home from Iraq, whose young daughter curls up on the couch next to him and says, “Daddy, I’m glad you didn’t die in the war.� And there’s an honesty there, there is something pure there, and life just chips away at it relentlessly. So when someone or something comes in and just takes a wrecking ball to it, maybe it’s not so surprising that I react so viscerally to it.