Hobson's Choice
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The Tower of Babel
Last week in Sunday School, the story was The Tower of Babel. The teacher asked all the children if they knew anything about the story. One boy volunteered that the story was in his Bible; a girl thought that "the tower was leaning." And then the teacher asked Eleanor what she thought.
"Well," she said, "I don't know that one, but I think maybe it was when the airplane crashed into the tower."
Shocked silence from all the adults in the room.
I didn't know that Eleanor even knew about September 11, 2001. Unlike her cousin Andrew, she wasn't even born. I remember him asking at the time, "Is that real or pretend?" But as far as we knew, Eleanor walked around in ignorance of terrorism. We don't watch television news; she rarely catches a glimpse of anything other than children's programming. And we certainly thought that she was not listening to NPR in the mornings when Chris listens to NPR while Eleanor watches "Breakfast With Bear" and Jenny quietly loses her mind to the simultaneous stimuli of Morning Edition and singing puppets.
I get really tired of politicians proclaiming that "9/11 changed everything." Well, of course, it did, but I get sick of the pandering for votes. The revelation of Eleanor's knowledge has made me see how those attacks are now pervasive and always just a few thoughts away from the top of her mind. We don't even notice anymore that it's mentioned on the news all the time, that we talk about it often. It's like George Bush being president, one of those facts in the world that we don't even notice we're constantly dancing around.
It's made us think about how the news enters our house. A few years back, before we had children, a friend told us that she had stopped listening to NPR because she didn't want her children to hear all the grim news in the world. At the time, we thought that was ridiculous; we thought we would not shield our child from the world. And more or less, that's been our policy. We still listen to NPR, but not as much. We've de facto given up NPR in the car because we've given in to the constant clamor for Dan Zanes and Elmo, what Eleanor calls "children music." And when Zarquawi was killed the other day, I did spell out the news for Chris ("The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq has been k-i-l-l-e-d.") And for once watching the television coverage, I had my hand on the remote to zoom back to "The Wiggles" every time Eleanor came in the room. I drew the line at corpses and rubble and machine gun fire.
I'm still disgusted by what a white, middle-class problem this is. We have the luxury to decide what news Eleanor sees, what ugly facts she knows about the world. If we were in Iraq, we would not have that choice. If we were African-American, we would already be teaching Eleanor how to deal with white folks. She would already have had many personal and intimate encounters with ugliness in the world.
We want Eleanor to be politically active and savvy. We want her to know what the world requires of us, to constantly repel the ugliness and create light. We don't have a choice to insulate ourselves from the world. And yet, she is a child who has to look away when she sees people smoking cigarettes outside the library so disturbed is she by the idea of smoking. So do you, as a parent, point out that the real problem outside the library is that the smokers don't have a place to live and also that they're smoking because they can't or won't get the medication to keep the voices in their heads a little quieter?
Of course not. But The Tower of Babel has got me thinking about my role in presenting the world to my child, of negotiating the distance between home and the outside world. We have this middle-class vision of a perfect childhood, of making sure that everything's fun. We can't. Can we, though, teach gentleness and joy in the face of, in despite of, the "airplane that crashed into the tower"? In a couple of years, Eleanor will be in school, and the world will come rushing in. The first grader in Sunday School knew immediately what Eleanor was talking about, the "Twin Towers" he told us. Will our home then become not its own little world, but a shelter?
9:21 a.m. - 2006-06-11
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