But Where do the Children play!!
I've always thought my childhood was ideal. We slid down rocks, rode bikes over fields of dirt and wore out our trousers in the seat and knees. And sometimes we played board games with all the neighborhood kids out in the front stoops of our houses. During the summer we would play in the streets. Baseball, pop up... 500, kick the can... and we'd hide in neighbors yards, jumping fences with maybe one or two adults yelling out at us to get out of their flower beds. But most were generous with our games. Other games we played were cops and robbers or combat. Toy Tommy guns were all the rage on TV ads. We never got one of those fancy guns, so we made due with whatever we could find. We dug out bunkers in our back yard... and mud would fly, and we'd make the sound of bullets flying at one another. One year when I was still quite young my uncle, a colonel in the Army, brought us a very real rifle that he no longer needed, and gave it to us to play with. You could move the turn down bolt and pretend you were loading it. We used to fight over who got to play with it. Nobody ever thought about what it looked like for a kid of 5 or 6 to be running up and down the street pretending to shoot each other with it or any bb guns that we had. Nobody ever got killed. There were no police on the look out for kids with real guns. That was in the late 50's and early 60s... The red tips hadn't yet been enforced on play guns. My parents just wanted us to play outside so any thing we did was okay as long as nobody got hurt ... well, at least not too badly hurt. We had our share of bruises and skinned knees and elbows, and many splinters. Imagination was key. And the best part is we didn't come home until the street lamps came on or when we heard our names being yelled down the street.
And we continued to play our games until we grew tired of them and one day we laid it all down and never returned to the chest we kept it all in. It isn't often I think back to those times. I'm more apt to remember 1968... the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy. I remember before that when John Kennedy was killed, but 1968 had much more of an impression on me. I began to write poetry that year. I was 12.
a great american who stood there still
who stood at a podium or on a hill
after the speech he wondered and thought
will I reach the place I once sought?
the sound of the bang, the sound of the shot
what happened to him, was a horrible thought.
I cried all night
Next day I read it to my teacher and I was immediately paraded off to the principals office where I sat in a chair and somberly waited for him to see me. He exclaimed that he was so proud of me and had the secretary type it up on onion paper. Then he shook my hand and took me back to class. It was all so surreal. I treasured the feel of the onion paper in my hands... and thought about the impact the whole day had on everyone around me. The silence and the deep sadness of loss loomed. From that day on, I felt the need to make sure good people didn't die. But how can a kid make a difference? It didn't seem up to me as I had no say over any legislation. But I did what I could and wrote up my own petitions, carefully making lines for people to sign. I went door to door telling people why it was important to me to fix these problems of war and pollution (another subject for another day) and mailed them off to Washington.
It's been fifty years since 1968. I'm not sure how much of the games we played as a kid impacted my stance on gun control today, but I was most certainly moved by the deaths that took place by people who used them to kill others in real life such as Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.. And when killing is done in mass, it is beyond tragic. Little children and adults, hit by bullets that tear through their skin in a way inconceivable to me. I feel terrified at where we are headed. This is not something we would think of when playing cops and robbers. We would yell out "You got me!" and then we'd fall to the ground and pretend to die. We were innocent kids, who acted out scenes we thought happened. Remember the show Combat or The Lone Ranger, or Gene Autry? The good guys always won.
The whole subject of gun control and our kids safety and the ability for children to have innocent lives, playing outside, pretending is at stake here. When we pull out weapons that are intended for war, to kill people in mass... I wonder ---- HOW DID WE GET HERE? Come to find out the AR-15 has been around when I was busy playing with the rifle my uncle had given us. It's an old gal. Former Green Beret, Barry Sadler sang an ode to his AR-15 that he used in Viet Nam in the 1960s entitled "One Son of a Gun of a Gun." One of the lines says "You see this AR-15, she's hot and she's mean, and she ain't built for love or fun. And yet this AR-15 is part of the team. She's one son of a gun of a gun." I never heard that song until today. Anyone can find it on UTube.
But Where do the Children Play!!
As we argue which side and what group is right and wrong ... Left, right ... conservative, or liberal, it's all falling on deaf ears. I think we each need to stop attacking each other. What are you going to do to help find a solution to this problem? I think we're at the point in the effort where we need mediation. We need to stop and look at each other in the eye and quit looking at one another as if we're enemies. We need to lay our weapons down and put them back into a trunk, talk and find solutions. We need the good guys to all come out of the wood work.
Note: Kennedy was killed with an eight-shot Iver Johnson .22 calibre Cadet 55-A revolver and King was killed with a Remington 760 Game master chambered in .30-06 Springfield.
