You got to teach your children well. Don’t let em just pick up a dollar bill and start reading the back of it unsupervised. Guidance.
I been puzzlin since reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne. It’s fraught with carnival nonsense like a bear precisely five stories tall who has his ability to fly stolen off by a witch, but there’s a pearl there. Call it a tragedy of errors. A well-meaning parent tries to understand and instruct her sensitive, curious child. But she misses some signals, doesn’t flesh out every detail of things, and consequently the kid goes off the rails and shits the bed, morally speaking.
The other day my son expressed his understanding that we celebrate Christmas on account of being “American,” as opposed to our neighbors being “Jewish,” doing Hanukkah. He also thought a thing called “volcano” could not also be a “mountain.” That didn’t coldcock me as much. But I realized it’s the same; for him the words “volcano” and “Jewish” are equally unloaded.
Forgot to see the world through his eyes. Children start with “me,” spend a lot of time working out “you” or “them,” and need loads of help with “us.” Didn’t realize the neighbors’ habits - building a rad fort with our prunings for Sukkot, asking me over to turn off a lamp on Saturday - were a chance to blow the doors off his notions of “me” and “you” and “them” and help him get savvy on “American.”
Son, volcanoes celebrate Hanukkah, but we’re all mountains.
