Truth Vs. Respect
I suffered a rushing cascade of memories from antiquity this week. I’m still trying to figure out what the antecedent or catalyst was, and for the life of me, I cannot recall. It might’ve been an old commercial jingle, replayed on YouTube or something. In any case, it all came roaring back, and of course, it was rooted in my childhood, same as where all our concrete foundations lie.
Actually, it was pretty great, being an American suburbanite kid in the 70s. Our adults weren’t yet embracing what the Industrial Revolution had begun to wrought, in terms of the environment, and so the offerings of consumerism were definitely less concerned with child safety.
Boys and their toys. It’s a thing.
Yes, it’s a trope, whether it’s junior’s Tonka Truck or the ICBM nuclear missiles of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
To wit…my memory’s shot, but not so shot it doesn’t recall Big Wheels, the Six Million Dollar Man Action Figure (still remember looking through the eye, peeling the rubbery skin to reveal the bionics), Diamondback dirt bikes, laying out Hot Wheels tracks, setting up Lionel train sets, Stretch Armstrong, the OG console Atari 2600 (apologies to Intellivision and Commodore). Spirographs, Colorforms, Magic 8 Ball, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, ViewMasters, Shrinky Dinks, Weebles, Play Dough, cans of Green Slime, Slinkys, Etch-a-Sketch, Nerf, Cap guns, and pump action water rockets.
That’s just off the top of my head. Despite the real probability that half of that stuff probably gave us nudges toward cancer or dementia.
I have a decidedly more rural component of play in my childhood. My neighborhood gang of kids were always playing war…the real seventies kind, building monstrous forts outta plywood and scrap metal from our dads' garages. A fellow neighbor kid (passed on now, rest his dear soul) crafted one almost single-handedly that was literally two stories tall. He dug trenches and foxholes, and manned the cut plywood parapets in the fort with legit, working BB gun turrets. We carried real machetes and knives, all kinds of swap meet martial arts stuff you could legally buy back then, even as a minor, nunchaku and throwing stars and blowguns. To this day I lament bro-gifting one of my most bitchin' finds at the flea market, a sword-cane with a brass-tipped cobra head, a toothpick-style blade hidden within the cane. What I would give to have that back would be a lot.
I still have a few of the shuriken in my bookcase. To think kids well under the age of 18 could buy that stuff with impunity...ah, those days were good. It’s true, ya know. Back then, certain underage kids in more rural parts of the country could play with dangerous items without growing up to be a psychopath, same as we could watch Looney Tunes and still know tossing a boulder on a coyote means that dog ain’t getting up again.
Oh yeah, almost forgot the bullwhips and the horse trainers. Yup, bullwhips. I learned how to crack those mofos at an early age. They hurt. A ton. We risked permanent blindness on any number of occasions, be it from whips or BBs or pellets. I’m not trying to defend such levels of ‘play’ for underage kids. We were anomalies, in my redneck of the woods.
Those BB and pellet gun wars, though. Those little, non-lethal projectiles hurt. Especially with the pump action pellet guns, and you'd know you were in for it when the dude across the way kept pumping after ten pumps. Bastard! One gal, she was shot in the lower chin, and years later, she found out the BB had embedded and she had to have it surgically removed. I still have a scar on my right middle finger from a machete almost cutting off my finger outright. We were reckless lil’ suburbanites.
Those were the Gen X days when your parents would boot you out of the house after breakfast and didn’t expect to see you again until dinner. Yup, I’m sounding grandpa-get-off-my-lawn here. I know that, Zoomers. But it was what it was. I ain’t saying it was better. I’m just saying it was good.
In my area, we had the space, an overtly white bastion of middle class central California, lots of oak trees, rivers, fields upon fields of cattle grazing flat lands. We had three large ponds nearby too, full of bullfrogs, crawdads, big mouth bass, and bluegill. Over the years, we fashioned several homegrown rafts and tube floats, and we used to have naval battles in the same manner. I used to take my horse swimming there.
I was a SoCal hick. Still am, I guess. I was a fortunate kid. That goes without saying, but since this is the Stack, I’ll say it anyway. As dysfunctional as my family could be, what with alcoholism and workaholism, and classic Roman Catholic Italian stances of non-expression rampant in the household, I still managed a high caliber childhood, despite being a fair runt on the playground, being a drama geek, being a nerdy kid who read more than anyone else in class.
I have no complaints. I can’t, not without compromising my relativity. Compared to many other countless childhoods across the world, kids who were starving, who’d never seen or played with any seventies-style American toys, kids in the Congo, kids in the West Bank, any number of children living on Indigenous reservations, kids in the slums of Fortaleza in Brazil, kids running from tuberculosis and such extreme poverty they never knew a single day free from food insecurity. Much less the excesses of American consumerism.
Nope. I was lucky. I’m aware. It’s actually kind of daunting, to even write about privileged things like 70’s culture in suburban America. It feels super entitled, to have the memories I do, and somehow, rendering them in print feels like I’m spoiling the batch, so to speak. But I am grateful. These days, in my old age, I feel strange about the freedoms I was afforded, when so many others were not, even my own brethren, whose parents were formidably less tolerant than my own. I was a punk to my parents. A mouth. An X-rated mouth, for which my buddies would be roundly trounced by their fathers via leather belt or wooden spoon or flyswatter handle or anything handy, really.
I need not go off on a tangent about how spoiled I was, because it’s a given. I was entitled to freedoms most kids do not get to enjoy. In hindsight, though I received my share of seventies-style spankings and whuppin’s, I surely should’ve received more, though I’m unsure that would’ve changed the manner in which I saw adults, whom I tended to see as peers more than elders. Which, as you might imagine, infuriated many a teacher and most of my friends’ parents, who, in the privacy of their homes, likely wondered why my parents weren’t taking a belt to me more often.
I’ve always been of the minority opinion that respect is earned, not given, and that respect for elders isn’t always necessarily an absolute, especially in seeing how many of my ‘elders’ behaved, which quite often could be racist, or patriarchal and sexist, or mired in the throes of alcoholism. Expecting me to adopt some title or track without a say in the matter just because I was young, like being a doctor or a catholic or whatever, seemed a height of hubris. It didn’t matter much to me how old someone was…if they were good people, they were good people, be they 70 or 7. If they weren’t…well, I didn’t see how living a bit longer than me automatically granted more merit just because of the years. I received a few detentions and groundings for that social aberration. Of course, I’ve learned with age comes wisdom, and for that, yes, of course elders deserve respect.
Now ask me how many of those same elders exhibited consistent and morally valuable expressions of true wisdom.
The answer is precious few, and I say that with understanding, not condemnation. We’re all products of our environments and the times in which we live.
One thing I’ve learned about humans. They’d rather have respect than truth. That sucks for the world, and our prospects of survival, but it is what it is. I have always failed to see the logic of going along to get along. That doesn’t really serve anything other than someone’s sense of pride. You know what they say about pride goeth’ing before a fall. But most humans, they’d rather fall and keep that inflated sense of self identity, rather than looking close in the mirror. I was the kinda punk kid who pointed that stuff out. My elders didn’t particularly care for it, you probably guessed that already. I would call my friends’ parents by their first names, or even ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’…I presumed familiarity, seeing as how I view my friends, and by proxy their families, as extensions of my own family.
Yet that was a minority view. Most folks see blood as blood, and nothing betwixt them. I get that, and I certainly don’t think it needed to be me who showed the forest’s trees for themselves, but that didn’t make the truth less truthy, because at the end of the day, we’re all family, and that tribal roots stuff never played with me. Maybe part of that’s because I was adopted by my parents. Honestly, that really doesn’t factor in to my viewpoint in that regard. If you happen to bond with the family you’re born into, great. A lot of people don’t get to do that, because their blood family might well be a set of parents who aren’t very nice people. That happens a lot more than the average American believes.
It’s easy to be a parent. Most parents are parents because some man didn’t pull out of some woman. That’s a stone cold fact. Very few humans intentionally set out to be parents. Personally, I follow the adage of chosen family being even stronger than blood, because that’s the stuff you have to work hard to maintain, rather than being granted automatic inclusion because you share the same DNA. That’s primordial thinking, simple tribe mindsets. The idea of culture and civilization is to rise above our monkey-brained roots and become SOMETHING MORE.
I think the essence of middle class childhoods in rural suburbs of California in the seventies has been on my mind not just because of some nostalgic saber-rattling this week, but because the idea of kids today having the freedoms that us seventies kids did back then seems so terribly alien to parents these days. It’s anathema for many to consider letting their kids run around town unsupervised under the age of 12, without cell phones, that because of mass shootings and the wicked decline of American civilization, it appears most people are uncomfortable allowing their children to do these things except in the most privileged communities, and even in those places, it’s not common.
Again, it’s an American specific culture, because many societies and countries across the world have their children engage in plenty of adult activity, including but not limited to, becoming soldiers, sex workers, underage laborers and anything else you dare not dream. Lots of kids are forced to grow up before they hit adolescence. In fact, one might rightly argue a safe, privileged childhood full of toys and neighborhood play and unsupervised activities, is the exclusive purview of the West, because most of the third world and a great number of Pan-Asian societies practice wildly different parameters of what constitutes childhood.
Anyway.
I really just wanted to take a moment to wax poetic on the play of my youth.
But as usual, I went right ahead and got all…writer-boy…about it.
Stupid monkey brain. Always a spoilsport.
Still. Cliche or not, those were the best times of my life. How could they not be? Now I sound like Dreyfus’ narrator in Stand By Me. Ah well. Fuck it. I would say that some tropes are universal, but that ain’t true. Some kids get lucky. And I was one of them.
Oh, and if you’re wondering what my favorite toy was as a seventies kid, if it’s among those I listed above, it’s not. It was a plush Snoopy toy. Big, big Peanuts fan here. In fact, it was Sparky’s comics that taught me how to read, before I hit preschool and kindergarten. I met him once, at a writer’s conference in my twenties. He signed a book for me, personalized it, and shook my hand.
And yes, the fact I came across an opportunity to shake Charles Schulz’s hand is yet another example of my privileged life.