How to talk to children about Las Vegas
Now that the initial coverage of the Las Vegas shootings has receded to Page 3 and beyond, let’s give a thought to how we might talk to our kids about what happened.
What might we tell them to fear, other than what was so clearly illustrated on CNN and everywhere else? Fifty-nine reported dead, hundreds more wounded or injured in the ensuing confusion, jerky iPhone videos of people running, survivors still distraught, panic-stricken and barely able to speak about what had happened, all to the soundtrack of hundreds of rounds of what sounded like automatic gunfire.
CNN and network news were dominated 24/7 by the same awful story for at least three days, video of people being wheeled into hospitals, quick cuts to experts in a variety of security fields — themselves obviously stunned and lost for any kind of rational explanation. No one over the age of two could miss it.
It’s difficult to say how real this was for our kids, as inured as they are to similar scenes every other night on TV.
But for adults, even after all these years and as immune as we thought we had become to the insanity, irrationality and the appalling normality of what had happened, it hurt. We thought we had become accustomed to the cruelty for which humanity seems to have an inexhaustible capacity, but we were still stunned.
As parents and teachers, we can only hope that this kind of thing never becomes “routine normality” for our kids. We can only hope that the unthinkable will never be distorted, never diluted into “normal” — not even by a 24/7 calmly organized news reader and his or her breakdown of the who, what, where, when, why and how of this appalling event.
But that reaction, our adult reaction, happens at the outer edges of our own lifetimes. Our kids, moving into today’s world, have been reassured by us time and time again: Stay with your friends, there is comparative safety in numbers, being part of a crowd at an outdoor concert is safer than walking at night on some streets, even with others.
However, that promise is in danger of becoming just more wishful parental thinking about safety at a concert or in a movie theatre or even at a school, and it is the infrequent but still appalling mass murder that seems to become almost normal.
All that said, we don’t want our kids to grow up living in fear.
Fear is corrosive, and by cautioning children to be afraid of the world, we shouldn’t be teaching them to shut out its wonder, the delight of exploration, the thrill of learning how to manage some risks on their own — even if it means learning by making mistakes.
We can, for the most part, reassure our kids about the almost non-existent chance that they will ever be anywhere near a mass shooting and that they don’t have to live in fear about mass shootings every day.
But there are other kinds of less dramatic, less palpable fears we need to begin educating and reassuring them about.
We need them to learn that even greater danger than a madman with a gun is the ever-present and even more vicious and destructive fear-mongering that every day does more violence to our culture than any madman with a gun. We have to teach our kids to reject the kind of pervasive fear that is created to serve somebody’s political purpose.
Every day, our kids are exposed to a culturally corrosive kind of craziness — the kind they see from those to whom we look for leadership.
These people randomly fire their ideas, not bullets, into the crowd, without a thought about the consequences. They exhort us to fear the ones among us who are different, whose skin colour, religious affiliation, gender identity or cultural heritage is different from our own.
Kids already know that, shocking as they were, the Las Vegas shootings were murderously wrong. We don’t have to tell them that.
But they are only now in the process of learning that a politically motivated culture of fear is more dangerous than even a senseless mass shooting.
They need to know that when fear becomes part of our culture, there has always been the temptation for some segments of the people to turn to demagogues for reassuring lies.
We need to help them understand that there are people out there who, while they might look and even sound normal, are crazier and more dangerous to our long-term way of life than that madman with a gun in Las Vegas.