When I was a little boy of five or six, my
grandmother would sometimes tell me bedtime stories about Dracula, Jack the
Ripper, and witches that caught and ate little children. She left out some
details, such as the specifics of the Ripper’s methods and the fact that his
victims were prostitutes, but these were suspenseful, frightening tales anyway.
Dracula drank people’s blood, the kids didn’t always escape the cannibalistic
old witch, and Jack really did murder his victims. The stories made me shiver;
maybe I had nightmares. But they also made me think. I could, I was sure,
figure out a way to escape that witch if ever I crossed her path. I wanted to
be the hero who drove a stake through the bloodthirsty count’s heart. I wanted
to be the detective who finally caught old Jack. Looking back, I realize that
hearing about horrible things made me dream of being the one who solved the
problems.
At
about the same time, my grandfather on the other side of the family bought me
my first comic book. It was an issue of Batman,
drawn by the amazing Gene Colan, one of the finest comic artists of the 60s,
70s, and 80s. I started reading it immediately. In the story, Batman faces
vampires. The issue ended with a cliffhanger, a powerful image of Batman with
two little punctures in his throat after having been bitten by one of the
undead. I was terrified. I wanted that wretched magazine out of my sight.
Grandpa took it and gave it to the kid next door, who was a few years older
than me. It wasn’t until I was eight that I took another shot at reading
comics. This time, it went much better and I grew to love that medium. But
despite the trauma cause by that Batman story, I later came to realize that it
did a very good thing for me. Much like Grandma’s bedtime horror stories, it
jolted my imagination awake, an effect that would have a major role in shaping
the person I was to become as I grew older.
It
wasn’t just in reading that I found violent, sometimes frightening events. I
took part in them too, in the way that children have for thousands of years, by
playing. My cousin and I would become Batman and Robin (after the traditional
twenty minute prelude of arguing over who would get to be who) and run around
punching imaginary villains.
When
I was old enough to understand that my grandfather had served in World War II,
I made him tell me stories about it (he left a lot out of course, I later
realized). It sounded heroic to me, intriguing. I had a toy army helmet and
used to crawl around the yard, hiding behind bushes evading enemy patrols and
shooting at them when the opportunity arose. Grandpa joined in the game
sometimes, giving me tips on strategy. He even made me a toy rifle out of wood.
He saw it for what it was, a kid having fun. Sure, he’d been through Hell over
in Europe, but he was able to appreciate that kids like playing soldier. He’d
probably done the same in his childhood. Even as an older man, he’d sit and
watch westerns and I know for a fact that he spent many hours of his childhood
on a horse nobody else could see as he shot Indians.
So
I, as a child, fought crime as Batman, shot Nazis in World War II, explored
alien worlds as Captain Kirk, and went off on a thousand other adventures, most
of which involved violence of some sort. My escapades were even assisted by a
man who knew the horrors of real violence but could understand the difference
between the terrible reality and the child’s impulse to fantasize.
Years
later, I have good memories of those days. Even more importantly, I can look
back and see how far those early imaginary experiences have taken me. I grew up
to be a writer. I spend plenty of time now thinking about ways to murder
people, doing research on different kinds of weapons, figuring out ways to have
characters narrowly escape death, sometimes unscathed and sometimes scarred and
permanently changed. Yes, there’s a lot of violent, gruesome stuff that goes on
in my mind. But guess what? For one thing, it helps pay the bills! And…it goes
from my mind to the page and has no effect at all on the rest of my life. In my
novel, 100,000 Midnights, a young man
lives a peaceful and mundane life until he’s drawn into a world beyond what he
once thought existed and forced to use his wits and sometimes resort to
violence to survive. Would I want to be in his shoes and have to fight and even
kill to survive? No, not in reality, but I think it makes for a good story. I,
and my readers, and most people can distinguish between fantasy and reality,
enjoying the wonders of imagination without wanting such events to be
true.
That’s
right. I’ve never fired a real gun, not even once, and I have no desire to. I
hate violence. I’ve been in one fight in my entire life, a seventh grade, after
school fistfight. I won that fight, but I felt dirty and guilty afterwards and
have never wanted to be involved in anything like it again. So here I am,
decades after a childhood of pretending to shoot and fight and go to war…and
what did it leave me with? I have a successful marriage, I own a house, I’m a
published writer, and I’ve never been in legal trouble or intentionally harmed
another human being in any way. I think I turned out all right.
With
that in mind, I’ve been thinking about some recent events in the world and,
specifically, in the Unites States. The shootings in Newtown, Connecticut on
December 14, 2012 were an unspeakable tragedy. The massacre of all those
innocent people, most of them children, is so disturbing that I can’t
adequately describe how it makes me feel. In the shooting’s aftermath, the
debate about gun control is loud, divisive, and prominent. I’m glad it’s being
talked about. We need to examine that issue closely and decide what to do about
the availability of such deadly weapons.
But
I’m not writing this to talk about the politics of real weapons. Something I
find very disturbing in recent years has to do with the kind of weapons that
aren’t real, that can’t hurt anyone. Children are being punished for using
their imaginations, and that really bothers me.
This
didn’t begin in the wake of the Newtown incident, but instances of it have been
all over the news since, so it’s heavily on my mind now. A seven-year-old boy in
Colorado is suspended from school after throwing an imaginary grenade while
pretending to save the world. A fifth-grader is scolded and searched for
bringing a piece of paper shaped like a gun to school. A Pennsylvania girl of 5
is suspended after suggesting that she and her friend shoot at each other with
Hello Kitty bubble guns!
When
I was in the fifth grade, the teacher told us to write a story about anything.
I concocted an epic battle between soldiers on an army base and the horde of
ninjas who were attacking. It was violent, it was action-packed, it was pretty
powerful stuff for a ten-year-old, and I was proud of it. I got an A because it
was creative and I spelled everything correctly! But considering some of those
news stories I just mentioned, I suspect the teacher’s reaction might have been
different if I was in the fifth grade now. It was a story. That’s all it was.
Not a warning, not a threat, not a terrorist manifesto, not a cry for help from
a demented mind! It was an adventure story written by a kid who liked to dream.
I
have to wonder what would have happened to me had I grown up in today’s
immediate-suspension atmosphere. Is mentioning a gun or committing a pretend
(and sometimes heroic) act of violence all it takes now for a teacher or
administrator to put a permanent mark on a child’s record by suspending them?
These are children using their imaginations. Do people really believe that any
child who pretends to fire a gun or toss a grenade or throw a punch has the
real potential to grow up to inflict bodily harm on others? Do we really think
that little of the intelligence and empathy of our children that a moment of
imagination must be stomped on instantly before the six-year-old who points his
finger and yells, “Bang, Bang!” grows up to be a serial killer or hitman or
founder of a renegade militia?
Are
we to ban all types of play that contain an element of imaginary violence?
Teachers should encourage children to be good to each other, teach them that
real violence and real war are terrible things, but harshly punishing a child
for pretending sends a very wrong message. That real violence should be avoided
is what should be taught, not that thinking about it or playing at it is
something that will not be tolerated. What’s the next step after that? Do we
make sure kids can’t have access to books or movies or any other material that
might make them think about violence? What about Shakespeare? Should we shield
the kids in English class from the violent betrayal of Caesar or the suicides
of Romeo and Juliet or the murderous deeds of Macbeth? Not that I’m predicting the widespread banning
of books, but it falls along the same lines of logic as suspending a kid for
pretending to be a soldier or a cop. We can’t deny children the right to their
imaginations because a few of them are going to grow up to be criminals. That’s
going to happen anyway; it’s inevitable. If we pull kids out of school and tell
them that playing has consequences like that, we’re going to scare them out of
using their imaginations. Do we really want to go down that road?
Honestly,
we’d be better off accepting the fact that people of all ages imagine all kinds
of things. Pretending and fantasizing is part of being human and includes all
aspects of life. We dream about success and money and sex and love and death
and fear and war and everything else that makes us who we are. Some of us use
our imaginations in positive life-changing ways and share them with the world
as writers or actors or artists. Others, the few who quite possibly have issues
that go far deeper, lash out at their fellow human beings in the worst possible
ways. But telling a little boy or girl that the imagined scenario that just
went through their mind is some kind of crime risks taking more away from the
world that it ensures protecting it from.
We
live in a world of harsh realities, about which children must be taught the
facts and guided in the essentials of behaving responsibly in such a world. But
we also live in a world where stories are told, fiction is created, and art is
made. The imaginary worlds created by human beings bring joy to people even
when the contents of those worlds are violent or frightening. And since fiction
is an altered reflection of the world we really live in, it’s often going to
contain the things that exist in our world, things like guns, swords, and
bombs. People fight in reality, so people fight in fiction. But we have to
learn to attend to the problems of reality without stepping on the wonders of
fiction. Children are exposed to guns and battles and war through fiction. They
see such things in movies, read about them in books, and, being children,
imitate them. So what? That’s what kids do. The vast majority of children, I
think, have the sense to have fun imitating the action scenes they see on TV or
film or read about without thinking it’s all right to do anything to truly harm
anybody. Play, at its best, is mental exercise. The imagination is one of the
most important of all the things that make a human being special. To make a
leap of ridiculously lazy logic and assume that a child having a pretend
adventure that involves a bit of dangerous action is a step away from shooting
his classmates or becoming the next Hitler is not only absurd, it’s an excuse
to say you’re addressing a situation while what you’re really doing is ignoring
the real situations, the real problems you should
be looking for ways to solve.
I
won’t claim to know the solution to the problem of violence in society, of
people who shouldn’t have deadly weapons obtaining them, of the potentially
dangerous mentally ill sometimes going unnoticed until it’s too late, but I
know the solution is not to extinguish the fires of imagination the moment
those wonderful sparks ignite in the mind of a child. We’re putting far too
much at risk if we start doing that.
In
conclusion, I’d like to share the memory of a conversation I’ll always cherish.
More than twenty-five years after being scared witless by that Batman comic, I
got to meet the artist, Gene Colan, at the New York Comic Con. I told him
exactly what had happened, how that comic had scared me, but how I later came
to love his work, and how I gave that story credit for delivering a jolt to me
and setting my imagination to work. I told him his work had a lot to do with me
growing up to be a writer. Then, this man whose work meant so much to me smiled
and said, “You know, when I was a little boy, my father took me to see Frankenstein with Boris Karloff. That
movie gave me nightmares for weeks…but it made me love being scared, made me
love horror, made me want to draw things that would make people feel how I felt
in that dark theatre. If my work did for you what that movie did for me, I’m
very happy to have accomplished that, and I wish you all the success in the
world.”
I
walked away from that conversation with a tear in my eye and joy in my heart. A
few years later, when I heard that Gene Colan had died, I was glad I’d had a
chance to have that talk with him and glad to have been part of the cycle of
inspiring fear that went from Karloff to Colan to me and, hopefully, to
somebody who gets a thrill or a scare out of one of my books someday. I cringe
to think what might have happened if any of the links in that chain had been
told it was wrong to imagine anything dark or dangerous.
