Rockets, guns, bombs, hatchets, swords, and light sabers. Today my grandsons play happily on the floor, building a virtual arsenal of imaginary weapons with their Legos. They are cheerful and cooperative as they build and smash, build and smash. Occasional houses and fishing rods materialize, too, but the energy circles mostly around destroying things with loud noise and delight.
“I’m sorry,” one says defensively to the other, when he knocks over a space ship loaded with imaginative and intricate weaponry. “That’s OK,” is the reluctant reply that follows immediate outrage. “I can make it again.” Soon they are back at it, rendering utter mayhem on the rug.
These are well-adjusted, first-world children whose parents discourage violence, real or imagined. It is not present in their lives, yet there seems an innate attraction reinforced, perhaps, by the surprisingly nihilistic - to this grandmother, anyway - computer games and movies made for kids. Creativity and imagination fill in the gaps for these self-invented warriors.
Not true, I remind myself, for the children stranded in refugee camps, running from the immediate danger of guns, bombs, hatchets and swords - real ones. When they fashion weapons from every broken stick and rock available and turn them on their playmates, they draw on the violence they have witnessed up close, the dangers and cruelty their families are desperately trying to escape. No imagination necessary.
I reluctantly concede the notion that attraction to both real and imagined violence is universal within the realm of childhood, but I also know that children, as they mature, will mirror what they've seen. My grandsons will outgrow this stage, they will go on to obsess on other aspects of their privileged lives.
But what will happen to the Syrian children who have experienced violence first-hand? Are we so naïve to think that their experience of violence will remain enclosed inside the camps to which they have been sequestered? More likely, these children will, soon enough, pick up real weapons, whether inspired by teenage zealotry, moved by desperation, or forced to do so by the very people that pursue and terrorize their families. Do we not understand that violence breeds violence, that the refugee children playing now will turn grown-up weapons on each other and on us soon enough if their lives do not improve?
I obviously don't have the answers, but if we want to avoid the mayhem and protect our way of life, offering compassion and a more peaceful future to these families seems to me a far safer strategy than condemning them to fester in the nightmarish, inhuman crossfire they now inhabit. Our callous indifference breeds danger. Our stubborn, misguided selfishness dooms us and plays into terrorist hands. I am more than ashamed. I am frightened and shocked. If our country has forgotten its principles and moral character, let's at least, in the name of our own self interest and the welfare of our children, give these families a second chance.