Image courtesy of AP and Cathy Willens; if you're logged into your Yahoo account you can vote for this image).
Tom Brooks writes in USA Today -
"The Christmas display in front of Joel Krupnik's Manhattan brownstone has all the subtlety of a blood-splattered Santa.
Which, in fact, is what it is.
'It's horrible, just terrible,' says neighbor Joe Nuccio, 79. 'He's got Santa Claus with a bloody knife in one hand and a doll's head suspended in the other. That's bloody, too.'
* snip *
Estelle Farnsworth was so upset by the life-size Santa strung up in her Miami neighborhood that she called police. Santa's hands were bound behind his back, his feet were tied together, and a noose was around his neck.
Have yourself a gory little Christmas, it seemed to say.
"I was absolutely furious," says Farnsworth, 65. "Everybody was upset."
A little girl in the neighborhood thought Santa had morphed into Satan and was going to get her, Farnsworth says.
Police told Farnsworth that desecrating Santa might be in poor taste but that it was constitutionally protected expression.
Like Krupnik, the neighbor who staged Santa's mock execution wanted to express his dismay with the commercialization of the season, Farnsworth says.
Point taken, she says. But she believes it could have been done more tastefully.
'Why not put up a beautiful manger scene?' ..."
Answer: Because it wouldn't have been funny, Estelle. Demonstrating that one doesn't have to live in Miami or be female to have a bug up one's backside, the article goes on to quote one of the neighbors in New York, of the first holiday decorator, who says
"Maybe Krupnik is bothered that Christmas has become too commercial, Nuccio says. "I am, too. All this nonsense about whether you should say 'Merry Christmas' or 'Happy Holidays.'
'But he shouldn't have done that to Santa.' (and there the article ends)"
Yo, Nuccio! Your parents did break the news to you about Chris Kringle, right? He's a fictional character, you mope.
As for anybody with an ounce of common sense reading this, which would exclude those you saw quoted in that article above: yes, you read that right. Somebody actually called the police on her neighbor and tried to get him arrested or at least cracked down on because she thought that his Christmas decorations were too irreverent. You can go click on the link above to see those quotes in their full context and see that they haven't been taken out of context. And, in fact, those decorations did come down a while later, though the article doesn't tell us just how free a choice taking down the display in Miami was, or how much arm twisting went into it. Judging from Ms.Farnsworth's tone, probably considerably much.
Maybe I'd toss out some snide remark about the general level of sophistication in Miami, if people there think that a response like that is warranted by the imagined provocation, but given Chicago's history in such matters, I'd be throwing rocks from inside a glass house. Fine, there's a lot of this kind of attitude going around. Which brings me to the next question - what ever happened to that first amendment that we used to hear so much about, a few decades back? And will the 90s ever be over? We're halfway through the millenial decade, and we're still seeing that 90s era, speech code inspiring belief that full grown adults are entitled to be shielded from everything and anything that they choose to be offended by.
Yes, choose. Guys, hello - people used to laugh about things like those santas. You know, laughter - that semi-warbling sound people used to make, as they explored the boundaries of our expectations, without anybody really being hurt? Yes, an old lady said that a little girl was frightened by the display. Newflash, guys - little girls are always being frightened by something; that's why little boys can't stand them. Remember? There's an excellent chance that you were once a child, yourself, though looking at how seriously some people take themselves, in some cases it's hard to believe. Pull up a few of your old memories, from when you were about that age.
Little kids, girls especially, live in a world where the boundary between fantasy and reality gets blurry, the latter never being terribly solid in their little minds, and so the nightmares rising out of their subconsciousnesses always seem to be taking flesh before them, until a parent or older relative or neighbor can put their minds at ease. I remember a kid in my neighborhood who used to be afraid, when a dark muddy puddle at the end of his parent's driveway froze into a path of ice as black as the ocean depths, that the puddle was as deep as its blackness suggested, and that if he stepped on it, he might crack through to the icy abyss below and drown. He imagined the ground beneath his feet melting away, the frosting of snow above concealing the hideous reality of the dark icecapped seas that flowed where the dirt used to be, poking through here and there to reveal themselves.
And you should have heard what the girls were worried about!
That little boy now has a degree in Physics, and the much firmer grasp on physical reality that comes with adulthood. He grew up, and one of the reasons he did was because with adult support, he faced his fears and saw their unreality, emerging into adulthood without the wealth of phobias and neuroses the more pampered children seem to end up with, in abundance. I wonder what Estelle Farnsworth would have had the parents and neighbors do - make sure that ice never accumulated in any of the potholes? A fool's errand, producing nothing other than the loss of an opportunity for the boy to mature - kids' imaginations are so vivid, and their fears so eager to find something to attach themselves onto, that a child will always find something to be afraid of, most conveniently for those adults whose greatest joy in life is that of depriving other adults of their freedom. "We can't say this or do this because of the children", an excuse that was offered for the passage of the Internet Decency Act, and for every piece of censorship seen before and since in a country that supposedly prides itself on the freedom it offers.
Freedom that we can't ever exercise, as a matter of practice, is no freedom at all. This is not to say that one should be able to hold a live sex show on one's lawn, but let's get real. What exactly did the alleged little girl see? I say "alleged", because narrowminded old ladies who like to run other people's lives are about as scarce as children with overactive imaginations, and a fair number of those "neighborhood biddies" are well known for their casual attitudes toward the truth; that little girl, whose unverifiable reaction is being offered as an excuse for the old lady to do what so many old ladies love to do best - pry - may be nothing more than a fabrication. But let's say that she's real, and that she really did express that fear. Then what?
How did she get from a Santa Claus figure being strung up, to Santa Claus being the Devil? Just like with the little boy of years ago who was afraid that the ground beneath his feet had turn to water, we're looking at the free association of an overactive juvenile imagination; even allowing for the unfamiliarity of the world to somebody who hasn't been in it for long, there's no connection between A and B, and nothing healthy about validating such fears by removing the object of them, implying to the the child who is then getting her way, that her fears had some merit.
What she saw was a collection of lifeless plastic figurines, some splattered with red paint and another with a rope tied around it. With good parenting from a pair of people who are willing to take the time to listen to her and put her fears to rest, she'll survive this and worse unscathed, and with the start on something a few adults seem to have grown up without - a sense of humor, something that she'll live a richer life for having. But that would require that the occasional parent, aunt, uncle, grandparent or even older sibling or cousin take a little time of their days to soothe the child, and that's just so terribly inconvenient, isn't it, especially when there's a spot on the couch that one wants to slip one's back into, when there's a book one wants to read or a party one wants to get to, even when the distraction is nothing more significant than the fact that Howard Stern is about to come on; anything other than attend to the needs of this tiny little person who needs to so much, and sometimes expects YOU to do something about it for no better reason than the fact that you are responsible for her being there, sometimes at the most inconvenient moments. "Who's Howard Stern, Daddy?" "Um, nobody, dear, you'll understand when you get older. Daddy's going to lock the door to his den, now; you can come by in an hour and we'll put your Barney tape on, then. When is somebody going to get that perverse Christmas decoration taken down?"
And when are people going to get the idea that raising children is supposed to be work, and that no matter what job one is doing, that the rest of the world does not exist for one's own personal convenience as one tries to get that job done? Yes, turning the world into a uniformly smothering, "child-safe" environment may seem to make the work of parenting easier, if one looks at the raising of the children in one's life in terms of one's own desire for immediate gratification as one tries to calm a child down quickly, but who ever said that the job was supposed to be easy? And if a parent, elder family member or other "caring adult" is this upset because he or she does have to make a little extra effort, then just how caring an adult is that one, really? We are happy to invest time in the things we care about, aren't we? If one is that angry about having to put a little time into helping that child become a well adjusted adult, one who doesn't run from imaginary fears, what does that say?
That some of the children running around in the world are well past their 18th birthdays, and that it's time for the rest of us to aid in their long overdue socializations by letting them hear the one important word that an adult says to a child, showing his love by helping the child grow into the person he or she would like to become. That one word being
Get ready to have a merry christmas and be your own strange happy selves. If one of the neighbors complains, tell him to get over it.
No comments:
Post a Comment