Must You Upset the Children?

“Are they saying Columbus wants to rape us?!” I asked my friend, shocked.

One of the marchers handed me a flyer that clarified their chant.

“Columbus was a rapist! Know the truth!”

This was the first I had heard the true history of Columbus’s brutal treatment of native people. I was 12.

I lost all interest in the rest of the parade, attended with my siblings and neighbors. The next day, I brought the leaflet to class and got permission from my 6th grade teacher to read it to the class. I didn’t like saying the word ‘rape’ but people had to know about this.

It didn’t help my already unpopular status. Even my closest friends questioned the validity of this new information. How dare I say such horrible things about Columbus?

It never occurred to me to think the protesters, who marched along the Columbus Day parade, were inappropriate for spoiling the festivities, much less for sharing the truth with a child. It never would have occurred to me that, fastforwarding several decades later, the same action could result in legal action or at least very loud complaining, against the protesters for interfering with what a child’s parent wants them to know.

Later that same year, I was home sick from school watching tv. I don’t recall if it was a news story or documentary, but I will never forget what I learned while not at school that day.

The people on tv were talking about a time not too long ago, when Germans rounded up Jews and subjected them to the most horrifying torture imaginable. They called it the ‘Holocaust’.

I assumed this news had just broken. Surely this couldn’t have been known about for decades and yet still kept out of conversation and media.

When my mother came home from work, I told her that she wouldn’t believe what had just been discovered- that during World War II, the Germans tried to wipe out all of the Jews. The show had shown footage of the emaciated figures being liberated from the camps.

To my further astonishment, she already knew about it.

Why, I wondered, had no one told me about this?

Thus we have an interesting paradox when it comes to both education and parenting. Adults had no problem giving my generation the ‘stranger danger’ talk, but felt we must be protected from harsher aspects of reality until…..when?

As an adult activist now, I am very aware of the reactions of both children and parents. When standing outside the Saratoga Race Track protesting the animal cruelty inherent in the racing industry, children tend to look at us with expressions of sadness and empathy, sometimes confusion, sometimes interest. Their parents will often physically turn them away from us or even cover their eyes.

They have an advantage my generation didn’t have. They can Google and find other sources of information or read in more details what their parents try to keep hidden from them.

Yet as I hear their parents yelling at us, shaming us for having the audacity to upset their children, I can’t help wonder why?

Why is it the fault of an activist who is merely telling the truth of a situation, if that truth is upsetting? Why is the anger not rightfully directed at the true wrong doers?

I suspect my elders would have been more open and comfortable talking about colonization, racism, sexism and other forms of oppression if they themselves had developed the capacity to acknowledge their role in the oppressive behavior, and then become willing to actively resist or change it.

I suspect that the plea to let children remain ‘innocent’ and free from the burden of understanding the horrible truths of historical- and present- oppression, has more to do with the discomfort it generates in the older generations whose attempts to end such oppression has been either absent or insufficient.

So what, then, is the role of adult activists who interact with children? Is it wrong to educate a child about the truth of where their hotdog came from, even at the risk of making them feel bad?

Children are far more resilient and capable of handling the truth than adults give them credit for. Not once did I fault the marchers at the parade for ‘ruining’ Columbus Day. In fact, I was grateful for their honest truth telling.

Not once did I regret stumbling upon the story about the Holocaust prior to having learned of it in school.

I was fortunate in many ways. Some aspects of my activism began in childhood. My father is a labor rights activist and had no problem teaching me about the oppressive capitalist system, the violations of workers’ rights by corporations and the like. We watched Michael Moore’s first movie together when it first came out and went to protests and rallies together. A point of contention in the household was that my mother often thought I was learning too much and would become depressed. At times I did, but I will take depression over ignorance any day.

While I do believe it is important to communicate with children in ways that respect their understanding of the world, we are doing a greater service in truth telling than we are in perpetuating myths that feel good.

Young people will come to terms with horrible truths when given the opportunity to practice their coping mechanisms. What is much harder to overcome is the feeling of having been intentionally deceived and lied to for most of your life in order to preserve someone else’s comfort level.

I once knew someone who detested one of my favorite Stephen King stories, IT.

“It makes absolutely no sense! Every scene is kids telling grownups there’s a monster, and the grownups ignoring them!”

“Yes?” I asked “So what part of that is unrealistic?”

Just like the children in King’s tales, kids in real life know good from evil. They are wise and sensible because they have not yet fully been conditioned to accept evil acts as part of an inevitable and unchangeable system.

The question is not “Must you upset the children?” but “Must you perpetuate systemic injustices, making your children accomplices in atrocious acts, because you project your own fragility on to them?”