Archives
Friday, June 05, 2009
Let the kids in on
it.
EVERY YEAR. It's a kids book. I read it when I was a kid. This exact one. It filled me with pride. People died in its pages, but it didn't give me nightmares. I wanted to know.
That's what you can do to honor D-Day this year. It's not just a day for adult citizens. Take the wraps off. Quit pretending your kids are delicate flowers. Don't listen to all the propaganda. Let them know what hardship and herosim are. It's a vital part of growing up. It doesn't truncate childhood or taint it. It provides a purpose to the process of growing up, which can still occur at its own pace.
Thankfully (unbelievably?), you can still procure this book, along with many others in the Landmark series, which is how I first learned about Lord Nelson, Francis Marion, John Paul Jones, Alexander Hamilton, and many other exceptional men.
Just to give you an idea. The book about Lord Nelson, Hero of Trafalgar, was more empowering than all my other childhood favorites. It described the tropical fever that debilitated his constitution in his youth, after which he experienced seasickness for the rest of his life. It described the grape shot that ripped off his arm at Calvi and the wound that took away one of his eyes. As a child I suffered from crippling migraines, the pain so bad that I wished I could die on the bathroom floor, and so I thought of Nelson. He gave me courage when there was no treatment for so much pain and no one to understand how bad it was.
It's a big mistake to think you can stage-manage life for the young. Give them a chance to plug into the greatness they must believe in to prevail, even at the tenderest of ages. It's not always the case that ordeals wait for the teenage years before striking with a vengeance.
Here's my salute to the men of D-Day. I know enough to know that no one can ever know what you faced, what you overcame, and what you did. My most earnest hope is that your newest descendants will arrive, not too late, at a similar appreciation.
