Today I thought H.o.p. and I could look at the military’s kid’s section of the Geo-Spatial Intelligence website. H.o.p. could review and I could (probably) mock it–not in front of him, mind you, I wouldn’t want to influence him, because after all I’m trying to see what key ideas and words are dropped on govt sites that end up glomming onto a child’s brain cells and how the child interprets those words and what they select as the key idea. And not that H.o.p. is a test subject and I wouldn’t end in discussing things with him I felt needed to be put in a broader light. Such as the page where it shows a geo-spatial intelligence film of a copper mine in Afghanistan, using it as an example for how military pilots use geo-spatial intelligence for flying around “just like in a computer game”, I would inform him what that’s actually all about and it’s not “just like in a computer game”. That the idea it’s “just like in a computer game” is deceptive.
But it didn’t happen.
I called H.o.p. over and showed him the first page. “This is about Geo-spatial intelligence,” I told him. “How would you like to learn about geo-spatial intelligence?”
“Wow, great!” H.o.p. said.
“And this is Terry-Firma and that’s Wanda World.”
“Wow, great!” H.o.p. said, or something to that effect.
I read him the first page which gave a brief introduction on geo-spatial intelligence. A couple of paragraphs. (In the meanwhile I was waiting both in Firefox and Explorer for their only game to come up, which kept saying it would only be a little while longer loading, but never finished.) I asked H.o.p. what if anything he’d learned from those few paragraphs, which ended in saying that without geo-spatial intelligence, “You’re nowhere at all!”
“Uh,” H.o.p. said, “it’s saying without geo-spatial intelligence you don’t have a home.”
Well, that’s not what those paragraphs were about but if you end those paragraphs saying that without geo-spatial intelligence, “You’re nowhere at all,” then seems at least one child thinks you’re saying they’re not going to have a home without it. The other day at the government’s counterterrorism kid’s website the word he’d remembered, that had been key for him, had been “fear”, which had been the one simple single syllable and emotion-charged word (stated only once, but early on) that would of course stand out among the continuous meaningless repetitions of abstract ideas of “intelligence” and “information”. Today? Home isn’t mentioned at all but the couple of paragraphs, talking about geo-spatial intelligence, ending with the idea that without it “you’re nowhere”, brings to his mind the idea of no home.
Then H.o.p. said he had to really go do something with his Legos and he promised promised he would come back and do the rest of the website with me. But first he had to continue putting together his own Alpha Team since they no longer sell the Alpha Team stuff that he dearly wants. Then he ran off and that was that and later he said no really he didn’t want to look at that silly website, he had better things to do.
And because I don’t keep a journal you get to read about what followed.
So H.o.p. finishes watching one of his cartoons he was watching while putting together his Legos and I hear a fast food commercial and he cuts off the television. He comes stomping in talking about when are people going to learn about slave labor and stop going to fast food places. He said it again. “When are people going to care about slave labor and stop going to fast food places?”
I confess, I’m a lousy mom. H.o.p. got quite hooked on fast food places during our trip…for the toys…and when we got home I sat him down and told him, in the simple way you might tell a nine year old, about how lots of stuff in the world, like cheap stuff that you might get at a fast food place–and expensive stuff, too, but most certainly cheap stuff–is made by what’s virtually slave labor and that when you frequent places like that then you are keeping what’s virtually slave labor in business. H.o.p. ignores quite a lot of what I say but for some reason he absorbed this quickly and has not, since then, asked once to visit a fast food place.
It may have soaked in because H.o.p. would like us to follow completely an Unschooling philosophy and though much of what we do is child led I’m too uptight to do Unschooling, because there-are-things-I-do-want-H.o.p.-to-learn (80 percent for which he has no use) . So many times when I say it’s time to do spelling or math etc., he tells me that it’s Forced Labor.
“This is Forced Labor, mom! I don’t want to do it. ”
Anyway. (Hmmm.) Today he stomps in and he’s complaining about all those people who still frequent fast food places and how it’s keeping people in slave labor.
I brought up how he had promised we would do spelling and math when he was done with what he had been doing.
“I can’t mom. I’m too upset about all those people who have to do slave labor.”
“You’re too upset.”
“Yes! I’m too upset! There are all those poor people having to work slave labor and no one’s stopping it. It’s upsetting.”
Then he starts going through the Lego website. (Yes, yes, I know anything in this house could have been made by what’s virtually or certainly slave labor, and certainly almost every toy he has.) So, he’s going through the Lego website and he’s fuming again about how the Alpha Team stuff he wants is no longer sold. Last night for some reason, I don’t know why, out of the blue he brought up how he wanted to start a petition to get Bush out of office. He really doesn’t like Bush and sometimes out of nowhere it’ll just pop up. Marty was around for this last night and talked to H.o.p. about petitions and told him too how if he really wanted to he could write letters to a congressman who felt about Bush like he did. Since H.o.p. doesn’t like to write that was dropped real fast. The only letters H.o.p. will write is when he feels he’s done something very very uncool and better apologize. So he’ll write a short, “I’m sorry” letter and hand it to us, beaming, because he knows how thrilled we are just to see him try to put together a few sentences on paper that don’t only have to do with his writing out bursts of dialogue for his movie storyboards. Which aren’t comics, by the way. I mentioned to him the other day that if he wanted he could turn his elaborate storyboards into comics but he looked at me like I was crazy and pointed out, no, they are MOVIE storyboards, NOT COMICS.
For some reason H.o.p. has petitions on his mind. He’s not one of these do-good kids who goes out and finds a good cause and tries to do something and ends up with a civic award. No, H.o.p. is too self-involved for that, though he is interested in recycling and things like global warming, though the main reason he’s interested in recycling is because saving the planet gives him an excuse for not throwing or giving anything away, because he wants to keep everything to use some day in some distant film, and because memories are attached to everything and he wants to keep all his good memories, and everything has a good memory attached to it.
So as he sits there, too upset about slave labor to do spelling, he starts going on about how Lego should not have stopped making the Alpha Team stuff and how he wants to start a petition to bring it all back.
Then after a little while that idea went away (it will come back tomorrow though). And maybe he’ll write a petition. Who knows. But I would prefer not to sign it as we have quite enough Legos, thank you.
H.o.p. likes the educational site Cosmeo, because it has a bunch of films and he likes watching the films there. Great with me. They have some great cartoons and he watches those a lot. (He’s watched the Petrushka story I think 200 times.) And, oddly enough, he likes watching the psychology films. If it’s about psychology and relationships and about the mind and emotions (or the body), he will watch it, and will watch it all the way through and then watch it again. He will often times go for that over anything to do with dinosaurs now. In fact, as far as he’s concerned I really really messed up because the last Netflix DVD I got for him was “Chased By Dinosaurs” and though it’s got great special effects, much of the action used to pump up the story line and make it interesting for kids is dinos battling and tearing each other to pieces and eating each other. Which I guess most kids would find exciting. But H.o.p. left the room and told me I should not have gotten “Chased By Dinosaurs” because it was gross. “Mom, you shouldn’t have gotten that movie. It’s gross and bloody!” Later, he decided he did want to see it because he wanted to watch the dinos, but only after I screened it and he covered his face every time I warned him a bloody part was coming up. Then we ended up holding onto it for a week because though H.o.p. didn’t want to watch it again, he understood I had gotten it for him thinking he would like it, and for some reason had it in his head it would disappoint me if we sent it straight back. So it sat on the desk for a week. For no reason at all.
Back to Cosmeo. H.o.p., understanding I wanted him to do something explicitly “educational” and wanting to appease me this afternoon, went to Cosmeo. I suggested a geography video, because geography seemed like a good thing to do at the time–because he cares nothing about geography and ignores anything to do with geography, and I keep trying, as with other things, to get him interested just a little. He said OK because it meant no math yet. So I searched and found an American geography thing for 3rd through 5th graders and I put it on despite the fact it mentioned something about patriotism in the description. I mean, it’s geography, right? How much does patriotism have to do with geography…well…never mind. I just keep hoping something on geography will begin to soak in because nothing has yet. Anything I’ve ever done with him about geography sails over his head. Except for Antarctica. Because it has penguins he cared enough to learn about Antarctica.
Pretty soon the American Geography video launched right into the patriotism thing. Like immediately. I hadn’t expected it to be immediate…and then be pretty much the entire video. “We are patriotic. We are a patriotic country! We are patriotic because we want to be proud of our country and show our pride by doing things like picking up litter…” Etcetera etcetera, you get the idea. Yes, I was expecting them to say maybe they wanted to show pride in the country by keeping our freedoms (what there is of them) but instead they talked about litter, and I recollect when I was nine I became really concerned about litter and started going out and picking it up off the side of the road, but it wasn’t because of patriotism, I just thought it was terrible how people threw their trash all over the desert. Picking up litter is something a nine year old might care about, so they got an identification point there–but patriotic? (In fact, H.o.p. has recently on his own mentioned the idea of picking up litter…he said he wanted to do it…PBS shows mention it quite a bit…but I vetoed that idea, considering where we live…wouldn’t be safe.)
In the meanwhile they’re reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in the background.
“What’s that?” H.o.p. asks.
“That’s the Pledge of Allegiance.”
“What’s the Pledge of Allegiance?”
“It’s patriotic stuff.” I didn’t get into the origin of the Pledge of Allegiance and why I’m not interested in H.o.p. learning it. I was too preoccupied with listening to the video by now, wondering where they were next going to go with this when they were supposed to be teaching geography.
“Why are they saying it?”
“They have kids say it in school. I haven’t taught it to you.”
“Why don’t we say it?”
“Because I don’t believe in rah-rah group-think Nationalism and that’s Nationalism. So we don’t say it.”
“Oh, OK.”
H.o.p. has picked up a repository of words pointing to ideas that he doesn’t quite get but he knows mom thinks these belong in the BAD box and for some reason with things like this he goes, “Oh,” in a matter-of-fact way, accepting way, like he’s got it (though he hasn’t got it, not at nine) like it’s something to absorb, to ponder, to attempt to understand, whereas no matter what I may ever say about spelling and math and picking up Legos, it’s not even up for debate, they are all in his BAD box and I should just accept that. But things like Nationalism and Slave Labor those are decidedly the kind of toys with which one shouldn’t play.
“What are they doing?” H.o.p. asked.
They were showing an individual carrying the American flag.
“Carrying the flag,” I said.
This was, of course, obvious, but there was something about the whole patriotic flag carrying that had made the act of flag carrying, I guess, not quite recognizable as simple flag carrying.
He got excited. “I want to carry a flag! I want to carry a flag too, some day. Can I?”
Geez. We were suddenly in some scene of a movie or television show. I can’t remember which it was. I just remember an end-of-show confrontational scene where it finally came out that what someone really wanted to do as a child was carry the flag, and a person said, Why can’t you? And next thing you knew the person was walking around carrying the flag. What show was that? Because it was the least anticipated thing in the world. I have no clue what show or movie it was, just that it was the least likely thing you’d expect to have happen and completely out to lunch. I should remember, too, because I watch so little television.
Ah, then I thought back to how when H.o.p. was little little he loved flags. He didn’t care what the flag was, he just liked a flag, a flapping piece of cloth on the end of a stick, waving it around. And how back post 9-11, when we were just going to war and everyone had flags up (we didn’t) my mother-in-law had flags up all over too, and little flags stuck all around in things like flower pots, and I had gotten upset because I felt like she’d taken advantage of H.o.p.’s liking flags in general by insisting on giving him an American flag to wave….and I’d said no, and she’d said, “But he likes flags,” and I’d said something about the war and taken the flag away that she was insisting on giving H.o.p. and left it at her place.
It took me back a moment. For a second I thought, “Has he not played with flags since then?” Before that he had a plain flag that got torn up. Then I remembered, no, flag waving continued on for quite a while after that. We still have the rod that we used to make into a flag, attaching felt to it or sometimes just paper. Whew, no guilt.
He wants to wave a piece of cloth. On the end of a stick. That’s all that it means to him, waving a piece of cloth in the air. That’s probably about all it means to most kids. Except for most third graders, I guess, who now have attached the red white and blue to the idea of flag because it confronts them every day in school. But how many just want to carry around the stick with the piece of cloth and wave it because it’s fun to wave cloth. And what’s fun is taken and twisted into patriotic flag waving nationalism?
We shall have to again create a flag of some type for H.o.p.
Leave a Reply