Violence

When my little brother Robby was about three, he said to my mom, “Mom, why don’t you like biolence? I like biolence.” I’m with my mom: I don’t like biolence. And that is why I vowed to be vigilant about the toys my sons would play with. No guns. It’s not as if I were being unreasonable, though. Swords were fine because they have sort of a medieval, imaginative quality and lead well to discussions about chivalry. Bow and arrow? Fine. We could talk about resourcefulness and living off the land by hunting bison. Wooden spoons that make machine gun sounds? Well, there wasn’t much I could do to stop them, and the whole idea sort of combines imagination and resourcefulness.

You’ll notice I’ve been using the past tense to describe my weapons limitations. That’s because I now have a basket in my basement that looks like this:

I caved, but with principle. I realized that banning guns was only serving to make them all the more enticing. And after a Christmas featuring lightsabers and several trips to the dollar store for “WEAPONS” (said with a glint in the eye and sideward glance to gauge my reaction), violent toys have been successfully demoted from forbidden fruit to something we whine about having to put away.

I’m thinking of boys and violence because last Sunday morning, Scotty and T were on the back porch using a plastic golf club to massacre a grasshopper. They ran in the kitchen with screams of, “You gotta come see this, his heart is coming out!” and “We just smashed his brain!” I took a deep breath and reminded myself my nurturing husband has a past with ants and a microscope. But did he relish the torture this enthusiastically?

So naturally I was comforted when, twenty minutes later, T started weeping for Hoppy, the universal grasshopper, because he and Scotty had killed his mother. “She will never ever come back, and his grandpa will miss her, and his grandma, and all her babies. I miss Hoppy’s mom. I’m sorry Hoppy.”

At least they didn’t kill her with a gun.