Opening Their Eyes

Today is a difficult day for a lot of people due to the movie theater shooting last night.  This is obviously a very tough subject for anyone to discuss, but as adults, most of us can at least put it in perspective.  We understand to some degree what it does to families and friends.  It tends to make us reflect on our own lives.  But we also know that the chances of something like this happening are (thankfully) exceptionally remote.  For children, I imagine it can be a different story.  This is scary stuff, and not all of them realize that it is a rare occurrence.  There are probably many children (even some adults) who are now freaked out just to be in a theater now.

This got me thinking about how different people raise their kids considering all the "bad stuff" that is out there.  And by bad stuff, I'm not just talking mass shootings.  I'm talking touchy subjects of any degree, like sex, swearing, racism, death, etc.  For awhile, some of us try to shield our children from those things, but obviously they will eventually come in contact with all of it and need to learn how to deal with it responsibly.  My kids are at an age where we're moving (or moved in some cases) more from the protection phase to the understanding phase.  It will be a learning experience for all of us, and I'm sure we'll have some unexpected consequences and conversations.  Our goals now are teaching our kids not to avoid touchy subjects, but how to handle them as children, adolescents, and not terribly far down the road, young adults.

So there is the somber, serious back story.  That leads me to a few things that were said in the car this morning with talk radio playing in the background.  Becca asked me what the deal was with all the talk about shootings, so I explained to her what happened.  She responded "oh", so I don't think she is freaked out about it.  Then there was another story about a couple of guys that were stopped crossing the US border with Kinder Eggs.  That lead to a discussion about how the government sometimes has some really stupid rules and regulations that defy logic.  The radio host made a joke about how someone was able to board a plane with a bomb in his underwear, but thank God the TSA was keeping those Kinder Eggs safely secure. 

Wait, did someone on the radio say....underwear?  Uh oh.  So I explained to Becca, when she asked about it, that someone got on a plane awhile back with a bomb in his underwear.  Both kids thought this was an incredibly stupid idea, which was the correct assessment, and they are only 9 and 12 years old, so I was pleased about that.  Becca was still curious, though.  "Are all bombs those big round things with the rope coming out of them like in the cartoons?  I don't think one of those would fit in someone's pants would it?".  Begin discussion about explosives and putty and how the right materials very well could be put in one's underwear to make a bomb, but it is still a stupid idea that would not end well for the owner of the underwear (assuming they were his own of course). 

I think I dodged a bullet there with the underwear, however the next story took the proverbial gun back out of its holster, in a manner of speaking.  This story was about a man who was stopped by the TSA in San Francisco for having a "large bulge" in his pants.  This bulge was, in fact, not a Smith & Wesson, but the more traditional love gun carried legally and concealed (usually) by roughly half the world population.  I don't think my kids fully understood 99% of the penis jokes and innuendos that they heard for the next five minutes, but on a more primal level, just hearing someone on the radio say PENIS over and over again is all kinds of funny.

And then as we are driving, we just happen to drive by Hooters.  We were looking for lunch, and Becca was very thoughtful.  "We could go to Hooters, so that way I could get wings and you can all have shrimp".  I told her that Hooters didn't have very good wings.  She said "Then why do they call it Hooters?  Aren't "hooters" owls, and owls have wings, so they must have good wings?".  I considered briefly about explaining how Hooters is not so much famous for the quality of its food but for the lack of clothing that the waitresses wear, and that "hooters" didn't refer to owls in this case but rather was a somewhat derogatory reference to large breasts, but I chickened out and just said "no, I don't think they the wings are made of owl.  Ohhh, is that a MacDonalds over there?!!"  I probably missed a good opportunity for more education, but the young sponges seemed to be about saturated at this point, so I'd wait till they dried out before showing them first hand just how truly bad Hooters wings really are.

So today my kids' minds were, I don't know if "expanded" is the right word, but I'll go with it for now.  What they choose to do with this newly acquired information has yet to be seen, but if any of my kids' friends suddenly start talking about underwear bombs and large penises, I apologize in advance.  And that reminds me...I'll be traveling through San Francisco in the near future.  Thankfully Johnah Falcon has already gone through security to break them in, so hopefully I won't have any problems.