A Bucket of Soldiers

I need to have more faith in my children, and their world.
I need to believe that they too, will overcome the crap – there is no other word for it: the effluvia, the waste, the trash, the sugar-dipped, deep-fat fried flotsam and jetsam that is spewed their way by our pay-as-you-go society.
I think – to be fair, that they are entitled to more time, to get down to ‘brass tacks’ as my parents might have said.
We don’t come to responsibility – naturally: it has to be grafted onto our genetic predisposition to flee from danger.
Primitive man formed the original habit – run or be eaten, and then added on other reasons for moving on: drought, fire, pestilence, greener pastures, wanderlust, and the cute girls in the tribe just over the hill. And so on.
Thousands of years later we still instinctively follow the path of least resistance: but thousands of years later it is not necessarily in our best interest to do so.
Travel is nice, but it does not necessarily make you a better person.
What we all need – is real experience. We need challenges. We need situations in which we have to – to use another cliché, ‘put up or shut up’. But nowadays it is far harder to find those kinds of experiences.
So we send our kids to camp, or sign them up for football, or make them mow the lawn – and are surprised when, at 18, or 20, or 25, they still seem clueless as to what it takes to make their own way in life.
And seeing that lack of maturity, we over-react – I think, to the elements of their existence that we find most alien to our generation. We scapegoat television and video games, and the toys that – in the absence of real responsibility, take up so much of their lives.
That’s where this diatribe comes from, by the way – from trying to understand what it is about today’s toys that our children find so appealing.
This column comes out of a few minutes before bedtime spent listening to my son excitedly tell me about Decepticons and Autobots.
Otherwise known as, the Transformers!
I didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
From my adult perspective, they seemed a complete waste of time, and money.
I thought I knew all the relevant information: which is that Transformers are large, often expensive, very complicated toys that ‘transform’ back and forth between machine and humanoid.
To put it briefly: the Autobots are good, the Decepticons (deceivers?) bad.
It began with a few simple Transformers - originally introduced over 30 years ago, and since that time has grown into a literal empire of toys.
What really bothers me about Transformers, and many of the other toys sold to our children today, is the ‘back-story’ that they all come with. To justify each and every new Transformer that comes onto the market, the manufacturers have created an elaborate fictional universe.
Though usually you also have to buy the book, batteries, and take adult education classes in electrical engineering to put them together, the modern toy does not require imagination: it comes complete with its own universe, its own heroes and villains.
Transformers are not just a series of toys, but a toy religion.
When you purchase these toys, in a real sense, you are asked to believe, to buy in to their often stilted, illogical, violent world views.
That’s a far cry – I thought at first, from the simple toys I had as a child. Those toys didn’t usually come with elaborate stories, invented universes, or their own television shows and feature films. They came in buckets, or boxes, with little if any instructions.
You took them out, set them up, and used them until they wore out or you lost interest in them.
But then again, thinking of the buckets of toy soldiers I owned as a child – I wonder if it wasn’t the same challenge?
Though you could buy toy solders by the thousands, and set them up anyway you liked, perhaps the rules of play that we were supposed to abide by were not so different, and were equally as confining, as modern toys.
While the Transformers creators spent a great deal of time and effort – and money, to establish a story line for their toys, the manufacturers of the toys of my childhood simply took their ‘story lines’ for granted.
Boys played war games – tossing clods of dirt at opposing armies, or gunning down ‘Indians’. Girls were given far less exciting toys to play with – and almost all of them focused on the domestic environment that it was assumed lay ahead for them.
In many ways the ‘story lines’ of the toys of my youth were as stifling to the imagination as those of today’s toy companies – or worse.
And didn’t we overcome those assumptions?
It’s a question worth asking.
I’d like to think that, despite all the time I spent digging in the dirt, positioning my tanks and bazooka-men for the big battle, that I was able to imagine a world without constant warfare.
I’d like to think that despite my love for the simple game of marbles, that I am able to handle the complexities of the real world.
There is very little about Transformers, or many of the similar toys and games that occupy so much of our children’s lives, that I find appealing. They are wonderfully engineered, but that’s about it.
I would rather my son do a hundred other things with his time, before he gets out his Cybertrons, or his Pokemon cards, or his Game Boy.
I will do anything, and everything I can, to make sure he knows he has other options, options that won’t just eat up the hours and ruin his eyesight.
But I need to have more faith that, in the end – given time and patience, he will be able to overcome the artificial, be able to see through the superficial, understand that there are better things to do with his time, better ways to live his life.
Maybe that’s how Transformers work.
After all the time spent putting the things together, snapping in the batteries, and reading the instruction you find yourself looking for better ways to help your children play, learn, and mature.
Cool!