War and Peace 13 comments

By Caroline Langston

“All we are say-ing / Is give peace a chance,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono bleat over the classic rock station on my car stereo. The DJ’s choice is merely incidental, but May will once again be Peace Month in my neighborhood, and a whole calendar of events is prepared—parent-child discussions, fundraising, and loads of other conflict-prevention-oriented family activities.

Time to talk about Gandhi again, and satyagraha. Somewhere in Paradise, Martin Luther King, Jr. is probably getting ready to pop open a Dogfish Head Ale and lament the one-note narrative his life has become.

Well, my son just turned six, and it’s now overwhelmingly clear: He has chosen War.

Let me say from the outset that I’m not at all an opponent of Peace Month, and have indeed pushed him into participating into a lot of these activities. For a year when he was three he attended a “peace playgroup” that worked on children’s social skills and taught little ones to love the earth and each other. Every week, each child would hold the soft cotton “world ball” close and tell something for which he or she was thankful.

More than once, my son picked up the world ball and hurled it across the room.

It wasn’t until my son was about four that he was diagnosed as having Sensory Integration Dysfunction. His sense of being “in his body” was all out of sorts, and that was why he would twirl in circles on the floor whenever he became restless, or complain of noises and smells that got his “engine” (to use practitioner parlance) agitated. The marble floors and echoes of the cathedral we used to attend drove him absolutely crazy. And I would stand there, clueless, trying to figure out how 1-2-3 Magic or John Rosemond or whoever was going to get me out of this one.

It’s the sort of disorder that in my younger years I would not have even believed existed: Those parents are just making excuses for why their son is running all over the place. (And it is true, I think, that in another era where children would have worked in the fields or walked two miles to school—instead of sitting in the back of the car for 45 minutes on the Beltway—that SI problems were probably much less prevalent.)

Two years and a few thousand dollars of Occupational Therapy later, my son has become adept at getting his “engine” under control. He finally responds to the limits we impose, can listen to reason, can (though doesn’t always) empathize with others.

But he is still a fighter. I don’t mean this literally, at least most of the time. For the most part, he’s moved past the hitting and shoving that little boys engage in, although just the other day I whisked him away from the playground where a tussle over a branch (a branch, for God’s sake) had left a friend in tears. For the most part, he can “use his words.”

Rather, it’s matter of temperament. He’s a kshatriya, a member of the Hindu warrior caste. He wants to be first—not just in an obnoxious way (though it often is), but on some deep level of his being. We are constantly urging him to hold back, to defer to others, arrange it so that “everyone wins.”

But he knows that in real life, everybody doesn’t win, and that real battles, both physical and ideological, play out over the course of real lives. It’s not fair, he’ll say. Or even, using the word that is technically forbidden in our household, “It’s stupid.” He does not suffer fools well.

Not long ago we were in the car, and I was talking about our faith, and that when he got to college and probably even before, he was going to meet a lot of people who did not believe in Jesus Christ the way we do, and that those people would actively try to discourage him from the faith. His response? “I ought to punch those people in the face.”

How to temper those emotions, how to inculcate his ability to hold his fire, bite his tongue?

And yet at the same time, how to retain the ability to stand up to others, to be capable of radical opposition in service to the truth when the occasion demands. As Gregory Popcak’s popular Catholic childrearing books note, it is often the kids labeled incorrigible who are the ones who ultimately “speak truth to power.”

Finally, and always: How do I teach the obligation always to love?

Just last night, my son overheard an NPR newscast that mentioned the 150-year prison sentence given to swindler Bernard Madoff. “That’s not fair!” he immediately piped up. “To have to stay in prison until you die!”

I explained the nature of Madoff’s crimes—the thousands whose life savings had been stolen from them, the bankrupted charities and art organizations, the elderly left penniless. I said that it was just like when he got a time out: I forgave him instantly, but he still had to pay the penalty of what he’d done.

He sat down on the floor and taking a folded piece of construction paper and a Sharpie, wrote out the following note that I promised to mail to Bernie Madoff in prison. On its cover, he wrote: “Tri too B Good.” (We’re working on the spelling.)

I share its inside message with you, slightly altering it for readability:

I no You did
Sum bad things but
I fregiv you
I am sare [sorry]
That You had to go too gal [jail]
Sare

The note astonished me, made me clutch at my side and blink back tears.

For his words showed that he, too, knows about the Serpent that slithers through our souls.