A Crisis of Intimacy: Who Are Our Children?

The year is ending with dark thoughts about childhood. We brood over the death of the girl who was abducted from her bedroom by an adult. But we also brood over the teen-agers who gunned down their parents. How shall we think about childhood? Are the Menendez brothers guilty or innocent?

Here it is almost Christmas. I overheard two women in a bookstore the other day. They hesitated over Lewis Carroll. They wondered whether “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is, after all, “too young” for a 10-year-old boy.

The 10-year-old I know best is my nephew who, this Christmas, wants Michael Jackson CDs and more Nintendo games.

Adults want children to believe in Santa Claus. Christmas, traditionally, is a time when adults entertain the idea that children are innocent. But I remember one long-ago Christmas when, to protect my parents, I feigned surprise and pleasure at a gift I did not want.

I hear children say all the time now that they carry guns because the walk to and from school is more dangerous than their teachers or parents realize. All week, last week, a teen-ager I know stayed home to watch her younger sister who was being pursued by a teen-age stalker. The girls have not told their parents, because they don’t trust how the adults would react.

Teen-agers are having babies in America. They live in a world of overchargedsexuality and too little intimacy. But is there a more resilient adult piety than the notion that children are sexual innocents? We learned this month about Franciscan priests in Santa Barbara who molested altar boys. And now we wonder what was happening at Michael Jackson’s ranch in nearby Santa Ynez, though perhaps a more interesting question has to do with the innocence of the parents of Michael Jackson’s little friends.

The tragedy of Polly Klaas (“America’s child”)--her abduction and murder--startles adults with the realization that no place seems safe for children anymore. Sonoma is not safe anymore!

Parents all over America wonder whether they can let their children bicycle over to the park or even play in the front yard. Vanished is the possibility of a Huck Finn summer. That realization comes as a shock to Americans who imagined they could take their families to sunny suburbs, thus avoiding urban evil.

But there is no possibility of a happy-land suburb at the edge of a metropolis that is corrupt. In a country where inner-city kids are at risk, all children are at risk. That should be the lesson of Polly Klaas. But instead of facing the moral evasion that created the American suburb, adults are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore . . .

Our politicians follow the crowd. Kathleen Brown is running for governor, and like some of her fellow liberals, fellow feminists, she is as mean as the guys. Young offenders should be tried as adults, Brown proposed in a get-tough speech last week.

Yesterday’s political question was whether women have the right to “terminate” an unwanted fetus. Tomorrow’s political question may have to do with society’s right to execute a teen-ager.

KILL THE BASTARDS! adults shouted in the evening news a few weeks ago. Adults in Liverpool, England, knew just what to do with the boys who murdered a 2-year-old.

Two hundred years ago in England, as through much of Europe, with the rise of the Industrial Age and the crowded city, there flourished an intellectual movement called Romanticism. It still shapes our thinking. Consider, for example, the romantic notion that leafy suburbs are spiritually more nourishing than concrete city life.

In 19th-Century Romanticism, there was also a fascination with the twin figures of the child and of the rustic (the adult as child). You can sense this fascination in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, our greatest national romance, the story of a boy on a raft with a runaway slave.

Many of our modern attitudes about the poor derive from Romanticism. We feel an envy toward social outsiders, we even imitate them. (Black kids dismissively refer to whites who try to act black as “wiggers.”) But we also feel guilt toward the poor (for their victimization), and with this guilt there is fear. Is Frankenstein to be pitied for being our victim or will Frankenstein make us his victim?

Thirty years ago, black America was the source of ultimate moral authority. The black Protestant hymns of the civil-rights movement moved a nation. Suddenly, three decades later, we are to believe that black America is morally bereft--Harlem, like South-Central, a moral wasteland.

One senses the same fluctuation now in the estimate adults have of children. On Tuesday, Polly Klaas is America’s child. On Wednesday, the child-murderer in Colorado should be strung up. One day we wonder if black kids are our victims; the next day we are terrified they will blow our heads off.

There are techno-environmentalists who propose that a new breed of killer bee is abroad in the land. Teen sociopaths exist today the likes of which have never been seen before. Beware their cruel sting! They are animals. They have been poisoned by lead in the water or bad air or the foul milk of crack mothers.

Then there are those adults who think children today need more “role models” (Gloria Steinem-speak). Adults, who no longer exert moral example, instead offer occupational roles to the young.

Psychiatrists, meanwhile, speak only of victims and victimization. No one is guilty; no one’s to blame--as long as your lawyer can find a psychiatrist who has a theory. In a world in which no one is guilty, of course, no one is innocent.

The Catholic Church used to speak of the “age of reason” as coming around the age of 7. Such a notion is foreign to us. We cannot speak of the moral responsibility of the young, because we do not confront our own greater responsibility as their teachers.

What do our children want for Christmas? The adults who run the toy companies have some ideas. The catalogue from Toys “R” Us offers a MICROMACHINES TURBO SHOT ($23.95). “Ready, aim . . . fire. MICROMACHINE VEHICLES includes targets and four cars.” (The catalogue shows a black child’s finger on the trigger.) Recommended for children “ages 4-up.”

Is this what they want? A recent survey reported that many children said they wanted to spend “more time with parents.”

Where are their parents? They are busy now. They are busy with their lifestyles or being role models. Or they are caught in freeway traffic because, after all, they have moved their families so far from the center of town. They are busy in the toy store buying presents.

The calamity of American life now is not political but intimate. Adults do now know their children. The adult temptation is to swing wildly from notions of childhood innocence to guilt, ignoring all the while the simple fact that children must live in a world that adults create.

The urgent question this Christmas should not be about the innocence or guilt of our children, but about adults. The age of our innocence--and guilt. What we need to learn from our kids. Adults should realize that there is no Santa Claus--which is what America’s children have known for a very long time.*