Children crying in the night

The boy can’t sleep. He lies awake at night huddled against the shadows that move across the ceiling of his quiet bedroom. When he does finally drift off, the bad dreams come and he wakes up, crying. Sometimes he lies there, coping with his fear. Other times he runs to the room of his parents and snuggles with them until morning.

It isn’t the spooks of a child’s imagination that terrify the 8-year-old. Not the friendly ghosts that walked the streets on Halloween night, giggling under hooded sheets and behind ghoulish masks. It’s reality that troubles his sleep and haunts his daily life.

His father recalls that it began with the kidnappings that seemed to dominate the news for so long. Little boys and little girls snatched off the streets, some never to be seen again, others murdered and tossed into the darkness. The boy wanted to know why anyone would want to kill kids who hadn’t done anything to hurt them. He wanted to know if there were bad men in his neighborhood too.

The terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and outside Washington, D.C., had heightened the boy’s fears, and the question he asked, the “why” that continues to resonate across the land, could never adequately be answered. The reasons are too unreasonable, the explanations unexplainable.

Images of buildings collapsing and people falling like dolls to their deaths were bad enough. The kids didn’t also need the specter of a sniper stalking through their dreams. But once more, terror dominated the news, this time by gunfire from the shadows. Worse, a note left by the killer warned, “Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.” Again the boy asked why, and again his parents couldn’t answer.

I know this kid. He’s smart and sensitive. He listens and observes and absorbs all the traumas that are a part of our world and, in the definitive sense, part of his neighborhood. He asks “Are there more of them?” when he hears of a sniper killing people for no reason other than killing.

I said to him one day that theirs was a kind of madness that affects only a few among the many. Their presence, I said, was rare. But then he hears about nations arming for war, about nations killing each other in the Middle East, about nations stockpiling weapons that are capable of greater horrors than we have ever known. And because he’s a smart and sensitive boy, he knows that the scary things haven’t gone away.

His parents do the best they can to shield him, for a little while at least, from the almost surreal terrors that abound. They don’t watch the news when he is up and about. They try not to discuss their own fears when our government warns that more terrorist attacks may be imminent and that war with Iraq may be near.

But kids pick up bits here and there. You can’t keep the whispers low enough to shut them out. They listen. They talk among themselves. And they cry in the night.

“Our children don’t deserve this,” a Maryland policeman said, talking about the sniper’s note. No. They don’t.

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Pandora’s box

This boy is every little boy and girl growing up in a climate of dread. It’s a sense that something’s out there, something’s coming. And they know, as a child knows, that it will strike from the shadows on their very own ceilings.

One doesn’t need a psychologist or a cultural anthropologist to speculate on how deep the fear goes and how long it will remain with our kids. Some may be able to shrug it off, but the sensitive ones will carry it with them into adulthood. We learn sometimes too late that kids don’t always outgrow their fears the way they outgrow their shoes.

My generation began with the good guys versus the bad guys, the clarity of positions leaving no doubt about the nobility of our crusades. But then the lines began to blur, and we lost sight of who the good guys were. And the bad guys aren’t just “over there” anymore, but among us and around us and down the alleys of our nightmares.

This month’s National Geographic tells in precise terms what the children sense. The world’s a scary place. By highlighting the weaponry that lies in what it calls “Pandora’s box,” the magazine explains in graphic form where the nuclear weapons are or will be, where the chemical weapons are or will be, and where the biological weapons are or will be. They’re everywhere.

How perceptive of this boy and the kids of his generation to cry in the night. How sad that fear blows through their dreams like a dragon’s breath, hot and foul-smelling.

The little goblins that walk the streets of Halloween don’t even begin to hint at how afraid we all ought to be. But deep in their troubled hearts, the children know.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.