One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [8]
What to make of these children in Kosovo who grew so moved by the telling of medieval history that they had to stop their game to make sure I understood their story, as if play would be impossible without this common narrative? What to make of these child soldiers in the Congo who roughhoused and laughed together only months after they had tried to kill each other? This was decidedly not how I imagined the children of war to be.
This project began when I was in college. It started with an insomniac night, when I watched reruns at three a.m. An ad for Save the Children came on, and I changed the channel. I did not want to sponsor a child, or even see those pictures the ad would inevitably show me. There was little escape, however. They were everywhere. The children were all the same: they were fleeing and hungry, all rags and bones and pleading, innocent eyes. They were from Ethiopia, Sudan, Liberia, Gaza, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo, Haiti, and Colombia. They were from the Congo and Sri Lanka. They were from Sierra Leone and Northern Ireland and from Israel. Where they came from hardly mattered to the story. The children were usually devoid of context. Seeing them I learned nothing about the conflict, the culture, or the child.
I had always thought of childhood as a kind of magical time, “a mythologized and privileged state,” as the Oxford anthropologist Jo Boyden calls it, kept separate from the workplace, the world of adults, the hardships of the adult world. I held a conviction that in order to have a healthy childhood, the young must be sheltered from the struggles they would later come to know as grown-ups, that the most essential conditions for “normal” development were safety and stability. I also began to observe the widespread belief that children were not competent to face many of the harsh realities of life. There was a conception that children, by the simple fact that they are children, are “innocent in the ways of the world and incompetent in it.”
Aside from the great pains that are taken to protect children from danger in the United States—look at the rubberizing of school playgrounds, the banning of tag, the flood of sanitizing gels in children’s knapsacks, as if germs and skinned knees are no longer acceptable parts of play, and, most pernicious, the banning of books, and blocking of the Internet in an effort to protect the innocence of children—there is a near total denial that children are protagonists in their own lives. When a young person gets into trouble, blame is spread between the parents, the media, and any other cultural influence that is in vogue at the time: video games, loud music, fashion, MySpace. When a young person does something prodigious or remarkable—shows a selfless compassion by organizing a clothing drive for hurricane victims or, like twelve-year-old Ilana Wexler speaking at the Democratic National Convention, expresses a political opinion—it is seen as cute and somewhat unexpected, as if children were not usually aware of events in the world around them. However, it would take a supreme act of will for children in much of the world to be unaware of events around them.
Since World War II, children have become involved in wars in unprecedented ways. Jewish children were targeted by the Nazi death squads simply because they were children, and at the same time, Jewish youths fought with the partisans against Nazi occupation. Youths as young as twelve had to choose for themselves—pick up a gun and fight, or die in a gas chamber or ghetto. As David Rosen of Rutgers University notes, recruiters would often target orphans because their family ties had already been broken and they were less risk averse than children who