For Kids' Sake

Japan is a culture which has succeeded in large part because the members of Japanese society follow rules with unfailing devotion. During my first visit there, I was on the 32nd floor of the Keio Plaza hotel, across the street from the Tokyo Metropolitan government building. It was early - perhaps 5:30am - and in the dawn I could see the green traffic lights spill onto the street. The roadway below was deserted. Below me, on the sidewalk, was a solitary person, waiting to cross the street. As I watched, he stood there on the silent street, waiting patiently for a full minute, until the light changed and it was his turn to go. He crossed, and at that moment I recognized that I was in a foreign land.

Forward ten years, and I found myself in downtown San Jose, waiting for the light to change. I was eager to cross, to get to where I thought I needed to be; other pedestrians crossed against the light, or jaywalked. I told my friend Kathryn about my experience in Japan, about how I observed that Japanese society functions smoothly because people are obeying the rules. She replied with her observation of how things are in Germany. "There," she said, "people don't cross against the light, because it sets a poor example for the children."

I was struck by that simple observation, and I realized that this lesson has the power to change our own society. I can already feel the overwrought histrionics of Reverend Lovejoy's wife, as she desperately implores anyone who will listen - so I tread cautiously. But consider this:

Would you drive the way you drive if you had a three-year-old riding shotgun, asking his endless stream of "Why?" in regards to your handling of the car? I recall an incident where a Type A aggro-buddy in a BMW shot through a stop sign by my house. In the car was his son; I wanted to pull this jerk over and say to him, "Daddy, what does Stop mean?"

Would you ingest chemicals to the same degree if you had to interact with a birthday party of eight-year-old girls? Now, I don't have children, but I used to be one, and I have been with some awesome young people over the past several years. For many of those interactions I was stoned out of my mind. Was it fun? Absolutely; kids are going balls-out, loving life, and they take you along for the ride. Could they tell I was stoned? Maybe; I sure could tell, and that colored my experience, maybe causing me to hold back, or be weird, or not engage fully. I don't deny that the urge to modify consciousness is a fundamental human drive, and I'm not advocating a squeaky-clean lifestyle as the only way to be. But you'd be hard-pressed to explain why you're chuffing on your seventeenth binger when the first couple did all the damage they're going to do - kinda like explaining why you're bogarting all the Nintendo cartridges when you can only play with one at a time.

This overprotection can go too far. We've seen its fallout in the battle in public libraries for free Net access - the concerned parents on one side, saying their children need to be protected from the depraved and disgusting corners of the Web, squared off against civil libertarians who say the library is like the town square, and not everything you hear on the sidewalk is going to be fit for a child. I tend to side with those who would say that the restraint of ideas is much more harmful than the potential effects on a child who ventures down an inappropriate clickpath - but I still recall, with disturbing clarity, some of the intended-for-adults-only experiences I had when I was an adolescent. Should our popular culture be defined by what's acceptable to a six-year-old? You could make a compelling case that most mass-media product that comes out of Southern California already has been bleached into lowest-common-denominatorism, but the point is that an elementary schoolkid just shouldn't be watching Married with Children or The Sopranos - or South Park, for that matter.

And while we're on the topic of inappropriate behavior by adults in front of children: What does it say about America that we consider it acceptable to emblazon our vehicles and baseball caps with purloined images of Calvin, delightful Calvin, urinating on an emblem of The Other? (If you're not familiar with this grotesque phenomenon, I invite you to visit The Onion for a primer.) Maybe the Dallas Cowboys or Chevrolet or La Migra deserve a little golden shower - all have behaved below reproach at some point, I'm sure - but is this behavior we want to be modeling for the young'uns? I consider it to be in poor taste, obviously, but also pathetic that someone would choose to define themselves by what they hate or oppose. How uplifting is that? (For the record, the DownerMobile sports two bumper stickers -"Set the gearshift to the high gear of your soul" and "The best things in life aren't things" - as well as a license plate frame declaring "We gotta get on the road / Destiny unbound." Yes, it's an old car. Yes, I'm an old fart.)