By Chris Tucker
Dallas, TX – Whatever else they do for a living, parents of young children are in the innocence protection business. We know that our product has a limited shelf life; I've never met a 20-year old who didn't know about the violence and hatred that permeate much of the world. But even though the odds are against us - though we have, in the long run, a 100% failure rate - we refuse to give up. We want to make it last as long as possible, that cherished holiday from evil that only the very young enjoy.
During this past week, as people in America and all over the world tried to make sense of this unthinkable horror, the innocence protection business took a terrible beating. The first day after the attacks on New York City and Washington, my wife and I didn't know what to tell our seven-year old daughter. We turned off the television, put the morning paper face down on the kitchen table, tried to act like it was just another day. My wife wanted to say something, but she didn't know what. Irrationally, I favored saying absolutely nothing, just as we had done during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal a few years ago. But we knew that some older kid at school would talk about the attacks, so - trying to keep it as simple as possible - we told her some very bad people had blown up some buildings in New York. We left out the part about the airplanes. I'll be flying next week, and in November we're all flying to Disney World.
But, little by little, the full story seeped in. Two days after the attacks, she asked me if the bad people used bombs or airplanes to destroy the buildings. When I told her the truth, she paused, then asked me if it had been an accident. Over the next couple of days, she asked the same question several times. I guess it was beyond her comprehension that anyone could deliberately carry out such a monstrous act.
Watching her try to fit this tragedy into her view of the world, I remembered the first time, as a junior high student, I read about the Holocaust. For weeks afterwards I could not believe what had happened to all those men, women and children. The book had to be wrong, or maybe it was fiction. Looking back, that may have been the first time I realized that even my parents could not protect me against every danger that life might bring.
Years later, in college, I came across William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming." Writing at the brink of World War II, Yeats warned that:
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned."
His words came back to me the other day when our little girl and a friend were pretending to be chefs in the kitchen, mixing up some greenish concoction of peanut butter and food coloring and potato chips. For a moment the tragedy seemed far away, unreal, like something out of a Bruce Willis movie. Then my daughter ran to her room and got her globe; and when I asked why, she said they wanted to know how far New York and Washington were from Dallas.
Chris Tucker is a writer from Dallas.