I recently saw a child change his mind about the computer game he was making.
Small children can apparently make computer games nowadays with little or no programming skills. I imagine some kind of template and select and order components thing. Very good whatever it is.
The child witnessed a reconciliation between warring adults. Doing their warring in front of, within earshot of, the children as they so often thoughtlessly, carelessly and dangerously do.
As, in fact, to look for a second much further afield to a closely allied area, the ‘child protection’ agencies up to and including militant police do – astonishingly. Self assured and self justificatory to an astonishing degree and glowing with righteous indignation and as prepared to wield instant power and inflict damage on a hapless parent or family as any trigger happy terrorist they think nothing of demonstrating, manifesting their awful presence right there in front of children.
In fact they seem to prefer it.
Perhaps believing they are manifesting in a child’s mind a rescuing ‘super man’ ( or ‘superwoman’ ) coming to save them from the clutches of these awful parents.
I think such self deceiving ego centricity is more than merely possible, I think it probably.
They are sadly – very sadly – criminally sadly – mistaken in many, many instances.
They in fact strike unnamed terror into the hearts and minds of children is what they do.
So back to this child. It witnessed in numb silence an exchange of adult psychodrama power which in this instance concluded on a happy note.
The child, unprompted, came forward after the event and without mentioning the event, of course, as is the norm, announced he was making a game and had suddenly thought he could make a game without nasties in it, without bad and evil things, but a game that was happy !
Imagine the dynamic. Imagine what might have happened within that child. To be set like a stone in a sea of apparent hurt and violence and pain and anger and injustice with a heart and mind in anguish because of how that environment was the whole world to that child – ‘acting out’ as the psychologists say, mimicking reality as he knew it, by devising computer games which – as so many today – all ? – were full of violence and hatred and hurt – and hunched over and head and trying desperately to ignore and avoid the ‘war’ , the conflict going on around him, which involved him so much.
Numbly set in a sea of darkness.
And then a light broke through. Came peace. Came a little ray, a little example, a little of the presence of kindness, understanding, forgiving: love.
Just a tiny.
And the child’s heart rushed to meet it and his whole world changed in a moment….