When I was growing up, my Mother strictly forbid me from playing with toy guns, nor did she allow anyone to give me a toy gun as a gift.  Somehow though I would always find a way to make a gun, whether it be from legos, lincoln-logs, or sticks found in the yard.  No matter what Mom the 60s flower-child tried to do, she couldn’t keep her young boy from playing war.

If it wasn’t actually pretending we were fighting ourselves with sticks, legos and rubber bands, we also had many other ways to play war.  Plastic red Indians and white cowboys would battle for territory on the bedroom floor, while the little green army men would wait their turn to battle their grey German counterparts when the white cowboys emerged (as they always did) victorious from their own skirmish.  The late-70s Star Wars, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica craze paved the way for imaginary space battles between good and evil as well, but it was never as fun as the battles between the cowboys and Indians or axis and allies.  Marketing geniuses of the late 20th and now 21st century turned those of us who grew up this way to video games of the same nature.  Good versus evil, black versus white.  Granted, some of these battles we pretend to fight were just, but some were (or are) not.

A year or more ago, a basket full of these plastic figures, including red Indians, white cowboys, dinosaurs, tigers, and perhaps a smurf, appeared at our house from my in-laws.  My children have yet to really embrace these toys, yet I now see how my mother felt more than thirty years ago.

As I was standing in the shower this morning, I noticed that one of the white cowboys was laying down in the soap dish as if he had taken an arrow or bullet from some unknown foe from perhaps the direction of the vanity.  I then remembered that there was in fact a red Indian stationed over by the sink with his flaming arrow pointing in this direction.  Both of these toys of course had been left behind by the children, neglected from one of their many sessions in the big bubble bath.

Standing there in the shower, I contemplated what these toys represented.  The white cowboy, hero, pistol drawn and at the ready to level any nasty bad guy that dare cross his path.  The red Indian, proud warrior, arrow ablaze and bow drawn, ready to burn and destroy.  It boggles the mind how insensitive the civilized world can be, all in the name of marketing and what we have learned from Hollywood and history books.  When my deeds were done in the bathroom, I picked these two little warriors up and put them inside the medicine cabinet.  There was no need to send them off to pollute a landfill, but there was also no need to display these symbols of violence in my home.

I know that it is impossible and probably not advisable to completely shield and protect my children from the realities of war and violence.  In fact, I think that it is probably more healthy to expose them to some of these realities so that they can gain an understanding of what humans are capable of doing to one another, why it just isn’t right, and what better, non-violent solutions exist.  Putting Mr.Cowboy and Mr.Indian (or Native American as we’ve only too late learned to label them) in the medicine cabinet was only one small step in molding my two small bits of clay into people who will create the world we’d all like to live in.

“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

\  On a comical aside…  I would like someone to explain to me why all my best ideas come up in the bathroom.  Not in the car, not lying in bed, not anywhere else where I seemingly have the same solitude, just in the bathroom where most of the time, it is at least my pants that are off.  Anyone?