I Hear Dead People
It is quite a commute for me and that little girl who calls me daddy when I take her to school. Sometimes she makes me put on certain music she likes, but usually we listen to sports talk. (Or, as she puts it, "All we listen to is football." She'll thank me later.) I absent mindedly flipped over to NPR yesterday morning during the drive. There was a piece on body counts and dead civilians and failed strategy and all that stuff. Nothing new, but interesting, so I listened for a while in silence. Then I looked over at my six-year-old and changed back to sports talk.When I was six, I heard the exact same stuff. Dead Americans. Dead civilians. Failed strategy. And I remember it. With only three channels on TV and only AM radio in the car, we were exposed to the news of the day everyday. But, for my kid, I turned it off. Not that she was upset or anything, she understands life and death, but why bother with dead people when we can listen to Frank Wycheck speculate about the draft.
I remember from when I was six. And the folks that put us there are older than me. Didn't they learn anything?
posted by Nashville Knucklehead @ 10:32 AM
5 Comments:
I am going to take away your musician's card! Expose that child to good music all you can and while you can, so 20 and 30 years later she will be writing thousands of blog posts about how appreciative she is about how her musician and music fan dad influenced her own musicianship and music fandom.
Reason #2 - I think I haven't gotten around to it yet but I think I could write a thousand more posts about how NFL football, basketball, and baseball on TV all the freakin' time and sports talk elsewhere probably narrowly missed turning me into a serial killer out of hatred for it all and extreme boredom. (College football doesn't count, but there was only so much I could take of it too.)
OK, maybe she likes sports better than I did as a kid, but I'm just saying (and knowing you are a musician and a music fan) don't discount the power of that musical influence. A lot of people my age could give a hoot about Buddy Holly and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and etc., and certainly those younger than me - I am grateful for the exposure (and rather tremendous at that) I had at an early age.
On another note, I know what you mean about the war talk, remember it well. I think it just bounced off of me at that age and since it was going on ever since I was born, it really didn't strike me until several years later that "Huh, so the US at war is not a common and usual thing that is always happening." I dunno, I know I heard and saw plenty of it but it just didn't make much of an impact then.
I listened to NPR once. (you do crazy things on a solo 14hr road trip) It was so depressing it about made want to jerk the wheel into the guard rail. If it's not bad news, it's not news at all on NPR.
Give that little girl some culture: play her some Bee Gees on the way to school!
I hated my step-dad for playing all of that NPR foolishness when I was a kid.
Of course, now I'm the dad who puts his own teenager through the same "blah blah blah."
I will have to say, I am very proud of the musical tastes of my 7yo, because I made deliberate efforts in that area. All the bubble-gum pop, she has picked up on her own, however.
I am an NPR addict but I have to be very careful around the kids. I was completely unaware of this until a few years ago, when the then-4yo exclaimed, upon hearing some piece, "They are DEAD! Mama, who is DEAD???" Thanks to our excellent war strategy, she still can't listen to the news almost four years later.
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