Recently, I was listening to some Peter, Paul, and Mary songs My generation music, of course, yet their call for social justice never ceases and their songs and music rang with prophetic voices.
Never have figured out why, but every time I hear “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” tears form. Something so poignant about this story of a child’s imagination, Jack, riding on Puff’s gigantic tale. Then Jack grew up:
“A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, Jackie paper came no more
And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.”
The song speaks of the loss of childhood innocence. That special time every child should have when life is full of hope and possibilities, when imaginations are not pounded out by the need just to survive and figure how to keep body and soul together. A time of freedom, learning, playing, growing, thinking, connecting, safe, secure and, again, innocent. Not yet sexualized, not seeing murder, bloodshed and betrayal on every screen and in every game.
How does innocence disappear? We are supposed to leave childish things behind, but is that the same as leaving the child behind? The child who can still believe hundreds of impossible things before breakfast, who can discover all over again how fascinating anthills are and what fun it is to learn to throw a ball or climb a tree or make up a game with friends or get lost in a book that opens doors to whole other worlds? Do we even let our children do this anymore?
I don’t want to romanticize childhood. For most of human history, having children, lots of lots of them, was an economic necessity and a biological unavoidability. Huge percentages died in infancy and early childhood. Those who survived were put to work at scarily young ages. An unthinkable number were and still are abandoned and egregiously mistreated. Not a nice world for them.
Even so, who are those whose hearts are not softened by the sight of newborn babies? Who is not touched when children will trustingly put their hands in ours and let us guide and direct them?
But now in England, we see that those should-have-been innocent children have grown to be what are being called “feral adolescents” who have been rioting freely and bringing destruction to everything in their paths. In other words, they have experienced no civilizing, taming forces of any kind. Their motivations are animalistic–grab food and hungrily devour it when available, have sex to relieve physical urges without accompanying love and covenant promises to sanctify it, roaming, crashing, leaving only chaos behind. They never got to imagine playing on that dragon’s tail.
I’ve seen lots of things blamed for this: a welfare-based economy that seems to discourage work and rewards the producing of babies without families to nurture them; a class system that discourages upward mobility. I think there is more: the influence of the church has nearly disappeared in most of England. While there is an official church, the Anglican Church of England, few are involved. Occasionally, new parents will show up to have their baby “done,” i.e. baptised, but there is no follow-up to actually live from baptismal vows made on behalf of the children.
It looks to me like systemic societal apathy. A devastating unawareness that civilization takes hard, hard work, and that the church, at its very best, has a profoundly civilizing influence on society. Religion, easily denigrated because bad religious practices are what make the published news, is dismissed as boring, old-fashioned, unnecessary and even detrimental to modern life. So, the baby again got tossed with the bathwater, and we are left with bleakness and unredeemed chaos. Surely, surely we can, by the grace of God, do better than this.
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