Next year will be the twentieth anniversary of San Diego City Works Press. In the lead-up to this and the publication of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (in 2025), The Jumping-Off Place will be featuring some of the highlights from City Works Press’s many publications.
The following text, “Playing War” by Susan Luzzaro was published in Sunshine/Noir: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (2005), City Works Press’s inaugural anthology.
by Susan Luzzaro
O golden child the world will kill and eat —Sylvia Plath
When you hold the little bullet-shaped body of a baby in your arms, swaddled in pastel colors and smelling of essence of self, skin, and soap, it’s hard to see through the layers of softness straight into the hard copy DNA that says potential for violence. Nature vs. nurture is the paradox that teases out preferences rather than answers. I have often been stunned by the profound morality of my grandson, in particular, his ability to empathize. In his brief five years on this earth, I have seen him cry about worms and bugs that would be ground to pieces by the lawn mower, I have watched him rescue drowning bees from his wading pool, and I have known him to refuse to eat a chicken leg because he was visualizing the rest of the chicken body. And he is very clear about war play or gunplay. When I told him he shouldn’t point the popgun at pets or people, he reminded me that the gun was a toy, that he was playing, and that he never, ever would really hurt anybody. When I continued on in my own vein, he asked me, “Then why did you buy this gun for me, Nonna?” His question was the beginning of this meditation.
My husband and I live on the edge of a valley that is, as yet, undeveloped. Normally, the walk down the dirt road, the birds, rabbits, sage, and wild daisies provide a little relief from the press of civilization—until recently. "Cease fire," a voice yells. Two camouflaged figures on the hill to the east of us lower their rifles. Under the heavy shag of the ancient pepper tree, we hear scurrying; then a 12-year old GI Joe parts the fringe and steps toward us. I could barely make out his facial characteristics through the mask that he wears, but he looks benign. He is apparently the leader of the rest of the paint ball platoon behind him. He reassures us that we can pass safely; his "men" will hold their fire.
The novel Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut, suggests that we should be careful about what we pretend to be because that is what we become. This idea interests me though I’m not sure to what extent I believe it. In the sixties and seventies many of us put our daughters in OshKosh overalls, or some variation on denim. The clothes were more practical, more comfortable than what many women of my generation wore as children, and there was the hope that when dressed in these clothes the girls would feel physically freer, more aggressive, that one thing would lead to another and the girls would grow up to hold their place equally beside men. But ideologically, were the overalls a flawed concept? Did we want our daughters to become Margaret Thatcher, Janet Reno? Did we want our daughters to wear three-piece suits and become dynastic CEOs? Navy pilots? And what of our sons? Perhaps we should have dressed the children uniformly in delicate dresses—exposed them all to the lessons of vulnerability.
In the time before Barbie dolls, before dolls that peed and needed diapering, my parents gave me a doll. Wearing a siren red dress, glossy brown hair and enviable curves, the doll was significant because my parents took me on an outing alone to present her to me. The doll was my gift for helping with my younger brothers and sisters on a daily basis, so my parents understood I would want nothing that was baby-like, or in any way dependent on me. I hardly ever played with that doll, though I valued it because it referred to my own value. Do the toys that we play with contribute to our identity? I believe I was shaped more by being a caregiver to my younger brothers and sisters than I was by possessing a doll. Still I wonder about the effect of donning a mock uniform, about shooting at your friends? I can't help but be suspicious of it. I also can't help but wonder if, given the money, a mother or a father in Palestine or Afghanistan or Iraq would buy toy guns and camouflage uniforms for their child.
Since the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq, more and more carloads of kids have been dropped off by busy parents to conduct paint ball wars in the canyon behind our house. The trash, the crushed soda cans, the CO2 cartridges, the paint-stained dugouts irritate me, but it’s the sound of gunfire and screams throughout the afternoon, the nearness of war, that really disturbs me. My neighbors are disturbed by this too. There are practical reasons—an elderly neighbor was recently shot in the leg while walking his dog. But there are philosophical reasons as well. Most of the parents in this neighborhood are the kind who monitor the TV shows that their children watch. They are alarmed by the violence in many children's shows. By the same token, they encourage their children to watch shows like Sesame Street and Barney that promote the idea of a moral universe. The games these parents teach their children, the way they choose to discipline their children (timeouts), also suggest that they believe that children can be molded, made more pacific, and, perhaps, by extension, the larger world, as well.
In “On Human Nature,” to which I will refer several times, scientist and Nobel author, Edward O. Wilson, argues that warlike activity increases during wartime. Following the data of the anthropologist Richard G. Sipes, Wilson concludes, “the practice of war is accompanied by a greater development of combatant sports and other lesser forms of violent aggression.” Nowadays, there are places you can go for “paint ball adventures.” If you access www.skirmish.com, a camouflage-clad figure wearing goggles on his eyes and bushes on his head appears and points a gun at you. The web site reads: “700 acres of top-notch terrain . . . Perfect for weekend fun, corporate teambuilding, bachelor and birthday parties.” The site goes on to display the various scenarios in which one could play war: the Pentagon, a fortress with towers and shooting platforms; Firebase Dewey, which is modeled after an army depot, a castle, and so on. One of the more troubling contexts for war play is called Hood in the Woods. “This is a Pocono version of a hood, with all the big trees in place. The Hood is a building to building, street fighting, game . . . It’s close and intense . . . quick reflexes and sharp shooting rule.” What real world event this play theater is anticipating? Again I ask, not as much for rhetorical purposes as for perspective, would a Palestinian elect to holiday at Skirmish in the Poconos?
There seems to be an inverse relationship between the desire to play war and the actual possibility of being engaged in conventional combat. War, as waged by the United States in the recent past, has come to resemble some types of play. Computer image targets, computer-programmed bombs and unmanned aerial vehicles piloted by someone on the ground wielding a yoke, stick, and rudder reflect the way technology has changed war, and mirror the way war is waged by teenagers in arcades. According to a Defend America news article, “Planners are using UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) for missions too dangerous for manned aircraft . . . UAVs can be sent to locate surface-to-air missile sites without putting crew members in harm's way.” The odd paradox of technology and knowledge: At the same time that the U.S. has successfully established significant separation between weaponry and human targets, the Human Genome Project, by beginning to identify specific genes along DNA strands, reveals the fundamental similarity of one human to another. As the Project points out, “Human beings are 99.9% identical.” Look through one end of technology and the human beings are closer, more intimate, a lost brother, a distant cousin—through the opposite lens and they are tiny expendable ants.
The first member of the Navy to be killed in Afghanistan was petty officer Neil Roberts. In the event of his death, Roberts had written a letter to his wife which included the following: “I died doing what made me happy...For all the times I was cold, wet, tired, sore, scared, hungry and angry, I had a blast.” It's possible that these words were written with a mind to comfort his survivors, nevertheless, they don't reflect the awesome possibility of being killed nor the terrible probability of killing others. Rather, his words have the surreal quality of someone participating in a sporting event.
Further obfuscating the distinction between war and sport is the seeming bloodlessness of the war. Both wars have been characterized by an aggressive policy of de-emphasizing civilian deaths, and it is extremely rare to see an image of civilian devastation. You have to want to see these images; you have to search them out on the Internet. We are not permitted to see even the flag-draped caskets of American troops. Mother Jones carried an article filled with pictures of American soldiers fitted with prosthetics, which was a rare and disturbing view of the way many soldiers return home.
During the first World War Sigmund Freud wrote, “Thou shalt not kill . . .. When the frenzied conflict of this war shall have been decided, every one of the victorious warriors will joyfully return to his home, his wife and his children, undelayed and undisturbed by any thought of the enemy he has slain either at close quarters or by distant weapons of destruction. It is worthy of note that such primitive races as still inhabit the earth . . . act differently in this respect, or did act differently until they came under the influence of our civilization. The savage-Australian, Bushman, Tierra del Fuegan—is by no means a remorseless murderer; when he returns victorious from the war-path he may not set foot in his village nor touch his wife until he has atoned for the murders committed in a war by penances which are often prolonged and toilsome...behind this superstition lurks a vein of ethical sensitiveness which has been lost by us civilized men.”
About veterans of the current wars, I cannot personally say, but about veterans of Vietnam, Freud had it wrong. During the Gulf War there was a campaign to honor the returning military personnel. Yellow ribbons were tied around trees, fences, and street signs to honor the returning heroes. The media spin at the time was that these veterans were not going to be treated like Vietnam veterans who were spit upon. A number of the people I went to high school with, or am friends with now, served in Vietnam in the early years of the war, and their return was quite different. It was, in fact, “ethical sensitiveness” that caused these men, when they came back from Vietnam, to grow their hair long, and march in contingents of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. One of the strongest memories I have of that time was sitting in a smoke-filled apartment listening to the Chambers Brothers singing, "The time has come today." My friend had just returned from a tour of duty as a marine in Vietnam, and we were in awe of him. Due to his experiences, due to the simple fact that he had been out of the United States, he inhabited a vastly more mature world than we did. He preferred not to talk about Vietnam, but he told us that afternoon: "We had no business shooting people, or water buffaloes; we have no business being there." This friend, among others, spent years trying to expiate the nightmares of Vietnam.
After the war on Iraq began, a craze for little green plastic soldiers swept my grandson's kindergarten. Thirty characters could be acquired for $1.59, a refreshingly cheap toy. Little boys, my grandson included, returned to lying on the ground, patiently setting up their side of the battle. Wilson asks, “Are human beings innately aggressive? This is a favorite question of college seminars and cocktail party conversations, and one that raises emotion in political ideologues of all stripes. The answer to it is yes.” So the kindergartners reached into their DNA and found the gene for territoriality. They set up fences and dug trenches and fortified their positions. If the origin of the hostilities were obscure, the point of the game became increasingly clear: the last man standing.
Children all over the country were shaken by the image of the Twin Towers collapsing. They absorbed the fear, shock and grief of the adults around them, as well as the enormity of fallen buildings, smoldering wreckages, and sudden irrevocable death. It changed the way they walked in the world. Many schools brought in counselors to work with the children, or to advise the teachers about how to deal with all the attendant emotions this tragedy created. Then the country held its breath. The desire for vengeance was palpable. War was inevitable. Anna
Freud and Dorothy Burlingham wrote about the effects of war on children. Although their observations were written in l942 and based on children who physically experienced war, who played “joyfully on bombed sites, around bomb craters,” I believe their insights are applicable to all children who experience war, however indirectly. “The danger lies in the fact that the destruction raging in the outer world may meet the very real aggressiveness which rages in the inside of the child. At the age when education should start to deal with these impulses, confirmation should not be given from the outside world that the same impulses are uppermost in other people.”
Surviving war physically, let alone psychologically is the immediate problem for many of the world’s children. Shortly after the United States went to war against Afghanistan, an old friend called me. She had opposed the Vietnam war and the Gulf war, but she called to inform me that she supported this war because “They (the terrorists) killed babies, Sue.” But my friend didn't call when the picture of a little, Afghan girl of six, wearing her lovely green party dress, was on the front page of all the newspapers—a victim of a U.S. bomb gone wrong. Derrill Bodley and Rita Lasar, both of whom lost family members on September 11, traveled to Afghanistan to bring attention to the civilian casualties. While there, Bodley met with Abdul Basier, whose five-year old daughter was killed by a U.S. Bomb that missed its target. I want to believe that my friend, even though she did not call me, was touched by Bodley's sparse but essential words: “This man has lost what I have lost. We are no different.” The Unicef State of the World’s Children 2001, reports that as a result of war, “In the past decade 2 million children have been killed, 4 to 5 million disabled, 1 million orphaned and 12 million left homeless.” It’s unfortunate that we can’t really absorb numbers this big, or see these children as our own children or grandchildren; we would be calling one another all the time.
But morality is a luxury. My grandson’s ability to weep for the smashed spider, to choose vegetarianism, to move his plastic soldiers from one trench to the next with no physical or invisible psychological repercussions stems from the fact that the children in the United States are in a kind of aristocracy in relationship to many of the world’s children. Some children are not playing—they actually are soldiers. Writing for the American Friends Service Committee, Shannon McManimon writes that there are “approximately 300,000 children under 18 . . . most child soldiers are from 15 to 17 years old but others are as young as 7. These children often start out acting as porters, cooks, spies, or sexual slaves.” Because violence has become a way of life for these child soldiers, as Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham pointed out, the children have severe problems readjusting to community life.
I love the idea of protecting children whether from cluster bombs or violent images on TV. I admire countries like Norway, Sweden and Canada for taking Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles off of the air because they concluded they were too violent for children. For years it was argued that you could not incontrovertibly prove the connection between smoking and cancer. How many cumulative studies, how many copycat crimes do we need before we protect our children from the inundation of violence in our culture? If in the nature vs. nurture argument E.O. Wilson comes down on the side of the inheritability of aggressive instincts, he also goes to great lengths to stress the importance of culture. “We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture.” Like family, church, and school, TV is a major cultural transmitter. Unfortunately, most of us have no input regarding the content of this powerful tool; we can only turn it on, or turn it off.
I was pleased to hear that the elementary school my grandson attends has adopted a plan called Peacebuilders. The stated purpose of the Peacebuilder Plan is “to create a vision in children’s minds about the benefits of increasing the peace . . . It serves as a model of how kids can affect their world to achieve positive ends, even when they might believe that’s not possible.” The blue and green symbol of the earth dots the page on which the Peacebuilder's pledge appears. Each morning after the Pledge of Allegiance, my grandson says: "I am a Peacebuilder. I pledge to praise people, to give up put-downs, to seek wise people, to notice and speak up about hurts I have caused, and to right wrongs. I will build peace at home, at school and in my community each day." It's a lovely vision, but have you noticed that we rarely talk about peace anymore? The author Lawrence Durrell wrote, somewhere in the Alexandrian Quartet, that the Greeks had invented the idea of the soul in the mad hope that it might take, perhaps Peacebuilders is an attempt to reinvent the idea of a world without war.
There is some research to support the idea that a community's values, if faithfully conveyed, can derail the aggressive instincts woven into our genetic material. Among "the tiny minority" of peaceful societies, Wilson cites the Semai of Malay. He says the Semai can't even imagine violent aggression. "Murder is unknown, no explicit word for kill exists ('hit' is the preferred euphemism), children are not struck, and chickens are beheaded only as a much regretted necessity. Parents carefully train their children in these habits of nonviolence." Though I understand Wilson's pointed "tiny minority" to be emphasizing the fact that the overwhelming preponderance of human societies have opted for violence, I choose to seize on the possibility of choice. Wilson also writes about the Maori, who after obtaining muskets from the British colonists, almost succeeded in wiping themselves out in tribal warfare. When they realized this, however, they reshaped their culture into a peaceable one. Wilson concludes from the Maori experience that: “The full evolution of warfare can be reversed even in the face of entrenched cultural practice.”
In the animal kingdom as well, there is fresh evidence that aggressive behavior can be modified. An experiment by zoologist and ethnologist Franz De Waal placed easy-going stump-tailed macaques with rhesus monkeys who are more aggressive and have fewer resources in terms of conciliation. According to De Waal, “Our question was whether we could get any of the stump-tails” gentleness to rub off on the rhesus.” After five months the rhesus behavior was altered. The rhesus learned and employed a variety of conciliatory mannerisms. Even after the stump-tails had been removed and the rhesus were left to interact with themselves, they maintained this newly acquired pacifism. "Like chemists altering the properties of
a solution, we had infused a group of monkeys of one species with the ‘social culture‚’ of another.” The logic of these examples might indicate that pacifism could be cultivated in children as well. Following this logic, the Peacebuilder's program might alter, at least metaphorically, the chemical properties of the children. But, what happened? Peacebuilder kindergartners were playing war with little plastic soldiers.
In the sixties people used to say, “What good is an encounter group in a concentration camp?” and De Waal points out that, “conflict resolution cannot be taught without attention to the social environment within which it functions.” Likewise, you can't teach children to be
Peacebuilders in the midst of the most militaristic country in the history of the world. Though the inclination is to point to violence as an aberration, to point to TV, or movies, or toys as the source of the problem, we have to look at the larger picture. If our country has the largest defense budget in the history of the world, and military troops stationed around the world, if throughout our history as a nation we have placed troops in other countries over
200 times to make them do what we wanted them to do, and if President Bush has said, "These enemies (terrorists) view the entire world as a battlefield, and we must pursue them wherever they are,” then it stands to reason that it is necessary for our government to cultivate a culture that lends itself to militaristic fervor, and to continually cultivate a pool of potential soldiers. You can't be a drug warlord without a gun, and you can't behave like an empire without a powerful military force. The truth is this country wants my grandson, and children like my grandson to play war, and to be mentally predisposed to making war.
If the devil is in the details, the U. S. has refused to support international agreements that would raise the minimum age of soldiers to 18. McManimon writes, “Recently, Pentagon officials . . . have contended that raising the minimum by 2 years, to 17, is unacceptable . . . U.S. opposition to age 18 is also fueled by Pentagon concerns about possible interference with its domestic recruitment practices, especially in the wake of current enlistment shortfalls. The Pentagon has greatly expanded its outreach and advertising activities for young people, including Junior-ROTC in high schools and various other military programs for children as young as eight.” Branches of the military pay frequent visits to the elementary schools in my local school district, including the Peacebuilder's campus. They speak at assemblies and are major participants in Career Days. They display uniforms, weapons, regalia, and the children are dazzled. Only last week, I unrolled the local newspaper and found an ad enclosed that read, “Are you good at foreign languages?” It went on to urge the reader to join the navy. When the children turn on the TV there are recruitment advertisements, and when the children go to high school, or to college, or to look for an illusive job, the military is there all along the way, waiting for the jobless to turn to them.
We are a culture in contradiction. Programs like Peacebuilders, games that teach conflict resolution, and parental practices that eschew spanking for passive restraint demonstrate a deep regard for getting along, as well as a strong belief that pacific values can be taught. Yet our entire superstructure derives its logic from the idea of constant strife, inherent aggressiveness. When I purchase him a toy gun, yet disapprove of him when he points it at someone, I, too, exemplify the contradiction. When my grandson's battlefield evolves into a play center, he is trying to resolve this contradiction.
One point is clear: human nature is malleable. Though we may have ancient aggressive proclivities encoded in our DNA, we also have powerful cultural tools that can shape and sway the societies in which we live. The world might be otherwise. Many people believe this without realizing it. That is why they teach their children to share, to play peacefully, to behave compassionately—in the wild hope that it will take. But as long as the largest role model for children, the United States government, is a serial war-maker, we must not delude ourselves that we are creeping toward peace. The recently released book, Silent Night, documents the stories of the unofficial Christmas truce between opposing forces during World War I. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the blood-mud-and -death-weary soldiers in the trenches—not the officers—initiated an unofficial cease-fire by exchanging little gifts of tobacco, food, and clothing on Christmas Eve. And on Christmas Day they wanted to play soccer, not war.
Susan Luzzaro was a writer and teacher who lived in Chula Vista. She passed away on May 1, 2017.