Was sitting around the other day reminiscing about time spent with my grandmother.
(This is going to be long...)
One of the things she loved to do was play cards. She liked Rummy but when I was five or six years old the rules of the game were a little too much to comprehend. Couldn't hold all those cards in my hand anyway.
Since she liked cards, though and she knew I liked Batman so she found and bought a set of Batman cards. The game was essentially "Go Fish" with Batman characters.
I knew Joker, Penguin, Batman, Robin, Batgirl and all of those. But to fill out the deck there were a few odd characters. One of them was Kidnapper.
Just a face drawn on a playing card. Square jawed guy with a shadowy beard and a black mask.
Wasn't sure what a kidnapper did so I asked my grandmother. She said somebody who caught children and held them away from their parents.
Looking for reassurance I asked her if they were real or fake like Penguin.
Oh they're real, she said without much thought. She told me that some kid in a nearby town had been kidnapped just a few months before.
She thought nothing of it.
I was terrorized. Every guy I saw on the street for months was a potential kidnapper. My parents thought I was stupid for booby trapping my room and checking windows and doors. Branches scraping on the window at night was a kidnapper trying to gain access. Every car that drove by was a kidnapper casing the house. Like an idiot I found a different way to walk to school that didn't involve being on the open street. I navigated storm drains and side streets. In retrospect I was in greater danger there from some random kidnapper than if I'd been on the main road but what does a first grader know?
While turning that over in my mind I considered what my own kids had been exposed to by first grade.
If you watch the news its a constant litany of rapes, murders, robberies and mayhem. You can't escape bullet riddled bodies on CSI, L&O and countless other shows.
I've had to explain concepts like homosexuality, genocide, adultery and fuck all else because of what they hear on the radio and see on TV.
If a drawn face on a stupid playing card could horrify me as a six year old I wonder what the relentless assault of death and destruction does to kids today?
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