I tortured, I killed, I maimed, I shot and stabbed and hit and kicked. And I considered this fun.
I was 10, and the game was simply dubbed Army. My little brother and I would rally some neighborhood kids who we knew to be a touch on the nerdy side -- they were not, in any sense, too cool for school -- and we'd kill the bad guys for a few hours in the summer sun, or under a bright summer moon if the mission was covert. You understand.
The level of violence ratcheted up with every passing summer until, at its logical conclusion, we were using our plastic guns to put bullets into bad guys' kneecaps when they wouldn't talk, or mowing down entire rows of the faceless baddies, or murdering each other when things went bad. We set mines and blew guys' heads off and severed their limbs until the jingle of the ice cream truck called us from the killing field.
We were nothing but products of the culture in which we existed: one that glorifies bloodshed like nothing else, one that normalizes hideous violence -- naked brutality of the first order -- in every possible medium. We didn't think much of killing in our backyard war games because that's what soldiers do. We had seen untold hundreds of bodies mutilated on our TVs. We were numb to it. It was playtime for us. What a fortuitous phenomenon for those who need young folks to be immune to the horrors of war.
Today I have a four and a half year old, one whose every game revolves around fighting and killing and destroying. Everyone -- from his Mario and Luigi toys to his cars to his Star Wars Legos -- dies horrendous deaths. Everything turns into a gun. Everyone gets shot. My son plays death-centered games with his friends, his cousins, anyone and everyone who will engage in these bloody fantasies. My son, like me in the early 1990s, is a product of his culture. Violence is crammed into every crevice of American pop culture -- it's pervasive, inescapable, and it defines everything. Violence is our greatest export. It is who we are, both to ourselves and to the world, which has seen the aftermath of our main export in the form of an endless body count.
I stopped fighting the good fight against this aspect of gun culture a while ago, as I wrote in "96 Ways to Rise And Grind." "Rise and condemn lawmakers' ambivalence toward mass shootings while your kid plays with a toy gun, just call it a laser shooter and grind."
I don't mean that I've stopped caring about our insane gun culture and the immense and needless suffering it causes. I care very much that many hundreds of innocents are slaughtered by people with easy access to weapons of war just so gun manufacturers can cushion their bottom line. I'm baffled that the Second Amendment stands as is even though the folks who wrote it would die of a fucking heart attack if they encountered a microwave, much less an automatic weapon designed by madmen to kill other madmen. But my days of insisting that my kid says "laser" instead of "gun" are over. The culture has beaten me down; fighting it was as exhausting as it was frustrating. Useless too. So useless.
I pretended to murder as a child. I indulged in video games that made killing a blast -- the most fun you can have with two thumbs. Hopefully the culture won't erode my son's sense of right and wrong. I'd like to say it didn't erode mine, but I'm not so sure.