The Things We Worry About. Or Not.

I just want to take a moment to say how surprised I was by the verdict for the murder of Ahmaud Arbrey. In Georgia, no less. The conviction of Travis McMichaels, his father Gregory McMichaels, and their friend Roddie Bryan was clearly warranted by their actions, but I wondered if the jury would actually render a guilty verdict on the murder charges. I won't get into a comparison of the Rittenhouse vs McMichaels & Bryan trials, but suffice it to say that the nation watched with more scrutiny this time. 

Step Surveillance Station

Thanksgiving was a quiet event at Chez Wifely, but Shabbat Thanksgiving is a traditionally raucous night. Dinner was dairy after Turkey Day, with red snapper, the fish of choice. Little Miss and Young Sir were happy to have a new victim...I mean audience member (my friend Joanie who is visiting from SoCal) to delight with their plots, and there was lots of laughter. Especially when, using my rubber Millennium Cows and small stuffed things, they created a series of surveillance stations to capture our location at every minute. Now, for someone who refuses to use Alexa et al, this was a little creepy because I keep finding surveillance stations all over the house.

Mantel Surveillance Station

Little Miss's precision in placement was pretty good. She had the sight lines all figured out. She explained that this was a safety precaution, but I wasn't buying that one. Of course, Young Sir said, "Yeah!" to everything she said. Watching them work together to set up the surveillance stations was actually kinda remarkable. She had a willing henchman, and gee, isn't that what a younger sibling is for? I know I often played the role of henchman to my big brother, although I cannot remember ever setting up surveillance stations. We were almost as creative....we hid Fizzies in toilet tanks... but we're not talking about us. Anyway, a couple of thinks struck me after the kids and kiddos left. I found myself thinking about why a 7-year old would even know what a surveillance station was. And once I was headed down that path, I was thinking about how she instinctively knew the best places to set them up for maximum coverage. 

This was a big think if you ask me. It screamed volumes about how little kids view the world. I didn't ask too many questions about why she thought we need surveillance, but I'm guessing she learned this on The Octonauts  where they're always setting up stuff to watch the ocean floor and fight off bad ecological events. The show is really terrific, and has been described as Star Trek meets Jacques Cousteau for little kids. They are all about real animals in the sea and the help they need to survive. I get it. It's great stuff.

But I ended up thinking about the peripheral messages, the ones that little imaginations glean from visuals. In olden times, this might've been called preparedness thinking. I can remember making a make-believe bomb shelter in a friend's basement. We were in first grade and we were acting out what we saw and heard in school. Are Little Miss's surveillance stations much different from that? Probably not.

I'm not so sure, just as I'm not so sure her knowing about this stuff is so bad either. Little Miss could turn my photos on my old iPod Touch into slideshows with music long before I knew how to do that. Kids are growing up with Alexa doing their bidding; I guess they have to sorta grok the idea that Alexa and others might be de facto listening to them. Savvy kiddos are not bad things. Teaching them to be savvy about technology is definitely not a bad thing. 

The big kids work hard to keep technology age appropriate for the kiddos. There are hard limits on television and other media. The premium is on reading, not watching. These are good things. Both kiddos love books and stories. They do listen, which is sometimes remarkable all on its own. I am relieved as much as thankful for that. But I still worry.

Yeah, that's what savtas (grandmothers) do. We are natural born worriers. I kinda think the things both my grandmothers worried about for us are vastly less complicated than the things I worry about for Little Miss and Young Sir. I'm also guessing the things the big kids worry about for the kiddos are somewhat different from what Ziggy and I worried about...although we were at the forefront of monitored screen time. 

None of my grandparents were born into a world where people routinely flew across continents and oceans. None of them ever saw a PC, much less a smartphone. They worried about moving pictures and vaudeville. My folks were better at technology adoption than their folks, but they worried about smutty books, "appropriate" movies, (okay, we were coming of age in the 60s) pot, and premarital sex. Ziggy and I worried about internet porn, violent video games, drugs, and safe sex. See, things changed. Parental paranoia changed with the generations. I don't even want to imagine what Mr. and Mrs. Junior Son will worry about as Little Miss and Young Sir come of age. 

And those are just the little things. The big ones, like antisemitism, racism, and gender inequality are out there in spades waiting for my beloved kinderlach to challenge them all in the name of justice. 

I hear myself going, "Oy! Oy! Oy!" a lot. Some things, on the other hand, don't ever change. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

They tried to kill us, We won. Let's eat.
Chag Urim Same'ach to all!

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