The Eyes of a Child

by Radio Raheem

G21 Staff Writer

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OAKLAND, CA, USA - I watch the kids around here on their way to school in the morning as I'm on my way to the job. I get wistful, like a lot of folks, looking at these serious little people trudging down the streets with their big packbacks on, swimming through the world we have created for them, like fish through dangerous rapids. I try to remember how I felt going through that same walk everyday when I was a kid. A lot of what I remember about my thoughts back then isn't good and the world was scarey in a less chilling way back then, as far as I'm concerned now. One thing I do remember was that I couldn't wait to grow up so that I could make all the decisions about my life and what I could and could not do, watch on TV, when I went to sleep, and so on.

I remember my Moms saying: "Boy, when you're grown you'll be sorry you was in such a hurry to grow up." I'm not, though.

There's lots to like about being a grown-up, but there's lots to miss about childhood, too.

Sometimes, I wish I could see more of life through the eyes of a child, even though I know that means taking a lot of things the wrong way and believing things that aren't really true.

People say kids grow up faster these days, but I don't believe it --- especially not when I think about how before the 20th century kids had a much harder, much more dangerous and deadly life than most of the kids here in the First World ever experience today. Kids were little more than chattel in those agricultural societies we idealize today. Just like slave labor they had to go out and work for little more than the clothes on their backs. Adults brutalized kids then and many still get away with it now. Having kids was a way of having more people to work on the farm in many societies, including here in America. So children only seem jaded to us, is my thinking, because we rely so much on the 20th century notion of idealizing kids. And all that "For the Children" crap the politicians have been feeding us for years now.

In most of the world today, children are pressed into service as soldiers for various rebellions, are starving because of the cold-hearted politics of adults, are being made automatic product/brand-obsessed drones, still being used as slave-labor or worse, and/or infantilized in order to re-live the childhoods their parents wanted for themselves. It would be a hard thing for most of us adults to have to look at the world through the eyes of these children.

When I think back to my own childhood, I think about how I believed what some adults said about how a person could be anything and how you could achieve as much as you wanted. I believed them.

Then I grew up and discovered the qualifiers: if you were fortunate, and if you had connections.

What I also learned was that you won't play in the NBA if you're under six feet tall and you wouldn't become President of the United States during the 20th century unless you were a connected Caucasian male.

And I learned that even grown-ups didn't get to do everything they wanted, though it had seemed that way through a child's eyes. There were levels of authority to be considered, among them family obligations and bosses and governments.

I think about this stuff as I watch kids on their way to school. They most-likely think of school as a chore imposed on them by adults, the way I did, to learn (or memorize) stuff they will never use in Real Life, like I did, and get impatient with the whole routine. These kids don't see it as the training ground of the regimentation that makes them ready to hold down a job when they grow up, let alone see the relevance of how all the reading, writing and arithmetic makes them prepared to be better employees. I know I didn't when I was a kid.

When I was a kid, it always seemed like school had too little of the stuff I really enjoyed and too much of the stuff that no grown-up I knew ever even brought up. So:

• Too little sports, too much dates in history to memorize.
• Too little music, too much math.
• Too little play, too many rules.

And what was all that lining up according your height stuff all about? Or the raising your hand before you could speak? It just seemed like an un-natural way of getting things done.

And now I know it was. But, as the training ground, I can also see how that was the way it had to be.

Still, I find myself wishing, watching kids now that I'm not one, that things could have been different somehow. I find myself wishing that there had been more time away from grown-ups, for one thing. I find myself wishing that there would have been days when the grown-ups chose to let us do things that a kid would want to do. I find myself wishing that some grown-up had asked us what we wanted to do, instead of telling us what we had to do.

I know a guy who says that he's swore when he was a child that when he grew up he would let kids do whatever they wanted. I thought he sounded just like a kid when he said that.

I also thought that I might have had that exact same thought some time when I was a child.

Radio Raheem

When I was a child, there was this one neighborhood girl I was incredibly sweet on. Her name was Eva Gaines. She lived around the corner from us and was in my class in school. Because I knew that she would stay back to work on her math with the teacher, I would always volunteer to stay back after school, too, and wash the blackboards (which were really green) and such. That way, I knew that when I finished my afterschool chores up I could walk Eva Gaines home.

I loved Eva Gaines as only an eight year old boy can love. What I'm saying is that I didn't even have a clue about sex at that age, but I knew I wanted to be around this girl and enjoy the way she smelled and how she laughed and the things she liked to talk about and the games she liked to play.

That's how I got into my first throw-down. There was this Recess bully name of Larry Deal. He was bigger than most of us in the Second Grade and lorded over the playground. Everybody was scared of him. Me, too. But one day Larry shoved Eva Gaines for some reason and I knew I had to act.

So I called him out and then I punched him before he could punch me and he fell down.

That was that. Larry Deal didn't pick on anybody anymore because he wasn't sure who were my friends and who was not.

I learned something about myself that day and something about bullies.

Now I know that that was a day when I started seeing things less through the eyes of a child.

Peace out.

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