I have numerous issues with the whole Black Friday frenzy thing, but here is one that I have not heard mentioned by very many others lately:
Please do not celebrate the holiday season by buying war toys for the children in your life.
Hurting people is not entertainment, war is not a game. Buying war toys encourages violence and that is something of which our world needs no more. No more at all.
I love toys, but there are so many good kinds. There are toys that can help kids learn, toys that can spark their imaginations, toys that help children to build and create...so many.
There is no need for toys that de-sensitize children to the horrors of war and violence.
Whether it is a recent generation video game full of graphic gore or a simple water gun, there is no need to put that sort of violent representation into the hands or minds of our children. Everywhere I hear people answer back my position with stories of all the many and precious toy guns, etc. of their own childhoods and how they were not hurt by them...
But weren't they? Weren't we?
What civilized nation keeps weaponry like we do? What civilized nation uses weapons on each other for crime and outbursts as we do? And then there is the child abuse, the domestic violence... it goes on and on, buried so deep in all of our psyches in this culture in which even our childhood play is saturated with violence.
And we believe, so many of us, in a military solution to everything.
I think we can do so much better.
Give the children in your lives constructive toys. Peaceful toys. Give them tools to build peaceful lives in a culture saturated by caring rather than violence.
Please start today.
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