"... but... but... who will think of the children?"

Last Friday afternoon they took the Tsuyazaki Jr High kids next door to Camelia Hall and the theater to watch a movie. They watched Kankara Sanshin, an anime about the Battle of Okinawa during the last days of WWII. It was a bit sanitized, to be expected given the horrors of war, but it did feature some graphic realities. People blown apart by shelling, the horrible conditions, the engendering of mass suicides by the Japanese army and visually, a moderate, but not insane amount of blood.

It reminded me that last year they took the kids over to see Nagasaki no Kane [The Bells of Nagasaki] based on the true story of Dr. Tatsuichiro Akizuki), wounded by the blast of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, aiding other victims during the immediate aftermath of the explosion at Urakami First Hospital, not far from the epicenter of the atomic bomb blast. Radiation burns, suffering... death and heavy pathos.





And all I kept thinking was that they could NEVER have shown these in an American Jr High school. Maybe... maybe... in an upper level High School course, but this kinda violence would never fly in the states.

And honestly, I think that's really fucked up.

At what point did it change from protecting your kids - you know, making sure they didn't walk off a cliff or get kidnapped and eaten by bears - to shielding kids from information about the reality of the world? How did it come to be that so many parents teachers and adults somehow think it's serving the interest of their kids by not telling them things or lying to them about the state of the world? I swear on all that I once considered holy [hi Catholic church circa age 8!] that this protectionist "think-of-our-oh-so-sensitive-children" attitude is about the most frustratingly nauseating things I come across.

I honestly do not understand willful fucking ignorance, or intentionally perpetuating it.