Innocent Babies

"Calvin and Hobbes" was a comic strip that ran for just a few years before the creator, Bill Watterson, decided that enough was enough, and he quit. I seem to remember he had a problem with the lack of space he was given to draw his comic strip, and rather than try to squeeze more out of less, Watterson withdrew rather than redraw.

Calvin was a six-year-old boy who had a stuffed tiger named Hobbes. Everyone but Calvin saw Hobbes as a stuffed animal, but to Calvin Hobbes was an upright walking, talking, and fully formed person. Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes back in 1995, I believe. It's hard to imagine Calvin as an eighteen year old, but that's what he would be right now. Actually, given he was created in the late eighties, Calvin would be in his middle twenties by now, and that is even harder to imagine.

Watterson created Calvin as a typical kid with a more than typical imagination. Calvin frequently visited ruin on imaginary cities, and in one of his best-drawn comics, Watterson had Calvin imagining he was an angry god destroying a universe full of helpless people. Another strip had Calvin pretending to be a T-Rex, and devouring people and their cars. Another featured a station wagon full of people involved in an accident with a fuel truck and a passenger jet. Calvin's imagination ran hard towards the violence and truth be told, most little boys are not far removed from this sort of daydreaming.

As a child, I kept company with a host of rubber creatures I called Antimules. Some were creatures from this world; alligators, giant ants, spiders, and that sort of thing. Other were weird misshapen creatures with claws, pinchers, and spines. They waged an unending war upon the poor Army men, forever frozen in their various stances; flamethrower man,  prone machine gun man, kneeling rifleman, and the others. My parents bought me a toy gas station that had an elevator that led from the garage to the parking lot on top of the station, and tourists were forever stopping in to top off and being eaten alive instead. To be a driver of one of my matchbox cars was to be in the same short life expectancy crowd as an extra on an away team in Star Trek.

Despite my violent fantasies when I played with imaginary monsters and their helpless human victims, I never harmed real animals, and I never hurt people. Well, as you can probably imagine, that isn't entirely true. When I was three years old, I put a piece of broken glass in a burlap bag swing my father had built for us, and the glass cut my sister, as I knew it would.  Yet that sort of behavior was exceptional rather than the rule. However, it cannot be ignored that a three year old can not only understand the consequences of broken glass, but also lay a trap for someone else in an effective and cunning manner. I knew the bag would conceal the glass. I knew where my sister would grab the bag. I knew that my mother would not suspect I did it, too.

It really scared me that my sister had been cut, but it also thrilled me. The trap had worked as planned. Once the blood started flowing, and the screaming began, I felt bad about it, but at the same time, there was almost a sense of deification that I felt towards what I had done. Remember, these are the thoughts of a three year old. I can faithfully recall that this happened in Cuthbert Georgia, and we moved away from there when I was four, so the age is right. If it is a false memory then it has been a persistent one.

I wonder how many parents have explained away an act of premeditated violence as an "accident" or how many parents have comforted themselves with the idea their child "didn't know what he was doing" or for that matter, how many simply refused to accept their offspring was born with this sort of behavior hardwired into them, as I suspect all human are hardwired, to some degree or another. Cartoons, movies, and popular culture cannot explain away my actions because that sort of thing didn't exist back then as it does now. It would be clean and neat to simply pigeonhole this sort of behavior as evil, but I suspect that no amount of prayer or dogma would make an ounce of difference. Whether we like it or not, whether we accept it or not, whether we understand it or not, we humans are a very violent species whose behavior is as driven by instinct as any other predatory animal.

The most difficult part in all of this is for a set of parents to view their sleeping children as animals capable of acts of willful predation. Mental illness is to blame, they didn't know what they were doing, older children lured them into bad behavior, they were possessed by demons, or my favorite of all time, "I know my child did not do something like that." But we can very well see from all the signs, that children, very young children, are anything but innocent. They can be as savage and cunning as any young creature whose species has a history of incredible violence against other species, as well as members of its own. It was human beings who have pushed their prey animals, and their competition, over the brink of extinction. Do we think that our propensity for such behavior would cease to reveal itself genetically simply because we started wearing nice clothes and combing our hair?

Take Care,

Mike