Teach Your Children Well. If you grew up around the same decade I did, the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s song about parenting ought to be rattling ‘round your brain right about now. The song represents some interesting ironies as well as some stark dichotomies. As folk-rockers go, you could hardly ask to find a more left-wing, anti-war, anti-Conservative bunch than CSN&Y. On the other hand, you’d be hard-pressed to find another group with a prominent member who’d done hard time for handgun possession (not to mention his whole “Things go better with Coke” philosophy.) But I come not to bury Crosby today, but to point out that many, if not all of the life lessons I learned as a child, I learned playing with (toy) guns.
It was way back when I was a kid too young to concern myself with adult worries like Vietnam, counter culture, and gun violence. It was Christmas, and all I wanted was the stuff I saw on TV. And that year, Mattel was waging a campaign on pre-teens, pushing their brand new, full-scale, completely accurate toy version of the military’s standard weapon, the M-16. Mattel’s version was known as the M-16 Marauder (I have no clue as to why), but I remember that it was cool in a major way. It looked – and more importantly sounded – as if I would be able to take on an entire platoon of bad guys, single-handedly.