First Aid for Childhood Memories
I’ve been fascinated by first aid kits ever since a kid. They seem to hold some kind of importance beyond the simple fact that they heal simple wounds. And it’s not just that they look so official, either, what with their big red crosses; the very volume of items contained seem to appeal to a kid’s imagination, a kid’s sense of discovery. They are fascinating for the same reason Batman’s utility belt is so, with a solution for every crisis handy.
Go ahead and show a kid a first aid kit for the very first time and gauge his or her reactions. It’s always one of intense interest if for the very first time. Of course, children are easily fascinated by just about anything new, but the point is that these kits are even more readily appealing by virtue of their very nature, how they seem so neat and tidy despite the plethora of exotica within. It’s almost like an echo of peek-a-boo, where so much can be hidden, how so much can be tucked away and made one.
And then there is the power to heal that each of these items are said to possess. But where is the first aid for the less pleasant memories of childhood? The wounds of childhood may be assumed merely physical, but in fact they run deep inside, whereas adults, for all their psycho-babbling books and advice columns, occasion only physical wounds once mature — experience has basically inured them to emotional turmoil within; experience, and a more fully formed capacity for logic.
Not so with the child, whose world is almost purely one of passion, not only founded up sentiment but just about entirely composed of it. Hence the need for a kit of emergency aid for the emotional wounds of children, which can fester and leave scars the same as any other. But the world does not consider the needs of children, much as it professes to by way of mere lip service. It is why education is not simply underfunded but taken for granted in the worst way possible — that education is merely indoctrination, a matter of passing on facts, relevant to making a living, as an emotionally scarred adult.