HowlRound: Yesterday at 2:44pm, I received an email from our school district announcing that the children’s elementary school was under lockdown. No context or further information was provided, and when I arrived to pick the girls up a little later, the school seemed pretty quiet, the lockdown over. At the pick-up line, however, the kids were more subdued than usual, and one teacher muttered, “That was intense.”
5 comments:
The parallels this article drew between the killer clowns, the presidential election, and Halloween overall were interesting and surprisingly accurate. I think it's a little too excessive to say the clown madness was born out of the chaos of the US government right now but the similarities between the way the author's kids talked about the killer clowns lurking in the forest and the rumors about Clinton and her evil plan are obvious. Kids tend to repeat and exaggerate all they hear, but in the context of Halloween their fears are more interesting to examine. For one night, children have control over their fear and the rumors and indulge in a night if chaos and masquerade. The final paragraph of this article, discussing carnival and utopia, reminded me a lot of The Rover actually, and I'll remember Bakhtin when I see the show.
I feel like the overall concept of the article is a little stretched like a conspiracy theory. The last line of the article stayed with me, "the only boogeymen that exist are those we create." I took it in a literal sense that creating terror is as simple s believing in it and making it believable, something designers would find import. The article also draws traffic because it contains several hot topic concepts, and from an economic standpoint pop culture makes great short term profit.
I viewed this as commenting more on the power of how stories communicate ideas, even ones (and perhaps especially ones) that are based in fear and deception. The stories we tell each other, the stories we tell out children, the stories they tell each other, the stories the news tells us, the stories the stories the stories. They’re an important cultural institution that is almost as core to humanity as food and shelter. Stories are all an event is to anyone who wasn’t there to observe it. They’re how we know almost everything we know, and that becomes quite apparent when we hear what younger children think they know. They also happen to be the thing that everyone in the school of drama is learning how to create and present. As storytellers, we best not forget the importance of stories in human culture, the impact that they can have on a person or group of people. We want to make sure not only that we’re telling a story well, but that we’re telling the right story at all.
This article was interesting in its parallels between the election and the killer clowns that have been slowly but surely popping up all over the country. However, what interests me more is to think about how children have been viewing both of these very widely publicized events. Obviously children are aware of the election, but it never occurred to me that children must inevitably be hearing about Trump and Hillary Clinton all the time. (It is also interesting to note that the rumors the children have heard about Hillary sound like exact things that Trump would say and has said, but that is another point.) It is also very interesting to think about how children have been reacting to the clown epidemic, and honestly, it doesn't seem like it is too different from how college students and adults have been reacting. Everyone is scared of them, but it's like a fun horror movie or haunted house kind of scare, where you want something to happen, but don't expect anything to actually harm anyone. It seems like the children act in the same way, wanting the lockdown to be because of killer clowns on the loose. Similarly, whenever a clown is sighted for the first time in a certain area, everyone from that area shares one of the many articles posted about it.
I feel like there are three things within this post I could talk about, and I think I’m only going to talk about two: Halloween and Children listening. GOD, I love Halloween. It truly a night of ghoulish play, where the gruesome aren’t shunned but amazed over and accepted. It is one of the few days where you can dress up as almost anything you like (the whole debate of ethnic costumes comes into play here, but I don’t want to talk about that) and by most people you aren’t judged but praised because it is awesome! You can go as creative or uncreative as you want, and it doesn’t matter because no matter what you are in a long line of dressed up freaks who are enjoying their time and who just want to have fun!
The second thing: If this article isn’t an example of children listening and taking in everything you say, then I don’t know what. I honestly believe that is why hatred, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. still exists, because children hear it and take it as truth, so when they grow up and ‘understand’, they take in what they have heard as truth. For example, do you have that one thing that your parents told you was true, and you believed for the longest time, until someone told you it wasn’t? For me, well, I had a lot, most of them ridiculous things like this: When I was little, my mom told me Black people don’t get lice. Years later, when a Black-Mexican girl got lice, I proceeded to question my mom (after embarrassing myself because I told people that Black people didn’t get lice), she then explained to me what she meant was that Black people are less likely to get lice because of the product and stuff we put into our hair, like Tea-Tree Oil. Even though this is a little thing, and definitely not like the social issues, for the longest I had believed that there was no possible chance that a black person could get lice, and I had believed her because she was my mom and my world. Everything (the life stuff), I knew was from her, so why would I question her, until I was proven wrong. It is the same for these children gossiping, there are more likely to believe the stuff their parents are telling, whether it is true or not, and keep it as their own.
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