747: Suitable for Children
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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. This is a story my mom used to like to tell. My older sister Randy was eight or so when this happened. I think I'm up at school that Randy didn't understand and she came home and she asked my mom where do babies come from. And my mom just felt like, great, this is great, she's bringing this up on her own. I don't have to sit her down in some awkward birds and bees conversation someday. We can get this out of the way now when she's young and she's really excited to tell her this stuff and she explains the whole thing, right, where babies come from, what sex is. And the way my mom always used to tell the story, she said that she felt like, I am doing such a good job here, like I am such a good mom today. At the end of it, she asked Randy, okay, so that's everything. Do you have any questions? And then Randy pauses for a long moment and she asks, can birds really fly? And my mom realizes, of course, oh, she was not ready, like she absorbed nothing. And sure enough, like a year passes and Randy comes back to her, I don't remember why and asks her again, like where do babies come from and it's like the first time never happened. She remembered none of it. And I think of that story sometimes when there are debates over what is suitable for children. And I think there's a whole category of things that kids protect themselves from. Like they just don't want to engage with that stuff, adults don't need to keep them from it. But then there's other stuff, stuff that does seep into their world, that they take to heart and they mull about and they make part of themselves. And the thing that's difficult is that it can be really hard to predict what those things are going to be. But today on our program, things that kids hear, things they see, things that happen to them that affect them in ways that they only understand later, as adults, like, for instance, what it means to give little black kids toys that celebrate the Confederacy or to drag teenage boys into the desert to watch atomic bombs go off, or to bring your kid to work when your work involves breaking the law, how do you even quantify exactly what that does to a person? But today we try to figure that out. WBEZChicago is This American Life, I'm Eric Glass, stay with us. [MUSIC] Equine, stars and bars, and bars. We got the idea for this week's show from this thing that happened to one of our producers, you know, drumming. A realization that it came to an adulthood about a TV show that he'd watched as a kid. Here's Neil. The hit TV show The Dukes of Hazard ran from 1979 to 1985. It starred John Schneider and Tom Bopat as Bo and Luke Duke, two rakish good old boys trying to stay on the right side of the law in rural Georgia. But if you ask any man my age who is a fan of the show, The Dukes of Hazard's true star was a bright orange 1969 Dodge Charger nicknamed the General Lee. Every week on CBS, the General Lee would roar through country back roads, leaping over virtually everything, defying the laws of physics, and blowing little boys' minds across America.
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