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Recently, a girl wanted to go on a Cub Scout outing with her brothers. Scouting officials said no, and her parents sued. They engaged an expert who said the girl would suffer permanent and irreparable psychological damage because her brothers got to do something she didn't.
Another silly childhood trauma appears often in letters
to Ann Landers: I would like to ask physical education
teachers if they are aware of the damage they do to a child
when they have student captains chose team members in gym
class. . . . To be the one left standing, the one that no
one wanted, left me scarred emotionally.
At first, such whining seems preposterous. You can believe that children represent the culmination of 4.5 billion years of tooth-and-claw survival-of-the-fittest evolution. Or that Adam was created in God's own image. In either case, humans ought to be tough enough to surmount the minor misfortunes of childhood.
But perhaps we're not really made of such stern stuff. If that is so, then we have explanations for what once seemed mysterious:
Little Johnny raced out the door, scarf and mittens flying as he struggled through the deep New Hampshire snow. His haste was to no avail; when he got to the road, he saw the school bus disappearing in the distance.
It was the seventh time he had missed the bus that
winter. As he walked through the bitter cold to school,
Little Johnny's anger grew. I'm the smartest kid in the
world,
he thought. And they won't even have the bus
wait for me. Hell, they should send a limousine for
me.
The traumatized little boy grew up to be John
Sununu.There was Little Dick, who chopped down a lemon tree
behind the family house in Whittier, Calif. Who cut down
that tree?
asked his stern father.
Mindful of what he had learned about George Washington in school that day, Little Dick freely confessed. Whereupon his father grabbed a razor strop and whaled on Dick.
Permanently traumatized thereby, Richard Nixon suffered pangs whenever he told the truth, so he never did.
Like a trauma, a childhood triumphs can also permanently warp a personality. Little George was never personally attacked by the bullies that infested his prep school. But one day, the richest kid in the class was assaulted by a bully and had to run off.
This cannot stand,
George said, and he rounded up
a bunch of other rich kids. They hired some muscle to
pummel the first bully, who retreated and went back to his
old ways of picking on poor kids who didn't go to prep
school.
George Bush was a hero at school for almost a week.
Obviously, with proper treatment from childhood disturbance specialists, all these afflicted boys might have grown up to be normal. Now that we're aware of these potential problems, the future looks brighter than ever.
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