Explaining this year’s Olympic torch relay to a five year old

The child in me was sad to hear they had to extinguish the torch five times (or was it more?) during the Paris leg of its symbolic journey to Beijing. The romantic in me is enamored of the idea, a single flame to travel the miles and light the night in faraway lands. How stunning. How symbolic.

The single mother and the activist in me is silently cheering the protesters on. I wish Americans were rallying behind more oppressed peoples of the world, but the Olympics aren’t being held in Darfur or the Gaza strip. I’m heartened by the fact that we have not yet been cowed entirely into submission by the Big Brother tactics bearing down upon us as a society digging in for a lifetime of fearmongering by the powers that be…

The King of Everything is deeply interested in the ways in which human beings make their voices heard. Now that he’s able to read, I’ve been doing a lot of explaining of headlines in newspapers. I can’t censor or edit what the child reads by simply skipping over the seamier side of humanity as I could when I was reading out loud for him. China is difficult to explain to a five year old, but I’m trying as best I can. The fact that his school has a large Chinese population and is teaching the language to all its students means I have to be careful in what I say to my literal-minded boy.

As you navigate this brave new world with your children, please, try to see the other side of the story. Every villan is a mother’s child. Most of us think we’re doing the right thing, no matter what the other side thinks. Teach compassion. Teach curiosity. Teach kindness. Expose your children to other cultures, other types… expose yourself, too, to the ‘other’. We cannot come together if we blindly cling to what we believe is right and good without making some effort to see the world through new eyes.