An experiment with his toy soldiers, the kid kept his plastic close to heart in his G.I. Joe dreams--his head a constant Sunday morning ska song, burbling and bouncing in the muck puddle he'd built around his rockets. He could have been a contented oyster if not for the back fence blues, a boundary short to his sneaker but so endlessly expansive beyond he could practically make out the bug lords of Galaga warping and firing off their blue lasers in the star field. He let out his bodily compression with a good spit on the fence--the "you gotta be kiddin me dude!" delivered to the adult block towers that stood higher than the Vietnamese jungles of the shaggy grass he's kneeling in.
This is the dog-day sweat-soak of summer sun the adults have no control over (even if they think they do). Somehow kids aren't supposed to have thinking brains until they reach the age of majority, so how are they supposed to make it through school with Jello heads full of plastic and Pop Rocks? Really. Some guy named Mill over a hundred years ago decided to leave kids like Aaron out of the reality scene, called them "minors" and gave them all a patch of lawn to launch their wars against. "Minors" have no rights they can make any use with. And why is that? It's because those who granted themselves rights decided one day that being smaller meant you couldn't handle anything outside the patch of grass, as if that patch didn't have it's own rights and limits--it's own jungle law.
Is Aaron's backyard battlefield really the shining example of innocence plopped down angelic and muddy? Here the savagery is considered pure--the dirtier the sight in the adult mind, the more the innocence shines through. Lord knows what wars will be launched and how many people will be killed or thrown through prison just to make sure the dirt and snot that boy smears on his shirt is kept preserved. Intact. Forever.
But they'll only exalt his killing spree as long as it fits within the fence. Not that there's anything wrong with a good old killing spree so long as the kid is stomping out anthills, but the second he turns on the flowers, that's when you'll see the fangs come out! Then he'll be evil just like everyone else.
Some lifeforms are apparently better than others in the eyes of the adult. That's just the way they think. That's how they designed the planet they believe is theirs and the laws and codes they made up off the top of their heads to try to build a civil society for little Aaron to launch his battle against the ants in. Smaller is purer but bigger is better. He's learning.
How could it be any different? Sex is evil unless you can fill a billboard with it. Money is a trap unless you have a lot of it. Aaron's brain would surely explode at the very suggestion that money and sex--and not G.I Joe--run the world that keeps him on his patch of soft grass. And yet, despite all the evils unleashed to keep him there, he'd rather be bigger than pure.
That's kids for you!
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