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An Irish colleague of mine sent me a picture of a notice at a children’s playground in Waterford, Ireland:
No smoking; no climbing up slides; no boisterous play;
no abusive language; no bikes, scooters, skates; no ball
playing; no eating; no chewing gum; no glass bottles; no
pets; children must have adult supervision when visiting the
playground; the centrepiece unit is not suitable for play by
children under 7.
Now I yield to no one in my detestation of chewing gum (can anyone chew gum and look kind?), and I am not much in favour of abusive language, though I greatly prefer glass bottles to plastic. But this blizzard of prohibitions seems designed to turn children into spiritless and browbeaten creatures, easily bullied by any and all authority.
Whether the design will succeed is another matter. If I remember my childhood correctly, prohibition made something attractive to me, which is why I smoked one of my mother’s cigarettes when I ten. It cured me for life of any desire for cigarettes, so that in my case the prohibition may be said to have worked.
The framers of the wretched notice at the children’s playground (actually a bureaucrat’s playground) were presumably trying to prevent harm to the children by excluding all that might result in an injury to them, as well as imposing a certain orderliness on them. Ireland having secularised late by comparison with other western societies, it has taken with a vengeance to the new trinity of values: not faith, hope and charity, but wealth, health and safety. No doubt secularisation has brought many benefits to the country, but not a better sense of humour.
Now it is a modern doctrine of the law that psychological injury is to be treated in precisely the same way, for litigation purposes, as the physical variety. I think this doctrine is absurd, except from the point of view of litigation lawyers’ incomes. It is an open invitation to fraud, especially in a system in which there are no penalties for the litigant in losing. But I see no prospect of overturning the doctrine while there are so many graduates of law schools. They have to be employed somehow for, as the history of the French Revolution teaches us, disgruntled lawyers are a dangerous group.
The notice at the Waterford Playground is hopelessly focussed on physical injury to the exclusion of the psychological. True, the prohibition of abusive language might be construed as an attempt to limit or reduce the terrible damage done to the self-esteem of almost everyone by nicknames that practically always refer to some undesirable physical characteristic or other; but then, surely the bureaucrats should have come straight out with it and said ‘No nicknames’?
There should, of course, be no smiling or laughing in the playground, for everyone knows how damaging these can be to the hypersensitive, to those verging on paranoia who think, when they see a smile or hear a laugh that it refers to them. People are smiling or laughing at them, always of course in a mocking fashion. My clinical experience has taught me that many an act of violence, even murder, has been committed because of these ideas of reference. The violence seems unmotivated to those on the receiving end, but it is not unmotivated as far as the perpetrator is concerned.
So clearly, smiling and laughter should be forbidden in the children’s playground for the sake of everyone’s peace of mind. A serious and solemn demeanour should be maintained at all times so that no one should unnecessarily feel hurt.
Then, of course, there is friendship: it, too, should be prohibited. For is not unjustified discrimination the very essence of friendship? I prefer A to B, X to Y: but why I should do so, what rational reason there is for it, I am unable to say.
When I think of my own childhood, I recall how I sometimes longed to be included in little circles that excluded me. Or I wanted to be friends with Z, but he did not want to be friends with me. What had I done to deserve his rejection? Nothing. Yet I suffered agonies because of it. Thus began my life of weakness, imperfection and dissatisfaction.
The solution is obvious: No friends, for it is inherently wrong to be more interested in one person than another. Are we not all fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer? Why, then, do we need friends, each of us being equal?
I suggest then that Waterford Council employs monitoring officers in the playground (perhaps in the information age it could all be done electronically), to ensure that children do not devote more of their time, attention and affection to some children than to others. Only in this way can the harm of rejection be prevented, harm just as real, in the eyes of the law, as falling off the ‘centre piece’ (some kind of scaffolding, presumably) and breaking your leg before you are 7 years old.
