Think back to the last time you played make-believe. Compare it to reading a book or enjoying some other narrative art-form. Are they completely the same? What are some similarities? Differences?
The last time I came remember playing make-believe is when I had duels or massive battles with my friends using toy lightsabers or plastic guns. I remember always getting quite a lot of adrenaline from running around the yard and having to fight for my life, since I was usually the one who died first. This form of make-believe was based more or less off of Star Wars and action movies to which America is inured. However, on the turn side, I have read books and seen films depicting violence in such a way that frightens and unhinges my soul. There is a lot more attached to the deaths of soldiers in literature and artistic film. For example, though I have not read War and Peace, I still can see the deterioration of the soldiers' minds and the country's former glory. I never felt anything of the such while playing these backyard games. I never thought about how what I was doing was an ironic juxtaposition to a terrifying war-like nation into which I was being raised and would have to face.
This backyard play-battle is a simulation of what war would be like and it is sick to understand how we are being raised on war and violence only to go away to war because we believe it is right for our country. The biggest difference is that this is even less real than reading about war in a novel or in a movie because in good literature and film, one can see how a director or writer juxtaposes his or her film or novel to the real world and human beings' behavior.This would never be achieved with the simple toiling of children--we cannot even begin to understand what a horribly war-mongering race of people we are even as we fight and simulate backyard battles over and over again, rising up again as some strange, undead product of our battlling America.
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