Brothers

I’m a big brother.  Not a real big brother, but like a mentor big brother.  My little brother is a local kid named Jack who pretty much started life with a raw deal.  I became his big brother when he was eight but he is eleven years old now and we’ve formed interesting roles in each other’s life.  Jack gets a friend through me that is easy going and yet still an authority figure with whom he is comfortable trying out new things.  I get the opportunity to rethink life through the mind of an eleven year old.

Recently, his dawning and limited awareness of the adult world has brought on the certain rejection of all things childish and the tentative and unsure adoption of what he understands to be mature behavior.   His never-ending social commentary betrays his thoughts, and often leads to heavy discussion or the occasional difficult moment.  He’ll throw out a nonchalant cuss word with a surreptitious glance my way to see if I’ll scold him for it, or wanting to know if he delivered the curse appropriately.  One day at the cinema, he announced (wrongly) to the horrified families around us that the animated rat’s joke was really a double entendre referring to sex.  Other incidents have broached subjects such as drugs, violence, political views, racism, domestic abuse, childrearing, marriage, and poverty, but because of the life he has already lived, his thoughts aren’t always simply curious ignorance.

This past Sunday while driving up Martin Luther King Boulevard, Jack and I passed several blocks of chipper pro-life protesters taking advantage of the weekend sun to perform their civic duty.  They were lively and unusually homogeneous for my neighborhood; underneath the myriad REI, North Face, Smart Wool and Columbia Sportswear outerwear, they looked uniformly white and well-fed.  Most of them held signs featuring some catchy slogan like ‘God loves the Unborn’ or ‘Life is Right’ and waving bright guilt-free smiles to Jack and I as we drove by, encouraging us to honk our horn in support.  Even their socially-conscious children were bouncing with excitement over the good work.  I saw one happy toddler perched upon a Coleman camp cooler, greedily devouring a saucy taco with one hand while holding a blocky-lettered placard accusing Planned Parenthood of Murder with his other.  His grandmother smiled proudly over him with a poster of a bloody disfigured embryo waving over them both.

Now to put this in context, I’m riding by these anti-abortion protesters with a kid who was born unjustly into an insanely tough life and was immediately thrust into the foster care system with an uphill climb to achieve even a simple life.  He learns with difficulty and struggles with weight problems, social insecurity, and poverty.  Social issues often touch a nerve.  I kept my comments innocuous and just kept driving.  After three or four blocks of cheery waves and disturbing images he asked rhetorically, “what about if the mother is sick and having a child will kill her, or if she was raped by somebody?”  I was surprised at his ready argument which I suspect he heard from someone else, but his next question is the one that really caught me off guard.  He looked over and asked with full sincerity, “I want to flip them off.  Can I flip them off?”

My first response was to laugh, roll down the windows, thrust all of our middle fingers, and teach the boy a few new curses, but then I thought that might not be the best example to set.  I took a breath, marveled at myself inwardly, and told him he was not allowed to make obscene gestures at the pro-life protesters.  His voice immediately shot into a whiny higher octave as he tried asked why not.  I told him squarely that they had a right to be out there pitching whatever belief they wanted to share and it wasn’t our place to infringe upon their freedom of speech.  Showing much more tenacity and wit than I expected, he shot back about how his freedom of speech includes the right to tell them exactly what he thinks, and that means he can flip them off if he wants to.

I almost conceded for no other reason than I was proud of the little man for putting up such an argument, but I really felt this was the moment to explain about the responsibilities of free speech.  He gave me his full attention at the next stoplight while I explained that living in a country that respects our right to free speech means that we citizens have the responsibility to protect the space in which everyone feels comfortable sharing whatever they believe.  As a kid who is regularly bullied, he understood the difference between hostile words and gestures and constructive debate with no trouble at all and agreed that the finger might be considered hostile.  He was characteristically quiet as he pondered what I told him, then said simply, “Alright, I get it.” (pause) “Hey, can we play video games when we get to your house?”

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