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‘On narrow minds rests the future of children … ’
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When the voices of children are heard on the green And laughing is heard on the hill, My heart is at rest within my breast And everything else is still. — William Blake, “Night,” 1794
I’m sick and tired of hearing things From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics All I want is the truth Just gimme some truth. — John Lennon, “Gimme Some Truth,” 1971
May you build a ladder to the stars And climb on every rung May you stay forever young. — Bob Dylan, “Forever Young,” 1973
And he came to a door ... and he looked inside Father, yes son, I want to kill you. — Jim Morrison (The Doors), “The End,” 1967
Narrow minds keep us locked up tight But broader minds are the key to what’s right So let’s keep hoping for minds get open With the wisdom of time, ooh A baby crawls before he walks (oh, yeah) He coos and mumbles before he talks As the world turns, we live and learn With the wisdom of time. — The Supremes, “The Wisdom of Time,” 1972
I will admit it — I lost it with a mother recently. While finishing seeing her 5-year-old daughter for a well-care visit and preparing to see her 14-year-old son, I asked if she had any concerns about her adolescent. No, she said, “He’s doing great, girl-crazy and self-absorbed,” rapidly followed by “I don’t want him to get that HPV vaccine. You do know it is banned in most other countries, and I don’t think girls should get it either.”
I have known this mother for almost 20 years and through two family units and previously, while quirky, she appeared sensible. On some days, I let such statements slide on my quest to provide some guidance to a patient and family, choosing to focus on a less confrontational topic on the list of anticipatory issues. On this day, I chose to deviate from that style and asked in reply if she was in favor of cancer.
William T. Gerson
Not fair I know, and I’m not sure why I confronted her with a stark choice and with the hint of an argument in which I knew facts were not going to help me. She predictably refused permission for HPV vaccination, and in my visit with her son, I learned that he was sexually active and experimenting with drugs: surely a work in progress.
The danger
Children’s well-being, both existentially and politically, has teetered on the edge of success and failure for millennia, a high-wire act throughout the ages with only brief respites. Can we finally assure a more secure and longstanding future for our children?
Advocacy and social justice, tenets of pediatrics and many streams of religion, truly impact our day-to-day practice. In order to succeed in advancing the reality of well-being for all children we must fight against the narrow-minded denial of such a future.
Fight back with stories
Storytelling serves as an important means of expressing social injustice in regards to children. Today we can read Robert D. Putnam’s “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” a manifesto against inequality of opportunity which overlays data from neuroscience, sociology and census evidence upon individual stories of children growing up on both sides of the economic divide. In the past, it was left to poetry (even the epic poetry of Homer) and much more recently to lyrical music to put forth visions of parenting, childhood and nurturing.
William Blake stands out in that lineage. Blake created an image of the child that challenged a harsh contemporary social order. Few poets ever wrote more compassionately and often about children. His child was pure and innocent, naive perhaps in today’s understanding, but for the first time set apart from adulthood as a distinct time of life and no longer stained by original sin. That child is in clear contrast to the adults of Blake’s world, including parents and their social institutions — both of which appeared to damage rather than protect children.
Blake’s warning shot directed against the dark “Satanic” mills not only referenced the factories of the Industrial Revolution, but the cruel orthodoxy of its institutions. Such a clarion call predates but foresaw not only Charles Dickens’ utilitarianism and Dwight Eisenhower’s warning of the “military industrial complex,” but also Bob Dylan’s protest songs and Jim Morrison’s epithets against the adults in his world 200 years later.
The narrowness of minds today may not be as pernicious as those confronting Blake at the turn of the 18th century or Dickens a half-century later; however, our failure to secure the well-being of our children is as haunting today as then. Recent moves to legislate restrictions on the use of welfare income harshly resemble the self-preserving bromides of the 19th century. Children do not need moral platitudes, they deserve social and economic justice.
How to succeed despite the odds
Our inadequate response to safeguarding the lives of children resonate in today’s poets and lyricists: Dylan, Lennon, Morrison — all direct descendants of Blake. Today, as advocates of such an effort, we face some very narrow minds. Perhaps we should look back and identify those individual heroes from the past that have successfully influenced social change and hopefully in doing so, advance a model for a more sustainable social justice.
To William Blake, his society and its institutions were ailing, removing any appreciation of hope in the minds and future of children. He wanted to transform the dreary darkness of London of his time into a New Jerusalem. Only imagination, compassion, dedication to task and, of course, love could turn the course. Today, as we witness the suffering inflicted on innocent children all around the globe in the name of state, industry and religion, it behooves us to consider joining Blake’s “Mental Fight.” As The Supremes sang, let’s hope that minds open with the wisdom of time and that as the world turns, we live and learn and narrowness disappears. In our time, we should settle for nothing less.
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William T. Gerson, MD, is clinical professor of pediatrics at the University of Vermont College of Medicine and a member of the Infectious Diseases in Children Editorial Board. He can be reached at 52 Timber Lane, S. Burlington, VT 05403; email: William.Gerson@uvm.edu.
Disclosure: Gerson reports no relevant financial disclosures.