@FIRST_LIGHT

While we were on vacation at a family reunion earlier this month, Ben, my 9-year old son, decided to organize his cousins and shoot a short film using the hand-me-down digital video camera he considers his own. The outcome was a little unsettling for me, and a sign of our times.

Ben is pretty certain he'll be a movie director some day. To date he's made probably 20 or so stop motion and live action video shorts. He's a pretty thoughtful film critic, with insightful things to say about scenes, shots, stunts, effects, character development, casting, and plot. We don't let him watch much TV, but we do allow Friday night DVDs from Netflix. Ben is a huge fan of the 24 television series on DVD. He loves the hour-by-hour concept, the twisty plot, and the action.

A few days into our vacation, everybody in the family seemed to run out of reading material. So we headed into town to recharge at the local bookstore. Ben begged me to get the 24 Ultimate Guide by DK Books. I've been a little uncomfortable with his obsession with the show, but eventually relented and bought it for him.

Ben had consumed the book by the time we got back to the cottage. I didn't know it at the time, but he had become inspired to fulfill a mission, a secret agent mission.

Later that afternoon, I noticed Ben directing a group of his cousins through the recording of several scenes on the beach. They were brandishing pieces of driftwood as guns. I thought they were playing Cowboys and Indians. A few hours later I spotted them in the back yard shooting another scene, but this time one of the cousins seemed to be carrying a large stick on his shoulder the way you would if it was a shoulder fired missile launcher.

Today I found out that Ben had been shooting a re-imagined 24 episode, complete with terrorists holding hostages and zealous CTU agents bending the rules. Ben recorded over the video with another creation, so I never got to see it. But from what I could tell from his verbal description, it was a pretty violent and serious movie with scripted fight scenes, running gun battles, and lots of yelling. It had a high body count.

While I'm proud of Ben's creative expression of talent, I am a little sad that he's growing up on a diet of terrorist bad guys and government agent good guys. I suppose I should accept that these are in fact the icons of his era. But that doesn't make me feel great about it. Perhaps Ben doesn't see all the ugly side of the terrorist era at his young age - just as I didn't see the ugly side of the westward expansion into Native American territories. I hope so. There will be plenty of time for that later in life.