To Laugh or To Empathize

For a fun Sunday afternoon family time, we decided to go see the film Rio at the cheap theater down the road.  Buddy really enjoyed it, and Button almost made it through his first movie in a theater except he got bored near the end.

The movie itself was a fun kids movie, although not one that I think we'll want to watch repeatedly the way we've recently enjoyed Tangled or How to Train Your Dragon.  It was nice to get a family date and a relaxing afternoon.

The real reason for this post, though, isn't to give you my impressions of Rio.  Really, from a psychological standpoint, I was far more intrigued by the "short" that was played immediately before our movie began.  It portrayed Scrat the Squirrel from the Ice Age movies trying to find a place for his beloved acorn.  He ends up dividing the earth and being plunged into the core of the planet while still chasing his acorn.  Everything goes wrong, and he still can't keep track of his acorn.  By the end of the "short", Scrat is doomed to lose his acorn.  He has been burned, stretched, fallen on his face, and deserted on floating ice in the middle of the sea.

The creators of this "short" had an obvious expectation that their audience would think that watching the poor squirrel strive after his acorn in such a fashion would be funny.  And true to this, most of the people in the theater laughed.  Buddy, on the other hand, couldn't understand why we were watching the poor squirrel suffer.  We don't have a TV, so he doesn't get a lot of exposure to such slapstick humor.

I had a hard time thinking about how to wisely talk to Buddy about what was going on.  On one hand, I wanted to say, "Don't worry, honey, it's just being silly."  But really, this is the easy way out.  It's easier, isn't it, to laugh away pain and suffering than to empathize with it?  On the other hand, though, do I explain why we we find watching a suffering squirrel entertainment?

Really, why?  Why have we been taught to laugh at other's pain?  Because it's true that we have been taught to do this.  Buddy wasn't naturally inclined to find the film funny.  To tell him the film was "just being silly" is only to teach him that we shouldn't think about pain or care about it.  But this is what our culture wants us to do.  It teaches us not to think about the hard things in life, but to enjoy life to it's fullest.

As a mom, though, this is not what I want from my child.  I want my son to run and help a child who fell off the swing or monkey bars, not to laugh at them.  I want him to care for poor and the oppressed, not look the other way.  I want him to love others as Jesus loved people.  Jesus sought out people who were hurting and in pain.  He didn't laugh at their circumstances; He remedied them.

So, what am I going to do when another situation comes up when Buddy is exposed to something like Scrat's Continental Divide?  I hope that I will teach him to be more like Jesus instead of following what other people think is best.  If this means that I try to avoid certain shows like The Three Stooges, Looney Tunes, or many other popular cartoons, then so be it.  I don't want to be an overprotective mom, but I do want to guard my child's heart.  I want Buddy and Button to be more like Jesus than Charlie Chaplin.