Jack History

One of my coworkers is lobbying for me to record Jack telling his version of American history. If he weren't so camera-shy, I'd TOTALLY do that. Until he loses his stage-fright, this blog will have to do.

If you've kept up with this blog, you'll know that Jack is obsessed with a few things - two of which are history and justice. As a side note, he seems to have caught on to Mommy and Daddy's strengths - as he asks Daddy all of his science questions and me all of his race/history/justice/feeling questions. I'm thrilled to be off the hook for explaining Creation or the Big Bang or where the dinosaurs went, but I do struggle keeping up with his versions of history and the questions that come with them.

We've talked at great length, and with great repetition, about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John F. Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement, and the American Revolution.

Recently, Jack has been confusing all of the stories. He's woven them together in a particularly strange fashion, resulting in statements like "why didn't the African Americans just shoot the ship to get the flag?", which comes from combining the Americans' fight for freedom from the British and the African Americans' fight for freedom from the Man.

This morning we had a particularly lively discussion about "Avraham" Lincoln. It went something like this:

Jack: "If I had been there, I would have held up a piece of wood...with a piece of paper on it...and put it between them so they couldn't shoot at Avraham Lincoln and he'd still be alive. The bow and arrow would have just fallen to the ground."

Me: "Umm, well, that's nice that you'd want to protect him. You're sweet. But it wasn't bows and arrows. It was bullets."

J: "Can they go through wood?"

M: "Yes."

J: "Even really, really strong wood?"

M: "Yes. They can even go through some metal. But it's sweet that you would want to protect him. Good boy."

J: "Well how am I supposed to do THAT then? ... Why didn't anyone stop that man from killing Avraham Lincoln?"

M: "I don't know. But now they have what's called the Secret Service, and that is a bunch of people that go EVERYWHERE with the President. They keep him safe. And they've made a new kind of material to stop bullets."

J: "Why weren't the secretive people there with that stuff to stop the bullets and to help Avraham Lincoln?"

M: "Well, two things. First, they hadn't invented that special material yet. And second, I don't think they HAD a Secret Service before that. I think they made it later."

J: "I would get like 100 or 99 people and surround the President and then no one could get through."

M: "Good idea. And you wanna know something else cool? Whenever President Obama has to drive somewhere, they bring a whole bunch of cars that all look exactly the same. The President gets in one, but all of them drive in a big line to wherever they are going, so if you see it going by, you have no idea which one the President is in. That way anyone who MIGHT want to hurt the President can't get to him."

J: "So if Avraham Lincoln was in one car and there was a whole line up of them and they were all red, I wouldn't know which one Avraham Lincoln was in so I couldn't shoot him."

M: "But you wouldn't shoot Abraham Lincoln anyway."

J: "Right, cuz he's already dead."

Well okay then. That's one reason.