I write a review recently of the new Disney movie “Frozen,” which I liked a lot, and in the review I did point out that the original fairy tale upon which the movie was based – Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” – was completely abandoned by the producers for the new, fluffy, highly-sanitized version, and I am puzzled by this, as the great and successful animations of Walt Disney didn’t seem to have to do this, and he did well and made a lot of money.

A number of people immediately responded on my Facebook Page that life for kids is much more difficult than it used to be, that kids need to be protected much more than they used to be, that their lives are so much more difficult than they used to be.

I hear this all the time, I call it catastrophic thinking, a mirror of our culture and the media’s apocalyptic view of our lives – bad news is now the only news we get, and we get it all day long. The entrenched conventional wisdom that the world is a darker and more dangerous place than it has ever been, for us and especially for our children. Conventional thinking is the mob-of-the-mind, the ways in which technology and information and our own phobic and fear-driven culture shape our perceptions of the world. When I write about conventional wisdom,  I do not toss stats and studies around, you can find a study to support any conceivable point of view, I try and step back and think about what I see and feel.

I do not believe kids have it worse today than they did when I was growing up, that is not my experience or lesson from life. Every generation likes to believe things are worse than they used to be, and this is a staple element in our so called news media, which learned some years ago that bad news and fear is addictive, good new and truth is not. Parents soak up warnings like a sponge soaks up water,  I saw this phobic and apocalyptic view of children emerge around the life of my own daughter, whose teachers told her every day of her life that the world is a dangerous place – beware of strangers, sex, smoking, alcohol, the Internet, disease. I often found myself telling my daughter that there are dangers and horrors in the world then and now – just think of Newtown, Connecticut, but that the world is not worse for children than it used to be, not even close.

I don’t remember any special class telling my daughter of the love and beauty and hope in the world, of the good things people are doing, of the trust so many people offer one another, of her many new and important choices in the world. Strangers have saved the lives of many people in our time, I just heard the story of a man driving by a house on his way to work, he saw a child lying in the snow, clutching her dog, both of them wet and freezing in a bitter storm, he pulled over and she said she was alone in the house, she came out to let her dog out, got locked out and didn’t know what to do, she was eight, she had been lying in the freezing snow and rain for hours, she was turning blue.

The man said he would call the police, he offered to take her into his car, but the child was much more afraid of getting in a stranger’s car than freezing on the ground. The anguished man offered his jacket,  called an ambulance – she wouldn’t take the jacket either – and the paramedics arrived in time to save her. Had she really been taught to be safe, to make good decisions for herself? She nearly died.

It is common for me to hear parents talk about how much protection their children need in our awful world, how dangerous strangers are, how dangerous the Internet and Facebook is. Yes, life is more complex for them in so many ways, but I wish they would go online sometimes and read the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports for adults and children, as I did, and learn that their children are more likely to have an airplane fall on their heads than come to harm online or be snatched by a stranger.

When horrific things happen to children, we are hammered with these awful images a thousand times, in living color, in real-time, for days and months on end. We see the world through this apocalyptic prism, just as some of us come to see all dogs as abused, so are all children worse off than they used to be because the world has changed. This is the awful prism of fear and mistrust that has become a staple of the way we educate children.

The news media does not report every day that children are healthier, safer and live longer than ever before in the history of the world. Does that not matter or count? I don’t ever hear a parent say it. I say it, all the time, every day, it helps me balance what is good in the world and what is bad. I never imagined a world in which disturbed men with machine-guns could butcher children in their classrooms, or politicians so craven and corrupt that they would stand by and let it happen. But it is our world and our challenge to fix.

But still, that is one horror, it is not the world, it is not the whole story of children’s lives in our world. There is no perspective in our world, apart from that which we provide ourselves, the information we receive is literally in the hands of greedy corporate blood-suckers who will do and say anything to make money and keep their ratings up. Exploiting the lives of children – animals too – is a time honored way to do it, so the prism through which we see the world and the lives of our children becomes darker by the day.

I think of my cousin Kennie who died a generation ago after five painful years of struggling with a cancer that is almost 100 percent curable today or my friend Sammy who died of appendicitis,  or my next door neighbor who died of polio when he was eleven, or my cousin who died of tonsilitis, or a classmate who succumbed to the flu. I think of my friend Steven who hung himself in the bathroom shower when he was 16 rather than tell his parents he was gay, he was so sure they would have disowned him. I think of the young black girl who moved in next door to me in a white neighborhood of Providence, R.I., and was hit in the head by a rock thrown by an enraged neighbor yelling “niggers go home,” in a town far from the Deep South. I think of the young girls in my middle-school writing and journalism class who were told they could only work as fashion writers for newspapers, women, the teachers said,  could not be real reporters or editors. I think of my father busting into my room to seize my record player and my transistor radio because it was playing dangerous music from Buddy Holly and Elvis. I think of the wondrous choices of books and films my daughter got to read on her computer and in her room, choices I never dreamed of having. Without my radio, I had no culture at all.

We are losing the idea of life being what we make it, we need to see our dogs as helpless and pathetic, we need to see our children as in great and enduring danger, somehow this view of the world works for us, keeps us close, makes us necessary, feeds our sense of alarm and vigilance. People who believe the lives of children are worse than they ever been should read some of the novels that came out of Europe in the late 1930’s, or perhaps re-read the Diaries of Anne Frank. Many of us grew up in the narrowest and most stultifying of worlds, our culture lives smothered and controlled, the tight grip of dogmatic religions choking our sense of self. Each generation lives in its own new reality, one cannot really be honestly compared to another. Nostalgic is a trap, a way to emotionalize and romanticize our own lives.

In our world, we all need to reach our own conclusions, stand in our own truth. Life is always complex, it is always changing, it is always different. The catastrophic view, like our need to see the world as being on a “left” or “right,” is, to me, the death of thought, the loss of perspective, the surrender to the lowest common denominator in the things we teach our children and the way we see them. How sad to think of our children’s lives as being so dangerous and grim, how narrow.

There are great dangers and challenges facing our children, there have always been, there will always be. On our own paths, nobody seems to tell us that life is like that, I supposed Walt Disney used to, in his own way. But trouble and danger is only part of our story, our lives are not like the news we see on cable TV. I suppose the genius of Walt Disney is that he was willing to portray both realities and this great sense of balance in his movies, he did not need to white-wash the world.

Speaking only for me, and hopefully for my wonderful daughter, the world is filled with crisis and mystery, joy and love, the prism through which I see the world is multi-colored, not just black and white. The children I know are better off in almost every way than the child I was or the children I knew. They are smarter, more sophisticated, freer and safer than any of the children I knew or grew up with, even though the times were certainly simpler. Simpler is not always better.

People should draw their own conclusions, I do not accept the catastrophic view of kid’s lives, it is a narrow hysteria, a conceit, fed mostly by unthinking media marketers,  educators and politicians selling fear and anger, not truth or safety. It was not the view of the world I preached to my child or ever wanted her to accept.