Faireality

This year my girls were lucky enough to be invited down to Eugene, Oregon to model some fairy/dress up costumes for the oh-so-talented costume designer Richelle Rudeen, of EllaDynae Designs. (www.elladynae.com)

As you can see, these handmade dresses are truly magical.

These are not professional photos, mind you, just pictures I took with my iPhone and morphed a bit using different photo apps. There’s a secret ingredient in all of the EllaDynae dresses, though – they alter reality for the little girls who step into such tufts and twirls of fancy. With a bit of fabric and finesse, my girls were transported to far-away lands, full of dazzle and delight the likes of which only they could discover.

That my children, your children, our children can journey into ‘faireality’ – a place far removed from the black and white limitations of the concrete world – is the essence of childhood itself. Here they inhabit a state of enhanced reality, full of enchantments galore. It’s a cherished time of life, an essential time, wherein their ever-expanding minds bask in beauty, frolic in fantasy, run through rainbows.

As I, a grown up with both feet planted firmly in ‘reality’, peer out my window I see nothing less than twinkling lights, mischievous elves, and candy-cane ribbons – it’s almost Christmas. This is another cherished, magical time, a now-universal form of ‘faireality’, where love and joy appear ’round every corner and mystical kindness supposedly rains down on us all.

Yet even at Christmas time innocent worlds can be breached; childhoods can be curtailed; dreams can – and are – dashed into a million pieces. Instead of playing in the hundred-acre-woods, precious youth are pierced with hundreds of bullets…round after round of ammunition, fear, and hate destroying their tender, vibrant bodies.

This is a travesty of life itself. That one person’s ‘Fair Reality’ can rip to shreds an innocent child’s ‘faireality’.

Is it fair that your right to bear arms supersedes our children’s right to a safe and secure world? Is it fair that in your reality ‘guns don’t kill people’, even though statistically, factually, guns do kill around 10,000 Americans each and every year?

I am tired of the argument that all of us Americans have the right to bear arms for protection against a possible, one day, someday wrong-doing. When the constitution was written, there was one type of gun – a rifle – which took time, patience, and skill to load and fire. Most importantly, after it was loaded and aimed, this rifle could fire one shot. If you want the right to bear arms, then bear a rifle from the 1700’s and enlist in “a well-regulated militia”. That’s the only right the constitution grants you.

Any person who buys a gun that can fire hundreds of shots is a coward at heart. And we grown ups should start saying that, loud and clear. Arming yourself with an assault weapon is nowhere close to ‘sport’ or ‘protection’ – it is a purposeful step towards mass destruction of human life!

I want a new kind of Fair Reality for the children of this country. A land that allows them to frolic over rainbows without it raining bullets every time someone slips into anger or depression or irrational hatred. A Fair Reality in which all of the children still residing in their own ‘faireality’s’ are alive to wake up on Christmas morning and open their presents from the jolly, wise, kind-hearted old man, – you know, the one who’s more interested in spreading gifts of love and kindness throughout the world than in amassing deadly weapons for some violent ‘what if’ scenario.

Let’s write ban all assault weapons on our Christmas list this year, can’t we? Don’t our children deserve a childhood outlined not by fear, but rather kindness, faith, trust – you know, all those things we sing about ad infinitum this time of year…peace on earth, goodwill to men?

How about we all – each and every one of us – put down our guns and pick up our kids instead. That would be a faireality, indeed!