How old were you when you lost

[bigwillq]

your sense of innocence? I'm not talking anything sexual here but at what age did you realize that the world was not so innocent?

[Fenris]

1. I was born without it

[JVS]

2. Three

and I vowed that someday I would destroy it!

"It" being the world of course.

[NightTrain]

11. Me, too.

When my dad came home drunk, beat the living shit out of my mom in front of me, and got into a fight with the two cops who were called in to defuse the situation.

One of my earliest memories is of the cops leading my dad out of the apartment in handcuffs, bleeding from the top of his head where they had billyclubbed him.

And people wonder why I refuse to touch alcohol even socially!

[bigwillq]

12. Hey, at least you learned an important lesson

from that horrible event. Stay sober man!

[ikojo]

26. My dad is also the reason I have never touched a beer. I have

wine but only during the Seder and then most of the time I opt for grape juice if it's an option.

My dad was physically and emotionally abusive to my mom.

[Lady Freedom]

43. age 3

That is when I found out that people will lie and they don't care if it will hurt you or anybody else if it suits there purpose

[Bertha Venation]

3. age five

[Earth_First]

4. I would say it was my Kerouac-esque experience

at the age of 17...

[bigwillq]

5. I'm looking for more detailed descriptions

if you don't mind sharing.

[Colin Ex]

6. Interesting.

I think the exact moment my life changed and I started to really KNOW that everyone was full of shit happened in a Catholic church three years ago.

I was kind of skeptical about things (religion, everyone else) before then, but I was at Mass one day and the priest began to talk about how voting for pro-choice candidates was a mortal sin.

And I said to myself, "I don't think I'm going to be Catholic for much longer." It kind of kept going from there.

-C

[bigwillq]

9. Thanks for that. I feel the same way about

the Catholic Church. Personally, I think most forms of organized religious are nothing more that glorified cults and it's preachings are like brainwashing.

[bobthedrummer]

7. November 22, 1963-I was in seventh grade.

That truly changed my naive worldview, but the Warren Commission Report made me cynical.

[bigwillq]

13. My mom said that changed her thinking too

Then the next summer her father passed away and her thinking changed even more.

[Deja Q]

8. 31. But realizing how shitty humans make their world does not mean

we should change who we are.

[bigwillq]

10. That's true

We should be who we are no matter what happens in our lives. Events just help us progress and they are learning experiences.

[cally]

14. I was 8 or 9 and

my Grandmother killed herself and everyone in my world lied about it. I knew even then and I realized that adults lied to me.

[bigwillq]

15. Why do adults like to lie about death

no matter the circumstances? kids are more resilient and intelligent then some people think. I feel it's better to tell kids the truth. The majority will be able to handle it.

[cally]

23. I agree

it would have been much easier if everyone hadn't lied. I don't lie to lie to my children.

[NNadir]

16. I was very slow to lose innocence totally, probably in my 20s.

I've caught up though now. If there is anything likely to destroy innocence, sweet and otherwise, it is the Age of Bush.

[bigwillq]

17. Welcome to the club

The Shrub has destroyed alot of people's innocence I'm guessing.

[DemoTex]

18. Vietnam got what was left of my cherry, after the turbulent 60s.

Nixon and Kissinger's arc-light bombing of Cambodia and Laos shook me to the core. Especially after watching them from a ring-side seat:

However, US forces weren’t in Laos. We weren’t in Cambodia either, but Nixon and Kissinger were bombing the shit out of both. Welch and Quisenberry were on a mission over Dak To near the Cambodian border. They would be able to see the arc-light bombing attacks as Kissinger’s B-52s pulverized villages in northeastern Cambodia....

... Just short of the seventeenth parallel, I made a turn southbound for another infrared imaging run down the trail. The jungle darkness just northwest of Tchepone suddenly exploded with a carpet of bombs from the unseen B-52s. From my vantage point at two thousand feet above the Namkok Valley floor, the eruption of the earth - with streets of fire and visible shock waves - was awesome. I thought of Kurtz: “The horror, the horror.” I looked over at my observer, a doughy former Greyhound bus driver from Paris, Texas, named Charlie Walker. Charlie was on his third combat mission over the trail in Laos. Tonight he was witnessing his first arc-light saturation bombing. He was ashen. From The Dogs of War © 2003 (DemoTex)

[Lizz612]

19. Not sure what age

But it was when I realized why the kids who sometimes lived next door were so hungry, and why my parents wouldn't let me retrieve lost balls from their yard. They were dealing crank. And the kids were under- and malnourished. They were not good people. Thank god they were forced out. I think my parents had quite a bit to do with that.
I lost a good deal of my idealism about politics when Norm Coleman won back in '02.

[bigwillq]

20. Did your parents ever try to help the kids

like calling DCF or any other organizations like that?

[Lizz612]

38. Yeah they did

Called for the kids, but they only lived there sometimes, they were grandkids of the official renter. Where they lived the rest of the time I don't know. They also called Health Services about the fact that they didn't have garbage service. They called the cops all the time about the drugs. Not a damn thing was ever done.
My mother let them have fourths and fifths whenever they were over for lunch.

[Don_G]

21. Eleven

Mark Twain always had a sense of humor and knew how to get an idea across.

[name not needed]

22. 5

Watching the Oklahoma City bombing on the local news.

[bigwillq]

24. That was such a tragic event

Hey you're still a youngster well middle teens right? If you care to share.

[ikojo]

25. Six years old when my parents finally divorced

I was then thrust from the middle class to the lower middle class. My mom had to struggle for everything with little help from her ex husband.

I then had to start a new school and was teased and bullied from second grade to my junior year in high school, when I finally started giving it back verbally. After all I read far more books than those who teased and bullied me.

Not very trusting of other human beings that's for sure.

[bigwillq]

28. Kids can be so fucking

cruel. I can't stand that. I can honestly say I seldom made fun of other kids. Sometimes I would laugh at one of my friends who made fun of someone else which is still wrong but I use to feel bad for alot of kids.

Now That I'm older, a favorite bar game is to make fun of people. I guess that's cruel too but at least they're not kids and they can handle themselves.

[kath]

27. One moment that stands out is the time of the Kent State shootings.

I was a couple of days short of 14, and we lived in the Cleveland area, about a 45 minute drive from KSU. Some adults said "They should've shot more of 'em". I was totally appalled, thinking "how can you SAY such a thing!!"

(my memory is fuzzy on this part, and I've been wanting to check with old friends and family to see if anyone can verify, but my 8th grade American History teacher MAY have been one of the "they should've shot more of 'em" camp. If he actually voiced such thoughts to a class of 8th graders, then that is really, really, really appalling.)

[m-jean03]

29. I don't know --

My dad from day one. did such a good job screaming at us, throwing stuff, and threatening to leave, I don't know if I ever had a really "innocent" sense of life, at least in a Leave it to Beaver way.

Plus, I started reading at the age of 7, and read everything I could get my hands on from 1st grade through 5th -- I knew about (and found horrifying) Cherynobl, Hiroshima, the ozone layer, global warming, teenage pregnancy, cancer, AIDS, etcetera, by the time I was 12. So I guess had a pretty well-developed sense of injustice, social outrage and apocalyptic dread by the time I was in my teens.

[bigwillq]

30. I guess it's only fair if I share

I was about 8 or 9 and my mom and her mom and my step-grandfather got into this huge fight.

My mom's pops died when she was 15, which wrecked her. Years later my grandma re-married to this guy who no one liked but when I was growing up I use to go to their house alot and play in the garden, mow the lawn, feed and play with the chickens. It was so much fun. And also got to spend a lot of time w/my grandparents.

But after the big fight, we didn't see them nor did my mom talk to them for many years. They have since reconciled, my grandma got cancer like 8 years ago and my mom (who works at a hospital) helped her out getting doctors and shit like that.

I can see both my moms and my grandma's points. My mom and her siblings were pissed cause this guy (they're still married) made my grandma not see any one in her feeling (cause he a bastard).

But my grandmother, who is wrong for abandoning her family, also needed to go on with her own social aspects of her life.

This event saddened me for awhile cause I saw both my moms and my grandma in a different light. No one took us kids feelings into account. Our feelings matter. To anyone out there, don't let something like this happen to your kids. No matter what happens between you and your families, those people are still your kids aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.
Thanks for letting me rant.
-Will

edit: spelling

[Triple H]

31. October 25, 2002.

We here in MN know what happened that day. :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry: :cry:

I was 20 at the time.

[bigwillq]

33. Care to explain cause I have no idea (nt)

[kath]

34. Wellstone

[Triple H]

35. That's the day the Republicans killed Paul Wellstone.

[bigwillq]

36. Didn't know that was the date

Thanks for letting me know. Yes, that truly was a sad time. Still is.

[camero]

32. Seven

Another kid about the same age tried to get me to smoke pot. I asked him how stupid he was because my mom had friends that did it and I saw how they acted.

[Mrs. Venation]

37. I Was Eleven Years Old

and President Kennedy was killed. I remember the day like it was yesterday; it was a very frightening time.

I grew up near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where nuclear weapons components were manufactured. During the cold war my childhood was filled with terror -- terror that the enemy would nuke the weapons plants and that east Tennessee would be vaporized.

Sometimes the powers that were would conduct unannounced tests of the civil defense sirens in my home town; that would make me hystical every time it happened. One of the few times I ever got into trouble at school was during one of these drills. I refused to go to the shelter; I thought we were under attack and I didn't want to be alive without my parents.

I guess childhood didn't hold much innocence for me from about age six, but the assassination of John Kennedy destroyed any that I had.

[NoPasaran]

39. November 7, 1972

Nixon beat McGovern. I was sixteen.

[SarahB]

40. I try, somehow, to retain it

For me, having children means that in order to get through my days and actually find some joy in them, I have to see through their eyes. I have been through some serious tragedy and heartbreak as a child that I really don't feel like delving into, but somehow along the way, I've been able to retain much of this silly, innocent spiritedness within myself. I'm not naive and they're have been points along the way in my life where I've lost my way for some time (even a long time) and have gotten pretty cynical, but I refuse to let the world destroy that part of me and take that little bit of innocent hope and spirit left within myself. I NEED it. :)

[slinkerwink]

41. when the other fifth graders started making fun of my deafness

and started to ignore me.

[SW FL Dem]

42. I was 7 in 1964 in North Carolina

My brother tans easily and I remember the lifeguard trying to keep him out of the public "white only" swimming pool.

[VOX]

44. When Bobby Kennedy was killed in June 1968...

I was pretty young when JFK was killed, and of course the killing of Martin Luther King was devastating.

But when Bobby was killed, I knew that something dear was lost forever, and that things had taken a very bad turn.

I still feel that way, even today -- that that was a turning point in our history.