Which isn’t to say that that sort of action is easy to carry out anymore. Grown-ups sometimes feel as helpless as children, and on the internet, where this meme mostly proliferates, distressed social-media posts, futile emoji, and forlorn crowdfunding campaigns have taken the place of social and political action. Seen in this context, to extract and deploy “Look for the helpers” as sufficient relief for adults is perverse, if telling. Read: The quietly radical Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Not only was this advice meant for children it was intended as part of a holistic approach to managing a small child’s worry during a crisis. It also advises parents to turn off the television, maintain regular routines, and offer physical affection. On the part of the Fred Rogers website about tragic events, “focusing on the helpers” appears among an eight-bullet list of tips. “Look for the helpers” is a tactic that diverts a child’s distress toward safety.Įven for preschoolers, it was never meant to be used alone. They rely on adults for almost everything, from daily care to emergency rescue. Fred Rogers Productions maintains a r esource for parents on talking to children about tragic events that explains why. It’s a powerful notion for kids, especially very young ones. One of the “Look for the helpers” tweets posted on the day of the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre. But somehow, when it got transformed into a meme, the sentiment was adopted by adults as if they were 3-year-olds. “Look for the helpers” was advice for preschoolers. Rogers was an expert at translating the complex adult world in terms kids could understand: a grown-up emissary to a children’s nation. The program’s ubiquity also speaks to the applicability of the “Look for the helpers” idea-it’s easy to quote or cite on-air or online, and it binds people of many generations and walks of life in tender recognition.īut it was never meant to do that much work. population, which explains why the man and his show are so recognizable. It was intended for preschoolers, which means that anyone who had kids under age 5 and owned a television, and anyone who was a child of that age since then, probably became neighbors with Mr. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired from 1968 to 2001, and it continues to run in syndication and on streaming services today. Fred Rogers is a national treasure, but it’s time to stop offering this particular advice. Worse, Fred Rogers’s original message has been contorted and inflated into something it was never meant to be, for an audience it was never meant to serve, in a political era very different from where it began. That’s disturbing enough it feels as though we are one step shy of a rack of drug-store mass-murder sympathy cards. Once a television comfort for preschoolers, “Look for the helpers” has become a consolation meme for tragedy. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” reads the headline of Bari Weiss’s New York Times column on the slaughter. It’s as if all the other crimes and accidents in which Fred Rogers has been invoked were rehearsing for this one. Not just because the shooting marked another tragedy in America, but also because Rogers, who died in 2003, was a longtime resident of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, where the synagogue is located. family-separation policy, after a school-bus accident in New Jersey, following a fatal explosion in Wisconsin, in the aftermath of a van attack in Toronto, in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas school massacre, and more.Īnd so it was no surprise when “Look for the helpers” reared its head again after a gunman killed 11 people and wounded six others in a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday. Lately, whenever something goes horribly wrong, someone offers up Rogers’s phrase or a video in which he shares it as succor: during the Thai cave rescue, in response to the U.S. You will always find people who are helping.’” “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers said to his television neighbors, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. One of those small comforts has come to be Fred Rogers’s famous advice to look for the helpers. After the senseless calamity of a mass shooting, people seek comforts-even small ones-in the face of horror.
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