Word: mister
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...remember Mister Rogers as being as warm, fuzzy and innocuous as a cardigan sweater, then you did not really know Mister Rogers. It is true that Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which lives on in reruns, was an island of tranquillity in a children's mediasphere of robots and antic sponges. And in real life, Fred Rogers, who died last week of stomach cancer at age 74, was evidently as sweet and mild mannered as the kindly neighbor he played on TV. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he didn't smoke, drink or eat meat, prayed every day and went...
...part of what made Mister Rogers' Neighborhood great and unique is that, for all its beautiful days in the neighborhood, it was also the darkest work of popular culture made for preschoolers since perhaps the Brothers Grimm. Mister Rogers was softer than anyone else in children's TV because so many of the messages he had to impart were harder. That your parents might someday decide not to live together anymore. That dogs and guppies and people all someday will die. That sometimes you will feel ashamed and other times you will be so mad you will want to bite...
...version of which debuted in 1963, was his professional way of doing what he had done as a boy in Latrobe, Pa., when he played with puppets to calm himself after hearing scary news reports. And perhaps one reason his death touched adults so deeply is the feeling that Mister Rogers left us when we could especially use someone to teach us to manage our children's fears...
...last original episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood aired on Aug. 31, 2001--a scant 11 days before we needed him to explain the biggest Big Inexplicable yet. He returned to tape public-service announcements on how to talk to kids about the Sept. 11 anniversary, but the anxiety has only built since then. War jitters, orange alerts and duct-tape mania have rendered literal our most childlike, monsters-under-the-bed fears: that a tall building can collapse like a house of cards, that something bad can seep in ghostlike through your window and hurt...
...will not be able to stop it. Ridge had a basically Rogersian task--getting Americans to accept a terrible eventuality that they could not prevent. So Homeland Security offered a slogan--Don't Be Afraid ... Be Ready--which seemed immediately preposterous to citizens who (having grown up on Mister Rogers) knew that being afraid is normal, reasonable...