This weekend on Facebook, there’s a movement on to raise awareness of child abuse by using an image of a favorite cartoon character for your profile picture. The goal as I read it is for there to be “not a single human face on Facebook by December 6”; the rationale for using cartoon characters is to focus on positive memories of childhood.Okay, fine, cartoons are fun. I grew up without TV, so I picked a character from P.D. Eastman’s book “Go Dog Go”. As I did so, however, a couple of thoughts popped into my head.Thought #1: Not a single human face? Survivors of abuse have human faces–I know, I’ve looked in the mirror. So often the discussion of abuse, especially child abuse, takes on an abstract quality, as if we know intellectually that there are children who are abused, and that there are adults who were abused as children, but we assume it doesn’t apply to anyone present. If we want to raise awareness, I’m not sure whether getting rid of human faces is really the metaphor we want.Thought #2: A lot of cartoons model violent and abusive behavior. I know, Wile E. Coyote is just trying to feed himself, but remember the one with the big, mean dog who forces the cat to risk life and limb to steal a steak for him from the butcher shop, then bellows, “What? No gravy?” and beats the crap out of the cat. We know how that cat feels. This was actually the first image that popped into my head when I read of the whole cartoon thing. Thought #3: Oh, for cryin’ out loud, really!!? I realized that the nice, innocuous picture I chose from “Go Dog Go” was of the one dog that keeps asking the other, “Do you like my hat?” and the other one keeps saying “I do not.” What sort of subconscious thought process was going on there, with my history of trying to earn my abuser’s approval? In the book, the first dog finally finds a hat that the other deems acceptable and they drive off together to party. I kept trying to find that hat, but in real life it does not exist. An abuser is always going to find something wrong with whatever hat you wear. Lucy will never hold the football for you to kick, Charlie Brown. You’ll never get off the island, Gilligan (I know, Gilligan’s Island wasn’t a cartoon, but still). And if you think to bring gravy, it will be the wrong kind of gravy, or there won’t be enough, or there will be too much, or you’ll be punished for wasting your time getting it: “Did I tell you to bring me gravy? Did I not say, ‘bring me a steak’? I didn’t say a word about gravy, so what the [bleep] do you think you’re doing [bleep]ing around with [bleep]ing gravy? God, I give you a simple task, bring me a steak, and you can’t even do that without [bleep]ing up. Why the [bleep] do I even put up with you?”You know what I’m talking about. So anyway, this cartoon weekend is obviously triggering a reaction related to some of my “unresolved issues”. To say the least. I can’t post any of these thoughts on Facebook, so I’m really thankful that I can post them here. Thanks for listening. –Tre