This morning on the BBC they announced that there are currently 62 Legos for every one human on the planet; if anyone feels that their share of this Lego bounty is not enough, take my Legos. Please. And while you’re at it, take my husband’s, too. And, most especially, please take my children’s.
Not that they have that many Legos to take, because, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned numerous times in this space before, I hate Legos. I don’t dislike them; I am not annoyed by them; I hate them. I hate them all the way from their primo infancy right through their duplo adolescence to their fully formed adult Lego selves. And yes, I know that in this I am not unique: many people have expressed the same legophobia (misolegogy?) that I do, but I would like to believe that my reasons for hating Legos are a little bit unique.
You see, what I hate about Legos is not their multitudiniousness; while it is true that I intensely dislike the way they can quickly come to fill every concave surface in a house, multiplying faster than a Tribble, I do not hate that aspect of their existence. And I do not hate them because they are essentially nocturnal creatures that travel along unseen but long established migration routes that always seem to include my shoes; again, I intensely dislike this, but I do not hate it. And I certainly don’t hate them for their provenance. Although I know that after the great Danish cartoon flap of 2005 some Muslims urged a boycott of all things Danish (including Legos, blue cheese, and one can only hope, that awful canned ham), that is not the reason behind my own hatred of Legos. (If anything, that controversy almost made me do the unthinkable, and buy Legos in support of the Danes–I ended up doubling up on blue cheese instead). No, what I hate about Legos is how they always seem to come in creativity-numbing “sets.”
The Hogwarts set. The Star Wars set. The Lord of the Rings set. And how each set contains just enough Legos to complete the project pictured–just enough, and no more, so that once a crucial piece goes missing, the entire set gets poured into the ubiquitous Lego “stew.” Dumbledore got sucked up the vacuum? Two hundred grey “Hogwarts” pieces go into the pot. The blast doors on the rebel base at Hoth got flushed down the toilet? Three hundred white “snow” bricks go in. I realize, of course, that it is not supposed to be this way; the whole idea behind Legos is that they are supposed to encourage a child’s ability to play creatively and independently, so that, in theory, even without all the pieces to make one of the Lego “sets” a child will still be able to have hours of fun using the million of leftover bricks to build their “own imaginative world.”
In theory. Of course, what this theory fails to take into account is that these are kids that have been raised in a world where they sell the ingredients for S’mores already shrink-wrapped together. Where sock monkeys are made not out of a pair of old socks, but from Sock Monkey Craft Project Kits–socks included. Where all the materials needed to make “your own tree house” come together in one big box–shipped from China. I’m surprised that somebody hasn’t started selling bottles of water boxed up with a tray as “ice cube kits.”
What they really need to spark children’s creativity is to sell some kind of a Lego “Macguyver” set, where kids can gather up all of the leftover pieces of all their other sets and do something useful–or at least fun–with them. Then again, it’s probably against the law to sell propane torches to minors.