REFLECTIONS

All the 911 timelines and videos this week brought these things to mind.

     The day after 9/11/2001 I attended a church service, hoping to join with others in communal prayer, a unity of common purpose, inspiration and comfort.

     I heard peace.       I heard love.    

     I heard nothing of the need for individual and national courage and resolve.

     I heard nothing advocating the pursuit of justice.

     I heard nothing of victory over evil in the name of God Almighty.

     I  found no inspiration and little comfort.

     I went home and cried.

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REALITY    If you're squeamish you might want to skip the rest of this.

     From that day forward, we began to hear and to see from the "experts"  that our children should be protected from seeing the horrors of the day.  Why?

     Why do we protect our children from the world's reality?  They watch the mindless, sensational reality shows on TV. They play video games and watch movies with plenty of gore.  I believe they should see, as should the rest of the country, the jumpers, the confused and frightened humanity and what an abomination was committed against our way of life.

    Perhaps I come at this from the perspective of one who is from a generation that was not so coddled.
As WWII was ending I was 13 years old. We children saw the living skeletons and piled up naked bodies from Auschwicz. Children routinely went to the movies on Saturday. Those sights were in newsreels at theaters between two features, a cartoon and assorted short subjects.

     My parents came home, almost skeletons themselves, after three years in a Japanese prison camp in Manila, PI. They took me to an ex-POW meeting at which films were shown of liberated Manila after 28 days of intense fighting and massacre.  The city was almost totally destroyed. I saw brains spilling out of a Japanese helmet. I saw, bloated, unrecognizable bodies. I saw filipinos with their intestines spilling out of their bayoneted torsos. There were babies, children, women and men. There were Japanese soldiers, charred from flamethrowers.

     My mother wanted me to see what innocent people, adults and children, saw up close and personal. My simple, ration-book life, with few wartime inconveniences, gave me no real concept of what war was really like.  The films, my mother said, were all too accurate, except that the smell of death was missing.

     We should try to protect our children from needless pain and suffering. We hope that they will never have to see what thousands of children , even millions over the years, in Africa, the Middle East, are exposed to every day - fear, violence, permanent, disabling injury, starvation, devastation. We're wrong to shield them from realities that can make them strong., thoughtful citizens.

     Show them what evil can accomplish. Give them a history lesson. Give them resolve. Give them courage.

     Surely we can do that.

9/10/11