If you want to see yet another way in which our War On (SCTHANTDW911O) Terror is hurting America, you need only look at this disturbing drawing by my eight-year-old nephew…
(Click for a 1024×768 resolution of the picture)
My nephew was visiting last weekend. I don’t have kids, so there’s not a whole bunch of toys to play with. I gave him some paper and some markers and let him just create.
On my wall I have three laminated full-page copies of my hometown newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, from September 12th, 2001. The bold headlines read ATTACKED and Terror and tears and various pictures show the burning towers, the people running from the cloud emanating from the towers’ collapse, and many pictures of frightened, crying people.
As he poured over the newsprint, I realized that he was four-years-old when this happened. “Do you remember September 11th?” I asked. He told me he could not remember it happening, but that he was really interested in it.
I thought about how terrifying it must be to be so young a child in these times. Sure, my generation grew up with the possibility of nuclear holocaust, and my parents’ generation remember vividly the duck-under-your-desk drills. But we never actually experienced that horror. No bombs ever went off, and by the time I was out of college, the USSR didn’t even exist anymore.
Not so for today’s kids. They’ve got concrete evidence of their bogeyman.
My wife’s sister told me that my nephew has always been fascinated with 9/11. He draws pictures about it and asks about it constantly. He’s also very curious about the war. My wife’s sister is somewhat of a Volvo-and-Birkenstock peacenik, so you can imagine how this upsets her. She’s even very diligent about managing his television time and controlling his exposure to such things.
His first picture for me was a picture of the Twin Towers, one on fire and the other one with that familiar picture of a listing jumbo jet about to crash into the face of the second. He was copying it from the Idaho Statesman photo.
But the picture you see above was all from his imagination. The Iraq War started when he was six, old enough that he can remember it. Look at the detail in his imagery. He’s got the Air Force involved; a fighter jet dropping an “atomic bomb” from the clouds. He’s got the Navy involved; a battleship launching an “air torpido” from the sea. He’s got the Army involved; a tanker with a machine gun and a soldier throwing a grenade. He’s got the Marines involved; a Marine wields a flamethrower. And for some reason unknown to me, he has a giant wrecking ball on a chain.
Saddest of all; the center of the picture. A small child, crying “aaaaaaaa”. The bombs, grenades, torpedoes, bullets, flames, and wrecking ball all threatening his encircled form. And he’s labeled “dieing kid”. Not “dieing Iraqi kid”, not “dieing American kid”, not even “me”. “Dieing kid”.
Sometimes children see the truth better than adults.
I told him that he didn’t need to worry, that he was quite safe. He answered nonchalantly, “I know.” Yet I still worry, knowing that my gentle, adorable little young man lives in a world that fills his mind with scenes of brutal chaos and destruction. I worry about his nightmares and his future.
And I curse Osama bin Laden and the terrorists who created this new terrible world for my nephew. I curse George W. Bush and his maladministration who either made it happen, let it happen, or were too incompetant to stop it. And I curse the neo-con radicals and the rapture-hungry extremists who supported this illegal and immoral war and fanned the flames of violence and hatred until they’ve spilled out of an innocent boy’s mind as fear and hopelessness, drawn on a page in Crayola marker.
