{we rearranged again}
When I was nine years old, I remember being in the car with my Dad one evening, around twilight. We were turning off of our cul-de-sac, probably heading out to pick up Italian Food, and in a few months, the first Iraq war would break out. We’d been learning about US history in school and my idea of war was one where my safe nine-year-old world would be instantly under attack, soldiers running down the streets, bombs falling from the sky, my very existence threatened.
I had to know. “Dad?” I asked, with no sense of irony. “What’s going to happen if we go to war?”
My Dad is from a generation that lived through the draft. His army jacket was a regular part of my tween wardrobe. His Father and Step-Father fought on the front lines of a World War. He knew that the cost of battle wasn’t an abstract thing.
“Hopefully we won’t.” he replied.
“But what if we do?” I drilled it down to the core of my nine-year-old concerns. “Is America going to be attacked?”
Instead of rolling through the residential stop sign, my Dad came to a complete stop. “You don’t have to worry about that” he assured me; “that’s not going to happen in your life time.”
* * *
Yesterday, as we all know, a massive tragedy struck Boston. And it occurs to me that we are raising our children in a completely different world than we were raised in. As I discussed the attack at the Marathon with the adults in my life yesterday, I was gripped with the realization that each and every one of us had experienced first hand an attack on homeland soil. There’s very little we can do stop our kids from seeing that the world isn’t as safe a place as we’d like it to be. I looked at my daughter, eating her cereal this morning, still blissfully unaware for now, and I cried. Because this world is in a sad state.
But then in my Internet travels today I came across this thought from the late Fred Rogers, and it helped…just a little bit.
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