On the way to school today my kids say a homeless dude (Combat-Disabled Nam veteran if his sign was fully truthful) in a cammo jacket. While we were stopped at a light, somone honked to him and he hobbled with a cane through a couple lanes of stopped traffic and collected a donation & hobbled/hopped back to his curb.
Kids being what they are (the two who did most of the talking are 6 & 8 years old), decided that he must have been an old man because of his cane. I corrected them by advising that his sign says he was wounded in a war. All hell broke loose.
Kids: Was he one of our guys?
Me: Yes
Kids: Did you know him?
Me: No, I was your age when he got hurt.
Kids: Why does he live on the street?
Me: Probably he can’t get a job to buy a place to live.
Kids: YOU don’t need to be able to walk for your job. Why can’t he get one like yours?
Me: Probably he’s a little nuts from the war as well as having a bad leg. Sometimes wars do that to people.
Kids: So the war hurt him and made him crazy too?
Me: I think so.
Kids: Why’d he go to the war then?
Me: Because his president asked him to, and he thought he had to go.
2 minutes of silence followed, during which time I thought they’d moved on to something else
Kids: We’re at war now aren’t we?
Me: Yes.
Kids: Why?
Me: Because our president thought we needed to go to war.
Kids: Will people end up on the street like that man?
Me: Most won’t, some certainly will.
Kids: Is he doing anything for the people that get hurt? To give them a place to live if they go crazy from the war?
Me: No, not really.
Kids: Did he ever go to a war?
Me: No.
Kids: But he sends people to wars and then doesn’t take care of them when the come home crazy?
Me: Yes.
Kids: He sucks.
Me: (laughing) why do you say that?
Kids: Because he’s afraid to go to a war and get hurt, but he doesn’t care if he makes someone else do it.
Me: I guess that’s right.
ParentalAdvisory, would it matter to a 6 or 8 year old if a war is fought by volunteers or draftees? I didn’t press them for a cite re the cowardice issue–as a veteran I have my own opinions on the matter which I don’t share with the kids.
I was just entertained by their logic and childish sense of self-righteousness. Whether or not they have a firm grasp of the facts takes a back seat to their sense of what is right. That’s all.
If he’s a normal human being, he was afraid. What other reason was there to avoid combat? Or was he just overly concerned about the Viet Cong attacking Texas?
Is there a plausible explanation for his avoiding combat beyond the one the majority of sane humans would share?
Kids have a real talent for getting down to the nitty-gritty of something. “Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten.” Thanks, Inigo – and give your kids a hug for me; they’re wise.
I work with two Thai immigrants who have a 10-year-old daughter. I am her math tutor, and she is the apple of my eye.
Since I don’t like people to acquire political opinions before they can reason sufficiently, I assiduously avoid giving her my opinions on politics. (I do always make a point of referring to our leaders pretty much like I address her teachers, with the appropriate titles).
She offered the opinion during the first debate that “President Bush is stubborn.”
It made my day to hear Kerry offer a similar assessment a few days’ later (‘stubborn incompetence’, IIRC).
Exactly. I was having dinner with a friend (who, like me, is without children) last night, and we were talking about how if we DID have kids, they’d turn out the exact opposite from us (and from the kind of kids we imagine, in all of our ego-trippery, that we’d have).
For her, that would mean having a daughter who’s a cheerleader, reads nothing but Harlequins, and pledges the pinkest sorority on campus.
For me that would be a daughter who hates spa treatments, reads nothing but electrical engineering magazines, and joins the Televangelists Are Too Damn Liberal Club.
Inigo’s kids, on the other hand, are just the kind of kids I’d like (how does the 8-year-old feel about pedicures?); smart, capable of critical thinking, and compassionate. Doesn’t get better than that.
How about that his daddy pulled strings so he’d be in the National Guard rather than Vietnam, which came out during the first time he ran for President.
My daughter hates GWB. Of course, I sort of precipitated this. She’s been less than thrilled about our relocation to Florida from Ohio, mainly because she misses her school and friends there. When she asked why we had to move down here I told her it was because of the President I didn’t have a job up there anymore, which is technically not true, but there is some truth in the statement, IMO.
So I let the two kids (ages 6 & 8) stay up to watch the first debate. My daughter points to Bush when he started getting all weasely and said, “He’s lying, daddy, he’s lying! Look at him you can tell he’s lying!”
Now I wish I hadn’t “poisoned the well”, so to speak, so that I could have seen her unbiased reaction. I’m fairly sure it would have been the same, but there’s no way to know.
