Fathers Battling Injustice

For me, it was the Iraq war.

Posted By: Biodad
Date: Wednesday, 15 March 2000, at 12:08 a.m.

Is it manlike to keep your eyes & ears open: to be wary, sensual, ready for action. Or is that just the role of hunter? What does it mean to seek the truth?

I met some of the survivors from Kuait City who fled that August. Their stories were horrendous. Nothing but a couple of sound bites about it being occupied.

Other things had happened then too. The “Evil Empire” had fallen, troops were based in Europe with nowhere to go but home. Not another Vietnam!

We had the Oka crisis, with police cars stacked like golf carts, army men and razor wire.

I must say, those days were pretty good because I had a companion sitting beside me on the couch. My daughter. Was it just the summer before that she had wanted me to come out, but I wanted to keep watching the news?

Urging me that no one watched it in her house, or wasn’t important, didn’t make any sense - we spoke. O.K. “To see what’s going on in other places in the world”, she agreed and sat down.

Almost incredibly, there were three items about children that day. She read and understood. Became almost a favourite show. An accomplished conversationalist, neighbours were impressed, commenting on her knowledge of current events.

But you know, I think it was really something that she shared with her dad. The popular appeal, a bonus.

Three months later all this stuff about Kuait starts pounding. An enemy appears. The hardware looses on a cold night in February. Murder in the name of glory. A friend of mine, a sailor at sea, asks me to tape the news for him. But I stop after the third or fourth night, taping the same footage.

And it’s March Break or weekend reprieve and a grade four student is spouting classroom rhetoric about “a big country beating up a little country”. We talk and reason. Yes, that is so. But also, United States is a big country beating up a little country. Does that make it right?

She ponders a moment. No. A quizzical look. A thought almost as loud as a sentence: Maybe everything is not as it seems?

This is the question that irks the ire. And, hopefully, eventually will set my children free. My favourite slogan from the antiwar days: “War is unhealthy for Children and Other living things.”. Too bad so many forgot (or, perhaps, never really knew).

Messages In This Thread

For me, it was the Iraq war.
Biodad -- Wednesday, 15 March 2000, at 12:08 a.m.

Did you read the postscript
Athena -- Wednesday, 15 March 2000, at 7:22 p.m.

Re: the postscript
Biodad -- Wednesday, 15 March 2000, at 11:14 p.m.