War


We

Are

Responsible.




I have came to that conclusion after a conversation with my 13-year-old son. It is not easy explaining the world today in terms that kids can comprehend. I hardly have a grasp on it and I am a great deal older and wiser than he is - or so I thought.

After a battle for the computer last night, my son claimed his stance, "All you do is read news on the computer--- go watch it on TV so I can play my game."

I tried to explain to him that real news is on the Internet, not in the television. He was not buying it though.

"If the news on TV is not the real news, then why it is on at all" was his comeback.

"Here we go," I thought to myself and calmly tried to explain to him that the news we watch on TV is a business. In addition, as employees of any business, they have bosses. And their bosses have bosses and everyone who wants to keep their jobs do what the Big Bosses say.

And especially since 9/11, the Big Bosses do not want the people to know everything that is going so they either don't tell us or they spin things so much that I get dizzy watching them.

I explained that is why I call them trained monkeys. "There are no trained monkeys on the Internet" I explained, "Just real news, if you know where to go look".

I felt smug … I won - now he can go watch Spongebob until I was finished reading the news.

However, I was wrong - he wanted to know what news the Big Bosses didn't want anyone to know. I explained it had a lot to do with the war in Afghanistan and important information we didn't want the enemy to know.

The conversation went something like this .....

"Well, Afghanistan is our enemy"

"No, the people who live in Afghanistan are not our enemies"

"They have to be our enemy, because we dropped bombs on them"

"No, we dropped bombs on the bad guys"

How can a bomb tell who is the good guy and who is the bad guy?"

Well, the bomb cant but the pilot knows"

"The pilot can see the people and tell who is good and who is bad?"

"No, they base it on locations of where they think the bad guys are" (I started feeling a bit queasy.)

"Why didn't we drop a bomb on that Laden guy who flew planes in the Twin Towers?"

"We tried, but we could not find him."

"Then who did we bomb?"

"Training camps of the bad guys and places we thought the bad guys were at and we took the Taliban out of power."

"But we didn't bomb the people who attacked us?"

"Not exactly." "We bombed the country that let Osama live there."

"The people all liked him living in Afghanistan?"

"No the people didn't really like him but they could not stop what was going on."

"So the people got bombed even though it was not their fault he lived there? Thats crazy"


He was quiet for a minute and I thought the conversation was over finally.


Then he asked, "Afghanistan is not our enemy but we killed the people there? Is that why we had to send them money last year? To say we are sorry for dropping bombs on them?"


"Here, you can play your game for an hour then I get the computer back."

"Finally"


I managed to finish that discussion but he left me with a thought

-- "To say we are sorry" --

We destroy a country then we rebuild it. To say we are sorry? Or simply because we are responsible for the destruction to begin with.

In this case, the destruction goes back to the Cold War when we just up and left after getting Russia out of power.

Maybe they knew then we would go back someday.

We must always clean up our mess.

Tara