I'm a Bad Dad -

I'm a Bad Dad - James Lileks writes about a handout he got at his daughter's play group, about what to tell your kids about terrorism:

If your children ask, “What if another country attacks us?” tell them that by working with as many countries as possible, eradicating hunger, poverty, and preventable diseases, it will be less likely that this will happen. Tell them that is very important that all of us work to prevent the conditions that lead to war, and these are some of the root causes.

Other things we can do are: Be willing to not build as many nuclear weapons so that other countries don’t feel they have to build them to keep up with us.

Also let your children know that there may be certain instances where we have no choice but to protect ourselves like if we were directly attacked, but this isn't happening now.

Hm. Tha'ts not what I told my kids.

I remember the night of September 11. I told my kids that the world was full of people, most of whom love us, many of whom say they love us but put on like they hate us to impress their neighbors (being elementary school students, that made perfect sense to them), and some - a tiny minority - that hate us for being what we are.

I told them that we've made our mistakes over the years, but that we try to be the kind of nation people love; that we are the kind of nation the people who pretend to hate us mostly want to move to someday; and that the people that hate us, largely hate us not because of what we do, but because of what we are: Christians, Jews, or just free people in a society where people of all faiths and philosophies get along without blowing each other up (much).

And I told them that we try very hard to get along with those that hate us; we bend over backwards, in fact, more than does any other country in the world (which is true). We have entire branches of our state department that do nothing but apologize for our past, for crying out loud.

But there are people whose hatred is so deep, so intense, so unreasonable that there is no apology, no restitution, no reasoning that will make them stop. They're the kind of people that fly planes full of innocent people into skyscrapers full of other innocent people. And for them (or the ones they leave behind), we have cops and satellites and spies that go out and find the bad guys; planes that can fly halfway around the world and drop bombs down their chimneys; we have soldiers that drop out of the night to find the bad guys and haul them off to jail and leave all kinds of mayhem in their wake.

And they have a daddy that knows how to do everything from build a safe room to shoot a teeny tiny, tight little group with a Colt .45, and who has declared our yard a terrorist-free zone. Y'know - a daddy who doesn't feel helpless. Either should they.

Real terror - the kind of thing that gives people Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the real kind - comes from feeling absolutely helpless in the face of an intractable threat. I think it also comes from relying on unreliable people and institutions, like the United Nations, to protect you from the evil that walks the earth.

So I don't tell my kids about the UN and our culpability for all the world's ills and 34 flavors of mealy-mouthed phony diversity; I tell them that the United States is usually what I'm trying to raise them to be; thoughtful, fair, avoiding violence as far is is morally practical - and if someone just won't let it drop, and threatens you that badly, capable of thumping that person so hard that they reconsider their ways (and if they thump anyone that doesn't genuinely have it coming, Daddy's going to have some big words with them...)

Note to the Minneapolis Public Schools; I'm available for speeches to students. Feel free to call.

Posted by Mitch at March 4, 2003 07:48 AM