Our Children’s World

Yesterday I was driving the girls into town and on the way I passed a young man in a wheelchair. He was in the wheelchair because he didn’t have any legs. As I drove by he looked up and smiled and waved, and I smiled and waved back, even though we do not know each other. His face was bright and healthy looking, his hair thick, his shoulders broad. And in that instant I knew, I knew so clearly, that he didn’t have any legs because he had been in the war. This war, our war. The war I marched against once, before I had children, the war that I have never supported, the war that I have not done nearly, remotely, vaguely enough to register my outrage over. The war I sometimes forget about for days at a time.

We parents talk so much about the world our children will grow up in, the warming world where floods and famine will become even more common, the world where mountains of plastic diapers and empty Evian bottles will greet them at every turn. The world where our kids will roll their eyes when we reminisce about texting and IM and how much we loved our iphones, and then turn away from us to engage with their friends using a device we can’t quite master.

But we never talk about the world they will grow up in where their boyfriend’s father did three tours and doesn’t have any legs. We never talk about the world where their college roommate’s aunt is homeless because she can’t stop thinking about what she did in Fallujah long enough to hold down a job.

Yesterday while I was nursing June I read a George Packer article in the New Yorker about the dilemma Barack Obama will face as the election grows nearer and Iraq becomes, despite us, more stable. What will his pull-out strategy be? Whatever it is, and I hope–Lord, how I hope–it is smart and swift, I am more interested in his strategy for healing those who have been broken by this war. Get out soon, I say. Hell, get out on January 21. Then let’s turn around and look behind us at the souls for whom we did not get out soon enough.