With this post, I am simply adding to the swirls of hot, vapid e-air that circulate our e-planet these days.
Yet today my goat was gotten such that it felt appropriate.
I found it tough to complete this story this morning without getting too worked up. You see, something dark has happened to America under Bush. Me and those in my profession might end up holding the blame, I don’t know-time will tell, but it isn’t really complicated.
It is usually at this point in these sorts of discussions that my Christian faith gets called into question… or the facts of the Iraq War, whichever prove more damning witnesses to my viewpoint. (Notice: Christian faith or matters of history-of equal value for character assassination!)
So I won’t speak to any of that, as you likely wouldn’t listen anyway.
If you’ll keep reading, though, I’ll share a story with you. However fact challenged or politically myopic you might be, perhaps this will rouse you to think a little more about our world and your faith.
I was talking to two former students today at the school where I teach, both two of the very sharpest in their 9th grade class (no correlation there, obviously).
At random, one of the girls asked me, “Hey, are you Obama?!?” [in obvious reference to the Obama bumper sticker I sport these days.]
“Yup,” went my weary mumble as I attacked my pre-Finals-grading salad.
The look of bumfuzzlement was classic that this incredibly bright girl and her friend shared, such that I don’t remember what her exact rejoinder was. I’m sure some standard interrogative to the effect of, ‘why,’ ‘how,’ or even ‘how could you!?!’.
I’ll save the bulk of the conversation for the Whammo! Special Edition DVD version and skip to why you care.
She asked me why I didn’t support McCain, which I thought was a fair enough question. I don’t get that one often, to be honest. As I’ve shared before, though, for me all things come back to the Iraq War. So, I told this girl that I did not support the war (her friend’s eyes got as round as a donut at this point) from its genesis (eyes to about the size of the face of my watch) but of course support the troops now (back to skeptical but otherwise almond-sized).
“But they attacked us!”, said Interlocutor #1.
In my rush to verify what I thought I heard I stumbled over my next question, but indeed it was what I had assumed: this rising 10th grader, one of the sharpest of her class, a student of history, politics and religion at a pretty nice private Christian school (if I should say so myself), believes that a war willfully initiated by her leaders, preemptively, under false pretenses, was done so because of the terrorist actions of a rogue group based in an entirely unrelated country some 15 months prior.
The alarms weren’t quite going off in my head. This girl has a few years left with us, and then college will clear things up for her. But to be alive and roughly aware of major world events taking place (she would have been in 6th grade when the war on Iraq started), yet still hold that we attacked Iraq because they were somehow involved with 9/11… Such a rare find as that seemed something more the realm of Indiana Jones than of Mr. Parnell, and she has certainly been on my mind all day since.
We ended our conversation on a pleasant note, with her promising that she was going to ‘do some research’ and that we would have a ‘debate’ about this. I eagerly anticipate that, although I’m not really sure through what issues of fact she and I need to reason. (Either way, I told her to hunt down some sources beyond just Wikipedia.)
With that in mind then, here is the memo that I would send to the President, Vice President and Karl Rove:
Mission Accomplished, sirs. You have successfully perpetuated a lie to multiple generations of patriotic Americans within your own lifetimes.
A legacy indeed.
Now as I was piecing this post together in my head, all I could really think of for trying to end on a note of hope was to simply say, “come Lord Jesus, come.” We pass dark times in a dark world, and the power men trade amongst themselves is still shuffled between bloodstained hands.
We have no other hope but you, Lord.
Do come soon.
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