As bad as all this is, there remains one feature which can-and does-cause virtually a terminal and incurable remorse: the sickening sense that as parents we have failed our children. We have a nagging suspicion that we have failed to face the responsibility of standing alone in independent judgment of the legitimacy of this war, and of encouraging our children to do likewise, regardless of how such a decision might appear to others. We have an obligation to judge, not just what our leaders say, but what we may discover for ourselves if we would only take the time to look further.
Patriotism unqualified is seductive in that it promises us a quick fix to our conflict: Who is going to stand and be counted as one opposed to the noble purpose of risking one's life in wartime? Who would dare find fault with a son or daughter who chooses to fight? On the other hand, is a decision to decline to charge into the fray really a carefully considered one, a decision influenced by the anticipation of society's disapproval, and not one born of weakness, of cowardice?
This is vexing because, in making up our own minds, on the surface it may appear that, in the eyes of others, a decision to refuse to be part of a conflict might be indistinguishable from cowardice. We may even wonder if we are deceiving ourselves.
Watching the films of the 40's, we see scenes in which soldiers are just chomping at the bit to get into the fray, to "pay 'em back for what they did" to our way of life, or to our loved-ones, or to whatever and whomever. As we get older, we smile sheepishly at the re-runs. We are wiser now.
This wisdom is the unspoken remorse that I see in the faces and hear in the words of parents-of Cindy Crawford, of Mary Tillman--and it is unbearable to admit it: Could we have stopped them from going? Should we have tried? Even so, our remorse works its way up perilously close to our consciousness.
If we are to condone the sacrifice of our children and loved ones, it had damn well better be for something so unassailably worth the risk to protect, so dear, so precious, so inescapably important to our country, so cataclysmic in its import that, although never adequate, the conviction that all along there really was only one and only one choice--will be of some solace, without and beyond a shadow of a doubt, to those who were party to that fatal and irrevocable choice,
...unlike the war in Iraq.
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