American Taboo: War Planning is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things

From In Deepest Ohio, I Was Embedded in Bush Bunker, by Philip Weiss, The New York Observer, Oct. 27, 2004:

In my hotel that night, I read a piece being given out at Crunch's headquarters in Butler County. It's called "Don't Close Your Blinds" and is an unsigned parable supposedly narrated by a war vet's mother. (It has also been on the Internet.) A 9-year-old kid asks his parents why we're at war, and the father brings him to the window and tells him to pretend that the neighbors' houses are other countries and that "our house and our yard is the United States of America and you are President Bush."

Then the father tells the boy to pretend that the man across the way is Saddam, who comes out with his wife, "he has her by the hair and he's hitting her." She is "bleeding and crying … then he starts to kick her to death." The man's kids come out but are afraid to stop him. "‘What do you do, son?'

‘I call the police, Dad.'"

But the police are the U.N. They say it's not their place or the son's to get involved. The woman dies.

"Now he is doing the same thing to his children," says the father.

"He kills them?"

"Yes, son, he does."

The son wants to call the neighbors for help, but the father says the neighbors refuse to help.

"‘WHAT DO YOU DO, SON?' Our son starts to cry," the mother says.

Next the man goes into a neighbor's house and kills the old lady there. He sees the son through the window and puffs out his chest and smiles.

The son tells his father he wants to close the blinds and pretend he's not there. O.K., but then the man is at his door.

Now the son tells his father that he's going to fight.

"He balls up his tiny fists and looks his father square in the eyes," the mother recounts. "Without hesitation he says, ‘I DEFEND MY FAMILY, DAD! I'M NOT GONNA LET HIM HURT MOMMY OR MY SISTER …. ' I see a tear roll down my husband's cheek, and he grabs our son to his chest. He hugs him tight and cries, ‘It's too late to fight him. He's too strong and he's already at YOUR front door, son. You should have stopped him BEFORE he killed his wife. You have to do what's right, even if you have to do it alone."

And here we thought the adults were in charge.