When I was a little kid growing up in Hawaii I had tons of Asian school friends. They were from all over Asia, but mostly China or Japan. We also had a television. We watched Neil Armstrong take his first step as we drank our Tang (tasty) and ate our chocolate space sticks (really gross). We also got to watch the Vietnam War every evening. There wasn't much coverage on the Cultural Revolution, although that gave me nightmares for years.
The idea of bringing the war into our living rooms was new. TV wasn't that very old and so this was something that we could do. Frankly, it's a really bad idea. You may think that it's odd that these days the newscaster gives you a heads up if they are going to show something questionable, so you have time to tell the kids to go in the kitchen and make some popcorn. When they have really gross footage, they don't even show it. What they learned was that watching a man having his brains blown out on TV really upset people.
There were lots of things in the news in those days that I didn't understand, but I didn't know enough to know how to ask about it. How can people be so against youth in Asia? What did youth in Asia ever do to them? Also, who came up with the brilliant idea of giving guns to gorillas? It seemed highly unlikely that those big gorilla fingers could even fire a gun.
One evening's news made a huge impact on me. There were some soldiers rounding up little kids and taking from their families to I don't know where. One of the crying girls looked exactly like one of my friends at school. I panicked. I was desperate for answers... Where are they taking them? What will happen to them? Where are their mothers? No one in my family knew. My father, who went to Viet Nam for work fairly regularly set me down for a talk. (Similar, I'm sure, with zillion of family talks after 9/11.)
So the girls hadn't done anything wrong? No. Their mom's hadn't done anything wrong? No. But our leaders disagree with their leaders and hence we have a war. And why are children being napalmed, or having vaccinated limbs chopped off? Well... because it isn't legal to single out a single person for assassination, it wouldn't be right. It's okay to kill lots and lots of people who had nothing to do with it, but it's not okay to just kill the guy we have beef with. Wow.
President Obama catches flak for sending drones to just kill the guys he has a beef with. The six year old in me can tell you that that is a much better policy. Yes, it's true that sometimes the people right around the target also gets killed. That's tragic. It isn't as tragic as if the whole country gets punished. There are complex problems about due process etc. If you cut off the head off the leader of our enemies, another will appear. (Hey, some of my best jobs were caused by power vacuums.) Cut off as many snake heads as you want but LEAVE THE LITTLE GIRLS OUT OF IT!
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