watching the news these last few weeks
has been giving me a huge deja vus
and i'm not talking about a deja vus for 911
or the gulf war although that's certainly there
i'm talking about a major deja vus for my childhood
i don't remember much about the vietnam war
i was 8 when it ended certainly old enough to have been affected
i do remember being taught somehow that the news was for grown-ups
not for kids
i remember nixon
and i remember thinking he was the only president i would ever know
because he seemed to be around for so much of my beginning childhood
i did feel during the vietnam era
that there was something going on outside my world that i was not supposed to know about
there were a lot of things like that in my childhood
when my parents had trouble with each other
when they decided to keep separate bedrooms
on separate floors in the house
i had the sense that there was something in my world that wasn't
well kosher...but it was kept at bay
it was kept out of my reality
my parents never did split up
they stayed together until death do them part
but now as an adult
i can look back and know that their marriage
was not an easy, loving, romantic one
it was not any of the things i would hope to have in my own
and yet we, the kids, were protected from knowing this
i can't say that knowing would have bettered my life
i might have been even more neurotic
or less
it's kinda the same with the vietnam war
i was vaguely aware of it knocking on the perimeters
of my childhood
i knew there was something dark and bloody out there
but it never got in
so here i am again
watching the war on the news
seeing the explosions
for months i've known that no matter what the U.N. said
no matter what the inspectors did
no matter what allies rallied around us
we were going to war
i haven't been able to take a stand against it
because one thing i do know
is that saddam hussein is a monster
if for no other reason that the liberation of his people
he has to go
but why now?
why today?
why with such a fury?
why not 12 years ago when we risked the lives of so many of our own
to push him back?
what is the hidden agenda?
what is the terrible dark thing knocking just outside our horizon that
we don't know about it
and are we better off not knowing?
being an American today
reminds me a lot of being a child
we're given partial stories
geered to inspire us to patriotism
to rage
to support of our parental government
but we can feel
knocking..off in the hazy distance
the real truths
wanting to be heard
i for one
would like to take the risk of what all this knowledge might do to my pshyche
and hear the whole truths
then again
i saw "the matrix" three times
i want to be un-plugged
