War and Culture

A few evenings ago and several hundred miles away I said goodbye to a little boy. He hugged me along time as I knelt there before the doorway to the place where he would have to stay. “I love you Daddy. I love you” he said over and over again. I told him that I loved him too and that I would call him soon. And then, as I stepped back, still whispering words of encouragement and love, he stood facing me in the doorway, his baseball cap on his head and tears in his eyes. “Goodbye Daddy. Goodbye, goodbye…”

The next day having returned home to a quiet house filled with his toys, books, games, his Bruins mug on the table next to mine, I glanced at the front page of a newspaper. “Gaining a Scholar, Losing a Child,” said the headline in pleasantly amused and sentimental fashion. It told of the pangs and confusion of parents whose teen-aged children decamp to college. It prominently quoted one mother, a professor no less, who stated quite seriously that she had been dreading this day of leave taking since her child was five years old. How privileged to be able to afford and expend such grief on a small and natural passage.

But give the situation its due. Even natural rites of passage that ripen and occur in their own good time bring pain with them, even when pleasures attend. The problem is not in giving attention to such natural separations, the problem is in ignoring those that are unnecessary, forced, brutally harsh and, often, damaging. (more…)