The Po Show

Veteran's Day

Veteran's Day is sort of hard for pacifists.

Normally I wouldn't say much about Veteran's Day. We didn't get it off for school when I was a kid. It wasn't a holiday for me at work (except when I worked at the VA). But it's a school holiday here in NY (geez, what ISN'T a school holiday here in NY! Which is nice, but it extends the freaking school year to the end of June!). So I felt like I sort of had to explain to the kids why they were getting a day off from school. Especially Tessa, who wants an explanation (often in-depth) about EVERYTHING.

So I tried to keep it succinct, and just said it was a day to honor the people who had fought in wars. Of course this is not completely accurate, since not all servicepeople have fought in wars (like their Grandpa, who was in the Korean DMZ during the Vietnam War, missing Ross' birth). But I'm just not feeling up to explaining the entire military industrial complex. It's not just hard to explain, but thinking about it makes me physically ill. The kids know, vaguely, what a war is, in that it is a situation in which some people fight some other people, but they have no details.

I don't know, honestly, how much Matthew knows about the war in Iraq. We do not watch TV news, and Ross and I don't talk about the war much, so he doesn't get any exposure at home, but he does go out into the world on a regular basis. I'm sure he's heard something at school at some point. I guess I could ask, but I feel like that's opening a whole can of worms. I guess I would go with the old chestnut "We support the troops but not the war," but that seems like such a cop-out to me.

We're on borrowed time about having to talk about war, though, I think. At some point the kids are going to ask (again, probably Tessa). And the complexity of trying explain pacifism appeals to me about as much as trying to explain agnostism (a WHOLE NOTHER issue on which we're on borrowed time! I have had to try to work through questions of what a church is, and what happens to people when they die. God has been briefly touched upon. I'd rather talk about where babies come from. But I digress).

It was so much easier when my kids were two and were only concerned with how to make Teletubbies appear on the television :p.