March 15, 2003
Ronald C. Kiener
My 14-year-old daughter has just participated in her first student walkout in protest of the upcoming war in Iraq, for which she will likely receive a detention. I am pretty certain I was a bit older when I first helped lead a walkout at my high school in protest of the Vietnam War.
I am so very proud of my daughter for standing up for her principles and for having the courage to defy the conventions of her placid high school to protest in the cold rain this upcoming war. But she and I cannot discuss these matters, for she knows I am absolutely in favor of this war, and as she said to me the other night: "Dad, you know so much more about that part of the world. I'll never be able to win the argument, so let's just not talk about it."
As a college student in the early 1970s, I marched in the streets, learned how to use a wet washcloth to fend off tear gas and sat through organizational meetings to help mobilize against a war. As a college professor today, I have to decide what I will do with students who absent themselves from my class to protest a war I support.
This life-changing moment for my daughter is something I deeply understand and honor, and yet, separated by 30 years of life experiences, it is something I cannot share. I am flooded with torn emotions - I recognize the revulsion of a war that will kill innocent children, and yet I find myself craving the upcoming battle, anticipating the breaking news that the bombs have started to fall. Have I succumbed to bloodlust? Am I now a living repudiation of everything I stood for 30 years ago?
And so I flash back to that horrible day. Driving into work listening to the Don Imus show, hearing the first reports of a plane hitting the South Tower. Stopping in the audiovisual office in my building to watch the first videotapes of the second plane hitting the North Tower. Going to my 9:55 class - Introduction to Islam - and explaining to my 100 students that something horrible had happened and to keep an eye out for the name Osama bin Laden. Watching the department secretary come bursting into the classroom, telling me to call my daughter at her school, because Mom was in New York City and no one could reach her. Suspending class, hugging a crying student whose father worked just blocks from the World Trade Center. Driving through an eerily quiet West Hartford, noting the presence of police cruisers at many intersections. Trying to steer the car, listen to the radio and talk on the cellphone to my brother in Minneapolis. Arriving at school to retrieve my beside-herself daughter just as a police car came to secure the school.
Yes, I know more about the region than my daughter does. I know what a majority of Americans seem to know - that this war fever I am consumed with is some horrible blowback of an unfinished war and an inexcusable foreign entanglement from a time before my daughter was born. That Donald Rumsfeld gleefully shook hands with the tyrant of Baghdad in 1983. That Saddam Hussein is involved up to his eyeballs in what transpired that horrible day in September 2001. That within minutes of the assault on the World Trade Center, our bumbling joke-of-a-president had suddenly become the Churchillian leader of a nation at war. That World War III would ultimately not be just about Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden, but about terror-sponsoring countries, with Iraq at the top of the list.
But my beloved brave protester knows something that I have long ago forgotten: that it is unimaginable to think of growing up into a world of anger, unending violence and hatred. That it seems much more sensible to yearn for peace than hope for war. That innocence is preferable to cynical calculation. That human life ought to be more valued than convoluted history lessons. That the warmth of a daughter's smile is more important than the anger seething in a father's heart.
So, my daughter and I cannot discuss this war. I know war is the right thing to do, and if I were of volunteer age, I would be there to defend my country against the barbarians at the gate. She knows it is the wrong thing to do, and will commit her noble soul to remind all of us of the value of living life to the fullest.
I am not the first parent to say this, nor will I be the last: "I love you, Daughter, but you are mistaken." She is not the first child to say this, nor will she be the last: "I love you, Dad, but you are mistaken." I just hope we'll be able to sort out this moment 20 years from now - alive, smiling and safe.
Ronald C. Kiener is associate professor of religion at Trinity College.