The United States has been at war in Afghanistan since the fall of my second grade year, and in Iraq for half of the years I have been in school. In all that time, and in all of the years that we watched Channel One News in the mornings, we never saw a casket, never heard about the war dead or the loss of limbs, and only heard about veterans one day a year.

That changed last Tuesday.

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have all been President of the United States during my schooling, and all three have addressed the nation’s students in the first weeks of school. Clips of these addresses were shown on Channel One, or the existence of the speeches was mentioned in news stories. There was never any controversy.

That changed this September.

This August, we were warned that the President was scheduled to speak to students across the nation, and the news media was full of dire predictions of this unprecedented address. We were originally asked to have our parents sign a form saying that we could listen to the fifteen minute national pep rally for paying attention and focusing on our studies, with the option of spending that time in another room. Then the speech was canceled except in U.S. government classes. Our infantile minds were apparently not prepared to absorb such concepts as hard work and setting goals.

image via Fort Hood Sentinel

And yet, we were apparently sufficiently mature to watch last week’s memorial service from Fort Hood. Without warning and without parental permission, this solemn service and the words of the President and several reverends were shown school-wide, in class.

Tuesday’s memorial honored the fallen soldiers who died here in Texas, those killed by one of their own, a member of the Fort Hood family. Perhaps seeing the memorial was appropriate, but not without any prior indication that it would be shown.

In many ways I am different from my classmates, but I was far more prepared for hearing the President’s scholastic encouragement than for seeing the empty boots of fallen soldiers and hearing the roll-call and the sound of taps. My brother wears the same uniform as the grieving soldiers, and he has served at Fort Hood. I lived with him at Fort Hood during one of his trainings for his career as an army truck mechanic. The buildings in the background of the live shots were familiar to me, and I imagined that afternoon what it would be like to attend a memorial for my own brother. I was distraught Tuesday and am still emotional as I think back. I hope he remains alive well into his 90s, and I am more than resigned to grieve for him when I reach ninety myself.

Most of Fort Hood’s dead are honored with ceremonies similar to the service last week. The rituals are the same though the crowds are much smaller. The news doesn’t tell us about the 70 Fort Hood soldiers who committed suicide in the first half of 2009. We have not seen military funerals for any of the 5000 military service members killed in combat in Iraq or Afghanistan since I learned to write my name in cursive. Our morning announcements don’t indicate the number of those forever wounded in body or soul in that time. And we have certainly seen no mention of Afghan or Iraqi civilians killed by our military since my adult teeth started coming in.

Funerals and memorial services can be very traumatic, and the sight of empty combat boots is intended to sadden us. Many of my classmates have never been to a funeral, and fewer still have family members serving in the armed forces. Almost none have a family member deployed in a war zone. Our first military funeral should not have come unannounced and unanticipated.

image via CBC

There was a memorial vigil at Fort Hood tonight, but I didn’t get a chance to go. I have been thinking all day about who might be mourning the soldiers who died.

Do you know this Dixie Chicks song? The girl who is mourning the dead soldier (from the Vietnam War) is mourning alone under the stands at a HS football game, and no one even knows that she knew him, that she fell in love with him.

President Obama and everyone else has sent their sympathies to the families of all of the people who were killed yesterday here in Texas, but I wonder if there’s anyone else mourning who is just crying by themselves under the stands.

It’s a real tragedy. I don’t think we understand enough about what happened, but we know enough that it’s time to end all of the wars.

Lyrics:

“Travelin’ Soldier”

Two days past eighteen
He was waiting for the bus in his army green
Sat down in a booth in a cafe there
Gave his order to a girl with a bow in her hair
He’s a little shy so she gives him a smile
And he said would you mind sittin’ down for a while
And talking to me,
I’m feeling a little low
She said I’m off in an hour and I know where we can go

So they went down and they sat on the pier
He said I bet you got a boyfriend but I don’t care
I got no one to send a letter to
Would you mind if I sent one back here to you

Chorus: I cried
Never gonna hold the hand of another guy
Too young for him they told her
Waitin’ for the love of a travelin’ soldier
Our love will never end
Waitin’ for the soldier to come back again
Never more to be alone when the letter said
A soldier’s coming home

So the letters came from an army camp
In California then Vietnam
And he told her of his heart
It might be love and all of the things he was so scared of
He said when it’s getting kinda rough over here
I think of that day sittin’ down at the pier
And I close my eyes and see your pretty smile
Don’t worry but I won’t be able to write for awhile

[Chorus]

One Friday night at a football game
The Lord’s Prayer said and the Anthem sang
A man said folks would you bow your heads
For a list of local Vietnam dead
Crying all alone under the stands
Was a piccolo player in the marching band
And one name read but nobody really cared
But a pretty little girl with a bow in her hair

[Chorus x2]

School started today and I have to find a news story for a current events assignment.  I don’t think I am using this TIME story, but I do find it weird and interesting.

A Florida Culture-War Circus Over Rifqa Bary

By TIM PADGETT / MIAMI Monday, Aug. 24, 2009

Rifqa Bary, 17, reads a Bible during her court proceedings in Orlando, Fla., on Aug. 21, 2009

Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda / Orlando Sentinel / Landov

Florida has a knack for turning family dysfunction into national spectacle. Ten years ago it gave us the Elian Gonzalez mess; five years later came the Terri Schiavo debacle. Now we have a new domestic dispute that threatens to become another culture-war circus, complete with a clash-of-religions angle to boot: the battle for Rifqa Bary, a 17-year-old girl from Columbus, Ohio, who ran away to an Evangelical church in Orlando, Fla., because, she claims, her Sri Lankan Muslim family has threatened to kill her for recently converting to Christianity.

The Orlando lawyer who claims to represent Rifqa, conservative activist John Stemberger, head of the Florida Family Policy Council (which fought in 2005 to keep Terri Schiavo on life support), last week wrote in a petition to keep the girl in Florida that she “is in imminent threat of harm from the extreme radical Muslim community in her hometown of Columbus.” He warned that one of the world’s largest “cells of al-Qaeda operatives” once worked from a Columbus mosque the Barys have attended.

The saga began in mid-July when Rifqa, after a dispute with her parents, bolted from her home and rode a bus to Orlando. There she took refuge with the Rev. Blake Lorenz, the pastor of a conservative Christian congregation, the Global Revolution Church, and his wife Beverly, whom the cheerleader and honor student had met on Facebook. Almost three weeks later, on Aug. 6, the Lorenzes finally let authorities and Rifqa’s frantic parents know the girl was with them. Then, a few days later, Rifqa dropped a bombshell to an Orlando television station: she had run away, she claimed, because her family, angry about her conversion to Christianity, had “threatened to kill me.”

After its probe of the situation this month, Florida’s Department of Children and Family Services took Rifqa from the Lorenzes and placed her in foster care. At a hearing in Orlando on Aug. 21, a judge ruled that she could remain in Florida until he decides, probably at a later hearing slated for Sept. 3, where she should ultimately go.

Court Expected to Send Runaway Teen Home Despite Muslim Honor Killing Fears

Personally, I think they are exploiting it.  This girl’s story may be good for a newspaper for judges and social workers, but it shouldn’t be on Fox News or in Time Magazine.

Dear Levi & Mercede,

I was sorry to hear about your mom’s arrest and plea for drug use and selling drugs.  I was even more sorry that it’s in the newspapers and on the blogs, and that people are making fun of her.

I am around your age (nearly 18) and my mom has been in jail for almost eight years on drug charges, so I know some of what you are going through.

I am also completely a busybody and am going to use this blog post to give both of you some advice.

1. Go to Alateen.  Or ACOA.  Or someplace that’s NOT your church where you can learn about addicts and addiction how none of this is your fault and that you can’t cure your mom.  Also, Mercede, if there’s a support group in your town or in your HS for kids who have a parent in prison, GO!
2. Mercede, I don’t know who you are living with these days, but my brother became my guardian when he was 18, and he was way too young.  And that’s without being a father himself or having reporters and photographers following him around.  I hope that you stay with a family, a whole, real family, at least until you finish HS.
3. You will find out really soon who your real friends are and who thinks a lot less of you because your mom is in jail.  Sometimes even good friends can be insensitive, but at least they still like you for who YOU are.  Some kids are incredibly creepy and think it’s cool to know someone who knows someone in jail.  Stay away from them.  Same thing with overly curious adults.
4. People will ask you what they can do to help.  It’s a dumb question, but if they ask twice, tell them to do something to improve life for prisoners and provide treatment for addicts.  You may even want to join organizations that encourage treatment instead of prison for addicts.
5. Stand up for your mom. Make sure that the lawyers and guardians and corrections people all know that someone is watching and that someone cares. I don’t visit anymore, but I do have an adult in my life who communicates with my mom and with the prison.
6. Because your mom is an addict like my mom, and because we watched our moms use drugs instead of facing problems head-on, all three of us can become an addict more easily than most people.  So learn what the signs are, and be careful, and watch out for each other.

We all need to work on making this country less inclined to incarcerate addicts and more inclined to help them find treatment.  And that starts with making sure that drug use is not a crime.  Prohibition didn’t work for alcohol and it’s not working for drugs.

I hope you do go to Alateen and counseling and get all the help you need to not have to ride your mother’s roller coaster addiction.  You didn’t cause it and you can’t cure it, but you can learn healthy ways to get through the next few years.

Your friend,

Cassie

I don’t have a view of the same beach from here, but it’s a nice place and we can hang out until Peanut Butter gets the electricity turned back on over at Relaxed Politics.

No dancing on the tables or breaking stuff!

President Obama got in a lot of trouble this week when the press took a still picture from a video and made it seem like he was looking at a 16 or 17 year old girl’s ass in a tight dress. A few comments on this.

• That’s NOT what he was looking at. Watch the whole video.

US Magazine says this:

Pictures can be deceiving.

Yesterday, a photo surfaced of President Barack Obama seemingly checking out the backside of a 17-year-old junior delegate at the G-8 summit in Italy.

But new video tells a different story.

See Obama’s “Just Like Us” moments.

It appears Obama wasn’t sneaking a peak; instead, he was just helping another young delegate down the stairs.

But French president Nicholas Sarkozy’s intentions aren’t as clear.

The Head of State — who’s married to former model Carla Bruni — keeps his face drawn toward the 17-year-old.

• I am a 17 year old girl and I know that if I wear sexy clothes and walk a certain way, MOST men will look at me. It’s the reason I wear short skirts some times and don’t wear them other days. So what if he DID look? Who cares? It’s not like she had an ID out that showed her age.

• Girls and women have the power to dress the way we want to dress in the United States. And be who we want to be. We don’t all need image consultants, and we don’t all mind if men look at us when we walk past.

Tex & I managed to stay silent for the entire minute of silence, but, o be perfectly fair, no one else at tonight’s Austin vigil was silent either.

Most of the 700+ people who protested with candles were Iranian, and they all seemed to know each other.  Between me and Betsy, we knew three other people, but everyone was there for peaceful purposes.  In addition to the protesters, there were police officers on bicycles and a few regular joggers and bicycle riders who happened to be using the same bridge.

I spoke with a 19-yr-old student who has family in the South of Iran and a grandmother in Teheran.  She says that her grandmother hasn’t left her apartment at all in the past 10 days, but she feels safe living on the 19th floor of a large apartment building.

Tex spoke with a family that was in Iran in 1977-79 and the mom left with her infant daughter four days before Iranians took over the U.S. Embassy there.  The whole family are dual citizens and want their votes counted in both countries.

Austin has six TV stations, and five of them had satellite trucks at the vigil.  There were also print reporters and a few radio stations.

We walked back to the parking lot with a family from Iran, and the father of the family said that he missed Wednesday’s rally but was glad that he made it tonight.  He said that he’d have to stay better tuned in because we’ll be needing more vigils and protests, but I sincerely hope that we don’t need any more.

Please help by mailing school supplies. And encourage the military to keep doing HELPFUL things!

1) Buy school supplies.  Pens, pencils, markers, paper, erasers.

2) Go to the post office and get some APO/FPO flat rate boxes that are used especially for sending mail to the military overseas.  If you order 10, they’re free, and they’ll ship them for free.

3) Insert the school supplies into the boxes, seal, fill out a customs form, and mail the school supplies to this USAF Airman, and he will make sure that the supplies go to children in the schools that they’re building in Afghanistan.

Thank you!

Time magazine had a story this week that asks a great question, but they’ll never find the right answer if they continue to see our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as “wars” and not “occupations”.

Why Are Army Recruiters Killing Themselves?

By MARK THOMPSON

I’m glad they’re asking the question about military recruiters, and glad people are reading about it, but here’s the part that shows they’ll never find the answer:

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now the longest waged by an all-volunteer force in U.S. history. Even as soldiers rotate back into the field for multiple and extended tours, the Army requires a constant supply of new recruits. But the patriotic fervor that led so many to sign up after 9/11 is now eight years past. That leaves recruiters with perhaps the toughest, if not the most dangerous, job in the Army.

The problem is not that we are less patriotic or that no one wants to serve. The problem is that these are occupations and no one wants to continue fighting wars that we won years and years ago.

Last year alone, the number of recruiters who killed themselves was triple the overall Army rate. Like posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, recruiter suicides are a hidden cost of the nation’s wars.

Yes there is a problem here, and yes the recruiters need help, but mostly we need to get out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Even with this economy, poor kids don’t want to go into the military any more. Would you?

How cool is it to have a first lady who thinks that getting A’s is cool! After the Bushes telling acting like being stupid is the coolest, I really like Michelle Obama’s message. And her clothes! (But not the turquoise sweater.)

The reality is that I think we need more women role models who are famous for something that doesn’t involve their husband, but Michelle Obama is still the coolest ever!

This is from BBC:

The world needs strong young women to pave the way for the future, an emotional US First Lady Michelle Obama has told schoolgirls in London.

Mrs Obama was close to tears as she addressed the excited crowd at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington, north London.

She told them: “We are counting on every single one of you to be the best that you can be.”

Mrs Obama is in the UK with husband Barack for the G20 summit.

Her visit to the North London school was greeted with much excitement by pupils and she sat smiling, riveted, as Year 11 pupil Grace Hollowell and the school’s junior choir performed the Whitney Houston hit Believe.

Mrs Obama, a mother of two girls herself, smiled and watched intently throughout the other performances, which also included a modern-day staging of The Tempest, and a presentation on the school’s new Learning To Lead scheme.
‘Strength and dignity’

The First Lady high-fived one pupil after the performance before she took to the podium for her speech.

As she addressed the crowd, Mrs Obama choked up, saying: “Wow. I can’t follow that. Let me tell you, I am just very touched and moved by all of you.”

There isn’t a full transcript, but BBC describes it really well:

In a brief speech to about 100 pupils she spoke of her working class upbringing in the Southside of Chicago, saying she was “an example of what is possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by people around them”.

She went on: “I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life who taught me about quiet strength and dignity.

“You too can control your own destiny, please remember that.

“Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.

“It won’t be easy, that’s for sure, but you have everything you need. Everything you need you already have right here.

“We are counting on you, we are counting on every single one of you to be the best that you can be.

“We know you can do it, we love you, thank you so much.”

“Phenomenal woman’

Mrs Obama also spoke of the “special relationship” between the US and the UK, based on a common language and shared values.

She said she had met Britain’s “most extraordinary women” on her first official visit as First Lady, including the Queen and Chancellor Alistair Darling’s wife Maggie, who she called a “true firebrand”.

She described Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah as a “phenomenal woman who has been charming and delightful”.

about sex? And teen pregnancy? And what you are worth?

I’ve had different talks with different people, and virtually no information at all from school, but I really like the message in this article. It’s directed to moms and not kids, but that has never stopped me before.

As news of Bristol Palin’s breakup with fiancé Levi Johnston fans the flames of the never-ending debate about sex education, my thoughts keep turning to Sarah. I wonder if she wishes she could go back and do things differently. Would she offer something in addition to abstinence education? Will she change what she says to Willow and Piper?

As a mother, I think about what I will tell my young daughter about the millions of teenagers like Bristol Palin who get pregnant before they’re ready. What will I be able to say to prevent her from joining the statistics?

And when I start imagining “the talk” we’ll have, I realize that very little of it will actually have to do with sex. It will be more about the need for self confidence, an inner strength and the ability to say no to things she isn’t ready to do, to not want to please someone so badly that she’ll do something she knows is risky to earn or keep their love – whether that’s to have unsafe sex, to take drugs or to stay with someone who demeans or abuses her.

The author also talks about relationship violence and manipulation when she speculates:

I don’t know Bristol Palin, but I imagine her getting pregnant had something to do with rumors of Levi cheating, with her wanting to win him/keep him/prove her love to him. And when they were in the moment with nary a condom to be found, she didn’t stop him because she didn’t want him to stop loving her.

I could be very wrong, but from my experience – from years of scares I shared with friends, the hands I’ve held as pregnancy tests were taken in school bathroom stalls, the fingers that were crossed, willing periods to come, that’s what it was about. None of them got THAT lost in the heat of passion that she didn’t consider the lack of contraception and what might happen. None of them just didn’t have access to contraception. They just considered more strongly the repercussions of stopping the act. They took a risk for affection.

I actually think that she’s wrong and that plenty of kids don’t know enough about condoms. Not enough facts anyway.

But the part of the article that really made me think was this:

If I do, I’ll explain how badly I wanted someone to love me because I didn’t love myself. I was young, insecure, and I wanted to know that someone wanted me. I didn’t want to stop when he was finally showing me that he wanted me; I didn’t want to be the uptight one who insisted on protection. Someone else would readily take my place; I wasn’t that special.

I want my daughter to know that she is THAT special. I’ll tell her all about sex and that I hope she waits until she’s older, in a monogamous relationship and all of the other things I’m supposed to say.

How is she going to convince her daughter of that? And help her daughter believe it even when she’s around her boyfriend? I’d like to see what her daughter writes in a few years.

What do people teach boys about this?

and no one will know anything.

TAKS spells prizes for achievers

Austinn-American Statesman

Over the past two years, a growing number of Texas school districts have used a state education program to reward students who perform well on – or, in some cases, simply pass – the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills with excused absences.

I have always loved school and am glad that I have always been around other kids. I am not sure how I feel about this court ruling, but I wonder if the judge asked the kids.

I like the questions that Nate asks.  My only other addition is to ask if the judge would make a parent stop sending kids to an evolution-hating  school run by fundamentalists.

Home-Schooling

Recently, a judge in Raleigh, N.C. ordered three kids who were being home-schooled to attend public school instead.  The issue arose in a divorce proceeding where the father wanted the kids to go to public school, and the mother wanted to continue home-schooling her children.  I have not had the opportunity to read the case itself, but if you’re interested in reading more, click here.

Apparently the problem was that the kids were receiving a creationist focused education when it came to science.  However, the kids were also testing two years above their grade level.  So that begs the question, why were they forced to go to public school?  I don’t believe in creationism, but it does seem to me that no matter what they are learning, if they are testing two years above their grade level, then home-schooling seems to be working out.

My greater concern, though, is: when is it okay to home-school?  The lesson here is that if a judge disagrees with the curriculum, then he can order the kids to public school.  Not enough math?  Too much math?  Not enough structure?  Not reading the right books?  Cases like these can be slippery slopes.

What do you think?  Did the judge make the right decision?  Is it okay for parents to home-school their children?

from Nate at  The Young Writers Blog: The Only Writing Blog For Young Writers And Everyone Else