I'm terribly depressed. What should hit me between the eyes this morning, but the front page of my "local paper proclaiming "Bay High students debate war".
"What's so bad about that?" you think. Well, nothing, really, until you read the first paragraph:
When asked to indicate, by a show of hands, how many supported President Bush's Iraq war initiative, all but two or three arms shot up.
Okay. Maybe it's a small class...
The vote came from a class of about 30 seniors studying international history at Bay High School.
Ouch. And it gets worse. The next paragraph has a quote from a student in the class:
"We have to kill every one of them ... There's not going to be an end to this war until we eliminate insurgency in Iraq."
And as if that wasn't depressing enough...
Later in the article, after several paragraphs about how the teacher conducts this elective class by throwing out questions and how their final exam will be written and graded by Cambridge University as part of the "Advanced International Certificate of Education" program, we get more quotations:
"We were just in seventh grade on 9-11 ... Let's pay them back for the terror; that's probably all we understood at the time. Now, I feel nothing's going to solve it. The most Americans can do is to protect ourselves and do whatever we have to do to keep them from fighting here. We're not going to be able to set up a democracy there. They're always going to hate us."
Admittedly, I think most of those here can agree that "nothing's going to solve it" and that "we're not going to be able to set up a democracy there," but "Let's pay them back for the terror"??? What terror? Osama bin Laden and his gang, sure. Iraq? How can this supposedly interested and engaged class still assume that Iraq and bin Laden are synonymous?
Most depressing of all
"My initial response was different from other students ... At first I did not support the war. But now, I'm able to make opinions for myself. For now, I sympathize with President Bush and the soldiers under him. He wants to do what should be done. You can't limit war. It's impossible."
And from this blatant display of bowing to peer pressure, after several more quotes of students saying "you can't reason with unreasonable people," that until the "end goal" of the Iraqi government controlling the insurgent violence is met, "you can't think of that as a victory", and firm belief that there are "a lot of liberal, open-minded Arabs," the article concludes with a quote from the teacher:
"They look at both sides of an issue," said Wannamaker, obviously proud of his students. "They react to situations with intellect instead of emotion. When they vote in their first election in '08, I'm confident they'll vote that way."
This, right here, is one of the fundamental problems we face. There is an entire generation of children growing up here, surrounded by people who believe, in their bones, that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. That getting American soldiers killed as the occupying force in a foreign civil war will in fact prevent anyone from attacking us here. That the President is honestly doing the best he can, and he's doing what should be done. That we have to kill every one of the insurgents, and that may very well include killing every Iraqi since we can't tell who's an insurgent and who's not (although, to his credit, the teacher did follow those students up with "Do you stoop to indiscriminate killing? That's not what this country is about.")
How do we fight this? How do we inform? How do we counter the self-selected propaganda their local and national news media feed them, night after night? Especially in a community where the local paper's editorials regularly feature articles from lewrockwell.com and whose editorial page today featured an opinion piece from Michael Goodwin (the New York Daily News) starting with a crack at Gore ("And that doesn't even includ Al Gore's weather forecasts.") and moving on to "GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani laying down the marker that America would be safer with a Republican president, a surprise attack that put the Dem's Gang of Eight on the defensive."
We have a few liberals here. A very few. And writing a couple of letters to the editor and attending the odd public protest doesn't make a dent in the ongoing denigration assumed as a background to almost every political article and opinion piece they print. In a county where 27 out of 30 high school seniors interested enough in international politics to take this course support the Iraq war, how do we make a difference?
WE are the insurgents, the minority, trying to simply be heard.