"that my child may have peace"

I have debated about whether to comment at length in our new facebook book forum and decided that I didn't know these people well enough yet to go on at length. My chain of thought led pretty far afield from the book and situation under discussion. So this seems to be an alternate venue for me to comment at length on anything that I feel like - with reasonable confidence that no one is likely to read it. Okay, maybe a couple of people, but they know me well enough to ignore anything I say that really gets out of line.

The book is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and the subject was the evacuation of the children. The initial comment was from a young mother who is still appropriately giving the age of her youngest in weeks. The thought of sending the children away was very painful to her -- and I totally agree with her. The directors of the evacuation operation in the book did not allow parents to actually see their children off, because they believed that brave faces might slip and they would set sea with a boatload of sobbing terrified children. It was a decision forced by a devastating set of circumstances - and a typically British solution. I don't know of any other group of people who have done this sort of thing on such a scale. The people of London "soldiered on" during the blitz - and evacuated their children to the country. As the Guernsey islanders huddled in their beds with no fuel for heat or light and subsisted on potato peels and tree bark tea, as Londoners huddled together in subway tunnels as bombs destroyed their homes, they must have drawn some consolation from the thought that their children were spared what they were going through. Even so, it is hard to imagine how painful it must have been for all those parents - to surrender the care of their children to strangers for an indefinite period - which in many cases stretched into years.

That made me think about the people who did not evacuate their children. Those children endured the same privations and terrors that their parents did. What a choice.

All of that brought to mind two politicians. First, Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister of England who signed the Munich Agreement which essentially gave Hitler the opportunity to subjugate large sections of Europe without interference. He returned to England on the eve of WWII and paraphrased the book of common prayer by claiming that he had secured "peace for our time." The other actually predates Chamberlain by close to two hundred years. Thomas Paine roundly condemned a man who, with his eight-year-old by his side, called for "peace in my day." Paine's response, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." "Peace for our time" didn't work for Chamberlain. And I'm not sure it can be claimed that "that my child may have peace" really worked for Paine either, since no generation has passed without armed conflict of some sort. My grandfather fought on the Mexican border against the only actual incursion of hostile forces on the US mainland, then in WWI, and was one of the first veterans to return to active duty during WWII, my father's war. Maybe those parents who sent their children away at least partially succeeded in securing a form of peace for their children during a time of war - although at a painful price; a price we have never been called on to pay, because, with the obvious exception, we have generally fought our wars in other people's backyards.

And speaking of children and war, I just finished reading Reading Lolita in Tehran. During the Ayatollah's war against Iraq, he recruited young boys, children not even in their teens, armed them with inoperative weapons and a "key to heaven" to hang around their necks and sent them into "battle" as human mine-sweepers to clear the mine fields for his real troops. Which in turn reminded me of an episode of MASH: a farmer was unwilling to risk his ox in a field which had been mined, so he sent his daughters ahead of it. I'm not trying to be sanctimonious here. Our society is continually bombarded with slogans identifying our children as our future - usually from the educational establishment, the members of which studiously avoid any contact with that "future," thereby remaining unconflicted as they concoct new ways to secure personal profit at the expense of those children. And we as parents have been trained to meekly submit without question to whatever lunacy these "educators" and politicians think up. Not teachers, once an "inspirational" clinician asked me when I entered the room if I was an educator. I told him, "No, I'm a teacher." I'm talking about those who are not involved in the process who are making all the decisions based on whatever misinformation they have been fed by those with an axe to grind - or profit to secure. I'm not sure we have the right to condemn a man who has chosen to risk the lives of some of his children to preserve the lives of the others - granted, sacrificing daughters to enable him to provide food for his sons wouldn't play in the West, but it may have been appropriate in that time and place.

I quit. I think I probably need a live audience to shut me up when I start rambling. I promise to return to absolute silliness when I post again.