Where at least I know I'm free...

War Remnants Museum, Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam

I am wondering how many editions of 9th grade US History textbooks Houghton-Mifflin will publish before they include pictures of American GIS in 1968, proudly grasping tuffs of hair on the heads of decapitated Vietnamese children.

I am wondering how long we'll spend millions entertaining our children by allowing them to spar with bb guns and videogames, watching them either unemotionally shrug their way to an oblivion of violence or make livelihoods as mechanical engineers who design four-foot long bazookas, expressedly to be pointed at the heads of other humans.

I am wondering how a German citizen feels at the Holocaust Museum in DC.

I am wondering how the terms Imperialism/Communism/Terrorism are all, in essence, the same 'ism'.

I am wondering who the hell thought up Agent Orange.

I am wondering how I'd feel about all of this if I were born 40 years earlier.

I'm wondering how a US citizen could claim America the best country in the world and account for ruthless inhumanities in situations across southeast asia.

I'm wondering if these same Americans who would deem our country the best could recite the exerpt of the Declaration of Independence, displayed at the beginning of the war crimes section of the museum, clearly stating the Vietnamese distrust of such great words. It's palpably unmistakable as a statement of hypocrisy: Hey, America. We don't believe you when you claim that all are created equal and this "truth" is self-evident. Maybe self-directed, as it only applies to people born on a certain continent and with a certain skin color.

I'm wondering if my children, in 30 years, will backpack across the middle east, telling Afghani citizens that they are Canadian to avoid confrontation. Because by then, there will be museums showing awful things inflicted by a US military machine in the name of what? Democracy?To win a war on terror with an even more clever artilery of...terror?

On this point, I don't wonder, I know.

Those children of mine, smart and precocious, terribly attractive and wittily amusing (much like their mother) will ask me what I did to stop my government from engaging in these brutalities and then they'll ask me what they should be doing.

Run for Senate? Seemed like a good idea for self-confessed Vietnam war criminal, Bob Kerrey.

Change the military from the inside out? But their father and I have always told them not to stick their hands in on a lit stovetop.

Pull an "Up Yours, McNamara!" like Norman Morrison or Roger Laporte, who in 1965, protested the Vietnam war by setting themselves on fire? (Maybe the more dramatic option, just not really ...umm...effective) Decide to rally their colleges to close in protest?

Pray? To who? The oil gods, so we'd never run out? The Dow Jones Industrial Buddha, so that our finances would surpass China and we'd all be "secure"? Dick Cheney, so that he'd stop making up ridiculous crap about axises of evil and backing it up with the Office of Legal Council and Justice Department?

I don't wonder, I know:
I will have absolutely no idea what to tell them.