National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, as quoted on “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos:
“We’re at a point now where we’ve got a plan,” Hadley said. “Execution of that plan is now everything.”
Oh. really. I was under the apparently misguided assumption that “they” had a plan all along. Mind you, I was under no illusions. I knew I probably would not agree with anything that the current administration came up with as a plan (not that they need to consult me 😉 ). But surely they had a plan. Have we truly been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq for the past 5 years without a plan? Can this lunacy be true?
I was in first and second grade during the height of the US involvement in Vietnam. I went to school in a two room school house. First and second grades were in one room with Mrs. Metakos. Third grade was in the other room with Mrs. Keith. There was a coal bin in the basement because the school house had been converted to oil in the past 5 years or so. There was still coal in it and we used to sneak in when we could. We had to be careful to not get coal dust on us though. It was very tempting for some odd reason. There was a swing set and teeter-totters and a whirlygig for playground equipment all set amongst the maple trees. There were plenty of trees for playing hide n’ seek or tag. The driveway was accomodatingly gravel so we played marbles there in the spring. We also played many, many games of Red Rover.
The game I remember best, though, was grabbing a stick, hopping the back fence and playing War in Cedric’s cow pasture. We had to be careful to avoid the cow pies (land mines). Girls had to be especially careful because we all had dresses on. The “big boys” in third grade were the leaders of these expeditions. This often happened on nice days when we ate our lunches quickly and had lots of playtime for lunch period. We all learned how to make agreeably fashionable machine gun noises with our mouths and kill the enemy with our sticks. Sometimes the enemy was the cows. That was sort of unfulfilling because the cows didn’t know they were the enemy and refused to play dead. Sometimes they did not even acknowledge our presence. So we often formed teams and shot each other so that people could play dead in ever more dramatic fashion. This lead to some rather feisty arguments on the way back to the school when the bell clanged about which team “won.” The “big boys” did the arguing, us little kids were just glad to be allowed to play. But either way, we all came back heros for having fought a good fight.
It is child’s play to think one might grab a weapon, hop a fence, and vanquish one’s enemy in an afternoon … or even a few short months. Veni, vidi, vici is a myth that not even the Romans fully believed. It is never true. Since the time of Adam people have proven over and over again that they do not want outside rulers coming in. We do not know what is best for them. How long, how long must we sing this song? How long until we have real adults in charge of this country? People who will stand for doing what is actually right rather than what looks good or what polls say. Someone who will look at life in and on this planet as not a game, but a wonderful and horrible responsibility.
