• There’s a grainy, black and white photograph of an inky-fingered girl on the scrap of battered newsprint in front of me. Although her dark eyes are out of focus, the photographer’s lens is in love with that tiny, pudgy hand. The caption by the Associated Press, “An Iraqi girl holds up an ink-stained finger after her parents voted Saturday in the country’s provincial elections,” is little more than a meaningless cacophony of words and symbols, but the headline at the top of the page strikes at the heart of the issue at hand, a cotton-toothed basilisk of hope rearing back into the sky.

    “Iraqi elections avoid major violence,” proclaims the bold 36-point. Some unseen hand has taken the liberty of filling in each broad, looping hollow of the letters, and as I trace my fingertips across the words, the thick, dark pigment smears over my skin.

    As I gaze absently at my right index finger, small and slender and darkened like the little girl’s, I flash inwardly to a concrete oasis hundreds of miles away, in a desert country I’ve never seen except in photographs. In another world, over a week in the past, I’m standing outside the sand-worn building where the entire population (or so it seems) has gathered to vote not only for a new government, but a new life as well.

    I watch the little girl as her father takes her finger in a gentle, steady hand, and presses it to a pad of violet ink. She endures this obediently, then gives a delighted shriek and a broad smile when she sees her skin tinged with the vibrant hue. I can’t understand the slew of words that pour excitedly from her mouth, but their message is clear. Wonderful. Everything’s just wonderful now.

    I can see her ten years from now, running through a field and falling to a thick mat of flowers, dark hair billowing about the beautiful, innocent face as she watches the clouds. A few years later, in the same field, she’s standing with a young man, their hands clasped delicately over a barely-there bump in her abdomen.

    I imagine her children standing in line, just as she is now, watching and waiting as their parents continue the legacy of democracy and new beginnings. The words of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ring full and lush in the open conch of my mind: “The purple fingers have come back to build Iraq again.”

    As my phone begins to ring incessantly, I pull myself from this reverie and take the call; but not until a moment of silence has passed, both for those lost in the Good Fight and for the new hope for Iraq: the next generation.