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For Ron, Kai_Arrein as we know him here. For he went off to do something great.
Love: Desert
War was something I never really thought about growing up. I was content running wild through the streets with other children. I hated sitting in one place for more than a moment and although I had a fascination with the news. It comes to me now that I never really understood it. Until, that is I got into the election of 2000. For some reason politics became an interesting topic when a C student from Texas who had second grade reading, writing, math and speaking skills was up for election. To my shock and dismay he won as well, and with his winning I found the news a lot more interesting and understandable.
I wont pretend to say I knew everything, but I learned. My father was always willing to often-explained thing that kids my age had not a clue about. He was proud I even had such an interest while my older brother stayed blissfully unaware. I found I loved history and much as the knowledge I gained from the news. I was able to hold conversation with people twice and tree times my age. It was a strange thing, to feel so full of news and yet in school it was passed over as nothing. As if current events were just lost.
I don’t think anyone in my grade got up to watch the 6am news. But I had to find out what happened in the parts of the world that were awake while I slept. This coupled with my fathers strange but wise words and his almost infinite knowledge made me only more in tune with what was going on around me.
He at the time was a NYPD Emergency Service cop in Truck 8. It was this that tore me apart a year later. As I watched helplessly as the symbols of the United States economy fell like dominos. I knew about the World Trade Center from the news, it was a big hub for all sorts of foreign economic activity as well as many enterprises. Only being in sixth grade I understood so much more that the other kids. I watched as the towers fell and could feel deep in my heart. A clenching, crushing, suffocating feeling that my father was there.
In the days that followed I found myself more attached to the news that ever, it made me sad and angry. I watched and I learned, I silently took in the names and faces of those who had been lost. My father, thankfully not among them. He not only saved himself, but also saved a friend while he shoved them into a car as he ducked under it. After he dug himself out of four feet of ruble and sorrows he went to the second building and yet again tried to get more people out. When I asked him late why he did it, he just laughed and said, “When everyone else is running out, we’re running in. It’s my job.”
I cried, I cried because of the news, because I couldn’t watch those tapes of those towers falling. Lost like the hope of the people they banded together. I watched as we went to war and then with keen eyes as we switched tactics. How out own president had changed areas and went after something else. I was appalled and furious, being a liberal thinker it made no sense to me.
So now I sit here writing, to tell my story of how this all came about. How my love for the truth and the goings on of the world led me to these thoughts. A friend of my fathers had a son a year older than I. He went over seas to the Sand Box as we rightfully now call Iraq. I sent him letters, I sent him packages, but it hurt all the same.
He wasn’t the only one. I got older I worked harder, I understood more. I watched people go off to war and I watched some come home in a body bag. A coffin with an American flag adorning it hardly seems fit for these people. So it came to me, a blissful thought before all this. What kind of people are we, if we send others to their deaths. Who are we to decide who lives and who dies? All this was just angry thinking, I didn’t want little Mario coming back in a box, and I didn’t want to see a funeral like that.
War hit even closer to home, my best friend Ron. I realized something else, something far more crippling to my mind than war itself. That it was their choice, all of it was their choice. They chose to go into Basic; they chose to go to war. It hurt; it hurt so much to know that someone would be willing to leave it all behind for a chance to protect our country.
Ron left on a warm September morning; I haven’t heard from him yet at all. It worries me and yet it doesn’t. There are days now I find myself thinking about him going through basic. I find myself still thinking in a very liberal way; I find no fault with accepting that. But as I think more into what I learned in the news, I found it all to be negative. I realized pain, suffering, and horror sold to the public. It made me sick with sadness, and no I think of Ron when I watch the news.
I asked someone not quite wise but who understood a bit. Why do we send good people to war? It was funny to him, to have me thinking of such things at my age. Just a senior in high school and I understood so much and at the same time so little. His answer brought a thousand more questions, a million more confusions. They don’t sent bad people to war he told me, everyone that goes is a good person.
Then why send anyone at all? That’s the question that today still plagues my mind with hate and spite.
The news which one was a cover to all that happened around me seemed to open. Every passing day brought and still brings more sad and troubling reports. From school shootings to more soldiers dieing for a war that seemed so wrong. I read somewhere that as long as people roamed the earth there would always be conflict, because man could never live in peace. It was in itself…a fallacy. The eye between two storms or the downfall of a nation to such extent it lost everything and could no longer fight.
I wait not at all patiently for a letter from Ron, as he had promised to write. The news may bring no comfort but it brings something else just as valuable. It brings knowledge and lets me know I’m not the only one out there waiting. That all over the U.S and the World there is someone waiting for a letter from someone they cared deeply about. Waiting to see their words on paper to know they are still there.
I give myself freely to my paranoia in this waiting game. For Ron is a real person, someone that changed my life for the better by just being himself. So I have to promise him that I wont lose myself. I wont forget who he is, and who I am; why I care so much.
Now and again I watch the news and get a sad feeling about is happening. But my mind over weighs the sadness with something kinder. Knowing that these people left on their own accord, knowing they care so much about more than themselves to risk their lives for a greater good. I may not agree with the war at all, dig my heels in and pulls backwards till the day is done. But I support what these people are doing; I support our troops but not the war.
I hope every one of them lives to come home; to be thrown into the arms of there loved ones. That no more will families have to cry over there the loss of their son or daughter a million miles away from home. No more parents will have to watch their children die before them. It’s not fair, but it’s the truth.
Come home Ron, Kai_Arrein, so I can beat you into the ground for leaving.
 Desert--Mirage · Sat Sep 29, 2007 @ 07:43pm · 2 Comments |
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