Yesterday, I took time to watch a foreign film titled, Innocent Voices. It is a film that looks at the lives of the children in a town of El Salvador during the 1980s. The movie takes us into the last village that stands between the two forces. We watch as a young boy, 11 soon to be 12, sees his life torn apart by war. He witnesses civilians being killed. He watches as the innocent voices, those of the children, are torn from their families to be conscripted into the army, or, worse silence for life. This is not a feel good movie.
Watching a film like this makes you take a hard look at your own life. The movie had ups and downs. The people found ways to bring laughter even into this horrible situation. They found joy. They watched as their friends were taken from school. Then they had music. It seemed to make it alright. Yet through each scene, I could not help but compare my childhood to theirs for I am only a few years older than they were at the time. Would I have been able to live through something like this and still survived?
I then thought how people complain about how our children are today. How well could American children do with this situation?
Now before people stop reading, I understand it is nearly impossible to compare since children lived it every single day. Many were born into it and knew nothing else. How can one expect to children who have never had to experience war to be compared to these children? Then it struck me, American children have and do.
I watched a scene where the children were fast asleep in bed. The machine guns started spraying bullets with no care as to where they hit. What they called a house was soon a shooting gallery. They threw the mattress against the wall and hid under the frame of the bed. I started thinking of the stories of I have read coming from some of the cities within our own country. I have too often woke to hear a story on the news about some child asleep in their bed when a bullet came through a wall or window. I questioned whether or not our children could survive. I was wrong. Our children are having to survive.
Tonight, I had the house to myself. My wife and daughter were both out. At first I thought that this would be such a nice, peaceful evening. It is not. I am sitting here thinking of the children of our city, state, country, and world. Sadness is not even a word that comes close to what I feel. The thing that makes it worse is that most people have no ability to do much about these things. The only thing that I have the ability to do is to help educate the young people of today to find a way to stop all of this here and around the world.
Somehow we need to stop the circle. But how?
Tonight I bring up a problem, yet I can offer nothing towards the solution that has not already been said. We must demand from our leaders more be done within our country to stop this. No young person is brought into this world with hate. No young person comes into this world with the ability to kill one another. Yet, that is what we teach them. They see their friends being dragged and forced into this life. The hate grows in them due to teachings of the adults.
How? How do we stop the lives of our young people from traveling this road? It is only through our children that we will find a peace, but somehow we must get the adults of the world to teach it first.
I get it. I am lucky that I grew up where I did and that I live where I live. Our daughter is fortunate as well. What will it take until all of our children are as fortunate? The movie ended by stating more than 300,000 children are recruited into armies even today in more than 40 countries. We need to rest of the countries to stop this. But how?
I am sorry that the road tonight was not a happy one. Shed a tear with me, and then let’s figure out how to fix this.
Thank you for meandering with me tonight.