It was a bit ago, and they were discussing the 3000th soldier to die in Iraq. Why the interest in #3000? What about 246, 3, 623, 874, 2594? Get my drift???
Isn't it enough?
And these numbers are only US soldiers, right? It doesn't include civilians or Iraq citizens... I recognize that many people could care less about the folks in Iraq, the Iraqi's I mean, but I just can't help thinking that these are sons and daughters, parents, siblings...
Which leads me to-
My son, Gus, always has good questions while we are driving, and today he wanted to know if the police killed 'bad guys'. We chatted about this for quite a bit and the discussion didn't end until we were home looking at real pictures of jail cells on the internet. He was surprised when I told him that police officers don't try and kill the 'bad guy' unless absolutely necessary, but try to capture him peacefully or at worst, only injured. (At least this has always been my understanding.) I told him about the idea that somewhere the 'bad guy 'had someone who loved him and that they would prefer him alive than dead. As would, I assume the 'bad guy'. "But then they would just go to jail for a long, long, time , right?"
I assured him that this was indeed true.
We had to go over the concept of not just outright killing the 'bad guy', but I think he got it.
Even when people do bad things they are loved. They are someone's son, daughter, brother, uncle, friend, lover...
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2 comments:
First off, love the "Days Left In Office" ticker. Got to get me one of those.
As you can assume from my screen name, I am a wife of a cop. hee. For a period of time, our boys were under the assumption that daddy went to work to shoot people. (It didn't help when we drove by their dad on a traffic stop and he had someone laying on the ground with the taser pointed at him.) Now he makes it a point to tell them about the good things he does while on duty. The helping part of it. They seem to be getting a better understanding of it.
It is hard to portray cops to kids, all they see on tv is shoot 'em up type of cops. No wonder children are afraid to approach police officers when they are trouble...
Sorry, guess this got a little long. Thanks for stopping by my blog!
I have had that conversation with my sons, too. Hard concept to understand as I can hardly understand it myself. But I try to picture one of my children making an awful, horrible mistake that would end them up in a police chase... Yes. Please try to only injure. Somebody, SOMEwhere, loves that person...
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