Dolls and figurines and food packages are hardly the expected image of GI Joes coming home from war, but it should be more often, and is happening right now. American soldiers coming off their duty tour in war torn Iraq are being sent to faraway areas ravaged by floods, famines. Here, they face the healing process of handing out food packages to eagerly reaching hands, handing dolls or toys to smiling children, and you can just sense how good this is for each soldier.
We walk alongside an American soldier who has a tag team of children around him, saying after nineteen months in Iraq you got the feeling that everyone wanted you dead or gone. Here, it feels so good to remind ourselves the Army supports life as well as death, and helping will make home coming so much easier, to remember both sides of life. Maybe less bad dreams. Half a life time ago, I was a Psychology major and we learned that if people were giiven a list of ten items, and then later asked to write down what they remembered, they tended to remember the last item most often.
And so I feel this is deeply wise of the army and military everywhere, to have the final "sentence" be one of giving of oneself and receiving the gratitude that follows, increasing the sense of self worth of all. As Churchill might have put it, after we have stopped hanging them by their thumbs, can we try love, and get our coming home heroes a place to perform good and save a life. That is what we could give back to them, and perhaps have a new generation of deep and caring people who have seen hell and would much prefer to bring a food bowl, or dolls to an angel, no need for the gun.
... my aim is now, as it has been for the past ten years, to make myself a true woman, one worthy of the name, and one who will unshrinkingly follow the path which God marks out, one whose aim is to do all of the good she can in the world and not be one of the delicate little dolls or the silly fools who make up the bulk of American women, slaves to society and fashion.
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
President John F. Kennedy faced off the Soviet Empire at it's height of power and influence in the world, perhaps, when he stared down Russia over the Cuban Missile Crisis. My son was born that day, and I recall praying that we had a world intact the next morning. Today we really face many smaller terrors, none so earth shattering, and the world made it through the Vietnam horror, and will surely survive the present tragic folly of Iraq and the area. What John Kennedy did give youth was the Peace Corp, and many of us either joined or just went overseas to see what we could see.
And I saw that enthusiasm in the faces of these soldiers newly arrived into central America coming off military aircraft from Iraq: their beaming smiles; the doing good, the smiling children, the lack of need for their guns, the importance to not frighten the children by showing guns. This is what American youth thrive on, and they await a leader who inspires this inner good that created mighty and free America, not the snarling ammoral bully that has defiled so much that is worthy and noble of America. Buy an antiques doll and put a smile on a child's face. After you have helped teach her daddy how to farm the side hill better.
Derek Dashwood enjoys noticing positive ways we progress, the combining of science into the humanities to measure politics, wise use and mis use of power and protective love at
Because the priest must have like every dog his day
Or keep us all awake with baying at the moon,
We and our dolls being but the world were best away.
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
Antique Dolls.