The End of Your World Is Closer Than You Think

Dear Mr. President:

My boy killed a man the other day. Did you know that? Do you care? He wrote to me, my boy did. I had missed his handwriting – he hadn’t written in a long time. But as I read that little snapshot of information from his life, I could see him as a child, gripping his crayon so hard, forming his letters with such pride. He would hand me that paper with the alphabet scrawled so orderly across the top and a picture of the two of us, holding hands. We were nothing but two little sticks- he a blue line pressed into the paper, and I a purple one, with a little swatch of brown hair. My boy wrote to me to tell me that the man he killed had a son.

The paper was wrinkled, stained with dirt. I sat in my quiet kitchen, painted mint green, and could see him in my mind, head in hands, envelope folded in his pocket, sweating from heat, from anxiety, from pain. But once again, it’s nothing new. My boy’s a soldier, he chose it. He chose to be one of the nameless, resign his name and his family to a number he kept on a tag around his neck. He looked so proud when he bowed his head to the man in charge, receiving that thin strip of metal around his neck. The commander had a short crop of light brown hair, dark brown eyes who had been humiliated into showing no emotion, tan arms, and tough hands. He invoked a sense of security with his stature, the way he stood so strong in front of all those young boys, trembling in their seats with anxiousness. He raised his taunt hand to his forehead and faced the flag, but I couldn’t help but think of the guns he held with those fingers. The commander was the kind of man in who most would place their faith, but Mr. President, you’ve shown me how to mistrust.

In that mint green kitchen of mine, I spent hours with my son at the kitchen table he’d helped me scrub until it lost its sheen. I would sit with him as he opened the envelopes from the military men you put in charge, the ones to whom I was handing over my boy. “Choose life,” I told him countless times. But he would look at me with those sea foam green eyes of his and say, “Can’t I care just once to take a stand, to take a side?” You’ve never seen his beautiful eyes, have you?

He wrote to me more often when he first arrived over there in that strange land where the sand take the place of grass, and bullets take the place of rain. He would tell me of the other boys, the ones who shared his tent, the ones who lent him cigarettes when he would run out. Sometimes he would describe vaguely the scenery, the numbing grays and browns of the desert, of the buildings rising up from the sand, but never the people, never the living, breathing population. He was a slayer of a people he had never met. The letters got less frequent eventually, but once he wrote of a little boy who had been separated from his mother. The little boy was crying, distraught, frightened by the fighting. My boy became the enslaver of a people he was sent over to set free.

“There’s no reason for this,” he wrote, over and over on that single sheet of paper. “Where is the honor in the killing of an innocent son?” The commander, the one whose stance invoked trust, put a tough hand on my boy’s shoulders, told him to stand up, and informed him that days pass and life goes on. My son told his superior of the little boy’s terror, of the sound it makes when a newly orphaned child weeps. “A casualty of circumstance,” the commander responded.

Mr. President, you say they’re dangerous, you say they’re out to get us. But what if you’re wrong? And Mr. President, are we no better, when we ourselves disregard human value?

The ignorance of your citizens brings them to your feet. When the crowd roars at your arrival, you smile back amiably, I know you do. I can watch you on television from the chair in my mint green kitchen. You’ll wave, you’ll toss a few meaningless words to the masses, and you’ll go on your merry way to the house built for you by your forefathers. Stepping out of the shiny limousine purchased with the money of your citizens, you walk on the political ground paved by the constituents of your country. But who are they to choose? The yelling members of the throng as you emerge from the dark interior of your chauffeured vehicle stretch their arms toward you. You gain your power from numbers, but are they all not just cowards, staring through the crowd at the man they elected to make everything better in lieu of their own efforts?

I wonder what you think when you wake up in the morning. I wonder if you think of my boy, waging a war thousands of miles away, with a stretching, roaring ocean between him and you. Perhaps you think of the millions of people who sleep as well, the lives that are ultimately under your control. It makes you feel powerful, doesn’t it, knowing you have them all under your thumb, like you were playing a board game. But really, Mr. President, you’re walking through this world all alone. My words fall upon deaf ears. You haven’t learned, you never will.

A man killed my boy the other day. Did you know that, Mr. President? Do you care?