Friday, April 27, 2012

How I won the war...


It sometimes happens that you have to say "no".

As a father of five, and a grandfather of two, I sound like a broken record sometimes...
and it isn't always easy to say "no" when children are involved...

You don't want to disappoint a little girl.

Or a little boy.

When I was a boy, there was a terrible little war in a beautiful little country. They were both called Vietnam.

Draft every able bodied young man? No.

Bomb Hanoi "into the stone age"? No.

Shoot protesters on Kent State campus? No.

Spend YEARS negotiating in Paris while my brothers and sisters get slaughtered? No.



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I don't read the newspapers anymore.




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I don't watch television.




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But a customer told me today that 17,000 boys and girls are going to some country you can't even find on a map. It ends in "Stan".

Marco Polo put a big circle around that country when he returned from the Orient. He noted "go around this one..."

The British Army found out the hard way that home made rifles could kill at a distance of just under a mile...

The Soviet Union broke its famous Red Army into splinters trying to win this country over, using giant helicopters that fell like toys from the skies around Kabul...

All of our bases in the Afghan theater are in line with the oil pipelines that run from the Caspian Sea...

Mr President, you don't have to slaughter my children to prove you are a world leader.

Mr President, I didn't buy a used war from Richard Millhouse Nixon.

And NO, MR PRESIDENT... I will not buy one from Barak Hussein Obama, either.

You will receive no support from me, sir.

(I hate Kool-Aid...)


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I say it one last time.




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NO


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2 comments:

Ryan Zamperlini said...

Sometimes saying no is necessary! We must only be careful and know how to use this trick!

hugs

Minka said...

If only it helped, saying NO.... but it diesn't very often.