News Good Mourning America
posted by on September 24 at 7:23 AM
The PI reports that a non-profit called Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors conducted a “Good Grief Camp” this Saturday at Fort Lewis. Each camp attendee had lost a parent or sibling in the vast War on Terror. The camp offered games and activities that helped attendees “come to terms with their feelings.” The whole business was embarrassing.
FORT LEWIS — Kaylee Sharp-Henderson had been silent much of the morning, and now she was avoiding, with all her 8-year-old might, directions to write down what made her feel sad. Or angry. Or scared.Around the table, the other children in her group bent their heads over their construction paper and made furtive lists with colored markers.
When they were finished, Tina Saari, the group leader, handed each child a small tin of Play-Doh.
Kaylee wadded the clay into a ball.
“This is the Iraqi that killed my dad,” she said, her voice rising as her fists pummeled the clay into a flat pancake. “I hate you, I hate you. I hate you.”
The other children hammered at their own piles of clay, and in a flurry of pounding, they smashed out feelings of grief only the smallest casualties of war could know.
First of all, the poor girl should have pounded a putty ball of the president or the vice president. Pounding an Iraqi person is a complete misdirection of her anger (the group leader should have told her that). Second of all, was there no thought put in to the name of this camp, “Good Grief Camp”? Or was the double meaning intended? One says something positive: “good grief”; the other says something negative: “good grief.”
Third of all, isn’t the report on the camp exploitive? Because it gives no explanation for the war, says nothing about why or how it happened, it empties the feelings of loss of any real content. The feelings are simply an empty fact of life, something that must dealt with, come to terms with, expressed with Silly Putty or some other silly substance. The lack of a political reality means the report supports the war. (To state the truth about the war—it has nothing to do with the War on Terror, 9/11, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, WMD, and so on—is the same as not supporting it.) Because the report supports the war in Iraqi, and because the war in Iraqi desperately wants the fiction that made it possible (War on Terror) to receive public support, it is in effect exploiting the grief expressed at the camp.
That's funny.
It is the industrialization of the healing process. Carried out on a mass scale, grieving can be efficient, and while not painless, you can come through it as if nothing had happened at all. You'd not want to stay at war forever if there were people running around feeling bad about it all the time.
If only we could do what they did in Monsters, Inc, and turn the tears of children into fuel.
Sounds like junior soldier training camp.
elenchos, your comment is a winner.
In an adult, or even a teenager, I'd definitely agree, and say it was misdirected anger.
All a kid knows is someone killed their dad/mom/sibling. The politics, the larger "world view" is something that is typically beyond the perception of an 8-year-old.
The President is ultimately responsible, but the Iraqi is most directly responsible in a child's eyes. Yes, if the blame stays on the Iraqi insurgent, then that fuels a cycle of hate and retribution etc., etc. But isn't that expecting a little too much from someone who is only 8?
WTF kind of misguided bullshit is this post. IT'S A LITTLE KID WHO LOST HER DAD, YA PUTZ!
no. no no no no. it IS iraq's fault. first of all, iraq elected bush. then it signed up for the military (to take advantage of that quick and handy mercenary cash---bloody bloody blood money---prolly paid off some of the cable and the SUV), then iraq came over here, killed two thirds of the population, then, sneaky iraq, it slipped in through the window in the middle of the night and slit her father's throat as he lay reading the bible. damn you iraq! how could you have done this to america!?
Adrian!, your comment is a winner.
Mr. Chicago's Sunday was largely uneventful. Upon opening his eyes, and after propping 4 pillows behind his head at 11am (followed by the wake and bake ritual), he began glancing through the Times I had just delivered to his bedside. Muttering to himself, "Who gives a crap," he settled on the Funny Pages. However, even that was stopped short. The Onion had hijacked the Peanuts cartoon! In it, Lucy, instead of pulling the football away just as Chuck was about to kick it, she stuck a knife into his foot, stole the football, and pranced away shouting bubbly, "I passed the Gang Initiation!"
Good Grief, I say.
finally a good slog post by charles.
It is my fault.
dan also invented baby aids.
Maybe if you'd seen the picture that went along with the story or the hundreds of pictures that the Times has printed. If the papers were printing those pictures and the thousands of pictures that must be out there of Iraqi kids suffering, it would drive home how a war for oil is torturing the most vulnerable members of our societies.
Allowing the Repubs to change the topic to a MoveOn ad is b.s. Showing the grief and pain of the children who have lost parent(s) is important. It won't affect Bush and Cheney who only care about the profits of Haliburton and KBR, although it might encourage to increase the number of paid soldiers in Iraq, which already outnumber US soldiers.
First of all you made this into a political issue with your first statement. No eight year old should be accountable for the workings of war. You have no respect for her loss if the first thing you can think of is "she's blaming the wrong guy."
Secondly this country has no idea how to deal with death or grief- it makes us uncomfortable (as shown in your assumption that grief is "negative").
Third, the absence of explanations for the war DOES NOT mean it's for the war, and most certainly it does not diminish the grief of these children. How incredibly thoughtless of you to state that this absence "empties the loss of any content." So because this article doesn't give you a history of the war, it's victims- these children- have no content to their grief? This article wouldn't have been printed if they were pro-war.
At this point, I'm grateful that this article even made the papers, since we don't get to see the soldiers coming back in caskets or the thousands of soldiers who will never be the same. This article is a tiny fragment of the mourning this country is going to experience. There should be many more of them to come.
Kate,
War is awesome. Stop being such a bitch.
Sooner we leave, sooner we can get over this.
@16 - eh, don't be so confident. Plenty of Americans still can't stop bitching about Vietnam.
I second Kate @14. Jesus, Charles! She's EIGHT. If she's angry now, just think how angry she will be when she finds out why her dad *really* died... and she will find out soon enough.
Charles isn't dissing the girl for her grief. He's talking about the way that grief is being sequestered from its deeper and darker truth, and turned into propaganda.
Okay but Grant, the kid is eight. She doesn't have the emotional maturity to deal with her dad being gone, let alone dead, let alone murdered by her very own maniac president. I didn't see the print spread of the story, but my impression at this point is that the program was hardly propaganda... It was an attempt to get some group therapy to people who can't afford it otherwise. What, was the Good Grief program founded and funded by Shell Oil?
@17 - yeah, but those are the ones who live in Canada.
but my point still stands.
@18,
If the girl is already blaming some unknown Iraqi male, it's highly probable that she'll never put the blame where it really belongs. Any other 8 year old would process what happened as -- my daddy went away and now he's dead. Just the fact that she knows enough to blame anyone seems to indicate that her family members have been heaping blame on Iraqis in her presence. Perhaps someday she'll figure it out, but I wouldn't count on it.
@18, why is it "highly probable" that she will never put the blame where it belongs (as if that's just one place)? when I was 8 it was highly probable that I'd lay the blame for my dissatisfaction with a happy meal on the Hamburgler. (Okay, I'd probably stopped believing in him by then but...)
To echo Kate and others, these are children who have lost their parents. That and this particular program is what the story's about. Whether the war is or isn't misguided isn't especially relevant for an 8-year old.
Katelyn, Doublepower, I grew up on military bases. Every event that takes place on a base bears the imprimatur of the base's mission. Dissent and free speech exist within a very small confine, because everything - the school supplies, the food you eat, your pay or your parents' or teachers', comes at the pleasure of the DoD. It is exactly because a child losing their parents is such a dreadful and heartbreaking ordeal that any occasion to draw out the kids on the topic should be handled with the ultimate respect and restraint. One of the reasons I personally was suckered into supporting (by not opposing) this war when it started was because of the honor in which I held the U.S. military. But that honor, like so much in our society, has been corrupted, and manipulated by the most shameless and sneaky bastards ever to hold high office in America. When journalists can't photograph coffins, you damn well know that a grieve-in on the grounds of Fort Lewis has some very particular parameters set for it. I lost a lot of people - including both parents - when I was young. I empathize very deeply, and yet something about this gives me the creeps.
Random Thoughts:
When I hear "Good Grief", I think of Charlie Brown trying to kick a football.
Since we're on the subject of acronyms today, this non-profit's initials is TAPS. Good Grief!
@25 - Initials "are TAPS", not "is TAPS". I think. That doesn't sound right either. Initials is (are) plural, but invokes singularity - TAPS (pronounced "taps") as opposed to TAPS (pronounced "tee-ay-pee-ess"). English sucks.
Grant -- it sounds like you have way more personal experience with this than I do, and of course I defer to you about what it's like to grow up in the military. It's true, there are scary limits on our freedoms in these times... I'm still glad that girl and her fellow grievers got a chance to do some grieving, regardless of how publicized it got and regardless of the parameters set on that time.
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