As a parent of two sons and a 2-year-old Muslim grandson, I’m grateful for Dr. Paul Schoenfeld’s article in the Tuesday Herald, “Talking Terrorism: What kids need to know.” The one essential additional advice he omitted is the caution to “Help children resist ‘us against them’ thinking.”
We know and need to remember from history that people with all different religious beliefs and no religious beliefs are capable of doing wonderful good for others and terrible violence against others. The U.S. war in Vietnam was responsible for the deaths of more than 1 million Vietnamese and more than 58,000 Americans. The disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq caused a half-million Iraqis to die and fueled extremism that now is coming to haunt all of us.
In contrast with poignant personalized media accounts of victims and survivors of the violence in Paris, during the invasion of Iraq our government and media cooperated in not focusing on personal accounts of Iraqi victims and shamelessly hid the return of flag-draped coffins of American casualties.
How to talk about these things with our children and grandchildren clearly needs to be age-appropriate and sensitive, but it’s essential to help them understand that all people are capable of doing good and doing evil, and that it’s not “us good guys against them bad guys.”
Ron Young
Everett
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