Aftermath

The morning of September 11, this year, I opened the door and let our dog out. After that, I walked outside and put our flag up. When I cam back in, I went into the kitchen where I found an armored robot with a long-barreled ray gun and a heavily armed air transport vehicle on the table. They had been left there by my son the night before. It was not a response to anything in particular. It's what he builds with Legos.
My wife and I have wondered how we could have encouraged such a wide streak of interest in guns and ammo. It is true that my wife did buy my son a squirt gun after much soul searching and debate between us. We found ourselves tumbling down a slippery slope as his young imagination became attached to Nerf guns and the armed struggles of robots throughout the universe. In a household that regularly discussed the evils of war and the challenge of peace in our time, we could not understand the way our son gravitated to things that go boom.
I started to understand when I stood there in my kitchen on 9/11. My son has grown up in a world that explodes. It's part of the way he sees things. Those block towers he made in his bedroom would eventually come tumbling down. The response to terror is fear and anger. It's not what we have taught him, and it's not what he understands outwardly, but inside it's a scary place. He has grown up in a time that calls to arms. If you were to ask him, he would tell you that he is a pacifist, but just outside his front door is a world at war. It's got to be a comfort to him to know that if it ever makes it inside we've got the mechanized robot infantry to deal with it.