By Tami Coyne
© 2004/Tami Coyne/All rights reserved

Excerpt:

I was born in 1960 and my formative years were spent worrying about the Vietnam War, race riots, and the nuclear threat. Too young to remember the Bay of Pigs invasion or the Cuban missile crisis, my earliest memory is John F. Kennedy’s assassination. My sister and I were pulling our blocks out of the closet when our kiddy show was interrupted with the news of the president’s death. We comforted my mother as she wept, not understanding the enormity of the loss for the nation, but feeling pain, sadness and confusion at our inability to make her feel better.

Within the next 10 years—by the time I was just thirteen years old—Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and Watts, Detroit and other cities had erupted into riots, four people were killed in the Kent State massacre, 58,000 American soldiers and two million Vietnamese had been killed in Vietnam, and over a million people had died in Biafra from starvation and war. Back then the nightly news didn’t shelter us from reality. As a result, I had the images of the naked Vietnamese girl running down the street after a napalm attack, the photograph of the horrified young woman kneeling by one of the dead protesters in the Kent State massacre, and the starving Biafran children with distended stomachs and sunken eyes seared into my consciousness for eternity.

Sadly, my daughter was about the same age on September 11, 2001 as I was on the day JFK died. Will her first conscious memories be of airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center, of people choosing to jump to their deaths rather than remain trapped in towering infernos, of crumbling buildings and heroic rescue attempts? Will she be haunted by the continuous Technicolor loop of doom and destruction that appeared on our television screens for what seemed like months after the event? How will she process the fact that as a result of our heart-melting rage at the loss of American life on 9-11, 3,400 civilians died in the bombing of Afghanistan and ten thousand and counting innocent people have died in “Operation Iraqi Freedom?” Will the allegations of war crimes committed by the American military at Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanmo Bay and other secret locations across the globe, the gruesome accounts of the “Convoy of Death” in Afghanistan, and the reprehensible birth defects resulting from depleted uranium define her childhood the way the My Lai massacre, agent orange, landmines, and napalm defined mine?