Home > Through Bush’s failed ‘stay the course’ policy, this little girl lost her father

Through Bush’s failed ‘stay the course’ policy, this little girl lost her father

by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 31 October 2006
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Through Bush’s failed ‘stay the course’ policy, this little girl lost her father

By Mary MacElveen

October 31, 2006

Before I have a conversation with all of you, I want you to please take a look at the picture below and gaze upon this little girl’s face for a moment or two. She is deserving of your attention. She is the representation of all little girls who must now go on living life without her father. As many have focused in on the children of Iraq in this heinous war, we often do not zero in on the little girls and even boys whose fathers and mothers have served in the United States armed services. They too have suffered and will continue to suffer and it is up to us to finally come to their aid.

(That picture is here)

I spotted this little girl’s picture in the New York Times yesterday and was remiss in writing down her name. But, as I said above, let her be the representation of all little girls across the United States of America whose fathers will not be coming home to them alive and whose lives were cut short overseas.

Today being Halloween in which many children across the United States dress up in costumes, this little girl’s father will never get to see her dress up and go door-to-door collecting her bounty as she says “Trick or treat”

This little girl’s father will never again get to see her blow out the candles of her birthday cake and gaze upon her smiling face. As each year passes, my guess is that her wish would have been is to have her father there with her.

As we head into the holiday season, this little girl will not have a father playing Santa Clause. He will never see her face light up with joy on Christmas morning as she opens up the presents left by Santa. This little girl’s father would have felt some sadness when his daughter no longer believed in Santa. He would have continued to act as her Santa.

This little girl will never get to show her progress in school with her father as each and every report card comes home. In life it’s the small things that we often take for granted.

This little girl’s father will never get to experience her first sleep-over party in which both she and her friends would have kept him up all night long. Had he lived at one point, he would have come home from work and will miss her flying into his arms to welcome him back home. She would have chewed his ear off telling him what happened during her day.

He will never get to experience his daughter’s first interest in boys where she will say “He’s cute” It will be at that point had this father lived, he would have known his time as the man in her life was slowly coming to the end.

This little girl will never get to experience her ‘Sweet Sixteen’ dancing with her father on her special day. He will never get to experience presenting to the family and friends gathered at that party the young woman she has now become.

As this little girl prepares for college, he will not be able to assist her in picking the right one or to worry if he had the funds needed to send her to the school of her choice.

He will not be able to see her on her high school graduation day when both she and her classmates would have thrown up their mortarboards in their collective celebration and achievement. Nor will her father get to experience his fret as she went away to college wondering whether or not she will be safe. He will never experience of the empty nest in his daughter’s first right of passage as an independent young woman.

Had he lived, he would have experienced his daughter’s graduation from college and like in high school; both she and her classmates would have thrown their mortarboards up in the air in collective act of celebration and achievement.

When this little girl someday marries the man of her dreams he would have replaced her father as the man in her life. This little girl’s father will not be able to walk her down the aisle and gaze upon the eyes of her future husband to guard his precious daughter. He would have asked his future son-in-law to love and protect her for all eternity.

As they move into their first home, this little girl’s father will not be able to get in the way to make sure their new home is safe and help with any needed repairs.

This little girl’s father will never get to experience the birth of his grandson or granddaughter as his once little girl now became a mother herself. He will not be able to stand outside the nursery window, puff his chest with pride and say to all, “That is my grandchild!”

As many of us go to the polls next Tuesday, we must put our concerns behind us and in a selfless act hold both Bush and the Republican Party responsible for creating the void in this little girl’s life. Through Bush’s lies you will see above what was lost to this little girl forever and the ones just like her.

In past campaigns, I always told the voters to gather their utility bills and tax bills and bring them with them as they head to the polls. Once there, they were to take them into the voting booth and cast their vote based upon them. What I ask of all of you now is to send this little girl’s picture to all fifty states in which we all will carry her picture into the voting booth in our collective outrage and heart felt sorrow change the course instead of ‘staying the course’ which has been Bush’s failed policy as it relates to this most heinous and immoral war.

Whether your concerns are immigration in which you think the Republican Party is better at handling national security, you must ask yourself, what security did they give this little girl? They gave her none. You must be able to put aside what concerns you personally and act selflessly to come to the aid of this child. Through your vote, you must act as her guardian. As a collective, we cannot vote for any Republican candidate. We must start at the federal level and let it trickle down to our state and local races.

It is time that we tell the Republicans that we are coming together and our message is, “We will not leave this child behind and others just like her”

http://www.marymacelveen.com/blog/_archives/2006/10/31/2462237.html

*It is important that you do go to the above link to see a picture included within this editorial who lost her father over in Iraq.

Forum posts

  • No matter how much you want my heart to go out to this little girl - which it does - I still can’t get over the fact that her father - or some other little American girl’s father - was partly responsible for the pain and suffering of the little Iraqi girl depicted in the photo linked to below. Her mother and father did not choose the war, whereas the little American girl’s now dead father did. There is a universe of difference between the two little girls’ tragic plights. Lest We Forget.

    http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/01/19/international/19iraq.ready.html

  • Ms. MacElveen forgets one very important item in this column: This war of invasion and occupation is being waged with an all volunteer army, not a conscript army.
    This brings up two tangents that I would like to explore.

    1] Had their been a draft, this war would have been far more unpopular that it is now. It is precisely because this war is being fought with volunteer forces, and not draftees, that many Americans are not going to be as sympathetic towards those American troops who have suffered in this ongoing and miserable nightmare, simply because no one put a gun to their head when they volunteered. It would have been a much different story had many young Americans been forced to kill or be killed by Muslims. This is the most important difference between this Iraqi war of occupation and the Vietnam war.

    In spite of all the dastardly and two-faced ways the Repukables have solicited support for this false war, there is one thing they never touched, and that is reactivating the Selective Service.
    Yes, this corrupt neocon generation of Repukables could be described as being congenitally stupid, but they weren’t so stupid that they reactivated the Selective Service.

    Had they reactivated the Selective Service, the neocons’ popularity would have nose dived three years ago, we would be seeing one thousand times more anti-war protests than we are seeing now, and the White House’s approval ratings would be in single digits, and not the laughable 26% we are seeing now.

    Which brings me to tangent 2]

    The latest scientific data, as funded and presented by the Johns Hopkins University, states that over 650,000 Iraqis have died violent deaths since the invasion of 2003.

    I am sorry, Ms. MacElveen, but my heart goes out more to those innocent Iraqi children, who now number in the millions, who have been left orphans because of this war, and not the several thousand whose fathers or mothers died doing what they thought needed to done, which was for all practical purposes, the infliction of utter destruction upon an already wasted Mulsim country.

    The children of Iraq didn’t ask for this suffering and misery to happen to themselves, and neither did their parents.
    One cannot say the same about most American troops, since the majority were all in favor of invading and occupying a country, weakened and decimated by UN sanctions, that was never capable of attacking our own.
    Yes, War is hell, but this man-made hell is usually suffered by those who are the weakest and the most innocent. And the weakest and the most innocent are the Iraqi kids, not the Americans.