The sin of omission

A friend of mine was describing a new battle she is having with her eighth-grade daughter. Emily has fallen into the game of telling only what she wants her parents to know while leaving them in the dark about important details that she knows will affect their decisions. Sharon has explained to her that this is a lie, too--a lie of omission. Of course, when they went shopping the other day, her mother spent a little more than she was supposed to have. As they walked out the door, Sharon told Emily, "Now, we don't have to tell Dad about buying these other things." Emily, being her mother's daughter, jumped right on it. "Oh!" she brought up slyly. "Is this one of those lies of omission you've been telling me about?"

As humorous as that was, yesterday I ran across a situation that was not humorous. This situation made me re-reevaluate what is going on with our country at this time.

Our newest classified worker is in a classroom right off the library. Her job is to help with kids who have emotional and behavioral disorders. She's tough--hard-core, a mutual friend calls her. But she loves with the toughness that she hits life in general. She's deep. She's real. I love her.

So yesterday was movie day in the EBD classroom. The teacher, trying to find movies of value, chose Schindler's List. Judy came through the library and said, "I'm staying with you. I can't watch this."

I sympathized. That is one of a handful of movies that I really want to see, but I can't bring myself to watch it. Like The Passion, Life Is Beautiful, and a few others, even the thought of sitting in front of a screen, watching the suffering or at least knowing it is going on, is more than I can take.

Still, I didn't think this outlook fit Judy.

She continued. "I worked with a man who had a tattoo on his wrist. For a long time, I thought it said "Mom"..."

I got chills.

"Once you got to really know him, he'd tell you about it. He was 16 when he was taken. He was tough, too. The only reason they kept him alive was because he was a welder. When he learned he was making war equipment for the German army, he'd hold the weld a little too long. They soon figured out what was going on, so the guards would make the workers mark them.

"One fellow was older and he had lots of experience with this kind of work, so they made him a supervisor over the welders. One day, they acted up, so the guards took the supervisor out and executed him. They left this man locked up in a cage with his body for two weeks.

"And the German Jews are still upset with the United States today. This went on for years and we knew about it. German Jews were calling their American relatives, telling them what was going on. Word got to high places, but no one did anything..."

I chimed in. "Until someone attacked us directly and then we felt like we had to get involved."

"That's right. No one thought it was any of our business, but here people were dying and being tortured and were leading miserable lives, and it wasn't our problem."

And they say God works in mysterious ways. What if he'd stopped the bombings at Pearl Harbor?

I made a parallel. "So now here we are, in Iraq, and people say we don't need to be there when the same thing was going on there."

"Exactly. And you can understand why some of the Iraqis don't want us there! We were there before and we pulled out before we did our jobs and it just got worse for them. Now we're back and people are afraid we're going to do the same thing again."

I'm not pro-war. I hate the idea of us being there, but I know that we're there for a good reason, regardless of the spin. Hussein had his own Holocaust going. bin Ladin wants one. Sometimes there are better ways to handle things, but sometimes there aren't.

This time, I'm not sure we have a choice.