While all the arguments are still raging and the stones are still being thrown over who is truly a patriot, who has sold out on freedom, who is a fit parent, who is judging whom unfairly, I came across this article and had to smile. Here was the reality of Elian's experience.
Elian Gonzalez Did Not Realize He Was Home in Cuba<
It threw me back ten years to my own children at that age. Of course he didn't know he was home! Any more than he had a clue just how very far in all ways he was from Cuba when he wound up in Miami. Or what all the fuss was about.
Someone once said here early on that Elian might not be able to verbalize it but that he knew America was "good" and Cuba was "bad". And I laughed at that- wondering if that person had children
Elian is six years old-
When my boys were that age, we travelled a great deal. They went to Europe, all over the Carribbean, to Hawaii, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia. How wonderful that they can see the world, we thought, that they can experience so much! Think what they're learning!!
But children experience their world in a significantly different way than adults. We came back from a trip to Stonehenge and when I waxed on about the mysteries of it, one son said, "But what was that sheep doing to the other sheep?"
Sheep? What sheep?
While we were oohing at the Rose Windows of Notre Dame, they were eyeing a bug crawling across the historic floor, wondering if it spoke in French. Hehehe.
They liked the rings on the finger bones of dead saints in the churches of Frankfurt, and their souvenir from Mexico is an "Indiana Jones" whip- and didn't we have a good time in the hotel room that night.
On our second trip to England Ammo said halfway across the ocean, "Can't we just drive next time? This takes too long."
He thought England was next to Arkansas.
While we grown-ups are looking at great expanses of time and space, concepts and issues, children are immediate and personal, operating in the small intimate environment that surrounds them. If Elian is anything like my six year olds were, he has only the vaguest conception of where he has been and what has happened to him. To him, America may have been the next town over- by way of a very strange boat trip, with an ever-changing cast of strange characters, and a lot of emotional hoopla.
DId you see the article about his American classroom where they recently had a 'memorial' ceremony? The children read poetry and prayed for Elian. Marisleysis tearfully said she "believed that wherever he is, God is always going to be with him."
The school will create a small museum in the boy's honor with the schoolwork he did during the estimated 100 days that he attended, and a large display of photographs, one of ELian in his school uniform giving the RIchard Nixon V- sign. The museum will be opened by the next school year, in late August.
I wonder what these American children are thinking about this? And when the museum opens next year, will there be a lot of six year olds trying to remember Elian. They may recall small happy things about him, the Elian of their daily lives who played and learned briefly with them in their little world, but where did he go? What happened to him that was so different from, say, Bobby, who moved to Idaho? -- did Elian die? Did he go to prison? Did that ugly woman really kidnap him and torture him?
No, they may not understand any of the larger picture- that is, until we adults tell them what to think and what to remember. Which I suspect will not be good. |
