Adolescents in Wartime

I have been inundated lately with images of adolescents in war from both my reading and my film experiences. The movie Winter in Wartime, set in World War II in the Netherlands, revealed the conflict of a young adolescent boy. The boy disliked his father's seeming acquiescence to the Nazi occupiers while he admired his uncle's seeming involvement in the resistance movement. When he has an opportunity to choose sides with his discovery of an injured Allied pilot near his home, he does so and eventually assists the pilot to safety. In the process, he becomes a man quickly. The novel The Book Thief by Markus Zusak also features a young protagonist who befriends a neighbor girl and is killed, while sleeping, in a bombing raid. In the film White Material, a story about a civil war in an African country, we see young boys armed with machetes. Even in our own newscasts recently, we are beginning to hear of young boys who are just twelve years old being armed with guns, and that is a frightening reality, not fiction.

I try to imagine what it would be like here in America to put children at such risk at such an early age. My granddaughter who's twelve spends her summer days at the pool with her friends and many of her nights at her girlfriends' houses watching movies and endlessly texting others. Her adulthood will come soon enough, and these days will later be prefaced in her conversations with, "Back in the day . . . . " After growing up too fast myself as a child with an alcoholic father, a clinically depressed mother, and a broken home, I am happy that my grandchildren have peace obviously, but I worry about the millions of children who are experiencing the stresses of war today in Syria, Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries. What will their future be?