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Children

In April, 1986 there was an accident at the nuclear power plant in, Chernobyl, Ukraine. The Lad was then exactly 10 years old and I remember him walking into the kitchen, stopping still having overheard the excited commentary about radiation and wind directions, his face going completely white, his eyes wide with panic, as he asked: "What's happened?"

This was still the Cold War Era and his first thought was that someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on someone else.

We calmed him with an explanation of what HAD happened, that it was far away, that it was an accident, and that there were men working to fix it.

This, of course, is far different. First of all, it did not happen an ocean and a continent away; it happened in New York and Washington. Even children on the West Coast understand that it happened "here."

The Washington Post yesterday morning had as the focus of its weekly Health section: "Attack on America; The Psychological Impact" including a section on dealing with children's' reactions.

Anecdotal information is making its way around Washington, DC. One friend told me about her child having become very absorbed with the people who jumped from the upper floors of the World Trade Center.

First Lady Laura Bush got on television quickly last week doing interviews in which she suggested parents control the amount of television their children were watching. In addition Mrs. Bush published a letter aimed at elementary school children, and another aimed at middle and high school students.

Dr. Jo Linder-Crow of the American Psychological Association, pointed Mullings to the APA web site on which there is a world of information for parents in dealing with their children.

The worst possible outcome of this attack would be to raise a generation of children who hate people they have never met, because their fears were not dealt with promptly and effectively.

Economy

The Lad, having finally made it home from Tokyo by traveling across the Pacific Ocean on an Air Force C-5A transport, joined us for dinner in downtown Washington. The restaurant is one of the newer, trendier numbers in town. When I walked in I asked the maitre d' if his business had been affected. He said that on the previous Monday night they had been filled. I looked around the dining room. There were three tables in use.

We know about the airlines, whose CEOs had an audience with the President this week to plead their case for Federal intervention.

What we sometimes forget is that about half the US Gross Domestic Product, according to some estimates, comes from small businesses.

The ripple effect on small businesses which depend upon vacation and business travel, which help provide the services for large dinners and conventions, which deliver food to restaurants and, by extension, the businesses which serve THOSE businesses might be less dramatic, but no less damaging.

Most small businesses are like most families: A couple of weeks without income is economically devastating.

Free Speech

Representative Barbara Lee of California cast the only vote against the resolution granting President Bush, in effect, war powers. I absolutely disagree with Ms. Lee's position on the issue but we pay her to cast votes and her constituents will decide whether that vote was good or bad.

After lunch yesterday, I was walking back to my car when I overhead several women behind me complaining about the way President Bush is handling this effort. "It's all that macho stuff" one said using a common Anglo-Saxonism for the word "stuff."

I was tempted to stop and explain things to them: In America you CAN take a position different from the President and you CAN state it out loud on a street corner in downtown Washington, DC - or, for that matter, on the Floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The terrorists who attacked us last week do not hold the First Amendment in very high regard.

We, however, must.

At that same restaurant I wrote about earlier, the valet parking crew was clearly made up of young men of Middle Eastern origins. As one took my keys I said "thank you" in Arabic which was, to say the least, an attention-getter.