Perspicaciousness

I have a seven year old daughter...
This means I am exposed daily to one of the most fickle and savagely selfish creatures on the planet.
It also means I am graced daily with the presence of one of the most pure and beautiful creatures on the planet.
She can be loving and sensitive, funny and charming...
And she can be utterly shrill, vindictive and completely self-centered...
That's just before breakfast.
She often tells us that we're being mean to her and that she wishes we weren't her parents.
She often wants nothing more in the universe than to snuggle underneath our arms and hear a story.
She has taught me an awful lot about what perspective can do for a situation.
Sometimes, in the midst of one of her fits of cussedness, I catch myself explaining to her how lucky she is in comparison to so many kids her age, who don't have enough to eat, who don't get to go to school, or ever wear new sneakers.  I stop short of telling her about the children who are abused, who become collateral damage in the wars of grown-ups, who are sold into slavery.  I stop short because I don't want her to know about those things.  I don't want her to have that perspective.
In a weird way, I want her to keep thinking that the worst thing that could possibly happen to her is that she will have to clean her room instead of going outside to play.
Which is why it's so hard when parents have to explain the horrible things that you cannot even hide from your seven-year-old.  I know, that when that bomb went off in Boston, we Americans were just experiencing the sort of thing that happens almost daily in Beirut or Baghdad.  The tragedies in this country used to be spread out, so that you could delude yourself into thinking that outbreaks of evil were preventable.
Here's how it works: an enemy attacks, we investigate the motives and methods of that enemy, we track down that enemy and bring them to justice, it's the old sheriff going after the bad guys motif.  It doesn't matter whether the bad guy is Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh or Osama Bin Laden, they must be hunted down and destroyed.  Every time we slay the dragon, we think we're going to be safe forever...
but there are always more dragons.
It's okay for us to tell our kids that there are no such thing as monsters...
They don't need that kind of perspective.
But it's our job as adults to stop believing the fairy tales we tell to children, because the monsters are going to keep coming.  We are never going to stop the flow of sick and twisted individuals who would set off a bomb at a public event.  As of right now, we have no clue as to what the motivation of the Boston Bomber was, but it very well may be that they had no motivation other than chaos and destruction.  What difference does it make if they had a good reason?
An eight year old boy and a 29 year old woman are still dead, many people are missing parts that they were probably fairly keen on keeping.  What perspective makes that okay?
Not a single one that I can think of...
What we need to do as a society is understand that we can't just keep chasing the bad guys into the wilderness, we need to address the systems of injustice and poverty that produces theses monsters.  We need to address the twisted soul of our culture that inspires people (foreign or domestic) to consider innocent children their enemy.  We need to realize that our war machine does the same thing to villages in Afghanistan as the bomber did to Boston, and we need to realize that, to much of the world, we are the monster.
Our perspective on this does not somehow justify our enemies...
It does not make the attacks of 9-11 or the Boston marathon bombs acceptable...
What it does is helps us see things like adults, people who are old enough to know better.
It is my hope that, one day, my daughter will grow up enough to understand things from the perspective of an  adult.  And I also hope that the children of Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran will grow up to understand things from the perspective of an adult, maybe they'll do a better job fighting the monsters than we have.  I'm probably being naive, but if I refuse to believe in fairy tales and I must acknowledge the monsters... I need some hope somewhere.
For now, I suppose, I'll just grieve for those children who will never see things from an adult perspective, because a monster stole them away.