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Strollerderby
“Should This Be the Last Generation?”
That’s the provocative question posed by Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, in his recent Op-Ed in The New York Times.
As someone who was pregnant and living in downtown Manhattan for 9/11 and its afermath, I often fretted over the future of the world my daughter was soon going to enter. Would she grow up in a war zone? Would she lead a life of suffering and deprivation? Luckily, my dystopian “Mad Max” vision of the future didn’t become a reality — at least not yet.
Singer wonders whether it is inheritantly good to be brought into existence. Is it fair to bring a child into a world with global warming, the threat of nuclear annihilation, environmental disasters and the rest ? Continue reading »
“Don’t you think it’s a little irresponsible to be pregnant in a war zone?” an intelligence officer asked Elizabeth Rubin as they rode along in the black Afghanistan night in the back of a Humvee. Ironically, just a moment earlier he’d asked her — if they ran into trouble — to load the bullets into the machine gun.
Rubin balked. Four months pregnant, she hadn’t disclosed her pregnancy to anyone. That move gave her a few more precious months out in the field, but it also earned her a brisk refusal of her next embed assignment by a female colonel.
“How could a woman, particularly in the military, not understand why I would have kept my pregnancy to myself?” Rubin writes in an article for the Guardian. “Is it true that the toughest adversary for women is still other women?”
So begins her intriguing story, one that starts with her asking her doctor for pregnancy-safe antibiotics to take to Afghanistan with her and follows her to a middle of the night raid where several of the men she traveled with for two months are killed. And one that ends with her realizing that though all along she’d though a baby would put an end to the adventure in her life, the baby really was the adventure she’d wanted all along.
I spent more time than I would have liked this weekend contemplating children’s bedrooms. They were not the rooms of my own children, but the rooms so mournfully portrayed in the The New York Times’ magazine feature “The Shrine Down the Hall,” photographs of the bedroom’s of some of the youngest American soldiers to die in Iraq. Continue reading »
Here’s a video that’s sure to make you feel old.
As we approach the New Year, Vimeo user Allison Louie-Garcia has asked kids born in the year 2000 to look back on the last decade. Their fears about war and terrorism sadly bring the violence of the last decade into focus, but the questions are mostly light-hearted.
Asked, for instance, about the first time they used a computer, the kids say things like, “I think it was just around my second birthday.” Asked to identify Britney Spears, one kid says, “Isn’t that the girl that cut her hair bald?” And wait ’till you hear what they think the sound of a dial-up connection is.
The decade according to 9-year-olds from allison louie-garcia on Vimeo.
No matter how loyal one is to the military, there’s not a parent alive who can’t sympathize with the predicament of Alexis Hutchinson, a 21-year-old single mother and army cook who refused to deploy to Afghanistan because she had no one to care for her son. Hutchinson is currently confined to Hunter Army Field in Georgia and may face criminal charges, depending on what the Army’s investigators turn up. Continue reading »
Want to be a suicide bomber when you grow up? Why wait? The Taliban is now recruiting kids as young as 5 to fight. Some are being trained for suicide missions.
Last week a teenager between the ages of 12 and 14 blew himself up in a busy square, killing at least 40 people. Earlier this year, a 6-year-old approached a group of American soldiers wearing a suicide vest armed with explosives. The boy could not remember what he was supposed to do with the bombs, and was disarmed. Continue reading »
It seems that the Pentagon has had a better year than most of us — and its best year since 1973. Its best year for new recruits, that is. All four branches of the military — the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps — met their recruitment goals for both active duty and reserve personnel for the fiscal year that ended September 30.
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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