Foreign Policy in My Kitchen

I'm not a political blogger.  I have no desire to be a political blogger.  It's not that I'm not interested in political issues, I just worry that people are so polarized anymore that when you voice support for one side or another that people stop listening to you carefully.  I worry about stereotypes that cut both directions--that if you support different positions than I do that you will make assumptions about everything else I believe, and that people who agree with me will do the same.  No one I know is that simple.

So at the risk of alienating anyone or people jumping to all manner of conclusions I feel the need to comment on last night's presidential debate on foreign policy.  Not that there was any debate on foreign policy since it all seemed to be agreement on foreign policy, which I found rather mystifying, honestly, since I don't think the two major parties agree on much in that area.  But that aside, this is what I found myself reflecting on this morning.

There has been a lot of discussion about looking back at the past four years.  They have been a hard four years for many, and I understand.  But compared to the four years before that?  I prefer the path we are on now.

When I think of foreign policy, I think not only of the role of our nation in the world, but of the future of my children and our own family.  I think about standing in my kitchen watching President Bush on television while my husband was deployed in Iraq the first time.  I was washing dishes while my daughter, only four at the time, was drawing at the table.  I didn't usually express political opinions in front of Aden back then because she was too young to understand and her life was complicated enough with her dad away.  But then the president was asked if the responsibility for all those soldiers overseas troubled his sleep at night.  And President Bush replied that he slept just fine.

I almost dropped the dish I was holding.