Hippie days are here again!
Dana Milbank, political sage of the Washington Post, reproduces this excerpt from a post-massacre French TV interview:
Boy: Bad people aren’t very nice. And you have to be very careful because you need to move house.
Father: No, don’t worry, we don’t have to move. France is our home.
Boy: But what about the baddies, dad?
Father: There are baddies everywhere. There are bad guys everywhere.
Boy: They’ve got guns. They can shoot us because they’re very, very bad, daddy.
Father: They’ve got guns but we have flowers.
Boy: But flowers don’t do anything. They’re for… they’re for… they’re for…
Father: Look, everyone is laying flowers here.
Boy: Yes.
Father: It’s to fight against the guns.
Boy: Is it for protection?
Father: That’s right.
Boy: And the candles too?
Father: They’re so we don’t forget the people who have gone.
Boy: Oh. The flowers and candles are there to protect us?
Father: Yes.
Journalist: Do you feel better now?
Boy: Yes, I feel better.
Comments Milbank:
That father-son exchange is a more powerful answer to Islamic State than any missile strike.
And why stop there with the flower power? Why bother with those nasty "missiles" at all? How about sticking a daisy into the muzzle of every ISIS rifle, the way the original hippies did back in the Vietnam War days? We could also ship the Islamic State some posters saying, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"
Make love, not war! Make love, not war! And soon enough those bad people at ISIS will dissipate like a cloud of weed smoke at Woodstock.