June, 2025

I’ve been wanting to write about this little green man for some time now.  The green army man first showed up some years ago when I was digging in the front garden bed.  My trowel hit something unfamiliar and up came a little plastic army man with his feet fastened to a small base and arms outstretched ready for a weapon.  I placed it in a flower pot hanging over the garden where it resided in leafy camouflage until this week when I decided to take down the old pot. There was the little green guy still as ready for action as ever.  I don’t know when that army man first made it to the front garden, but certainly it was left there by some small son.   I can imagine him lying on the ground playing with his military men, locked in an imaginary world of battles between the good guys and the evil.

I wonder how many small army men are still circulating the globe right now?  How many are lying in dusty drawers or on collector’s shelves?  How many remain buried in garden beds?  Do the young still want to play army and soldier?  As they play, do they imagine the heroic deeds that they might accomplish themselves someday? I know that this is just a simple child’s toy, but it has me thinking about so much more.  A childhood should be a place where imagination is free to explore places where only the mind can go.  Our best hope for our world lies tucked away in the mind of a child. A society should do everything it can to see that we create a world where an imagination can be nurtured and allowed to grow in positive ways.  We need heroes that children can wish to emulate, but I wonder if there are enough in today’s world to go around?  

My wish is that we will always live in a country where our soldiers are considered our heroes. I have heard enough stories about wayward regimes using the power of the military to subdue its citizens to know that is not something I would ever want for our beloved country.  As we watch events unfold in the streets of our cities and towns in these June days, let us hope that our soldiers keep in mind that our children’s eyes are watching them and looking, as they always do, for a hero worthy of the imagination.