Parenting & Family Quote by Garry Trudeau

Trudeau’s power move here is refusing the easy posture of the politically awakened celebrity. “I don’t think so” is a deliberate undercut: it swats away the idea that his opposition to the Iraq War is merely a mood or a brand. Then he admits what’s harder to say in public without sounding selfish: the conflict becomes urgent when it brushes up against your own family. That’s not hypocrisy so much as an x-ray of how empathy actually works in America, where distant policy can feel like weather until it hits your street.

The line “about the same age as my kids” does the quiet rhetorical work. It turns “soldiers” from an abstract constituency into a peer group for his children, collapsing the distance between the home front and the battlefield. Trudeau, as a cartoonist, has spent decades translating political systems into human-sized absurdities; here he does it without a punchline. The bluntness (“My godson is going over soon”) reads like a confession: he knows the moral hierarchy we’re supposed to perform - caring equally, at all times - and he’s choosing honesty over virtue.

“About to get personal” lands with a sting because it indicts more than himself. It suggests a country structurally designed to keep war impersonal for most voters: an all-volunteer force, regional enlistment patterns, a media cycle that can turn casualties into numbers. Trudeau’s subtext is that personal stakes are often the only stakes that move the needle, and that’s the bleakest cartoon he could draw without drawing anything at all.