Parenting & Family Quote by Eddie Bernice Johnson

That image of kids drilled for combat isn’t just “too far” in the abstract; it’s a line being drawn against a post-9/11 mood that treated militarization as not only necessary, but morally clarifying. Eddie Bernice Johnson’s phrasing is deceptively plain. “Right after 9/11” does heavy lifting: it locates the moment when grief and fear were most easily converted into policy, spectacle, and permission. By pointing to a magazine cover rather than a statute, she’s flagging culture as an early warning system. Before the wars were fully argued in Congress, the aesthetic of war was already recruiting the public.

The specificity of “mostly 12-14 year-olds” sharpens the indictment. That’s not an accidental detail; it’s the age when identity is malleable and authority can feel like destiny. The cover becomes a symbol of what Johnson saw as a national overcorrection: the shift from protection to preemption, from civic resilience to a posture that imagines the next generation as future soldiers first and children second.

“I thought that this had just gone too far” reads restrained, almost polite, but the restraint is strategic. Politicians often signal seriousness by refusing melodrama. The subtext is a warning about the costs of letting trauma reorganize our values: when fear becomes a brand, childhood becomes a battleground, and patriotism gets measured by proximity to violence. Johnson isn’t rejecting security; she’s rejecting the normalization of war as upbringing.