Can we really expect them not to be full of hatred?

My dad and I went out tonight and saw the film "Lincoln". Going to the movies is our favorite father-daughter thing to do, and I always get excited when I'm getting ready to come home to hear about all the movies he wants to see with me.

This one opened with a very real scene from the Civil War–young men in hand-to-hand combat, drowning each other in the mud and impaling one another on bayonets.

For some reason, my mind didn't travel much during the rest of the movie from that first scene of kids killing other kids.

Anyone who knows me well knows I don't like to talk about work much. It's not that I don't love my job, it's just that I don't like boring people blathering on about refugee law or research or fundraising problems.

I say this just to emphasize how strange it was to be coming home from the movie, sitting in the front seat of my dad's car, telling him about a young man I met outside the Sri Lankan refugee camps in Tamil Nadu. He was 17 and smiling. He was telling me about a recent surgery he had to remove shrapnel from his hand and leg. He was in a hospital in Northern Sri Lanka when the government forces bombed it. He was 14 at the time. The shrapnel in his spine is inoperable but he can still work, he says.

scars from his recent surgery

The scene from the movie reminded me of footage I saw on that famous Chanel 4 documentary about the war in Sri Lanka, of the things countrymen do to one another.

I saw the footage of hospitals being bombed. I met a handful of survivors of these attacks, including this young man, in Thailand and India and Indonesia.

What's weird is, I never talked with anyone about that young man. To be honest, I didn't think about him much after I met him.

When I'm in the field, or even just working abroad in that refugee world, none of it usually phases me. I don't give myself time to think about it and process who I am meeting and the atrocities I am hearing about.

It's only now that I am back in Omaha, without anyone talking about international humanitarian crises, that I'm starting to remember faces and stories. And I am feeling shocked in a way I never did at the time.

It's those kids from that Civil War scene of the movie. How did they move on with their lives after doing those things, after seeing those things? How can we expect this young Sri Lankan man to move back to his country and not be angry at what was done to his family? I am angry.

How long did it take for there to be true reconciliation in the United States after our war? Can there be true reconciliation, or do we just have to wait for time to bury all survivors and generations to forget?