A writer whose mother died when he was nine reflects on the plight of Elian Gonzalez, and on why the majority of Americans believe the boy should be returned to his father in Cuba. PNS editor Joe S. Loya is working on a memoir about his years in federal prison.

If I were Elian, and had survived being adrift at sea for eleven days, I wouldn't want to go back to Cuba either.

With a kid's limited knowledge of the world, he probably imagines that he would have to return to Cuba on a rickety boat like the one that nearly killed him in the first place.

The loss of a mother is not an abstraction. My mother died of a kidney disease when I was nine. She had a heart attack while on a dialysis machine at the age of 26. Three decades later, I remain profoundly pained by her absence. I can't imagine how much more distraught I would be today if, like Elian, I had actually witnessed my mother's final lurches in the throes of death.

This truth about Elian cannot be minimized: He saw the sea take his mother. If his community is truly interested in his mental welfare, they will stop all this political back and forth, playing futbol with his feelings. Turning Elian's private grief into a public spectacle is no help to the boy -- who must take cues from them on how he is supposed to grieve.

When I hear that Elian says he wants to stay here, I sense that he has become distracted in this land of milk and money, by McDonald's and MTV, and the Disney World atmosphere the Cuban-American community has created for him. The politicos surrounding Elian have quickly calibrated his interior compass with theirs.

On the front page of the New York Times recently, Cuban expatriates were cited lauding the democratic virtues of the United States over Cuba, namely the constitutional rights afforded citizens in the courts. Ironically, another headline on that same front page stated that the Florida legislature just passed a law to further strip the appeal rights of prisoners on death row.

There can be no greater threat to our nation's liberty than the person or community that is more American than America. So when the Cuban-American community appeals to fundamental principles of liberty and due process in calling for Elian's right to a day in court, the rest of the nation cannot help but notice the hyper-American sanctimoniousness in the plea.

Relatives want Elian to stand before a magistrate and say he wants to stay in the U.S. But liberty and due process are disingenuous words in Elian's case. No one honestly trusts a child's desires over the conscience of a parent. This nation has never believed that six-year-olds are free to make their own life's choices. Rather, they must be told when to pick-up around the house, when to take the trash out, when to go to sleep, when to shut up, what church to attend, what political views to espouse. We barely let them choose between a Pokeman or a Lion King lunch box.

The irony is that for all the Cuban nationalist's talk of liberty, Elian was never free to choose when his mother risked their lives on that tiny boat.

A guiding principle of this country's child welfare system is the belief that the child's interests are best served by a parent, unless the parent is deemed unfit. My brother and father and I survived my mother and went through some really anguished times. But our family's value is measured today by the way we struggled through the pain together.

Rabid anti-Castro Cuban nationals need one more civics lesson on the concept of family values and "We the People." They don't recognize that if Elian is allowed to stay in the U.S. then the entire nation will have adopted him. But we don't want him. The will of the majority of Americans would book Elian on the first plane back to Cuba where he belongs, in the arms of his father.