War Generation
It wears off they say. Time will make you change, they prophetize. The elders talk about the days long gone, wistfully churning tales about fortunes and happiness, looking down at their progeny with a deterring sadness melted with youthful love. These children can reach the skies they claim. But they know.They know that we have been born in wars.
They know the lives some of us have lived altered the cliché concept of "tomorrow".
They know because they were born in wars too.
War has its role in defining us.
I once crossed the line and asked someone close how she "found the war". She said nothing. I wonder if she will ever really overcome it.
People tell us that we can become great. That our country can soar around the world and back. I wait for that day anxiously, because I want to be there when it arrives. But typing this, I have a grudgingly frustating itch that this day will not surface.
Do the endless wars explain the Middle East? They are one of the reasons that we are the way we are. How many wars have been fought on our lands, for how many years/decades/centuries?
In the end, people want to survive. To do that in a war, you need someone to protect you. This explains our politics. This explains our behavior. This explains our corruption, our semi-selfishness, our acceptance of what is.
There are those who don't understand what war is. They see it as glorious. To them, war has a just cause. This can be seen in the attitudes, the speeches, and even the arts. Look at a poem that was writtedn just before WWI.
The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
--Rupert Brooke
--Rupert Brooke
And look at the difference in a poem written during it.
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori*.
--Wilfred Owen
War is not something you will understand until you see its effect. Dulce est decorum est pro patria more* is used as bait for those who have enjoyed the colors of peace. People advertise the heroism of war, the courage it needs to join a war, the lasting effects of justice due to war. Even today, movies are made that attempt to exonerate war from it destruction, and add to it the flame that makes it worthy of losing your life too.
But it is the effect of war that really matters ...
... and the effect will not be forgotten. We are the war generation. My parents were a war generation. My grandparents were also a war generation. They lived it.
This is our broken wing. We cannot soar because of war. We can sit and talk about how things can be better, how they should be better, how we can all work to make them better, but until the mentality of war is lifted from future generations, things will not be better.
Will this happen? I hope so.
But for today, all we can do is confront its effect. Today, we must do our best to prevent the future from glorifying war.
No more.
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*Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: It is sweet and right to die for your country.
posted by Lazarus, 11:41 AM
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