Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Back in the late 60’s just before my dad died, he and my son sat together on a park bench talking. My son looked up into the sky and said “grandad Look, its a airplane”. My dad looked up and started talking to my son. I stood to one side listening fascinated while my dad told him of things that had happened since he had been born in the late 1800’s.
“I remember when I was child about your age” dad said to my son, “seeing a man walking in front of an automobile waving a red flag. It was the first car that I had ever seen. The man had to walk in front of the car carrying the flag, to warn pedestrians and horse drivers and riders. The noise that the car made, was so loud and unusual that it frightened horses and some pedestrians”.
Later when my dad was a teenage boy, he told of reading about two young men in North Carolina who had flown the first airplane. Dad thought that this was the most amazing thing ever.
My dad told of the time as young man when he went fight a terrible war with the new airplanes, the first tanks and the biggest guns ever made. Dad told how he was wounded three times. Once by machine-gun fire, once from arial bombing and once from mustard gas inhallation.
Dad was a patriotic young man of his day, who proudly came home from that war to find his country in economic dissaray with no homes and no work for the returning soldiers. and the fervent pre-war promises of the politicians forgotten or ignored.
After spending 20 years struggling to support his growing family in a time of plenty for the rich and powerfull, another war started and he and three of his sons volunteered to fight a war that was once again declared to be just and honorable.
Dad told my son of the time during that war, when he had taken me to the back door of our house to watch London burning and how three days later, an older brother carried me out of our burning house with my hair on fire. My son asked “why did they do that Grandad?” Dad replied that “when people go to war, lots of ordinary people get injured, lose their familes, homes and belongings, and that everyone is hurt or damaged in some ways”.
I stood and listened to my dad talking to a child, of the wonders of his life. I saw as his face grew firm at the telling of his war stories, and how his eyes lit up when he talked about the early cars, and the first airplane that he ever saw and how, as an old man he had watched in fascination, as a man walked on the moon.
Three days later, My dad died. I regretted that I had not taken time to listen more to his tale. But one thing that I do remember, Is the sadness in his eyes when he talked of war. And how he turned his face to hide tears when he spoke of his oldest son killed if France in the beggining of WWll.
I remember my dad only as a pacifist who had fought for his country when called and who watched his children growing into poverty, in a land of plenty ruled by a culture of class and race and social separation. He taught me that there was no shame in being opposed to any war. His life had shown him that war does not solve any problems either political or social, no matter how just or honorable. He challenged me to stand firm when some politician would call for war, and to resist injustice and falsity as an excuse to fight. I learned from him, that when a politician decides to go to war, there will always be one group which stands to benefit. They are not the working poor, the emigrants the minority cultures or the socially disadvantaged. It is the rich who profit from imense wealth created from war, and who feed on the false patriotism and glory, from which the young who fight the war will derive no financial benefit.
I look today at a modern world as different to me as the first car and the Wright brothers flight was to my dad and although I have served in the military, I am and have always been a pacifist.
George W. Bush dishonors his father by starting a war in which the prime aim is not even just and honorable, but purely for personal enrichment for him and his followers. I am not a coward or ashamed to stand and declare the war in Iraq and its terrible toll on people is wrong. I am not a traitor or disloyal to my country in opposing the blatant war profiteering on the bodies of dead Iraqis and American soldiers. On the contrary I am proud to stand and say that the policies of this administration, offend and denigrate Americans and free thinking people everywhere. The Rupublican efforts to divert the intention of the constitution and the bill of rights in pursuit of profit and power is an affront to all Amercans.
I dread the day when I shall sit with my grandsons and tell them that between my fathers life and my own, nothing has changed. Rich men still order the sons and daughters of the poor to fight to defend a system that has no concern for them.
I have just one hope, that maybe. Just maybe, this generation will have the courage to stand before history and declare in the the words of Cheif Joseph of the Nez Perces in the year of my fathers birth, “From this time forward, I will fight no more forever”. Dare I hope that history at last will think kindly of us?
(318 votes, average: 2.97 out of 5)
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April 26th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Terry, that was an awesome piece of writing, connecting your family’s personal history to the long struggle to free humanity from the grasping hands of violence. Please tell me more!
April 28th, 2006 at 11:32 am
When folks click on anything less than 5 stars, please say why.
What’s to disagree with?
“War is Great?”
“War is end in and of itself.”
“People should be treated like tools, and sent to war so that the rich can profit?”
I’m reminded of a protest song from the great philosopher poets Smith & Dickinson–here are a few of the lines:
Kill for gain or shoot to maim
But we don’t need a reason
Some blackened pride still burns inside
This shell of bloody treason
Here’s my gun for a barrel of fun
For the love of living death
The killer’s breed or the Demon’s seed,
The glamour, the fortune, the pain,
Go to war again, blood is freedom’s stain
But don’t you pray for my soul anymore.
We oil the jaws of the war machine and feed it with our babies.
The body bags and little rags of children torn in two
And the jellied brains of those who remain to put the finger right on you
As the madmen play on words and make us all dance to their song
To the tune of starving millions to make a better kind of gun.
April 28th, 2006 at 2:45 pm
“dulce et decorum est pro patri mori” That’s all I remember from ‘In Flanders Fields,’ required high school reading back in the sixties. The poem is about a particular bloody battlefield from WWI now covered with flowers and the battle forgotten. The Latin means “it is sweet and noble to die for one’s country” and is repeated many times throughout the poem. For Vietnam maybe try Simon & Garfunkel “Are you going to Scarborough Fair,” with airhead lyrics about a fair in the foreground and in the background a descant with barely discernable lyrics about the Hundred Years War: “and die for a cause that they’d long ago forgotten.”
In my family the tradition is to go if you’re called, but everyone who has ever seen action, from the Civil war to WWII to Korea, has not cared to speak of it on their return, and the tradition in our family is also not to ask. The same with scars. You can ask about medical scars but not war scars. Apparently there’s really nothing that can be said.
April 28th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
“Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen
is not the same as the (not all togheter anti-)war poem: “In Flander’s fields” by John McCrae.
April 28th, 2006 at 4:59 pm
A link to “Dulce et Decorum Est”
April 28th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
thanks
link to “in flanders fields”
http://www.fettes.com/scotsatwar/printerv/inflandersfields.htm
anybody want to take on “all quiet on the western front” or “failsafe”? We must have done a dozen or more poems and novels senior year. they all kind of blend together for me. We had a real war every night on the 6 oclock news that was more interesting, although about the same every night. And those draft lottery numbers.
May 6th, 2006 at 12:04 am
“His life had shown him that war does not solve any problems either political or social, no matter how just or honorable.”
Please don’t say that to the Jews who were liberated after WWII, whose lives were saved by the Allied intervention in Nazi Germany, or to those who lost so many loved ones to Hitler and his army. I think they would strongly disagree with that message.
As would the Kurds of Iraq who were liberated and saved by our intervention. When people speak out against the current war all they bring up are the non-existant WMD’s. No one talks about the mass graves found in Sadam’s deserts, those who were tortured, drug from their homes, and murdered in death camps under his regime. No one (even the so-called women’s rights groups) talk about the women who were liberated from slavery under the Taliban, who were murdered daily for crimes as simple as showing a lock of hair, or leaving their homes without a male escort, who were denied jobs and educations. So easy to burn a bra….so difficult to actually fight for someone else’s freedom. Do you think reason and “talk” would have stopped the madness of the Taliban?
People wants every thing without a price. Give me freedom for Free, is the anti-war cry. Stop the killing…without killing anyone. Liberate the masses…without my, or anyone else, actually having to sacrifice anything for it.
I have no issue with abolishing War. No one wants war. No one who is sane that is. No one wants to send our men to war. I don’t want to see my son go to war, and maybe die on foreign soil. But until there are no more Hitlers, no more Sadams, no more Taliban, niether can we stick out head in the sand and pretend that reason will stop mad-men without reason who see such ideals as a weakness, not a strength.
May 7th, 2006 at 2:19 am
The Kurds already had a zone of control in northern Iraq that was effectively autonomous throughout most of the 1990’s, under no-fly zones enforced by the U.S. and Britain. During that time, the Turks came in right under our air cover and slaughtered thousands of Kurds.
Please don’t tell me we invaded Iraq to liberate the Kurds, or that the U.S. has the Kurds’ interests at heart. It just isn’t true.
May 7th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
You missed the point Satira. Hitler went to war against Europe, using his personal hatred of Jews as catalyst. At the end of WWII, my point is proven. The US/English aliance was ended in the face of agressive anti-communism. 2 years after the end of European hostilities, the Arabs were fighting the Jews. One year later, the Americans were fighting the north Koreans, and son and son. Count all the wars in your life and answer these questions, Are the jews free from persicution? Are the NorthKoreans Free? Is international Communism dead? Oh and did the Vietnamese and the entire far East fall under the thrall of Chinese Communism? Did the Afgahnis obtain freedom or did they just become the worlds largest Opium producers?
No my friend any war fought for any reason never achieves the stated goal. We can only achieve freedom by working on freedom.
Unfortunately, that would put the armaments business out of business.
Peace makes no profit.
May 12th, 2006 at 8:41 am
Umm, if we have no guns and other guys do have them,
comrade, how do we deal with “enemas” of revolution?
Oh I know, we unleash Jewish Amrican Princess brigades on them.
(I had a Druish wife too..Hoy vei!)
Clubbing them to death with Bloomies handbags! (stoning is expensive)
What is your definintion of Freedom? No “disrespectin’” .
Yours ,
Comrade Stalin.
May 13th, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Comrade Stalin is obviously one of those living on the top of the pile. His Nom De Plume should tell us how he thinks. Maybe when the shooting starts in the next war, he and his gun toting buddies will be on the first plane to the front line where he will lead his merry band of men into the fray.
Maybe that is the answer. If all the gunt toting nuts got together and decided to organize a militia and defend their country.
Het wait a minute, isn’t that what the second amendment to the constitution says?
Oh well. perhaps not.
War is hell thats why the rich guys don’t want to fight and their supporters hope that they won’t either.
May 15th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
An interesting plan, Terry: Draft anyone who owns guns, since obviously given the wording of the Second Amendment they are doing so in order to defend the U.S.A.
But you are overlooking one thing. If elite disinformation specialists like Comrade Stalin are sent to the front lines, who will create and disseminate the propaganda of the new Capitalist/Communist order? Who will mock the liberals for making logical sense?
There are those among us, Terry, who would overthrow the existing order, and establish an actual democracy. If people like Comrade Stalin are out there killing people and calling them terrorists, who will stand in their way? No, better to under-educate and indoctrinate members of the proletariat to do the job instead.