Veterans Day/Remembrance Day/Armistice Day tomorrow--Sigh--and a question
I went to hear my seven year old daughter sing with the rest of her class at the school assembly today. She, and they, sang "Brothers and sisters all patriots, ready to answer the call, in service of our country, of our country. Honor and courage and sacrifice" The principle spoke about honoring the veterans who die to keep us free and bring peace.
Sigh.
Apparently is costs us (the human race, that is) some 1.2 trillion dollars per year to purchase weapons to keep us free and bring peace. Not to mention the cost in trauma to human beings.
Here's my question. Is Veterans Day to the arms industry as Christmas is to the retail industry?
"Do you think they will thank you for teaching them that war is glorious?" --Dr. Who
7 comments:
i'm with dr who.
i'm going to talk to the principal!
you go lovely!
I'm reading "War and Peace," and everything Tolstoy says about the cruelty and futility of war is as true as anything written today.
Can you imagine if people had listened to him then? If the Napoleonic wars were the last wars fought in Europe? (And no civil war, for U.S. readers). Think of the human potential that would not have been lost. It's impossible to picture - the millions, literally millions, of young lives that would have been allowed to come to fruition. The resources that could have been spent on, who knows what, let your imagination run wild! It's so sad too think what could have been, and what has been wasted.
And that's the past. To think about what is going today is, for me, unbearable.
"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs,.....
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."
Wilfrid Owen.d.1918
I think Wilfred Owen might be my faviourite poet. Certainly he is a master of the sonnet, here.
Yes. He manages to get a clipped smugness into those last 2 lines - the Latin tag.
It gives me goose pimples.
I like "the blood" too.
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