Monday, May 26, 2014

Memorial Day 2014


THE NEXT WAR by WILFRED OWEN  
War's a joke for me and you, 
While we know such dreams are true. 
– SIEGFRIED SASSOON

Out there, we walked, quite friendly up to Death,---
 Sat down and ate beside him, cool and bland,---
 Pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.
We've sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,---
Our eyes wept, but our courage didn't writhe.
 He's spat at us with bullets, and he's coughed
Shrapnel. We chorused if he sang aloft,
We whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
 We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.
We laughed,---knowing that better men would come,
And greater wars: when every fighter brags
He fights on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.










This year's Memorial Day post is all about the damage done to young men (and these days women as well) by war. So many young lives are damaged or lost to settle old, fat men's disagreements. It's time we wrote laws that make the people who disagree be the ones who have to fight it out. If that were the case, we'd have world peace overnight! As Herman Wouk had one of his characters say in his epic War and Remembrance: "Either war is finished, or we are." How true that is!

4 comments:

  1. I feel the same. If you are willing to put your own life on the line, you have no business sending others to do it for you.

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  2. Interesting -- in a very morbid way -- how things changed. Hundreds of years ago, generals and even kings fought alongside their men. Then, more cowardly heads prevailed....

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  3. Here in the UK there's a lot of anti EU feeling at the moment. I think people forget that the EU was the brainchild of people who remembered how awful WWII actually was.

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  4. Taxi services charge by zone too. They will pick you up and drop you off inside a different zone for a flat rate. That means if you are going more than just a few blocks away and are going on an actual long drive you can get it for a flat fee. That means that they can't charge you a bunch of extra money by going down side streets to make you take a longer time. You are set with your zone.
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