I try to watch Memorial Day pageantry every year. In fact, it’s my birthday weekend and I always felt like a Memorial Day birthday gave the holiday extra significance. Parades, speeches, cemeteries, fireworks, BBQs. But damn. Damn. Damn it. I hate war.
I just don’t understand blowing people to bits. I hate it with all my being. One of my own young ‘uns feels the call, and yearns for that day they can throw themselves into battle. I will not stop them. But I will also NEVER share their fervor. I have lost friends and family to battle, to sickness, to old age, and now I know people who have lost their children to the battle that rages within our own borders, slain in the war zone created by a bullshit sliver of palaver we call the 2nd Amendment.
I had to give up watching war movies years ago. After running out of the theater to vomit during Deer Hunter, then Legends of the Fall did me in, man. I quit pretty much cold turkey. I did see the Broadway production of War Horse sort of accidentally, and it was a piece of art in my opinion, I have to admit.
But I just tried to watch the 33rd annual Memorial Day concert from Washington, D.C. with my folks who lived through WWII. I did OK through the tribute to Colin Powell and to WWII and Korean War vets — men and women. Then we got to a Lakota man who was a medic in Viet Nam. The graphic details of his stories, illustrated by screen after screen of bloody, mutilated bodies brought up the old vehement bile. Thinking about those fighters and civilians who went through all that, and then the Afghanistan war, and Iraq war, all the undeclared wars in between, the carnage in Central and South America and Asia and Africa we’ve caused, and now as people’s bodies pile up and rot in Ukraine, all of this builds up in me again and my whole being keeps asking,
“WHY???????!!!!!!”
I understand the need to fight back when attacked. I do not, and never will, understand the need to fling bodies into battles over rich men’s control of oil fields or whatever the hell else they want. For example, if kids are in a school with a live shooter, I understand the need for armed intervention and might even fight my own way in if I didn’t chickenshit out like a Texas cop. I can even support a bloody, violent end to one evil person’s life if it stops them from their massacre. But if we send in bombs and tanks and burn and mutilate bodies because we don’t like the principal, or kids in general, or our daddy didn’t like the principal (cough, GWB, cough) or expects to profit from digging the playground up (cough, Haliburton, e.g.) I have a BIG PROBLEM with that. A gutwrenching rage of a problem.
I have all kinds of respect and heart for those who get sent into battle and make the best of the bad situation by scrapping their way out of it and helping their fallen comrades. But watching us glorify the horrific realities of war on these “holidays,” with fireworks and bands and songs about heroes convinces me they’re “grooming” kids to be salivating to charge into the next one without a care as to why, just for “glory,” as they have for time immemorial. I’m gonna quit here so my rant doesn’t devolve into incoherent cuss words.
There are a lot of damn fine vets on this site and throughout the country and the world. I have nothing but respect for what you were able to survive. Y’all may think I’m just a whiner. But damn I hate war with every cell in my body.