The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

Don't Go

"Don't go" 

My hope to get through today without a barrage of 9-11 images and retrospectives was a fruitless one. I thought that maybe the need to keep reliving it was dying off, but again, I was wrong. You see, I understand why it’s necessary to remember it, just like I understand why it’s necessary to remember the veterans from long-dead wars, and I take no issue with honouring those who died fighting for what they believed in, or what they held dear. What I take issue with is the constant hammering, the needless circles of the media who do what they can to pull at the fine threads in our delicate psyches, leaving everything to fall apart, all the blood and the tears comingling in a pool on a hardwood floor. I’m sick of thinking about it because atrocity has existed in every age, on every speck of dirt, in each and every one of us in some personal, distinctive way. Conflict, you see, is part of the human experience.

I am not a pacifist, not entirely. I have violent tendencies like a lot of people do, and could easily see myself stopping someone from harming me or someone I care about without hesitating to check with God, by any means necessary. I occasionally fantasize about being part of a vigilante group who rounds up the drug dealers, murderers and the rapists and takes them out, one by one, knowing full well it’s only fantasy because my conscience would never let me do it. Premeditation has never been my thing. I’m more of a reactionary kind of gal, the sort who loses her mind in the heat of the moment, and any time I have to think about violence generally works to dispel it. I don’t believe in violence being the will of a higher power (whatever the higher power might be), and I don’t believe in fighting to the death for something I think is ultimately useless. I would not give my life over to an authority power who tells me I should so that he/she might enjoy the wealth inherited by way of my sacrifice, under the guise of patriotism. I would not hurl a grenade at someone who believes in a different way of life than I do, if their way of life would in no way impede the progress of my own. I’m a ‘live and let live’ sort of person, and make no apologies about this. My basic theory about all the differences in religion and politics on the planet is this: if what you’re about doesn’t harm another living thing in any way (including animal, vegetable and mineral), then carry on.

That said, there is an ire in me. War, in general, more than pisses me off. It’s usually rooted in greed or lust, whether it be a war between two people or millions, and frankly, neither of those two things amount to much when you’re dead. Sometimes, we pretty up the cause by waving a flag and singing an anthem, and I wholeheartedly understand the meaning in that because I do believe in honouring your country, if your country honours you. Still, more often than not, we lose the cause in the smoke, scratch our heads and try to come up with the justification for it all, until the dirt is covered in blood and body parts, and the planes carry what’s left home.

Unless you’re a Buddhist, or someone who favours the idea of reincarnation, you are someone who believes that this life is all you get. What I don’t understand is playing with it, wilfully turning your life over to another person who is as confused as you are about why you’re both doing it. Young boys who’ve barely experienced the growth of hair on their face, holding guns and running through trenches, or the desert, or wherever the conflict is happening, toward oblivion. They tell themselves before they go that it’s because they love their country, but most of us know, from the survivors who are fortunate enough to relate it, that while they’re running, they’re not thinking about their country. They’re thinking about their lovers, and their mothers, and their fathers, and their children, and…God? In fact, the most common last words of pilots during WWII whose planes were shot and were going down was ‘Mommy’, or ‘Mom’. Instantly, I visualize little boys crying for their mothers, and it wounds me on a personal level.

Most of us know a slick and feisty eighteen-year-old who boasts that he wants to die young, to never marry or have children. I’ve known too many to count, and every single one of them is now married with children, and doing whatever they can to live forever. Your perspective changes with age and experience, something most young men don’t have the foresight to anticipate before delving into the army fatigues, full of piss and vinegar. The younger ones, particularly the ones who come from disadvantaged families and are in need of a ‘way out’, are all too willing to support the cause because it’s romantic, frankly, the idea of dying or fighting for honour (a deep-rooted value instilled at birth), and they can make a little money along the way. There’s the image of power in it, something commanding about a uniform, and it instantly earns them respect just by wearing it.

Sometimes, though, you have to fight. Sometimes, you have to stand up for the safety of people you don’t know, and the preservation of land you’ve not yet seen, because it is for the common good. If you do it by way of defence, I’m all for it. If you’re going after the innocent to further a personal cause, I’m not. Fight for freedom, fight for life, but everything else is temporary and self-serving.

My family history is rich with tales of war and terrorism. I outgrew the glory in it a long time ago. What I look for is the root of the problem, the seedlings of the wars that were waged and fought, so that I can understand what made my dead relatives stand up and fight. My grandfather, Ernest, was in England and France during WWII, and he fought in the front lines on more than one occasion. His address book (which I still have) is filled with the names of people who mattered to him, most of which had lines through them and a date of death etched in pencil next to each one. He made it home, but many of his friends didn’t, and he made it clear that he would never discuss the war again, did not want to be reminded of the things he'd seen. To my knowledge, he did not, and though he died young (only forty-three, of a heart attack), he did it in his own home, with his loved ones all around him. I can’t imagine that he would have wanted it any other way. My paternal side is filled with Irish ‘freedom fighters’, commonly referred to as the Irish Republican Army, a much different organization back then than what we see today. Their sole purpose was to take their country back after being terrorized and starved for hundreds of years by the English, and I am proud of them for being brave enough to stand up and fight. It was about freedom, you see. It was about emancipation. Back then, it meant something different than what it has come to be about today, but the seedling, the root of the cause, is something I can get behind, and do. I do not always understand or condone the measures that the radicals have been known to take in the last thirty odd years, but again, those are the ’extremists’. Those are the ones who have lost the cause and been poisoned with the idea of glory.

My best friend, C., who is a psychiatric nurse, tells me what she has been dealing with for the last few years at work. They have had to develop a special wing at her hospital to accommodate the needs of many returning soldiers who, it turns out, will never be the same after their tours. They didn’t know, they have said, what they’d be seeing. They didn’t know what it would look like, or smell like, or sound like. They mean death, C. explains to me. They say they’d have never gone, if they had known what it would look like.

If I could tell my friends who are waiting for their tours to start, one of the men tearfully relayed to her, I’d say, don’t go.

But they will, you see.