City Of God 40

About ten years ago, or so, on the bus, I was seated perpendicular to a young soldier wearing combat fatigues. He had a full duffel bag with him, so I imagined he had either just arrived or was just leaving. He would have been very young, no more than twenty, and really a very beautiful, sensitive looking boy,. He hardly seemed to fit the stereotype of military macho. Perhaps now, ten years later, the sensitivity has all been kicked out of him, or he could have left military life very soon after our encounter...Who knows? We didn't talk. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn't know what. I wasn't going to judge or criticize him for his choice of vocation, out of respect, and also knowing that even if I am a pacifist, there are simply no black and white answers to why we do the things that we do. I decided to leave it, leave the boy in peace, and simply wonder about his circumstances. Soldiers are, after all, just human beings. and they do, for the most part, want to protect. That is part of their role, and their myth. But I think that anyone who has been in a war or armed struggle will tell you that, even in so-called legitimate combat, the first time you kill someone, take their life, is the most difficult. It is like losing one's virginity, only much worse. It changes you. And it also scars your soul in a way that you have to live with for the rest of your life. Even if your sole desire in being a soldier is to protect the vulnerable and the innocent. And you just cannot let yourself ask or wonder about the life that you just snuffed out, but will truly to ameliorate the anxiety by saying, well, it was going to me or it was going to be him, and I was doing my duty. And there are also the drinks afterward. So many veterans become alcoholics and drug addicts. That is the only way they can staunch the pain, the soul pain of having been turned by the state into licensed killers. I actually have a lot of affection for soldiers, and I believe that they often have the best motives for entering military service. I also have a lot of compassion for them because of the way they are manipulated and how their lives get distorted and misshapen by government propaganda. It seems telling that the majority of the people who enter military service come from working class families and have not had a lot of education. There is also the honourable instinct of wanting to give one's life for a higher and noble cause. Soldiers should not be demonized. They enter into their vocation unknowing and unaware, like sheep to the slaughter. They are not just killing machines but hapless pawns in this grand tapestry of death and destruction that our governments and the corporation and banking interests that dominate government policy keep weaving and extending, like the work of a clan of particularly fat and venomous spiders. And those spiders live off the blood of others. For this reason, I do not judge those who gather every November 11 at the cenotaph. Their loved ones perished, fighting for the defense and honour of their country, fighting to contain and disarm the threat of global tyranny. Yes, I do get it. I also know that war and its many causes and fallouts provides us with a myriad of such nuanced conversations as to make it absolutely impossible to every fully understand or comprehend why such huge-scale killing and destruction should be permitted or condoned. We humans really are a half-formed lot. We are like children playing with matches. Our very future on this planet, and the welfare and future of other species, are going to depend largely on how responsibly we choose and make and enact policies and reforms. War as an option has become inconceivable. The technologies of war are such and the interconnectedness of nations, peoples and species and the biosphere have become so delicately construed and evolved as to make any wrong or destructive move potentially dangerous and deadly to the integrity of the whole. This is why I wear the white poppy. I want to be a voice, if but a small solitary voice, that will still be heard, that will still proclaim that we have to start seeing beyond the myths and half-truths that have held us captive, and that we have to start engaging with one another in peaceful ways that abet compassion and beauty, if we want to continue as a viable species. We have not yet learned to be adults, and the gift of fire bequeathed to us by Prometheus seems always to be burning our fingers and singeing our hair.