City Of God 41

November is the month of death. It begins with Hallowe'en, or All Hallows Eve just before All Saints' Day November 1, then all Souls' Day on the second. November 11 we remember the war dead on Remembrance Day. In the meantime, nature dies all around us as the trees become naked and skeletal against the cooling and darkening sky, the rain becomes frequent, hard, and cold, and we hunker down in the warmth of our homes. There is a dark poetic rhythm to this month. It is a sad and depressing month, a time for introspection, quiet, and escape into our favourite addictions. The fragility of our lives looms dark and large before us in the dark reality of death. Remembrance Day has surged in popularity. The tub-thumping and drum-beating of recent conservative governments have brainwashed yet another generation, and Vietnam is a forgotten and distant memory. We love soldiers again, the military, killing enemies overseas. The propaganda of war becomes more insidious and overwhelming. It is all about the dead and fallen soldiers, committing the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives for their country, for the fatherland, for the motherland. No embarrassing mention is made about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, Dresden, the possibility of war crimes committed by anyone but the enemy or the Russians. Aside from the cannon fodder we send off to Afghanistan and elsewhere, no one who isn't old enough to remember the Korean War has a clue about war. I certainly don't. But I do know that truth is the first casualty. The second? Our integrity. We are people who thrive on lies. No one wants to think of the death and loss sustained by the enemy. War dehumanises all of us when we cease to think of the enemy as human, when we declare a nation as the enemy. We no longer want to see or know or hear about their lives. We don't want to know that they also fall in love, marry, raise and love their children, have neighbours, friends, care for their aged and infirm, love their pets, weep at funerals. They are the enemy. nothing destroys or distorts like war. Nothing so effectively numbs and disables our critical thinking. What our veterans endured was indeed horrible. But we have never known what it is like to be bombed, invaded or occupied by a foreign power, unless we are First Nations People languishing from the toxic and tragic hangover of colonization. We carry the innocent and cruel arrogance of the victors. We haven't been humbled. Our ass has not been kicked. We have no sense of empathy for the enemy, and without that empathy towards those who threaten or have threatened and harmed us we will never complete the process of peace, because peace comes through justice, justice through reconciliation, and reconciliation comes from humility. War is ugly, the ultimate expression of our human darkness. It is also good for the economy, if you happen to win, but winning makes us shallow and obtuse, victory blinds us to the humanity of the other, victory blinds us to our weakness, to our human fragility, and without that awareness we will be inhibited in reaching out to others in love. Will we always have war? it's hard to say. Most of us will probably say yes, but I don't want to share that certainty and for one simple reason: by saying that it has to go on happening, that our species is going to go on killing and destroying itself, we are closing our minds, our imaginations and our souls to any sense of hope that things might ever change, and without hope, there is no imagination, no creativity, no forward motion to work and prepare for peace. Will we ever change? Nothing is impossible.