Thoughts and prayers and thoughts and…
I’m like a lot of this country’s contemporary children: too young to have done anything more than watch the major military atrocities of the middle-distant past; too old to have dressed up for any of the recent and perpetual squabbles that harass humanity and absorb television. In truth, my own personal experience of battle stopped at a gradeschool scuffle that I instigated… and lost.
Ergo, you’d be correct in saying that I know zilch about war, just about as much as do present-day presidents, prime ministers and other high-priced lackeys who casually foment new and improved ways to demolish civilizations and to impede everybody’s beauty sleep.
Still, there’s one thing I do know, and that’s that a week from now, and for a few hours, as we’ve done for almost a century, we’ll stage the pilgrimage of remembrance, bow our pious heads in churches, public parks and playgrounds. Bands will play. Then will come the congregation in bars and donut shops from Dildo to Dawson, rallying to share and evoke, to celebrate ancient valour, to toast vanished buddies, to congratulate those who’ve managed — mostly by sheer luck — to have survived the idiocy of the last 100 years.
Probably we should do all that. It behooves us to honour the well-intentioned servants, the brave, the sacrificial lambs. We owe them each a poppy, a prayer and a pint; each is, so to speak, a gallant guardian, a saviour of state and station.
A grateful nation needs to say: Bless you; all hail!
Except that, as Last Posts, Reveilles, moments of silence and images of Flanders fade into a late afternoon, one wanders home to supper and a setting sun vaguely bothered about what almost always goes missing from these dramas: the names, the faces, the reflections of the peaceably ingenuous who paid prices for mindless military aggression yet are inevitably excluded from the theatre’s playbill of memory, regrets and hope. As greying visions of relatives and friends fall away for another year, one looks and listens in vain for any tribute to a whole bunch of somebodies who miss inclusion in the lineup of praise and petitions from a country’s mourners. Absent are the unnumbered innocents who wished no harm; the aged and ailing who never threatened anybody; the collaterally damaged urchins of Soho, the simple villagers of Central Europe and Southeast Asia, the lowly herdsmen of the Arabian plains and African heartland. We haven’t seen any commemorative cairns blessed in their honour.
In one guise or other, I’ve hung around cenotaphs for a long time; yet I can’t recall ever hearing any kind of homage to faultless victims; to the humble choirmaster who got blasted out of his loft in east London, to the gentle grocer blithely blown up and left to die in eastern Belgium, to the terrified child of My Lai, to the desolate widow of Aleppo, to the inoffensive Muslim of Myanmar, to shattered societies, to minds unhinged in Paris, Quebec, Ottawa, Las Vegas. Just maybe they’re entitled to a stage in next Saturday’s pageantry; just maybe their guiltless demise rates a bit of attention from parish priests and Legion chaplains, passing reference paid to their unhappy role in the world’s unhappy recitation.
Will they get it? Not likely. Warlessness, I’ll wager, takes a lot more effort than the world appears ready to fork over. ’Cause it ain’t easy thinking and talking — rather than shooting and bombing — the way out of hatred and bigotry and suspicion and muscle-bound bravado. One of the so-called Deadly Sins is Sloth. It ranks right up there with Gluttony, Greed and Lust. It’s sometimes called Lazy.
Anyway, away we’ll languidly go again.
Lest we forget? Remembering doesn’t seem to change anything.
Peter MacRae is a retired Anglican cleric and erstwhile journalist. He lives in New Glasgow.