05/28/2024
On Memorial Day enjoy our family picnics, but let's also remember all the innocent families and children our weapons and soldiers and politicians have killed, in the thousands, over the years... too many to count, too many to even think about... but we must, if these bloody, inhumane wars are ever to be replaced by diplomacy and peace.
As Matt Taibi wrote today: As a boy I read Wilfred Owen’s famous poem about World War I, describing the suffering of young men sent by industrial powers to die in clouds of poison gas. It’s a warning: if you saw what Owen did, and your nights were tormented by visions of blood and death, “You would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory/The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”
Owen was killed in November 1918, a week before the Armistice. In his poems you read a soldier’s hope that boys like me would read them before they became old enough to want to prove themselves in combat. God didn’t design us to be killers, he said, noting we aren’t born with claws or talons, and a boy’s teeth are more suited for “laughing round an apple.” I know that’s true of my children, who’ll be taught to remember soldiers like Owen today. Matt Taibi
