In the Interests of Sleepless Humanity – [11/11/2019]

Credit to: atlanta hot shots

If yea break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep
Though poppies blow in Flanders Fields

Or

Or

When you’ve lived through two wars and a Depression, everything else is easy ~ Maude Renwick

There are so so many things that I could say, that I find I have ironically…had to struggle to find the words…

It still never feels right that it’s not raining. I have been in warm climates for Armistice Day every year for…a long time now…and it never feels right. Cabo is out there, partying and drinking like it always does…and I would give anything to be home, in the cold and the rain…

Oddly, of all the important days of the year, this one makes me the most horribly homesick…mostly homesick for people who aren’t here anymore.

There are so many things I should have asked…those years that I stood in my little girl party shoes in the mud…and I didn’t…and while nothing can change that, I still think about it every year. This day isn’t just about the symbols for me, it’s about…people who could have maybe explained it all to me, if I had only just thought to ask…

But there is one thing that as the years go on, I am more and more sure of…

They don’t sleep. I know that now. Know it bone deep, as surely as I know my own name. They don’t sleep.

I wonder now if they ever will.

I had hoped you see, that I would live to see the time when this day was really just a day of Remembrance for the lost long ago.

But I worry now that I won’t see that…not now. I think that we have lost the ability for peace, and as such, this day will stand as it has for years: an acknowledgement that there is always a war. An acknowledgement that the torch has been forever passed and forever dropped, and so they don’t rest…because they can’t. Because we failed and we keep failing.

And I still don’t understand…

And every layer of that makes me terribly sad…and if I’m honest with myself, terribly, terribly angry…because dammit, why don’t we GET it. When are we going to figure out that war solves absolutely nothing. War does nothing but generate more of itself. It feeds on itself until there is nothing left except anger and sorrow and a deeply misplaced sense of warped pride.

I’ve tried to be a lark over the guns for so many years that my voice has gone hoarse, I don’t know how much more song I have left in me.

But I do still have a voice, and as long as that is still true, I will still keep saying “this has to change, this has to stop”…I will still try to make people understand. Perhaps in my own quiet way that doesn’t rattle around the world, but maybe one day I might make a difference to just one person…and maybe that will have to be enough.

If only for the sake of the next group of little girls standing ankle deep in the mud…if only so that one day they might be able to see a day where there really is peace…if only so that they might one day understand what we never could…

If only so that one day…the long dead can truly sleep…