There is too much accumulated pain in this world today…….it is time to learn and make the change.

George Santayana ‘Those who forget history or condemned to repeat it’

February 2002, sitting alone and trying to enhance memory skills (outcome of a horse riding fall), I transcribed a TV programme on the human impact of war. Nearly three years later (with virtually no memory of the intervening period), I find the details. The coincidence is that it is the day George Bush becomes President of the US for a second term). As a Pacifist I have decided to re-circulate this.

President Bush is democratically elected for the next four years so now we must appeal to people to link to a route that will seek to achieve peaceful resolution.

A comment and the profound impact of the visual on the television focuses my attention to another person’s stark reality. The young man says:-

‘The reality changes with the first air-raid’.

‘It needs to be witnessed, felt, the sense of smell must be evoked. The Macho men all of a sudden are ‘scared men’. The world becomes four-dimensional. They are face to face with the immanence of death.

He states the key factor as the sense of guilt……yes, its is the paradox. ‘YOU LIVE AND ANOTHER DIES’

The point is poignantly made that the war environment inflames the will to live but this gives way to a will to no longer live, once they have returned ‘Home’.

The reality is that mental wounds are just the same
as physical wounds.

What people forget is the reality of the war front; the need for alcohol; to enhance entertainment and compensate for loss of family, friends…. Combatants can ‘play around’ with dead bodies and fire hand grenades. There are no sanctions as such. The word CONTEXTUALISE IS SO OFTEN FORGOTTEN.

The reaction of the Ministry of Defence in the UK to the problems that arose per consequence of the Falklands war, was to reduce the medical budget. This appears incredible when one considers just what happened in Vietnam when three times the number of men who died in action actually committed suicide. This does not take account of those affected by alcohol, drug addiction and other scars of war. In the UK, more combatants have now died from suicide than were killed in the Falklands war and the numbers are rising significantly.

It is at this point, we need to ask, what can be done to halt the atrocities of War in Iraq and put an end to the War of Terrorism. People are suffering and people will continue to suffer. This is a quote that may help us to take another view. It is at least worth thinking about………

The Talmud
‘We do not see the world as it is, we see the world as we are’