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[MI] April 1: Storming the Beach
Apr. 9th, 2008 06:56 pm[ooc: Based on this pic.]
It was a different kind of war. The change started with some of the wars in the 19th century, and the bombing that hit in WWI was different. Trenches and explosions and things that even with the advent of gunpowder I had never seen before. But the Second World War was a new sort of horror for the world. Air battles meant destruction could be reigned on civilians in ways we'd never witnessed before unless an army invaded. But with the distance planes gave...who was safe? Pearl Harbor was at least a military target, but the bombing of London, of other cities...no one had to invade, and the only way to stop it, truly, was to take to the air, and the bullets fired that didn't hit planes had to fall somewhere, and if you shot a plane out of the sky, it fell as well, and there was no way to judge where. Children were orphaned, families torn apart, men and boys died in numbers we'd never imagined.
Then Hiroshima. Nagasaki. The display of the power of the atom bomb over a country that had become my enemy but had, twice, been my home. Tens of thousands dead, brutally, and the survivors likely wishing they'd been killed. I wasn't there, but I saw the pictures after. I knew our allies had done it.
The beach, Normandy...I was there. It was bad enough. We count it a victory, but the carnage was like nothing I had seen in 300 years. Crawling over the bodies of the dead, just to die, to be a bridge for the next wave. All those lives, cut off, stopped, ended, on both sides. When we got through, as the war wound down and we went to find survivors, we had to sort through the camps. We heard the stories the survivors told, saw the horror that lingered, that would always linger. And we had to ask why. I had to ask why.
It's continued. The 20th century was a century of amazing technological advancement, and the sheer amount of that which has gone to finding new and creative ways to kill each other astounds. We have such a chance to live in a world so different than what came before, but mankind just keeps trying to destroy itself, destroy neighbors, friends, enemies--do the lines really matter? War. Famine. Disease. It cycles back around and around and nothing ever changes. We are heading toward our own destruction, our own damnation. If things do not change, drastically, it's not a matter of if, it is a matter of when and how. That's all.
Things should change, people should learn to be better, learn to rise up and say "no more" and work together to change the world, to heal it.
But they don't.
They persecute those who come bearing that message: stone them, crucify them, shoot them, exile them. No one wants to hear. We, as a collective, do not want to change. It's too hard. It's too frightening to be that voice in the wilderness that no one will listen to, because history proves to us that they won't. The masses won't rise up and demand change, especially now. They have their TV and their internet and their iPods and around the world, people die every day, and more rise up to keep the wars going. Our children come home shattered from war, PTSD--something no one even thought of before the last century, something I never witnessed before those wars--consuming their lives and they have to wait a year to even be seen by the veteran's hospitals. And we do nothing.
It will consume us in the end, and at this rate, we won't even notice when the end comes.
It was a different kind of war. The change started with some of the wars in the 19th century, and the bombing that hit in WWI was different. Trenches and explosions and things that even with the advent of gunpowder I had never seen before. But the Second World War was a new sort of horror for the world. Air battles meant destruction could be reigned on civilians in ways we'd never witnessed before unless an army invaded. But with the distance planes gave...who was safe? Pearl Harbor was at least a military target, but the bombing of London, of other cities...no one had to invade, and the only way to stop it, truly, was to take to the air, and the bullets fired that didn't hit planes had to fall somewhere, and if you shot a plane out of the sky, it fell as well, and there was no way to judge where. Children were orphaned, families torn apart, men and boys died in numbers we'd never imagined.
Then Hiroshima. Nagasaki. The display of the power of the atom bomb over a country that had become my enemy but had, twice, been my home. Tens of thousands dead, brutally, and the survivors likely wishing they'd been killed. I wasn't there, but I saw the pictures after. I knew our allies had done it.
The beach, Normandy...I was there. It was bad enough. We count it a victory, but the carnage was like nothing I had seen in 300 years. Crawling over the bodies of the dead, just to die, to be a bridge for the next wave. All those lives, cut off, stopped, ended, on both sides. When we got through, as the war wound down and we went to find survivors, we had to sort through the camps. We heard the stories the survivors told, saw the horror that lingered, that would always linger. And we had to ask why. I had to ask why.
It's continued. The 20th century was a century of amazing technological advancement, and the sheer amount of that which has gone to finding new and creative ways to kill each other astounds. We have such a chance to live in a world so different than what came before, but mankind just keeps trying to destroy itself, destroy neighbors, friends, enemies--do the lines really matter? War. Famine. Disease. It cycles back around and around and nothing ever changes. We are heading toward our own destruction, our own damnation. If things do not change, drastically, it's not a matter of if, it is a matter of when and how. That's all.
Things should change, people should learn to be better, learn to rise up and say "no more" and work together to change the world, to heal it.
But they don't.
They persecute those who come bearing that message: stone them, crucify them, shoot them, exile them. No one wants to hear. We, as a collective, do not want to change. It's too hard. It's too frightening to be that voice in the wilderness that no one will listen to, because history proves to us that they won't. The masses won't rise up and demand change, especially now. They have their TV and their internet and their iPods and around the world, people die every day, and more rise up to keep the wars going. Our children come home shattered from war, PTSD--something no one even thought of before the last century, something I never witnessed before those wars--consuming their lives and they have to wait a year to even be seen by the veteran's hospitals. And we do nothing.
It will consume us in the end, and at this rate, we won't even notice when the end comes.
