by the time i emerged to collect my morning cuppa, the tele was on in the common area, and fren (respectfully) watching Anzac day parade.
i quickly scoffed my oatmeal, grabbed my cuppa and scarpered.
i know and respect a lot of people who have served, but i CAN wish they never had to.
i remember the man i called “grandfather”, sitting in the lounge room, all day every day, spitting great gobs of infected phlegm into a quart sized billy.
he had been gassed in France during WWI, and lived to the ripe old age of 81. It did not occur to me until far too late to ask him why he had enlisted.
Every ANZAC day he would get up early to watch the parade, and weep relentlessly as wave after wave of traumatised white adult males marched past the ABC’s cameras.
the cost of war is not just paid by soldiers, but by medical staff, nurses, and families, Wives, children and generations affected by transgenerational trauma.
and the planet, of course.
one of my uncles was in New Guinea during WWII. Most of his siblings avoided him, because he was a violent mofo. There was a revolving door at the local hospital for his wife, who prolly could not have pressed charges if she wanted to, because in those days, the policy in most states was for cops to ignore “domestics” wherever possible. And where would she have gone, anyway? Not even white women had any real “rights” before Whitlam.
i know why Anzac day makes me weep, and why i try to avoid it. it’s the frustration of knowing I was born into a culture where it is de rigeur to go thru life with our heads up our arses.
If we don’t acknowledge how trauma affects the genes of white people, we can ignore what we have done to the First Nations of This place. Or the lingering costs of our (usually unwarranted) presence in faraway places. My goodness… how Laos paid just for being “in the vicinity of” our war on Vietnam.
War is not futile so much as a ritual played out by a bizarre human suicide cult. It only benefits sociopaths happy to profit from the commodification of pseudo-cannibalism. Is there any other life form on earth so self-aware and yet so completely un-self-aware as humans?
Do we really have to subject ourselves to hell before we can bond with other humans, and revel in the benefits of “mateship”?
Many of us struggle to find meaning in our daily lives outside of acqusitiveness, or to maintain a sense of purpose when capitalism is in a negative spiral, as it currently is, and on Anzac day it’s almost impossible.
ironically, perhaps, the street address on my birth certificate is “Gaza Road, Puckapunyal”.
the housing that served Pucka was razed long ago, time marches on, and the needs of the war industry have changed.
but the industry makes no more sense than it did 60 years ago, when poor old Arthur used to watch the parade on the tele, spitting and snotting and calling it living.
#RamblingThoughtOnJingoisticClaptrap
#ANZAC #POSIWID
