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JUST A MINUTE
what's with all this two minutes' silence all of a sudden?
this is a new phenomenon and i don't like it. i don't like it at all.
already we have the whole remembrance stuff hijacked by men in uniforms and some kind of god-queen-country jingoism.
i mean, all those people who died were mostly ordinary people who had to go to fight. they weren't soldiers, they were boys. to be honest, i find air vice marshalls and generals-in-chief "honouring the dead" a little sickening.
american writer kurt vonnegut says that the men who were in the trenches in 1918 when the fighting stopped said that the silence was like the voice of god. i can believe it and i can try to cherish that moment and feel the loss of all those people.
but i can do that all the time, i can do that while we're thinking about kicking iraq again, while we are in afghanistan and while people are being killed in bali.
but "two" minutes is cheap. for goodness' sake has this currency of grief become so devalued that we measure it in the number of seconds we are silent?
the whole concept of two minutes being better than one is fucked up.
oh and i don't want to do it in public. i get upset about this war stuff and i won't jingo it up and try to have the straightest back or the most determined expression on my "grieving" face. i want to sob, goddamit, and i'll do it in private and i'll do it for as long as i want.
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