Wave After Wave

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/missy-comley-beattie/58900/wave-after-wave

Wave After Wave
Peace & Justice
by Missy Comley Beattie | October 10, 2014 - 9:49am

~snip~

For several weeks now, H, V, and I have stared at paintings, sculpture, and ruins. It’s difficult to comprehend one’s lifetime much less thousands of years. And learn from it.

While waiting to enter a museum, we’ve engaged in conversations. “Where are you from?” we’ve been asked many times.” Trish from Australia commented on the U.S.’s foreign policy, its effect on the foreign policies of other countries, shaking her head, an opportunity for me to say that our “representative” government doesn’t hear the people’s voice and that corporate media outlets deliver either entertainment, like celebrity weddings, or frightening narratives to scare us into obedience, like the ISIS beheadings.

The war that was supposed to end war wasn’t so long ago, yet we’re now in the long war, invading seven countries in 13 years, catastrophes that have and will continue to blow back wave after wave of hatred as friends, relatives, countrymen and women of the maimed and dead call for vengeance.

Even more I realize that we’re specks. Some of us are just more fortunate specks. I’m not traveling with a heavy backpack because I’m a refugee, displaced, fleeing war. I may be fleeing something, but it’s not danger. I think about this and have no answers. I used to believe enough of us could do something to effect change, to bring peace. But I’ve looked at depictions of battles, paintings titled Massacre of the Innocents, and I shudder at how violent we are and always have been.