I Think We're All Pretty Good People

[mnaz]

Politics and war
is just trying to ruin us.

[Doreen Peri]

When I was in elementary school
hiding under a desk, a drill to prepare
for nuclear war (as if a wooden desk could
save my life living only 20 miles from DC)

I would think about the future, the 21st century,
decades later, I was certain there would be no more
war and love for mankind would save us because
Love for Mankind is much stronger than a wooden desk.

But no, the future came and here I am still alive,
the wars are more dangerous, thousands of innocent people
being slaughtered daily and I don’t even have a wooden desk
to hide under, my certainty of the eradication of war was
a failure.

I feel robbed of the future we could have shared,
cheated out of peace and lied to constantly.

Sad, disappointed, hopeless, I lie in bed
and cry myself awake.

[mnaz]

I hear you, Doreen. We're swamped with religious and "cultural" dick-waving. We have open talk by "leaders" of nuclear warfare. So it wasn't just a nightmare I woke up from decades ago when what was left of my optimism for "us" peaked somewhere in the late nineties, like HST's wave, the one he wrote of a couple decades earlier in some trashed out hotel in Las Vegas, the great high water mark where the wave broke and rolled back.

[mnaz]

The thing about war,
you have to acknowledge
there is a war in the first place.
What if we just don't?

[Doreen Peri]

That would be great, but how could we not
acknowledge the war????

The images of bombs and murdered children are
everywhere!!!!!! Who could do this to people???
This is supposed to be a payback for October 7th?
What a horrible thing that happened on that date
but for fuck sake, you don’t just bomb and annihilate
THOUSANDs upon thousands of innocent civilians,
mostly children by the way… WTF is the matter with people?

This is INSANE!!!! Insane!! Insane!!!

[mnaz]

Yes, it's tragic. No words can adequately express my revulsion to that whole situation and its long, long ugly history.

As for my comment, I meant would-be combatants. I remember one time, Dad said something like "What if they tried to start a war and nobody showed up?"

It's almost a ridiculous notion though. Humans start and fight wars. Bottom line. And it sure as hell looks like that will never change, even after many centuries of this bullshit. We just don't have it in us to quit this horrific behavior.