roughbarked said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

captain_spalding said:

When i was very much younger, i visited the Bomana War Cemetery near Port Moresby.

Of course, as i’d grown up, i’d heard all about WW2, and the fighting in New Guinea, Kokoda, all that.

It was while walking between the rows of graves that something hit me hard. A lot of the blokes buried there were my age (as i was then), or even younger.

We were really just ‘older kids’, me and them both. Honestly, i doubt i had the adult skills necessary to organise a chook raffle (and i knew it), and possibly a lot of those bos were the same.

Yet, they’d been packed off to a hot, humid, undeveloped, naturally very hostile place, and told to defend it against an absolute horde of people who wanted only to kill them, and to defend it by killing those people.

And, those poor buggers had been killed. They’d died brutally violent, horrible and painful deaths, in a place they never wanted to be in, far away from all the people they loved and were loved by.

In front of me, buried in that foreign place, was where they ended up.

People would say that they ‘gave their lives’. They did. But, it was there that i understood that it wasn’t the lives they had that they gave . It was the lives they’d never have. They’d never see home again, or those people they loved. They’d never have careers, or hobbies, or sports. They’d never go to the beach again, or go camping, or fishing. They’d never enjoy their twenties gtgtttgtllggtggggggggggtgor thirties. They’d never fall in love, maybe marry, have children, grandchildren, watch their families grow and prosper. They’d never have a future. That was their real sacrifice.

I’d like to take Donald Trump Jr. to Bomana, and rub his nose in the dirt there.

War is and always has been one of the most monumental and consequential endeavours we as a species have ever engaged in. So many resources, so many lives, so many nations, so many ideologies. It appeals to the basest of human instincts, greed, ignorance, prejudice, violence and revenge and is an anathema to those qualities exhibited by the best of us. It seems that every few generations we need to understand anew what our grandparents learned and remind ourselves of all that is lost. An end to war must remains our collective goal and only when we engage with one another, empathise with one another, seek to understand one another, can we banish war to the past and grow as one humankind together in peace, in love. This remains our task, and I think we are up to it as long as we aim to do it together.

Same with a few other things. It really can only work if we do it together. Peace has to be a common goal at least until t is achieved. Climate repair another..

As every one knows Climate repair is urgent.