Not a Good Time to Live, Not a Good Time to Die

It is a time when every thought of the future is marred

The pains of war muffle laughter leaving the mouth dry with the guilt of sore sobriety in the midst of death

Sorrow rests on the brow; death and dirt hold hands and querying why we are finicky about hygiene when death lurks in the shadows ready to pounce any minute

and if bacteria miss you alive they wait for your certain death which may happen the next second

Songs are not hummed and no one sings out when the dirges are in low tones; the mood is damp and dour and the earth itself sucks and soaks in lifelessness

In the dull eyes of the living the color wanes and the lenses grow dull

The curfew may be part of it but imagined danger hangs heavy in the air that doesn’t flow freely to the nostrils of humans hunted like animals

The restriction on freedom to roam, to travel spills and spoils living even if without the crisis there were no plans to go anywhere.

It’s the absence of freedom that threatens existence and harasses the spirit more than the charge of death hiding in the shadows and hovering in the air

Every thought of the future is marred, the young planning to grow up to marry and have children The married planning to divorce; all have to wait even the old ones are saddened by fear of not going peacefully.

It’s not the time to live, to wait or want or even to die. It’s a time of that heavy burdening of the heart for fear of what one may do the next hour without thinking

But it’s bleak and blurred and that haziness stifles life and living, threatening to hasten extinction

“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war’s perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war’s consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining…

The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war’s refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.” ― Chris Hedges

“I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

“The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.” ― Fidel Castro

“There are but two types of men who desire war: those who haven’t the slightest intention of fighting it themselves, and those who haven’t the slightest idea what it is. … Any man who has seen the face of death knows better than to seek him out a second time.” ― Seth Grahame-Smith

“Most world religions denounced war as a barbaric waste of human life. We treasured the teachings of these religions so dearly that we frequently had to wage war in order to impose them on other people.” ― Jon Stewart