A Guffaw In Need of Being

Sylvia Shawcross

The rains of November are cold but the snows of November are colder.

It is said that an entire generation of young men from the Ukraine are gone now. They have died in the war.

Now, I thought the war in the Ukraine was the “War for Civilization Itself.” We sent them tons of money to preserve democracy and all that. We waved our blue and yellow flags and wept over the plight of the Ukrainians knowing we had to save the free world from that evil Russia.

I guess that didn’t much work out? Or what? Do we know?

Although I hear it is going on in the background. I think they’re still fighting over Bahkmut. We can’t know. We can’t know anything really. Unless we’re there. We just have to guess or find someone we think might know. Where the money went we’ll also never really know although They do make stabs at telling us now and then. It’s to pay Ukrainian salaries now I hear. Who knows. I sure don’t.

Anyway, since that “War for Civilization Itself” seems to be running out of the goodwill of people donating money, machines and munitions, now we have a new war and this one is a humdinger being started in an area of the world that three main religions of the world hold sacred. It’s a Holy War. It’s a War between Freedom and Totalitarianism. It’s a War to End All Wars. We’re waving different coloured flags, weeping over the plight of different peoples and must send tons of money. Again.

Only this time it’s really really the “War for Civilization Itself.” This time. Honestly.

Again.

Some would say it is not a war but a genocide.

It will soon be a war.

So I think we need to fire every single one of our leaders. And certainly our diplomats. They’re bloody incompetent. And that’s about all I have to say about that. Other than it all seems rather contrived. I mean, seriously…. Don’t you think? The whole thing from the get-go feels, since Covid even, as if it is all being executed in true military fashion with all the constant fear and propaganda and frenzying up of the mooing herds and the constant diversions. And the gaslighting towards stupefaction.

Again. Still. As ever.

My whole theory on the Middle East isn’t popular. I figure if people can’t live together you take their toys away and nobody gets to live there. That’s always been my contention. A few stray people to clean the historical sites and sweep the pigeons from the parks and the stray cats from the benches and we’d all be fine. We could have day passes to visit.

Now the greatest thing I don’t understand and I don’t know about you but it is this absolutely ridiculous reckless behaviour by the powers that be who appear not to care about consequences AT ALL. Not the consequences of public opinion, the law, constitutions, treaties, deficits, promises given, history nor even future generations. Not the consequences on their children, family, consciences and/or even what appears to be tens of thousands of people now dead.

As if there was not a single entity to which they must explain themselves.

They are their own Gods perhaps? They don’t need to explain themselves to people at all, even those who elected them or sent them all their money in taxes? They are saving the planet and that is what counts? Or they know they’re going to survive it all quite well thank-you-very-much and what does it matter what happens to the mooing herds after all… they moo and herd and are quite contemptuous really…. how could they possibly understand?

There seems to be no discernible moral boundary to a lot of their actions.

It certainly is a riddle wrapped in an enigma sort of thing. There are still days when I think we’ll all be told it was a movie script on screens and none of it ever really happened. We’d laugh and laugh and laugh…. “Oh what a joke on all of us,” we’d guffaw.

Oh well…

Here’s an earworm of no consequence whatsoever:

“History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope & history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore Is reachable from here,”

—The quote is from Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, after Robert Fitzgerald, a translator and interpreter of the Greek classics.

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