I forgot to post something yesterday (since now it is technically the 4th) about the fact that it was the 140th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg yesterday. Such a senseless loss of life that was, especially the third day of battle which yesterday was the anniversary of.
12,000 Confederate soldiers were ordered to cross a field, miles wide and slightly uphill, into a line of union soldiers made relatively safe by a knee high brick wall on the top of cemetary ridge. Those men must have known that what they were doing was suicide, that they were more than likely not to go back to their families, but they did it anywhere for many reasons -- pride, honor, and conviction among them -- and they paid with their lives. And it wasn't just that one advance either, but the entire battle, the entire war, the entire history of warfare from the time that monkey-men beat each other with mammoth femurs.
How many men and women have been lost to war? How many poets, statesmen, scientists, and explorers? How many teachers, engineers, and philosophers? How many parents? How many grandparents? How many people, good people, great people, have been robbed of life, not even given the chance to be conceived, by the evils of warfare often driven by the greed of those in power? It is conceivable that a man that would have fathered the great-father of the scientis responsible for finding the cure for cancer died on that field on that day 140 years ago. It is possible that the private from Virginia that hoisted that flag after its previous bearer was shot could have been the man that would have discovered the secrets of the atom years before anyone else. Imagine the novels that could have been written, the poems that could have been shared, the speeches that could have inspired, all lost in an instant when lead hit the body at the speed of sound. It is sad.
But I fear that no one cares, as we still fight and bicker and kill for our pride and greed and fear. We still send our future great thinkers and doers out onto the battlefield to die before their prime. We still bomb the great peacmakers while they lie in their cribs. We still drive to hate the ones that would've devoted their lives to love had their father and mother not been killed so violently. We do this, and it costs us more than we shall ever know.
12,000 Confederate soldiers were ordered to cross a field, miles wide and slightly uphill, into a line of union soldiers made relatively safe by a knee high brick wall on the top of cemetary ridge. Those men must have known that what they were doing was suicide, that they were more than likely not to go back to their families, but they did it anywhere for many reasons -- pride, honor, and conviction among them -- and they paid with their lives. And it wasn't just that one advance either, but the entire battle, the entire war, the entire history of warfare from the time that monkey-men beat each other with mammoth femurs.
How many men and women have been lost to war? How many poets, statesmen, scientists, and explorers? How many teachers, engineers, and philosophers? How many parents? How many grandparents? How many people, good people, great people, have been robbed of life, not even given the chance to be conceived, by the evils of warfare often driven by the greed of those in power? It is conceivable that a man that would have fathered the great-father of the scientis responsible for finding the cure for cancer died on that field on that day 140 years ago. It is possible that the private from Virginia that hoisted that flag after its previous bearer was shot could have been the man that would have discovered the secrets of the atom years before anyone else. Imagine the novels that could have been written, the poems that could have been shared, the speeches that could have inspired, all lost in an instant when lead hit the body at the speed of sound. It is sad.
But I fear that no one cares, as we still fight and bicker and kill for our pride and greed and fear. We still send our future great thinkers and doers out onto the battlefield to die before their prime. We still bomb the great peacmakers while they lie in their cribs. We still drive to hate the ones that would've devoted their lives to love had their father and mother not been killed so violently. We do this, and it costs us more than we shall ever know.
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