That is how bombed houses appear to me, too: as cake, not that I've had the misfortune to see any with my own eyes. From descriptions, yes. From images, yes, the actual and those of my imagination. But not from first hand experience. I am lucky. Very lucky to have escaped war and living in a war-torn country. I have anecdotes, only.
I experience wars and persecution through word-smiths: from the mouths of those that survive, from the hands of those that left some account of themselves, and from those that weave it into a fictional history. The wars that have been conducted in my time haven't been conducted on the soil I call and make my home. With the exception of the IRA, they've been far away. Even if British troops are deployed, the concept of war is still alien to me. There is compassion but there's distance. My life is unaffected. I am lucky, but my fortunate circumstances make me weaker. To live in, and to have only known, peace does not make you resilient or appreciative.
I do not want wars, I do not support wars, but wars we will have. We should not turn a blind eye to them, but nor should we get involved if we have no understanding of what might be the consequences of our actions. To make a situation worse leads to more unrest. To have no alternative is to cut the head off one monster for another to grow in its place. This we have seen but again been unaffected by. We leave the rubble to others to clear.
We send money. We send clothes. We say: How awful! We have the same response to any crisis that occurs, at home or abroad. Media, in its many forms, has had a numbing effect. It's happening elsewhere, it's not our concern, and the images of war, or flood, of a natural disaster have been seen too many times before, have been repeated too often. Twenty-four hour news on a loop loses the power to shock.
People are carrion. Civilians caught up or public servants sent in. And that's not just true of war, but also of other emergency situations. People are reported as statistics, or, dependent on age, deemed of lesser value. People are people aren't they? no matter how young or how old. That a crisis has involved a certain age group does not make it more or less of a tragedy. But then I think of all life as equal: the natural, the animal, the human. You can infer what you like from me putting the human last. I would deny it, but then we all have unconscious biases: the unconscious leaks out and proclaims your truth; the truth you have absorbed unknowingly. For it's true I do not like what mankind does. But I am no saint either. None of us are all good or all bad.
And none of us are equal, for if we were then wars would be harder to wage, life would be harder to take. That, however, is not human nature. For if it were there would be nothing to master. If there are no wars for us to participate in, we go to war with ourselves or invent new ideas to war against as a collective rabble. We make a noise, cause disruption, which gives us purpose, but delivers nothing.
Wars, of some sort and of our own making, will always be engaged in. Humans make love, humans make war. It's what we do. Although the wars we make will change as will the weaponry and the technology we use to wage them, and so the destruction caused, too, will change. It will still, however, create a divide. And for those of us not involved, a remote place from which to bear witness and shut out, turn off when we've had enough of experiencing, through the screen, the horrors others are living. The mind reduces it all to cake, or sometimes a doll's house with its front torn open.
Picture credit: Coffee Cake, 2003, Janet Fish (source: WikiArt).
Written 2nd March 2020.
