Within the same hour, on the same television but on different channels, I watched on one channel a mindless Beverly Hills actress who was selling one of her eighty cars to buy an island for her husband, and on the other, a mourning pack of Muslim people protesting after the main family having received the body of their eldest son, alongside his head.
What frightens me is that most of us believe the world is mildly equal, and those who disagree do so either because they see that marriage equality is not considered pertinent nor legal in most countries and states, or because they are aware that Africa is poverty stricken. Yes, these two facts are true, but so is the fact that there exists amidst our technological lives places where terrors of war and religion are claiming the lives of many, and unfortunately for me, I know of this and I see this daily.
My parents see it fit to have a Lebanese satellite box rather than Foxtel or Netflix because they believe their cultural roots to be of higher importance than the seven o'clock news - even if they flick back to Australian television every now and again to eavesdrop on their country of residence.
The world is interconnected with the help of technological advances, yet war and its terrors are slicing through this connectivity. Sometimes I consider moving out of my parents' home just because of their viewing choices, and at other times I am thankful for seeing these atrocities because they remind me that the world is not a beautiful place, and that beauty is simply an illusion.
It was rather funny and saddening at the same time to witness the alarm caused by the testing of the fire alarm and evacuation siren the other day at university.
We sat, our minuscule art class, working, cutting apart expensive interior decoration and art magazines so as to obtain a sufficient amount of pictures to collage a room showing perspective for our art journals. We all were quite occupied with our works, all eager to obtain the right sorts of photographs so as to destroy them and paste them eternally on blank pieces of paper, aiming for that sufficiently high mark that will satisfy us enough to justify the amount of money we pay for our presence in that class.
It is amazing the level of silence one encounters when one finds a group of students each trying to impress the teacher. Immersed in slicing through the highly finessed work of others to create our own somewhat finessed works, we treaded through magazines as though their contents were effortless and their contributors were useless nothings who have no conception of what a better looking decoration looks like.
Too excited with gluesticks and scissors, we forgot the outside world. We forgot signs of life outside of the realm of magazine-cutting, and we were thus rather startled when we heard on the speakers a loud siren, followed by a deep voice, "sorry for this test, this is a fire alarm test, please ignore it".
Everyone began to panic. They winced their eyes at the shriek of each siren, which, mind you, was not that loud at all despite their failed attempts at a crescendo, and I sat there thinking of my parents and my cultural heritage.
My parents fled Lebanon from the atrocities that are still going on to this day. Bomb sirens are a normal thing for them, and to think that the people in my art class were frightened of a fire alarm siren is of high interest to me.
Some people simply do not take into account the lives or circumstances of others. These people are not aware of how blessed they are in their ignorance. For what they do not know, literally will not kill them.
Tomorrow is Anzac Day, again. I say this in a sombre manner because it is every year that anyone barely commemorates another day wherein we "will remember them" yet we still send out troops to fight pointless wars - we, collectively, as in we human beings.
We of all nations should know better than to continue the impracticality that is war. War does not solve a damn thing, the hippies were right. All war does is dig even deeper foreign gaps between nations, between religions thus between humans. What will happen when evil aliens come forth from the heavens and demand us to sacrifice our planet? Will it be only then that we all would unite? That the Amazon tribes will lend us their poison spears when people from the white white west run out of ammunition? Would the red Indians of America ally with Australia's forgotten Aborigines in spite of the white white west? I only hope that the aliens come sooner just so I can laugh at the face of humankind's tragedy.
But it was this that inspired me to write such a drab post:
A picture from an Anzac Day lift-out in the Herald Sun Newspaper yesterday, the 23rd of April. It is mirrored because I took the photo on my MacBook, however that element of this picture is unimportant - what is important, though, is the content of the photo, the act of which I am unable to name even despite an extensive search of the name of this act of holding a string that, on the other end, is attached to a soldier holding on, the last grip with their loved ones before they go to a foreign place and clamp their hands around the grips of a gun and hold fast to it even if their grip shakes otherwise the "enemy" might shoot them first.
This is perhaps the most heartbreaking pre-war photograph I have ever come across, in fact each one of its kind is heartbreaking. One can only feel this heartbreak if they place themselves in the position of one of the two people on either end of the string: from the perspective of the soldier, who probably is holding on to the last piece of hope that they will ever see, or the person on the other end - the lover, the brother or sister, the father or mother, the best friend, the daughter or son who might see their father, uncle, brother or son for the last time ever, and this tug-of-war sort of play is the last experience before that soldier has to tug for their lives.
The entire prospect of war angers me. "Lest we forget", they claim, as they take the day off as a public holiday and become intoxicated on beer and fill their guts with barbecued meats as they sit around in the sun in their backyards watching their children play around and feeling the fresh green grass between their toes, while years ago men as young as fifteen risked their lives because they were brainwashed to fight for their country, a sense of false patriotism overridden by a "holiday" claimed by the propaganda, only to find blood, guts and ammunition being fired from every direction at them. In fact, in the case of the Anzacs, most of these young men never made it off their boats without being gunned down, bullets piercing their lungs, their skulls, their legs, everywhere. And what do they get in return? Some unmarked gravestones, some marked gravestones with dead flowers, and some decaying in the sea where they were shot down while all being commemorated with one minute of silence and a red poppy.
The parade showcasing the remaining veterans, some too shell-shocked and traumatised still after all these years to even know what is going on. All they know is that they are in the safety of a wheelchair and they are not wielding guns and running around shooting other young men for the pride and joy of their country. I look at those gloomy eyes and I see pain, I see things no human should go through or witness, and I realise that the fanfare of these parades are not enough to commemorate these men. War should not have happened in the first place. Anything involving the premature taking of lives is execrable.
So tomorrow, while we have that one minute of silence, imagine being on one end of that string and either wishing or being wished a 'bon voyage'. Only then we will know, minus the gruesome details, if war ever was worth being fought. "Lest we forget"? More like, "lest we not drink".
