On This Day

While rearranging some books recently, I stumbled upon a slim volume of poetry by Carl Sandburg. I opened it up to a random page and read the poem there. I thought that poem would be worth repeating today, given all the insanity that has been done in this day's name.

A Million Young Workmen, 1915

A million young workmen straight and strong lay stiff on the grass and roads,
And the million are now under soil and their rotting flesh will in the years feed roots of blood-red roses.
Yes, this million of young workmen slaughtered one another and never saw their red hands.
And oh, it would have been a great job of killing and a new and beautiful thing under the sun if the million knew why they hacked and tore each other to death.
The kings are grinning, the kaiser and the czar — they are alive riding in leather-seated motor cars, and they have their women and roses for ease, and they eat fresh-poached eggs for breakfast, new butter on toast, sitting in tall water-tight houses reading the news of war.
I dreamed a million ghosts of the young workmen rose in their shirts all soaked in crimson … and yelled:
God damn the grinning kings, God damn the kaiser and the czar.

The war in Iraq is as senseless as the First World War was. In both cases, a tragic event was used as pretext to start a war that the powers that be already wanted to fight. Both wars were started by men who valued vain demonstrations of their supposed resolve and strength more than they valued the lives of the young men and women they casually sent into battle to die. And as for the deaths of the Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire today, our leaders don't even care enough to keep count.

And yet despite the horrors — both moral and practical — of this useless war, we must "stay the course", we are told, because to do otherwise would be to admit that our leaders' agressive desire for war at all costs was a mistake. Better, we are told, that young men die than that old men admit they were wrong.

So yes, God damn the grinning kings, God damn the President and the Prime Minister.