allanhunter.net Blog

I’m the son of a veteran, and almost everyone I know of my age is a child of the generation that was impacted by World War Two, so to that extent they are all Veterans.  Certainly even my aged aunts and relatives in England were part of the fray. Aunt Betty lost a brother, had another as a POW, and spent night after night crouched in her Anderson shelter in the garden hoping it would actually be safer than the house when the German bombs fell.  As it turned out an unexploded bomb lodged in the foundation of their home, which was built on a hillside, and even though the house wasn’t blown apart by the time the device had been made safe and hauled away the place was a bit of a shambles. A home invasion by any description.

My great Uncle Steve, who’d been in WW1, used to watch my parents and friends as they talked about their war. I know now what he was thinking - that this sort of scarring is handed on from generation to generation.  He’d hoped that ‘his’ war would be the last, and that in a couple of generations people would be healed.  But we’ve had a tough time getting that much peace back into the world.

Now, of course, we have wars on drugs, the War on Want, wars on ignorance, wars on poverty…  As if war were actually a good thing.

What we haven’t got is a coherent plan on saving the planet.  For that the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day may be past already. It’s a couple of minutes before midnight, perhaps.