You've done your bit David. You played your role. You returned from war, many didn't. You found out what millions of men throughout the years and from all sides of the arena know, war always changes you for the worst. Boys rage to fight and men are broken by it. Even the worst of worst case scenarios, had you killed Hitler, you would still, in the darkness of night be troubled that you had taken a human life, because,well it's not really our job is it as human beings to be the arbiters of life and death.
Oil. Oil. Oil. More precious than gold, certainly more precious than human life. Yet, you can't eat it or drink it. It's like desert sand, inedible and incapable of quenching thirst, yet Oh how they fight for it generations upon generations of them. For strips of land like Palestine, 2000 years that fights been going on.
The only real thing our children will definitely inherit is war.
The Kurds have been royally shafted, the Yasidi decimated. ISIS fighters will return to my home town here in England. It is approximated at least thirty people left to join the jihadists. An they will return and shop where I shop, an pass me in the street, and their kids will go to school with our children, as if Syria never happened. And when it begins again the men making those same wring decisions will sleep well in their beds, in mansions with long gravel drives and will never be touched by the mistakes they have made, or encounter people forever changed by those decisions.
It's a shame and its an abomination but it's what we do. We are creatures of war, greed and avarice and we fear and kill those who aren't. Jesus,Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Benezir Bhutto, Robert Kennedy,
Einstein wrote that if men were to exist in two hundred years time, he would be unrecognizable from how he is today. That is either a chilling thought or an optimistic one.
T.