Doug’s Dynamic Drivel

Comment from BobN
Time: 11/11/2006, 5:04 pm

Well Doug, I must say that I find most of your blog entertaining. However, I definitely disagree with your myopoeia about “generals” & “war”. It must be demonstrable to you that Hitler, for example, had to be stopped. Also that good men & women had to put their lives on the line to do so.
Nope, not going to wear the white poppy. Don’t hijack the red poppies - ’cause they mean much that those opportunistic and plagiarized white poppies never could.

Comment from Doug Alder
Time: 11/11/2006, 5:48 pm

Bob, I don’t disagree with remembering those who gave their life for country. In most cases they did so willingly. Nor do I disagree with you the WWII was justifiable, but I would say that was the only justifiable war in the memory of those living and recently past. What I object to is the glorification of war. What I object to is that since WWI there have been over 100 wars or major regional conflicts and those conflicts have directly been the cause of 160,000,000 deaths (no that’s not a typo - that’s the headline from the Vancouver Sun today), by far the majority of whom were non-combatants, and we don’t remember them at the same time. What I object to is that national leaders send youth to die for their own political reasons when they themselves would seldom serve that way themselves. I have no problem honoring the innocent and far too often many of those innocents were the combatants sent to do a politician’s or corporation’s dirty work. That’s what the white poppy is, a way of remembering everyone that war kills. I could hardly call that a plagiarism.

Comment from BobN
Time: 11/11/2006, 6:50 pm

Doug, thank you for the reply.
The red poppy, as is the white evidently, a symbol. How you can believe that my poppy can be interpreted in any sense as a symbol of “glorification” whist yours is a universal cry for peace I do not understand. Yes, the veterans went willingly, in order that they and all others could retain or achieve freedom. Yes, nobody asked the innocents who died, in appalling numbers - that is indisputable. What the red poppy does is to honour those who put themselves in harm’s way to stop the atrocities that, without their courage and sacrifice, would have been perpetuated. The red poppy is thus specific - is that what you object to?
The white poppy is an imitation (and a pale one at that) of the red. Please think of a unique symbol instead of this. Acceptance of the Peace message on a more than miniscule scale would perhaps be possible then. (how many were produced? 20-30,000?)Protest glorification of war if you wish, for you have that earned right - what I question is your abandonment of the red poppy honouring those who fought and fight now to stop oppression.

Comment from M. Douglas Wray
Time: 11/11/2006, 11:12 pm

I have a huge Icelandic Poppy plant that grows in front of my home, every year when it blooms, I remember a trip to Washington DC and my first sight of the Vietnam Memorial. As I stood there and absorbed the sight of all those names I began to realize the magnitude of the loss our nation had suffered. I watched person after person walk up the Wall, touch a name and weep silently. The grief was palpable and I too wept. God himself must surely weep to see such carnage when all He wants is for us to love one another.

We must never forget the men and women that have fallen - not just because of what they fought for, but because they were -people-. Someone gave birth to them, raised them, married them, bore their children and more. The sacrifice lessens us all.

War IS insane and we MUST make it STOP.

Until that day comes, soldiers all over the world will keep standing up to do their duty - whether it be fighting a human enemy or defending us from Nature’s wild embrace.

For us to fail to give unto them the honor we would give a departed family member is to divorce ourselves from the Family of Man.

Work to stop the madness, but by all means, honor those who burned brightest fighting the Dark.

I hear what you’re saying brother, put up BOTH. Honor the loss AND point to the Goal.

Comment from Nigella H.
Time: 11/12/2006, 9:10 am

My dear Mr. Alder –

Your sentiments are admirable but I fear they are a little naive. Thank you for qualifying your unfortunate initial remarks.
Please tell me: do you honestly believe that your goal is achievable?
I think you are quite a young man. I am a middle-aged woman whose ancestors have fought in every European war and many in Africa and India, that has happened in the last 1000 years. I thought, when I read your initial posting, that you were young; from your last one, I am sure of it. Are you acquainted with anyone who actually fought in ‘Nam? I am.
The last and very bloody century is only one century in the short but always bloody history of our species. The lifetime of anyone now breathing is a minute fraction of the time that human beings have been living and fighting. There has never been a time that we did NOT fight. Nor has there ever been a time that anyone liked it very much. What has been admired and rightly extoled is the ability and willingness to defend that which is good in the face of that which is evil.
There is a trouble with all this high-minded thinking and rhetoric. It is simple: it does not work. Are you acquainted with a play called “Lysistrata”? It was written in Athens before Christ was born. It is one of the most pithy and amusing war protests ever written.
If TELLING people that war is terrible could stop war, it would have been stopped a long time ago. War has always been terrible. In time past, it was, I submit, a good deal more terrible for those who fought than it is now. Imagine being a soldier in the days of the mace and the broadsword. There were no anti-biotics, there was no sulfa, there was no morphine. There were no medicopters, no front-line recieving hospitals, no crack-trained physicians, no anaesthesia — and no social security or departments of veterans’affairs to help the halt and the blind survive in primitive societies in which you simply did NOT survive unless you could hunt and fight.
War if frightful, in itself. No one pretends otherwise. We have been telling eachother this, not for a few tens of years, but for many hundreds, indeed, several thousand years. It has not made a great deal of difference. It has in fact made no difference.
Why do you think it will start doing so now?
This is not a rhetorical question.
I would be glad to think that there was some hope for an end to it, a real end, not an un-naturally contrived one, as envisioned by Huxley or Orwell.
Do you actually believe that human nature can change that much? And if you do, WHY do you? I have never been able to entertain that kind of optimism, but I am open to reasonable persuasion.
I remain,
N.H.

Comment from Doug Alder
Time: 11/12/2006, 5:00 pm

Nigella - I am far from young and very far from being naive. I suspect at 57 I’m older than you and I have known a lot of vets from WWII, Korea, ‘Nam and other less publicized conflicts including some very black ops.

So from your perspective protest does no good because it won’t stop all wars? I find that rather hard to believe considering it was the millions of people protesting ‘Nam in the US that (along with the media coming from ‘Nam)turned the general population against the war and created a political atmosphere the politicians could not ignore. Vietnam was the first war in modern history where the public was seriously able to influence it’s progress and outcome.

Please do not put words in my mouth. I never said or suggested that protests would end war (although as stated above they can help end a war). What I said to put it in its plainest form is that it is morally wrong to honor the fallen soldiers if you are not at the same time honoring their innocent victims which as I mentioned earlier now number 160 million in the last century. Don’t forget that those soldiers you are remembering are from all sides in the field of conflict and are collectively responsible for those 160 million dead most of whom were non-combatants. That is what the white poppy represents.

From time immemorial wars have been fought, mostly by the poor, on the command of the wealthy, royalty, corporations and/or power hungry politicians. The general public were always, when there was a choice , lied to and manipulated into fighting them for all the wrong reasons.

Today mass communications does make a difference (like it did in ‘Nam and now Iraq). Governments can no longer easily hide their crimes and it takes mere milliseconds to make them visible around the world. Protest is very powerful, Ghandi proved it as have may others since then.

For those that disagree well we’ll have to agree to disagree.

Comment from Nigella H.
Time: 11/13/2006, 3:21 am

My dear Mr. Alder –

I am delighted to hear that we are of an age. I may therefore be more straighforward with you than I would feel right about being with a young one who might, after all, be only another victim of the steadily declining quality of public education.
I am not putting words in your mouth. Your “Goal”, capital “G” and all, is the end of war. That you said. I enquired whether you thought this could be done, and you have replied, in the context of two rather small-scale [thank God] wars, that “protest is a powerful tool”. For what?

Victor Charlie cleaned your clock in ‘Nam. That was what brought the troops home, not the people in the street. They did achieve, for a while, limits upon what the executive power could do without the debate and consent of your elected bodies. But that was surreptitiously removed, as of course you are aware.
Since you are as mossy a rock [chronologically] as I, you could have been in ‘Nam. Were you?

I do not think you should play numbers games to suit your rather foggy arguments. Those folk whose deaths you cite were real people. They are not statistics for your arguments. They lived in conditions that your worst nightmares could not imagine, by and large. Conditions that you might share, were it not for the very men whose symbol you are co-opting.

Conditions in which your well-intentioned but fuzzy-minded assertions ["protest is a powerful tool" is an assertion. assertion is not argument.] would have had you taken out and shot.

It is your priviledge to say what you please. By all means avail yourself of it. Try not to insult the honourable when you do so. They are not statistics. They are living men and women. They may have had to fight because of the reprobate policies of govenments. But that is not what they fought FOR. Most of the time that is not something they knew anything about. Blackguarding them only tarnishes the ideal you espouse.

Dust it off, Mr. Alder. And read Aristophanes.

I remain,
N.H.

Comment from diane oser
Time: 11/13/2006, 11:47 pm

The White poppy, along with the Red, deserve equal place in our observation at this time. War is wrong, and yet we are called to protect our country and families, and few would abdicate this responsibility. It has always been a quandry for me as I grew up, and having lived with a man who devoted his life to securing our freedom, and hearing his nightmares at night, reliving his acts of violence and murder,and dying feeling as though he had wasted his life,had lost all opportunities, and had many regrets, my thoughts are torn. I do not believe that war is an answer to anything, except to achieve a temporary coup as to who is more powerful, rich or justified than the other. Honouring the people who did fight, is valid. Honouring the people who were innocent victims of these acts of violence is right as well.
When will it stop? My biggest objection to war is the foundations that substantiate it such as religion, as no one has the right to say that their’s is better or truer than others,as well as greed. I will stand up for a person who will ‘react’ violently to an attack on their loved ones, but will fight tooth and nail to one who is fighting on the behalf of a belief system based on a religious belief,or a political belief, as we are all entitled to our path of choice. No one has the right to say or impose that their way is better or more justified than the other.
I portend to not be a political entity, and truly I’m not. I would like to see, however, some really enlightened attitudes and implemations in the directions of world peace. Therefore, red and white, they belong together. Unity?