Remember it without the whitewash

And maybe we'll do our part to protect those rights and freedoms those we are supposed to be remembering fought for.

And maybe we'll push our governments to be far more critical before sending more people off to death and maiming.

It just hit me full force yesterday about how WWII has its devastating casualties walking among us even now. It took this post by the Pretty Shaved Ape to do it, fool that I am.

My father was very much like PSA's dad, similar experiences, same inability to show much emotion except anger. I thought he was just crabby for 25 years, but hell-on-earth, how can anyone come back sane after witnessing and participating in the horrors those people lived through?

Dad rarely mentioned the war, though he did kick my teen-aged arrogant ass one day explaining what was done to him and his troop to make fresh, young Canadian men hate Germans enough to kill them. They were walked through a concentration camp that had just been liberated. It worked.

Dad took shrapnel to his leg, a lifetime reminder of the glories of war, and like all vets, he lost friends and relatives as well. He didn't speak of these things, couldn't, I suppose, except for one horrible story and I have no idea why he told me, seeming to come from nowhere as it did. I wasn't going to write it out, then realized that's what we do - shove the real nasty stuff out of sight and memory so that when We Remember, we can wear our poppies and use our bumper stickers, and it's all very noble.

It was night, small town, shells going off, noisy, hard to see. Dad and his group were going through the town and he and his friend would call out to each other to make sure the other was alright. When the group got clear of the fire, the group noticed Dad's friend wasn't there, so Dad went back for him and in the burst of light saw him sitting by the side of the road. Because he could only see when explosions went off, he had his hand on the man's shoulder before he saw his friend had no head. He slung him across his shoulders and carried him to the others.

Dad's voice was flat, almost matter-of-fact, but his face was fighting some hell I have never known.  I could say nothing, unable to grasp such a nightmare, and it is the only regret I have about my Dad, that maybe he wanted to talk, but having been trained by our culture that those subjects were taboo, I failed.  Now, I wish in vain that I could hug him for what he suffered, and really thank him for those terrible years of angusih and sacrifice.  And let him know, Dad, it was for something.

The hate, the loss...where does that go when these soldiers come home? People generally don't want to hear about it, soldiers are not likely to talk easily of it. So they pay and pay and pay for the rest of their lives by trying to balance the nightmares and conditioning with some semblance of a normal life as they try to teach their kids a better way.

Dad mellowed out in the last decade or so of his life. I think it was seeing his kids and grandkids doing well, being decent people. Well, ok. There's that, and it's a good thing, his unexpected peace seemed to say.

He'd be monumentally pissed to see how our country has been doing these past few years, though, because he didn't fight for the word Democracy, he fought for the reality and we are coming up short. Too few people take time to be informed and to let their reps know what they want. Too many are passively willing to give up rights for convenience. Too often are we threatened by our own government and denied the right to speak and the right to be informed.

Memory is a tool favoured by evolution because it helps us learn so that we can survive. If we are selective about what we remember, then it's a broken tool and we repeat the same mistakes over and over.

War is not glorious. It should be avoided and used only as an absolute last resort. Other less aware animals know this instinctively and will do their elaborate shows of force without actually engaging in a fight to get the other to back off. It does not favour survival to waste members when other means can accomplish the same results.

And we're supposed to be the smart species, the compassionate species, the reasonable ones.

It's not treasonous to remember the waste, pain, suffering. It's sticking up for our soldiers and the future of our kind so that we remember the horrible cost of war and think before we commit the lives of others to hell.