The song (by Sabaton) came on as I was heading to work this Thursday, and I found myself tearing up. It’s the first time in a few years that I heard it and it hit differently. I’ve got relatives and friends of friends in active duty.
Not anyone I’m in touch with, but I’ve met them, and I hear of them. The price of a mile is the suffering and lives of them, their friends, and so many other young men.
One of my bubbles has been burst by what’s happening in Ukraine & Israel. War is no longer history, news and reports. It has become a lot more real to me, and it’s something I could end up being a part of.
This feels like a rather serious topic for a community called casual conversation, but feel free to share your thoughts on this, or a “bubble bursting” moment of your own.
The song itself was lost on me as I don’t understand the language, but the imagery and text were quite evocative. Yet, with these kinds of things, I try to remind myself that the perpetrators of these horrors are long gone. The important part is to prevent these sorts of things from happening again, because if all of these “debts” of our long-gone ancestors were to be repayed in kind, nothing would remain of humanity but a pile of corpses, nigh all of them innocents.
Personally, I hope for a future where our great-grandchildren will think of war and its horrors as a legend of the past, barbarity consigned to the history books, lest it be forgotten and repeated.
For some value of “long” I guess.
Some of the most notorious perpetrators of Japan’s war crimes died in my lifetime. Hirohito died, for example, when I was 23.