Sending in armed forces to deal with international situations violently MAY close down a regime...eventually. Within months, maybe within a generation. And it sustains fractured and disenfranchised views of the aggressor, harbouring resentments and hardened ideologies on the way.
The following is a bit raw and unpolished. It's late and I'm getting this out before it manifests itself another way that I can't control as much. Writing it out soothes my nerves about it.
***
Memories remain, are replicated, passed down, and they ferment.
Children are the victims of war. That sounds twee. Sounds like the name of a song, even. Whatever. It's true. Think about it.
Then they react to what they've seen. They have to. They don't just forget, they're not goldfish. Memories go somewhere. Even if not on a conscious level, then deeper underground where they become unpredictable in the minds of children whose brains are quickly adapting and fragmenting reality for the sake of survival (just like children in our communities who experience trauma). Seeing what they see for what it really is would fry a child's brain into non-functionality. One minute life ticks along at its already maladaptive pace, next minute the only life they know is having the bejesus blasted from it with missiles falling from foreign aircraft, flown by foreign people engaged by foreign governments, who probably have supported the rebels, who are most possibly interested in gaining power for themselves and access to privilege and not in 'liberating' said children and their struggling families from their everyday oppressions and human injustices.
Picture your own child, and if you don't have one, a relative's child, or even yourself as one (yes, you WERE one, or have you forgotten?). Put yourself in the mind of that child, seeing the world from that perspective. You have already been told and had it reinforced a gazillion times that you are not in control of your own life (unless you're a lucky one from a more progressive family) and your older brother has been killed, your father has been detained in custody and come back home with an eye missing, untold bruising and a permanent limp (hey, I'm just jamming here; this is a pretty picture compared to many small people's realities) and you are told to make sure your twelve year old sister stays indoors or she will be raped. And you know what that means. Your family name will be worth nothing if your sister is no longer a virgin.
One day you hear the big people talking in low tones, and an already tense atmosphere becomes positively charged with anticipation. There will be bombs. The intent is for military and strategic targets, but your family knows this means your whole town is in danger. You can't go to school, you must all stay together. Your uncles go out to get what food is left on the shelves in the local traders' stands and come back with a meagre stash and a wound to the head after a brawl to get the last bags of flour. The kids are told to stay inside and stay with the big people. You cry and your mama holds you and tells you she loves you and you pray together.
Everyone goes to bed late after a meal, and as you snuggle in under a blanket with your siblings your ears are shattered by the sound of the neighbour's house being blown apart, men shouting and women screaming. Your neighbours are people who live ten metres away. Well, they were. The kids went to school with you and their mum was the lady who helped you be born. Dead, all of them. That's all you have time to think of, because now you have to choose whatever you can carry in your arms and your whole family is on the move to another neighbourhood. You may not see your home again. Your whole little life wasn't very happy before and now you don't know if you'll see morning.
Years later, you are an adult. Let's say you were picturing a boy-child in the previous exercise. What are the chances that you are a peace-making citizen who never got involved in the local militia as a teenager? How do you view those foreign invaders? Are you grateful that they bombed your life and culture away so that you didn't have the previous bad-guys to deal with anymore? Does your mind have a lot of room for advanced thinking about how to spread peace and acceptance of difference in your town?
And if you were a girl-child, do you think you live a peaceful life now? Did you get away without being raped whilst growing up? Do you think you have a violence-free home life? Are your kids living the kind of life you only dreamed of, free of fear, with happy parents who have the head and heartspace to show lots of affection and warmth and a peaceful parenting approach?
Just say you made it to another country, even. Years of detention. Seeing your brothers and father brutalised, all of you dehumanised, denied visas numerous times (because the 'system' can't have you being accepted first or even fourth time round without a fight, cos the voters in key electoral areas - which are worlds away from your own detention centre and main resettlement areas - wouldn't like that), all your natural talents and academic learnings meaning very little because you haven't achieved them in English, and your life having turned out very, very differently from what you assumed would be your future before those bombs fell.
If you made it to another country, presumably you even made it out of that detention centre in time to go to school. If you were a girl-child in that exercise, maybe it was even for the first time. AND you didn't have to wear the burqa that was customary to wear according to the culture of your area. Still, no-one talked to you for months because you would do weird things like jump at the sound of a binder having its rings snapped shut.
Or you're a boy and you just ploughed into the boys who eventually just got too much in your face and you showed them how men fought in the town you lived in years before. You get together with other boys who come from towns like yours and you feel safer. Especially because your dad still lays into you at home when he's stressed and can't send your mum out to the shops all bruised (they don't like that here in this country, and you really, really don't want the police coming round to check your visas if someone reports an injury to your small and lovable mama).
My artistic licence might not be up to much, and I'm sorry for that. I didn't grow up with refugees from countries like Afghanistan or Iraq. I grew up with other refugees, though. Damage followed them. I can't imagine what kind of damage follows the kids who have come here in the last decade. Or the kind of damage that kids who stay in those countries normalise and replicate because there is no mitigation of the damage. There is no funding for an intervention program in those places, no counselling and debriefing services.
For the kids who do make it here, they don't just bring it with them. They bring it into our communities. The violence that happens in other countries at the hands of world powers does not occur in a vacuum. It affects YOU. It affects ME. It will affect the kids who go to school with them. These kids will one day be your mechanics, your hairdressers, your caregivers, or they will one day be the burglar, the bag-snatcher, the drunk-driver. Depending on what, if any compassion is offered to them to circumvent the patterns of violence in their short lives.
This isn't an essay about refugees and Australia's ethical and legal obligations to asylum-seekers. It's a reaction to the unquestioned use of violence to bring down regimes that won't negotiate oil pipelines into Iran, to exact revenge on one man, to show a dictator that his brand of leadership isn't wanted and he will be taken out violently (and/or the rest of his family) if he doesn't give over because that is what will make the world a better place.
It's not the wanted man who is hurt when he is killed. It is the lives of millions of children who will grow to be adults (if not killed first) in which this violence will be reflected. War is redundant. War is a cop-out. War destroys more than it achieves.
And I'm sick of having to turn the radio off AFTER the announcer has just read the initial tagline about someone being shot dead by Western forces (or whatever forces), then having to explain to my son that he doesn't have to hear about the horrible things that happen in war while he's a kid, when he's asked me what war is and who the man was that was shot dead. When all I want is the weather forecast, but have to settle for checking on the internet so that I can put the iPod on and save my children's innocence. Because at least I have that luxury.
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