The truth is war is a story that everyone involved in is choosing to believe, even the ones on the outside. 

It’s something we get to grieve, and feel the horror about, and allows us to idolize people and glorify killing, we honour people for murder, yet put others behind bars it makes no sense.

It’s something we have been thriving on. 

There is no enemy but the human itself, the war is us, and we are it until we choose not to be, until we all choose to be a different story. 

A life taken is a life taken, a human is a human, we all bleed the same, and the common denominator that unites all of us is the truth we all live with is the very fact that one day death will greet us all. 

A soldier either kills another soldier who is a human or in fact, accepts the fate of being killed. 

I thought to myself this morning what if all the soldiers just lay down their weapons, every single one of them, and I understood why they don’t. 

The soldiers out there are killing under the false pretence of an enemy, they believe this story, and also because they are afraid. 

If they don’t kill each other or follow orders someone higher up might kill them or they may be punished for not following orders. 

So it feels like a trap and the only option everywhere a soldier looks is death, if it’s not in the eyes of an enemy, it’s in the eyes of the one who is issuing the order to kill. 

What it is, is insanity and I tell you why because although I never went to war, I did a short stint in the military and I went insane because I saw and felt it all in the training. 

The fear, the manipulation, the control, and I will never forget it because part of it lives in me, the fear of bending down to fix my bootlace and being screamed at or being screamed at because the bootlace wasn’t tied.

In the military, there is no winning, only death, and I witnessed many soldiers who went overseas and came back. I saw the death in their eyes, and I felt it in my bones. 

I don’t know how to stop the war, I only know how to speak about it, but at the end of the day death waits for us all, and I feel we all deserve a better death than the one currently being written. 

So I remember my own story.

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