Baching It... And A Few Thoughts On War

Teapot has left for the weekend of his dreams... He is gone on a Canoe Convention. Yup he is gone to oogle and ogle canoes of every shape and size. He left at 1:00 a.m. Argh! I'm pooped from being up in the middle of the night to give him a kiss good bye as he went out the door. But he checked in at about 2:30 p.m. to let me know that they had made it safe and sound... all was good and he was in high spirits. I'm sure that he will have a high old time.

As for the Daughters and I... we are baching it for the weekend. And as usual whenever Teapot goes away the mice play... and so we have been watching movies though I will say that we could have watched better ones... The first was a Jackie Chan flick... so so.... but then we watched The Wind That Shakes The Barley... a really good movie, but I want to kill Teapot for picking it for us right at this moment... We've all been crying for two hours. It's the story of the beginnings of the civil war between the English and the IRA and Sinn Fein, a dreadful time by any standards.

Being a light hearted soul, Teapot always manages to make us laugh after a movie of such sadness and desolateness, thus the reason for wanting to kill him... he picked the movie and then ran off to let us drown in our own tears with not a bit of light heartedness to pick us up and save us from ourselves. As with all movies of civil wars, there is no doubt that it is the women that suffer the most when their men go to war, and the Daughters and I empathized maybe a little too much with the women in this movie. With hands bound by the words of freedom and higher ideals, they watch their men going off to fight and they can't stop what they know will come. In the epic words of Ruby Thewes from Cold Mountain.... "Every piece of this is man's bullshit. They (men) call this war (the American civil war) a cloud over the land, but they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say, "Shit! Its rainin'!"

There is no doubt in my mind that fighting is not the right way to seek our rights, or to help the underdog.  I watch daily as this world around us deteriorates into chaos and wonder what Mahatma Gandhi would think of our efforts in Afghanistan.... or our efforts in Libya. And yet there is something dreadfully poignant about the first scene in the movie we watched tonight, as British soldiers descend willy nilly on an Irish peasant home and beat a young man to death for playing a game of field hockey because there are to be no public meetings.  You want to bash the brains out of the British soldier who is the leader as much as the Irish must have for the injustices and feckless abuses they received at the hands of the British. These types of abuses play themselves out all over the world regularly as we speak, in places like the Yemen or Syria or the Ivory Coast or the Congo. Why oh why do the strong and mighty feel the need to repress and crush the weak... why do they not have the need to support and uphold weak... why do they not take care of the weak? Why is nurturing not universal?

In the end all is quiet now in our house. Daughter #2 is above deck no doubt plugged into her iPod... Daughter #1 is glued to a book on the couch. The dishes are clean after a yummy supper of Nachos and cheese and Salsa. And all the wet and soggy tissues are in the garbage.... but in our hearts lingers the ethereal... the bight of pointless death and wasted lives... of gentle hearts who long for a better time... and who long for peace. What could be more ethereal... more magic than that.

Sweet Peace