Let me take you back 25 years. Between 1989 and 1991, I was 4-5 years old and between the fall of the Soviet Union, the Oka Crisis and the Gulf War, they kept interrupting my cartoons on Radio-Canada for annoying newsflashes! Grown ups talking, in the afternoon! They speak of a white house somewhere and spit out words I can't understand yet like "missile", "pentagon", "tank", "radar", "Saddam Hussein", "Persian Gulf".
The grown ups are fighting in a golf place somehow? I thought golf courses were green, not desert!
There's one thing I understood, though: my mom was afraid. When I asked her what all of this was about on TV, she said that this was war, that my teenage brothers could even be called to fight "far-far away, in big fighter planes". Years down the road, after reading many books and watching many documentaries, I understand that for someone of my mother's generation, War, LA guerre, is the terrible World War 2 that my grandparents lived. It's those apocalyptic images of nuclear anihilation that went on tv when my mom was a child in the 1950s. It's Algeria. It's Vietnam!
But I couldn't understand that quite yet. I didn't even know how many zeros there are in a thousand. I did know that it means "many manys". It's only been a few weeks since my older sister explained to me, while we were watching a movie, that when someone is dead, they can't bring him to the hospital to be cured.
When someone is dead, it's over. It's done. No more.
And on tv, Bernard Derome mentions "many thousand dead"...Many times "many-manys" people. Done.
Years down the road, after Bush junior desperately tried to make the World believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and failed but...invaded anyway, we have this glorious mess we call ISIL in the same area. On the internet, some say it was created by the US, the UN, Israel, (unless it's aliens, again). Those people will argue until the cows come home, all thinking they're smarter than the other side but I think that no matter who attacked who, when you get something as simple as what I understood when I was five, you get everything there is to understand about war.
Think for one second, my brothers conscripted! In the 1960s, people wrote songs against that.
