Memoirs, memos, memorials and loopy ideas.

As a child, as soon as I became aware that I was afraid (I had no concept of "abuse" at the time; I thought every mother was like mine) I began to, in my wild little imagination, draw parallels between enduring the dangers of (my abusive) childhood and going to war. Maybe it's because that's just so drilled into popular culture- what TV show or movie set within the last 100 years doesn't have at least one supposed PTSD sufferer? So I ended up reading a lot on the subject of PTSD, because as controlling as she was my mother was too thoughtless to ever screen my reading material, and with that one area of my life unrestrained I read all I could find about history as well. I don't think I ever thought there was an actual connection, I was just thinking of it as a way to keep myself going. It worked, 'cause I'm here.

One of the side effects is that to this day, though I've never been in a combat zone, I frequently empathize with the token shell-shocked vet in such pieces. If I don't, it's usually because their PTSD has been portrayed so inaccurately or with such blatant sensationalism that it's downright disrespectful. These days I read a lot of war memoirs instead.

My favourite is definitely One Soldier's War, by the Russian Arkady Babchenko. He was drafted out of law school to fight in Chechnya, then when the second war in Chechnya broke out he voluntarily enlisted because that's all he knew. Then he became a journalist. He used the phrase "war-charred eyes", which I think is fucking golden, and there's a scene where the boys joke about just getting the two opposing politicians in their suits to duke it out in a fistfight that's the most beautiful illustration of a soldier's desire for peace I've ever seen. He says of a dog that stayed after they tried to shoo him and ended up as food that everyone including animals chooses where to go, and when to die.

I have this strange conviction in my head that this generation relates better to our great-grandparents than our parents, grandparents, twice-great-grandparents, children or anyone in between. Maybe it's because it's my great-grandfather who fought in WWI. Maybe it's because both have been nicknamed the "lost generation" by the other generations, something which I find kind of offensive (my generation has been let down- to say we are "lost" as opposed to "betrayed" denies culpability).

In front of city hall, there's a war memorial with some statues on one end and then a stone arch for dead cops on the other. I remember going to a march/protest against police brutality that ended at the stone arch, where one of the guys holding the banner had half-jokingly said, "And here we have a nice Roman arch, which is how you know there's fascism afoot." The war memorial was built for WWI, but I think dedications to WWII and the Korean War have been added to it over the years. When my city started up its own Occupy camp, the first day speakers spoke from the stone steps of the monument, underneath the copper statue.

A week later those of us living there full-time had someone on watch at night, and the watcher usually sat there. I gladly slept in a wet tent in November for I think nine days before I started getting seriously disgusted at the number of people who went home because they were cold, or tired, or wanted to go smoke some pot (as serious as Occupy Wall Street was, Occupy Halifax rapidly became a joke). I wanted to shout at them that nothing worthwhile was ever done except by people willing to be cold, to be tired, to give up pot. But they were mostly in their mid-20's, folk of the generation just before mine, and all either quite well-off or from families who approved of their whereabouts. How could they possibly hope to understand that insidious long-term fear that makes people rebel?

There was a big-bellied bald guy in a suit standing next to the speakers the first day, and his presence made me and several others nervous because we had no idea who he was and he looked like the very image of capitalism itself. But later that day, after asking around, I found out that he was from some veterans' association or other, and that he supported the Occupy movement very strongly because, according to him, all the guys in the trenches of WWI would have supported it considering the terrible conditions they fought under and the awfulness of the war. So there's that.

I'm not really sure if I'm qualified to communicate the degree to which WWI shifted paradigms; it might take a historian to do that. But think of Stravinsky, Freud, T.S. Eliot. I don't think we'd have to worry about climate change (the bane of my existence, something I will fight against my whole life) now if it weren't for WWI. I guess maybe I'm just off my rocker, I don't know. Most things that seem strange or dehumanizing to me came around within the past century, the things I talk about when I say I was born in the wrong time (I have no idea when would be the appropriate time, but that's another story). Which is to say I feel like I didn't get some kind of memo updating me not only on how the earth is to be treated but on how modern human interactions work (as opposed to what I'd call natural human interactions), how careers are chosen and skills learned nowadays, the new ways in which knowledge is regarded. But I firmly believe the aftermath of WWI set us on a course toward the peculiarities of today. It's weird to me that no one even notices there's been a change.

I don't know any more than that, or at least I can't organize my thoughts to convincingly say more, so don't get worked up about me. I'm just someone whose mind goes to weird places and stays there quite persistently, a woman who survived to adulthood by playing soldiers.