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Teach Us Something


Teach us something, if you don’t we’ll not know that this war never ends, that we will be breathing the eternal war of our forbearers. We’ll not know that we exist in the bomb-tripped retaliation of hostilities not taught in history books or churches, not discussed at town hall meetings or in our homes. A history that will be neighbor to our children’s duration, whose marrow will be dust settling upon their bitter air of which their children breathe and envelop its despair.

How much more will it take for us to tell the truth, to teach the truth, to sing the truth, to change our “truth”?

We are a rigid-plated contraption, our engine’s dry of a useful knowledge, we are bred as a warring machine, the blades of our rhetoric based on lies, bullets in our history stamped “friendly fire”, arias of aggression harmonized to a drunken two-step. Our feet at birth tap out its refrain, our hands move in trigger-pull simulation, minds filled with jingoisms and fast food and television. And our trees are cut down to reveal a conjured bogeyman.

Teach us something, if you don’t we’ll not know that this age had a beautiful march for freedom, that our treachery was not the status quo, that the Iraqi people were not monsters. We’ll not know that the men and women wearing the uniform were conned by an amoral group of ruffians. Teach us raw fact, dismantle our hardened armor, oil our dry engines with veracity.

Let us breed, not war, but peace. Teach us that.

Copyright © 2006 mrp

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