It's an experience, growing up and watching news footage and things from the world wars in school on Remembrance Day. I used to cry uncontrollably watching all those boys drown in the mud, be blown up by shells. I can't help feeling how scared they must have been, terrified, really. How do we do this to ourselves? And we think that our wars are particularly bloody. But we've always been this way, since day one. Humans have always been this bloody.

The Romans, the Turks, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English; almost every civilization has a period where they roamed across nations scything people down in great bloody swaths.

And I sit in my home on Remembrance Day just frickin' lucky that right now, no one is presently coming for me. Maybe they're planning it, maybe the US is inciting it, but there's no one flying overhead ready to drop their payload on me. No one is marching up my streets looking for people who might be decended from Germans who might have been jewish.

I am one of those people. My mother's mother is German, born and mostly raised. She was a Zimmerman before she married, and somewhere back in the line, they were Jewish. I suppose since the traditions pass through the mother, we didn't inherit them. Somewhere waay back in the line it veered off into someone else's family. And maybe they were all killed. My grandmother was about 20-25, and she lived here in Canada during the war.

She was lucky.

And the things wars are fought over. So stupid, when you boil it down. Hitler had some idea of how he wanted to world to be. ONE guy, and a couple of his cronies, and that one guy and all his cronies had enough influence to sway thousands, millions of people. And once you have that kind of sway, you then have the power to sway it across nations. So they took that power and they mowed down whomever they pleased. Which forced everyone else who didn't want to be mowed down to fight back. So all the fighting and death was the result of one fellow and his cronies who wanted to turn the world into a place they liked. It's pathetic and sad.

How many wars are over things like this? One man who thinks that Rome should hold dominion over everything they can under the pretext of peace.

One clan of cavemen has a leader who thinks they should have ALL the caves on the north ridge. So the kill everyone else, assimilate the leftovers and take over.

It's nothing new. It's all about ego.

Anyway, I still cry when I think about the boys. And all the people who died on both sides. And how, fundamentally, what they were all forced to fight about was shamefully stupid. It makes me so angry.