I'm beginning to wonder if we've got it all wrong with war memorials. As you are no doubt aware war memorials commemorate those people who died for their country during various mainly unnecessary conflicts. "They Shall Not Be Forgotten," the memorials invariably lie.
But the mendacity is not what bothers me, it is the fact that war memorials have no room for naming the people who fought in these wars and didn't die. Surely we owe at least an equal debt of gratitude to them. They successfully fought a war and survived and yet no-one bothers to list their names anywhere and apparently we're all quite happy to see their names forgotten, without even any pretence that they won't be. "Forget them", we are apparently saying, "They only fought in a war and didn't have the foresight to even get killed, so no-one cares what they did."
But surely the people who lived were the ones who did their job properly. The point of being a soldier (or sailor or airman or whatever) is to NOT get killed: you are meant to kill other people (preferrably on a different side to you, unless you are American, when it pretty much doesn't matter, they all count-and let's face it it makes sense because realistically everyone is America's enemy really). So all the people who went to war and returned are the ones who did their job properly. The ones who went to war and then got killed got the whole thing completely wrong and yet it's them we are meant to pretend to remember. Even though they were really rubbish at their jobs.
It's like Macdonald's rewarding the worst employee every month instead of the best. What kind of message would that send out to the workforce? Every Macdonald's employee would be going out of their way to be inefficient, rude and slow and serve up horrible cold and gelatinous fries. Luckily (thank Heavens) Macdonald's don't have that stupid system, so all their employees do their best to be courteous and efficient in the hope that their picture might grace the walls of that hallowed establishment.
For all we know quite a lot of people might have deliberately got killed in wars, knowing that this was going to be the only way their achievements would be remembered. This has got to be a bad thing.
So I propose that all war memorials to the dead are knocked down and replaced with war memorials to the survivors (the people who did their job PROPERLY), not to all the idiots who couldn't even parachute into a barrage of gunfire and manage to carry on living. After all it was not dead men who liberated Paris or shot Zulus (in that equal tussle between guns and spears) or captured Saddam Husseins. The people who were dead were no use at all (I would almost go as far to call them lazy, but certainly unhelpful) and should be ignored and forgotten (once again, something America has clearly realised in its latest conflict and sensibly put into practice). And when they're being thrown into their graves, their shouldn't be ceremony or flags or 21 gun salutes. No, a man should just sarcastically shout, "Oh thanks a lot," and then add "For nothing" in case anyone hasn't picked up on the sarcasm. And then punch their grieving widows in the face for good measure. And let that be an end to the whole embarrassing episode.
If you agree with me on this please visit
http://www.thecurrentwarmemorialsituationistotallywrongandIadvoacatethe destructionofallsuchtravesties.co.uk (it would have been .com, but someone else beat me to it) and sign the on-line petition that is there. Current signatories=1.
Together we can stop this madness.
