United AUS Protests

New location addressing the Governor General 02/05/2022

https://fb.watch/cKVfHOghd7/

784 viewsKamo, 00:53

Wars aren’t often begun for good reasons. Certainly, the men of power who make waging wars necessary, even if only to end them, aren’t often good men, and their reasons are seldom good.

But ANZAC Day isn’t about men of power, and it isn’t about their reasons. It isn’t about rationalising just wars or condemning unjust wars. It isn’t about celebrating victories and it isn’t about commemorating defeats.

It’s just about ordinary human beings.

It’s about the young men of an even younger Commonwealth, going out into the unknown, each for their own different reasons—personal reasons—because each of them, like each of us, had a Will and a Destiny of his own.

And it’s about the sons of those men. And their sons. And theirs. In numberless conflicts across the bloodiest century that ever was. It’s about their scars. Their lessons. Their personal miracles. It’s about their pain. And their growth. And their overcoming.

It’s also about their sacrifice.

We talk a lot about the sacrifices that the ANZACs made for us. The blood they shed, their own blood, on behalf of generations current and generations yet to come. But not everyone that struggles and bleeds and triumphs and dies, is fighting on someone else’s behalf.

Like I said: every man, and every woman, and even every child that struggles in this world, has his OWN will, has her OWN destiny. We each have our dreams, our unrealised potentials, our paths and purposes not yet understood. So when we come together, and struggle together toward a common purpose, we still come for our own reasons.

For the first ANZACs, yes, there was Patriotism. Love of country, as love of family. There was curiosity, too, and youthful restlessness, and appetite for adventure, and hunger for self definition. But there was often shame as well. Reluctance. Reasonable, rational fear, of injury and of death, that was too often overcome, not by their own courage, but by the pressures of a nation that expected particular things of them… and by the manipulations of those men of power, whose reasons were seldom good.

Still. I didn’t come here today to tell you not to wage a war because the honey tongued have lied to you about its causes. You have all learned the hard lessons about shame and deception. You have stood in fields and marched in streets, and have been confronted on footpaths and in offices by men and women, ultimately as good and as flawed and as tragically human as you and me, whose purpose in that moment was to try and make you forsake your own purpose, and forget it.

I’m only here to remind you all of what the first ANZAC has in common with the last, and what every ANZAC has in common with you and me. To remind you that we have all known fear and shame and courage. And that we each possess our own Will and our own Destiny. And we each might huddle in our trenches, and we each might hurl ourselves out into No Man’s Land.

And not for anybody’s reasons but our own.

Because the ANZAC story isn’t just the story of our armed forces, and it isn’t even just the story of Australians and New Zealanders. The ANZAC story is the human story. It’s our story. It’s my story, and it’s yours.

Lest we forget.

811 viewsKamo, 02:40