Lest we forget

Well it's one way to get you to remember - get you out of bed before 5am on a freezing cold day like today. Speaking of freezing does it get colder than THIS? By god, I think I'll be leaving Wellington before July rolls in if that is the case. In saying that I do believe there is something particularly freakish going on with the rainbow, then the hail and lightning at 3am Saturday morning (I don't suppose anyone in the Wellington region would have slept through that hammering, I woke up, snuggled deeper under my duvet and felt delicious that only Sunday was approaching), and then the thunderstorms last night! I do love a good thunderstorm, but you can stick the cold that goes with it.

The walk down from Kelburn through Uni was unbelievably creepy at 5 in the morning with gusty winds and noone on the road. I was wrapped up like a marshmallow and with laurie's earmuffs on (I want some, and mittens and a new hat cause I've lost mum's one that I've had my whole Wellington life). Alannah was the only brave soul to come out as well, and I was glad for her company by the time i got to Mena's.

It was my first dawn service since first year at Uni (1999). I decided if Grandad survived four years as a POW in Crete I could haul my lazy ass out of bed to stand in the cold for 3/4s of an hour. The service itself was fleeting and appropriately solemn with the largest helping of religion I've had in my diet for awhile. I quite enjoyed that. Except for the hymns, I can't abide hymns. The indigestion came later when the insufferable Don Brash gave an address. "Justice", "freedom", "tyranny", "oppression" were bandied about and I grimaced to hear them. It's not that I don't appreciate the concepts and the sacrifices that were made including over 18,000 kiwi lives in WWI and more than 11,000 in the Second (I'm sure I heard that right, I wonder why the losses were greater in the first). God I do appreciate it, as far as the sheltered, privileged existence I have lived thus far can allow. I just worry that the words themselves justice, freedom, democracy, although mighty pretty sprinkled throughout political oratory, lend themselves so easily to abuse as a veil for all sorts of horrible alterior motives. Perhaps I'm getting cynical in my old age but those words aren't pure for me anymore. They have been commandeered by faces and voices I don't trust, and the ideals seem less precious when such a massive proportion of humankind is missing out on them. Perhaps that should make them more precious. And perhaps Brash is right when he said by allowing our defense forces to atrophy we risk losing international cred and alliances and jeopardize those same (our) ideals which are currently assailed not only by more traditional threats but also from dum dum dum - the international terrorist. I found that particularly interesting, that there is a class of international terrorists, like they have all graduated from the same high school. I am not trying to justify those acts currently classifed as terrorism in a popular sense any more than I would the violence condoned by some as a war on terrorism, I just wonder about the fear and loss of hope and desperation that must invoke such acts. And I wonder if the fear of losing what we already have isn't exactly what we have to fear the most in terms of escalating international political instability.

I like men in uniform, and I liked the men in uniform standing there with their kids, and I liked how the Army and Naval Officers directly in front of me snapped to attention when the The Last Post played. I liked the eerie dark silence broken only by the solitary drum that marched the Parade to the Cenotaph. I liked the melancholy strains of a lone piper that kicked off the service. I didn't like Brash and I didn't like the volleys from the firing party, I have sensitive nerves, and both aforesaid grated. But I did like that it didn't start to rain until I was almost home and by 7:30am I was curled up in bed again with a Milo, some toasted vogels with peanut butter and jam, a book and a (probably naive and cowardly) hope that if the shit ever hits the fan to the point New Zealand is involved, we will all get smoked by some nuc and never know what hit us rather than go through the heartbreak of watching a whole generation snuffed out by man's innate talent for self-destruction.
When are women going to start running the world?