Hey, Ho (Dave Carter)

Taking my mind off our private war for a while...

SONG: Hey, Ho by Dave Carter

BOOK: Who's Calling the Shots?: How to Respond Effectively to Children's Fascination with War Play, War Toys and Violent TV by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Diane E. Levin

POEM: Memorial Day by Steve Kowit

Because our sons adore their plastic missile launchers,

electronic space bazookas, neutron death-ray guns,

a decade down the pike it won't prove difficult

to trick them out in combat boots

& camouflage fatigues,

rouse them with a frenzy of parades, the heady

rhetoric of country, camaraderie & God,

the drum & bugle & the sudden

thunder of the cannon as they march

into Hell singing.

Which is the order of things.

Obedient to a fault, the people will do as they are told.

However dispirited by grief at the graves

of their fallen, the mother returns at last to her loom,

the father to his lathe,

& the inconsolable widow home to raise sons

ardent for the next imperial bloodbath;

Ilium. Thermopylae. Verdun. Pork Chop Hill.

QUOTE: "Perform, then, this one act of remembrance before this Day passes - Remember there is an army of defense and advance that never dies and never surrenders, but is increasingly recruited from the eternal sources of the American spirit and from the generations of American youth." ~ W.J. Cameron