Universal Soldier
I am drowning in work. As I slog through one thing after another I find myself tuning out the world. In my haste I miss the most of the news and use music as white noise to help avoid distraction. This afternoon my focus was broken abruptly with an important thought about the tragic wars taking place around this world of ours.
These are the lyrics to Donovan's 1965 song Universal Soldier.
He is five foot two,
and he's six feet four,
he fights with missiles and with spears,
he is all of thirty-one,
and he's only seventeen,
he's been a soldier for a thousand years.
He's a Catholic, a Hindu,
an atheist, a Jain,
A Buddhist, and a Baptist and a Jew,
and he knows he shouldn't kill,
and he knows he always will,
kill for me, my friend, and me for you.
And he's fighting for Canada,
he's fighting for France,
he's fighting for the USA
and he's fighting for the Russians,
and he's fighting for Japan,
and he thinks we'll put an end to war this way.
And he's fighting for democracy,
he's fighting for the Reds,
he says it's for the peace of all,
he's the one who must decide,
who's to live and who's to die,
and he never sees the writing on the wall.
But without him, how would Hitler
have condemned him at Labau,
without him Caesar would have stood alone,
he's the one, who gives his body
as a weapon of the war,
and without him all this killing can't go on.
He's the universal soldier,
and he really is to blame,
his orders came from far away, no more,
they come from here and there,
and from you and me,
this is not the way we put the end to war.
That could easily be me in that tragic position. It is important not to forget the power of circumstance in shaping my life. I deeply empathize with the position of young men and women on the battlefield. I also wrestle with the real question of how responsible they and we are for their actions.
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Who is this guy?
you're absolutely right. in one sense all of us are responsible for the choices we make, but circumstances have a lot to do with expanding or narrowing the range from which we choose. lately i've been thinking about the ethics and disintegration involved when individual beings do individual actions as part of a gigantic machine driven by someone else from a safe distance, who makes decisions based on policy and abstract goals. it's troublesome....