Another weekend shift. My favourite. More patients, less staff. Today, I iced the cake, by oversleeping.
However, I did later have the honour to meet (and treat) a veteran of The Great War; at least, that's what she told me, but as she wasn't 106 years old, I'm thinking she meant WW2. Either way, it's sobering to meet people like that. For all the talk of a war on terror, and the occasional fear of some nutter blowing up a tube, I don't think my generation has any concept of what it must have been like in either world war.
To have a real fear that regime change might be forced upon you, rather than something your government implements on your behalf on some other poor bastards, hundreds of miles away. Part of me thinks this is responsible for general apathy / anti-war feeling. I myself struggle to come to terms with how I feel about the various armed incursions we are prosecuting right now. It seems to me that where we are interfering, the incumbents (e.g Saddam, The Taliban) were bad. At least according to our value system. And I guess that's always going to be true for a certain value of "bad" anyway.
But I'm not sure what we're doing is making anything better. I just don't think you can take one culture and completely subsume it with another... not without wiping out entire races / tribes / peoples. Which is called genocide. And that's bad. Isn't it? And because most people can't see what the Armed Forces are fighting for either, the deaths all start to seem meaningless. Which I don't think can be right. Fuck it, I don't know... the whole thing confuses me. But I'm worried that people will forget the significance of today. Whether war is right or wrong is not the soldier's fault, but the government that commands them. Either way, we should never forget those who went before us.
On a lighter note, we all scanned our bladders at work today. I lost.
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