Bring him peace bring him joy..he is only a boy.

God on high, hear my prayer.
In my need you have always been there.
He is young, he’s afraid.
Let him rest, heaven bless.
Bring him home, bring him home.
Bring him home.
He’s like the son i might have known
if God had granted me a son.
Summer’s die one by one
HOw soon they fly on and on
and I am old and will be gone
Bring him peace
Bring him joy
He is young
He is only a boy.
You can take, you can give.
Let him be, let him live.
If I die let me die.
let him live, bring him home.
bring him home.
bring him home……
(Bring Him Home from Les Miserables, currently being sung by Mandy Patinkin.)

Ok. So. I’m trying to write a paper. Not a big deal, right? It’s due tomorrow, for a class that I prolly won’t attend (Dr F’s Social Psych) and she said I could email it to her. Fine.

Except. The paper? We’re s’posed to use the factors that operated in Milgram’s experiment of obedience to authority, the Standford Prison experiment, and groupthink to explain what happened….

in the My Lai massacre.

Ok. So. I hate history. I always have. I have a bad memory, and trying to force myself to remember things that happend 30 and 50 and 200 years ago? Yeah. Not so much. Unless I find it REALLY interesting, and even then, most of the facts don’t stick, just the vague circumstances.

My Lai, tho? Yeah. I remember that. Well, I mean, I wasn’t alive at the time. But. We had a million books in our house growing up. My brother was a huge fan of politics. As well as a history/war buff. So. Yeah. Books, magazines.

Pictures.

Of little babies? Just…wearing shirts. And their little dimplebutts and sausage legs. Laying on top of their mothers’ stomachs. Like they’re napping. Crushed, under bodies that were tryingtryingtryingdyingtrying to protect them.

And I probably only remember these images because when I saw them in the magazine or book (i think it was nat’l geographic prolly?), I got sick and threw up in the sink in the blue bathroom that my sister and I shared.

And I didn’t even remember or think of it til I was trying to write this paper just now. And. Thinking about therapy. And the nat’l geographics/ encyclopaedias/ reference books were all in the basement. With the ugly orangeyellowbrown plaid shag carpet. Not as shag as the orange yellow red carpet that was in my room before they ripped it up, or as shag as the red white and blue carpet that was in my brother’s room (that they never ripped up, not while we lived there. Not even the wall that was carpeted….) But still sort of shaggy.

I’m…having trouble concentrating.

and keeping down the gross easymac that i had for dinner. (yeah. I CANNOT EVEN COOK EASY MAC. I try. But. Nope. Everytime, it’s messed up. This time it was, again, crunchy. It wasn’t the noodles. So. I dunno. Anyways. Anyways. anyfuckingways.

I can’t comprehend. Beating a child, yes. I can comprehend that. I don’t like it or condone it. But I can understand it. Killing a man in cold blood. Randomly shooting a woman from a bell tower. Ok. Not as understandable. But. Comprehendable. Killing an entire village…of children. And women. And old men? No. NO. I would’ve put the gun to my head first. And. People say that they wouldn’t do it either, kill all those innocent people, and research goes and says “Yeah, you would, under those circumstances….” But. No. My life. The life of my country. The lives of my best friends. None of them are any more…none of them have any more validation….none of them are any more “special” than those children, those women. NOT saying that my friends shoulda been shot instead of them. No. NO ONE should’ve been shot. jesus christ. Even things like david koresh and jonesboro, I can understand! “I worship you, you say i should kill myself, you say that 4 thousand of us should eat glass until our intestines fall out of our noses, ok…” I can GET that. But. To stand. In front of a ditch of innocent people. And shoot them in the head? Shoot children in the back of the head as they pray? Babies? INFANTS? This. This is enough to…to whatever. This is enough to send me ip. It won’t. But. Well, I hope it won’t. But. It makes me nauseous to the point of being dizzy. To the point of wanting to hand in the paper that says nothing more than “I cannot, I will not, I refuse to explain what happened.”