The Cruel War
Blog 3590 – 09.05.2925
The Cruel War
One of my wife and my favorite movies is What Dreams May Come. My wife still believes in a hell after this life, I do not. Fact is I think we can make this life a hell by feeding silly nightmares to our children and ourselves of an angry and vengeful God who punishes his children and tortures them throughout all eternity for breaking rules that He/She supposedly wrote, but were clearly written by men to control others. Did you ever notice that the rules do not really apply to the rich and the powerful?
But, I digress. I was talking about dreams coming true. In the movie What Dreams May Come after losing her two teenaged children in a tragic automobile accident, which drives her temporarily insane and gets her committed to a behavioral institute, Annie somehow bounces back from that, but then after losing her beloved husband in another tragic automobile accident she is overwhelmed and takes her own life. “Suicides go to hell” is another of those silly and stupid man-made rules.
When Chris, the husband, who is in his own personal heaven that he has modeled after a favorite painting that his wife created of their shared dream, first hears that his wife has died he is thrilled that he will soon be seeing her. But his heavenly guide informs him that she will not be coming to heaven for she has committed suicide and that suicides end up in hell.
Chris played by Robin Williams, who ironically later took his own life, is incensed and determined to go to hell and rescue his wife. My Linda Lee, has had terrible bouts of depression over the last three and a half years and battles with voices that only she can hear. The thought that she may live in this state of torment for six to ten years is hell enough without the looming eternal and burning hell that we were taught to believe in as children. I do not believe that my loving and infinite source is responsible for her private hell anymore than I believe a loving God could have ever created such a place. I believe that thoughts become things and that those thoughts that we choose to listen to and to invest our emotions in become the dreams that come true in our lives.
When Linda and I first saw the movie What Dreams May Come she asked me, “If I was in Hell would you come and get me?” And I said, “Yes, of course I would!” Civil War Yankee General Sherman is often quoted as saying, “War is hell.” Being responsible for burning a miles wide swath across Georgia from Atlanta to the east coast he would know.
Peter, Paul, and Mary protesting the war in Vietnam sang the hauntingly beautiful song The Cruel War about a woman during the Civil War who so love her Johnny that she begged him to let her dress up like a man so that she could go with him to war. He keeps saying, “No, my Love, No!” but finally in the end of the song says, “Yes, my Love, Yes.”
My Linda Lee knows that one of the most hellish experiences in my life happened in nineteen seventy, the year that I spent in Vietnam from January to December. I had married my sweetheart on January second, six days before I had to report to Oakland Army Depot for processing to South Vietnam. I was nineteen. She was seventeen so we changed her birth year on a life insurance policy in her name to make her appear eighteen so that we could marry. Four months before I got to come home from Vietnam her letters stopped coming. My mother made her meet me at the airport when I got home. She had found another. I begged her for forty three days to come with me to my finally duty station at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She said, “No!” My heart and confidence were shattered. It was by far the most painful and hellish time in my life.
My Linda Lee has told me more than once over the years that she wishes that she could have been in my life back then, that she would have waited faithfully for me, and been there waiting for me when I got home, and followed me to Fort Bragg.
I am here for her. “Yes, my Love, yes!”
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
The Cruel War (Peter, Paul & Mary)
theencouragingword 