Litnet

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A nightmare
Cracked boulevards,
Helpless screaming, smoke dissipating from corpses,
What can blinding tears do?
It is not your fancy words, it is not your complex verbiage,
It is animalistic brawls, it is a shark hoping to swallow small fish on a global scale,
It is your misguided desire for more, it is your primal urge to have power for power’s sake, it is your quest to spill blood and savour it.
War is a nightmare, a nightmare we never wake up from.
A brutal shift in reality, a broken trust.
And war is not Adolf Hitler, war is not George Bush, no, war is not Gowon, war is not Ojukwu, war is not the singular names we pinpoint when the dust of misery and death settles.
War is the millions of humans whom the mere act of living would be unbearably hard for, and the millions who shall cease to exist, the millions of people who already have, the millions of people whose deafening screams still fell silent, the millions of people who suffer gratuitous pain, not the word “millions”, not the figure, no, war is the actual extermination and the infliction of hardship on very real human beings who lived and who live, nameless in the dirty cobwebs of records, nameless in news reports, nameless in roundtables of horrified leaders squeezing hands to end that which they knew not to begin.