My mother was very bright my mother’s
older sister was very bright my mother’s
brother died as a drunk, a mutual cousin asked
“With both our mothers so brilliant, how come
our Uncle Horace wasn’t?” I wrote back to her,
“Uncle Horace was almost certainly as bright
as his sisters but he was gassed in the first
world war, when he got home he was in such
pain from the gassing that the only thing that
helped was drink. He became nothing more than
a drunkard and our mutual cousin Paul had to
go out at night and peel him from whichever
lamppost he was clinging to. He never got the
chance to develop his talents.” In our next
worldwide conflict will “asphyxiating,
poisonous or other gases, and/or
bacteriological methods of warfare”
be used even though these are illegal,
according to the Geneva Protocol?
2024 Jacqueline Jackson
This article appears in No teen left behind.
