Nothing Has Changed

I suck at keeping a diary.

I always have. Probably always will. I'm one of those people, who will be so excited over writing in a diary when they first get it, spend hours putting their life into context in the first entry and write religiously for a week or so then forget it exists. I have one diary that I wrote in for a month or so, forgot it for two years until I found it in a box and wrote another entry dated two days to the day of the previous entry AND THEN I forgot it again but found it once more, again two years to the day since the previous entry, and wrote another entry. I've a dozen diaries in my room, none of which have ever gotten past halfway.

Why am I mentioning this? Well the other day I had a thought about something that was in one of those diaries- the one I mentioned with the entries spaced two years apart. The very first entry was about 2001-2002, just before the invasion of Iraq. In it, my- oh let me think- say eight year old self worries about what will happen if Australia joined the USA in a war. The entries written by eight year old me never make it to the invasion, I forgot the diary existed before it.

But in the next entry, ten year old me says that "nothing has changed" when commenting on the eight year old's fears. That even though my country was at war there was nothing to fear because really it didn't effect me.

The absolute privilege in just suddenly occurred to me while I was waiting for my mother to pick me up from Uni.

My eight year old self only had (limited) knowledge of the World Wars as an idea of a war and was well aware of their effect on the population via the (fictional) diaries of children who lived through them. She was worried about that happening to her. Ten year old me had near about the same kind of knowledge, though possibly a bit understanding of exactly what everything meant. She didn't grasp the fact that just because her world hadn't changed, it didn't mean that nothing had changed. She just wasn't aware of it.

I am. I'm fully aware that the war in Iraq has killed thousands of people, so many of them innocent and just like my eight old self. I'm very aware that the media coverage of the war was such that a ten year old who already had limited interest in the world's events never had a hope in hell of understanding that just because she wasn't being bombed daily it didn't mean that others were as lucky. I'm acutely aware that a fifty year old in the same time as ten year old me would have been nearly as unlikely to know exactly how the war in Iraq was affecting the people.

I'm so every aware that everything changes daily and that the phrase "nothing has changed" was a mistake...

I'm not sure what this is. A reflection on the sheer luck I had to be born when and where I was. Or on my inability to keep a diary and some of the interesting thoughts I had. I don't know.