Child soldiers are any children under the age of 18 who are recruited by a state or non-state armed group and used as fighters, cooks, suicide bombers, human shields, messengers, spies, or for sexual purposes.You wouldn’t let this happen to your kids– in fact, it’s the very opposite of the protection all our children everywhere deserve.
![redhand eve redhand eve](https://i.etsystatic.com/9121381/r/il/d82813/2060148675/il_794xN.2060148675_jwii.jpg)
If we imagine the fate of child soldiers as being that of our own children, we recoil in horror: the low life expectancy, lack of education or play opportunity, the effects of seeing siblings and friends killed, the fact that child soldiers have a high chance of being physically or sexually abused, as well as all the post traumatic shock effects we see in adult soldiers, are soul destroying, to say the least. All people are connected and TV images are not so removed from us as we think. Here at “The Forever Years”, we see the world as a “global family” and believe that this is an important way to think if we are to advocate for the rights of all children everywhere and encourage those who love and care for them. Some believe problems such as this are just “too big”, so why even bother thinking about them? Many prefer not to think about the plights of “other people’s children” in “other countries”, one of the worst of which is that of children made to fight adults’ wars. As parents in “peaceful” countries, we are busy with day to day life and the tasks involved in raising our kids. We work hard every day to enable them to attend school, participate in sports and other activities and to try to equip them with skills for their future lives, as so many parents do, all around the world. On the eve of that day, I think about my own children… each has their own, distinct personality, goals, hopes and aspirations. February 12th is “Red Hand Day”, an internationally recognised day for raising awareness of the plight of “Child soldiers” (anyone under the age of 18 who, for what ever reason, bears arms and fights in a conflict). The eldest turns eleven this year, the youngest is five. Love becomes anger’s great animator, as it should, as it must.I have four children. As Susie and I grow older, the anger at the indifference and casual cruelty of this world can still burn bright, but it does not define us, for the oxygen that fuels that anger is love – love for the world and love for the people in it. It turns out that this line did not prove to be true. It seems I lost a year, more or less, where we did six film scores in a row, in the little studio we use in Ovingdean, overlooking the churchyard where Arthur is buried. I had a long talk about this with Warren as we drove between cities on the recent tour. The ‘forgetting’ aspect of grieving is something that is only just starting to come to light because, well, it is hard to remember not remembering something.
![redhand eve redhand eve](http://www.identifyyourbreyer.com/images/9025b.jpg)
These days, though, we spend much of our time in London, in a tiny, secret, pink house, where we are mostly happy. We did, however, return once we realised that, regardless of where we lived, we just took our sadness with us. The words of the song go someway toward articulating why Susie and I moved from Brighton to L.A. I say this as someone who has no recollection of the song’s conception or intention, and who feels he barely had much to do with the writing of it at all. I rarely look to the past and so I am grateful you sent me back to this song because it holds some lovely little pulses of lyrical pleasure. The second verse is set on the flight to Los Angeles and begins with the line –īabies riding in the clouds, turning into cloudsĪs the plane – ‘ the tin can’ – tilts downward No, we cannot stay, like apples we will drop The lovers have been expelled from their ordinary Eden by the appearance of serpents that come in the form of a catastrophe, and – The song deals with Adam and Eve, a recurring husband and wife motive that seems to have been used in a few songs at that time. I have just listened again to ‘Heart That Kills You’ and can tell by the lyric that it was clearly written after Arthur’s death, and is probably a rejected or forgotten song fragment that found its way into the sessions Warren and I did leading up to the making of Ghosteen. Part of my own experience of grief has been a kind of forgetting – where significant portions of my life following Arthur’s death seem largely lost to me, or rather so misremembered that they have little relation to the truth. It is very difficult to recall the circumstances around many of the songs on Part 2 of the B Sides & Rarities album because most of them were written in the period immediately after my son died.