This is just something that’s been in my head since I bought the newest Linkin Park album. The song is “Hands Held High” from Minutes to Midnight. This is their best CD yet I think, so you definitely need to check it out. It’s different from their old stuff, but it’s still fucking awesome. Luckily, this hasn’t happened to me, but my deepest sympathies go to anyone who has.

Some of the lyrics have been changed a bit because there’re a lot of words and I didn’t need some of the lines for the story.

Turn my mic up louder

I got something to say

She hadn’t said anything in three weeks. Complete silence for three entire weeks. Twenty-one days, four hours, and thirty-five minutes to be exact. There was nothing left to say now.

I jump in my mind and summon the rhyme I’m dumping

Healing the bind I promise to let the sun in

Sick of the dark ways we march to the drum and

Jump when they tell us they wanna see jumping, fuck that

It would be a relief to hide in her mind, maybe in one of the stories she wrote where the good guy always came out on top, where darkness didn’t really last forever. He wouldn’t have wanted her to hide. He would have wanted her to smile, to be happy, to do what he’d always wanted, move past the pain of her history into the happiness he believed was promised in her future.

Risk something, take back what’s yours

Say something they might attack you for

People had attacked her for being against the war, for being so disillusioned with the government and so staunch in her belief that violence was never the way. They had never wanted to hear what she had to say, simply guessing that she was a mindless drone who was parroting off whatever anyone else said. She wasn’t mindless, she wasn’t like the rest of them, she didn’t believe their lies.

Like this war is just different brand of war

Like it doesn’t cater to rich and abandon poor

Like they understand you in the back of the jet

When you can’t put gas in your tank

She could remember being able to talk for hours with people about how wrong the war was, about the real reasons America was still in Iraq. How much is oil really worth? she had asked then, but it was pretty obvious that it was worth anything. To people like her family, nothing was more important than the people you loved. They didn’t have money for much, but they had each other. Love was what was most important, not money, but that wasn’t the way the rest of the world worked. The President had made that pretty clear.

Have some respect for a leader so nervous in an obvious way

Stuttering and mumbling for nightly news to replay

And the rest of the world at the end of the day

In their living rooms laughing like

What did he say?

There was a time she had laughed along with the rest of the world, found something humorous about the way George Bush looked on TV. Hell, there was a time when she could laugh at just about anything. Only three weeks ago, she’d been laughing from the time she woke up, but that was before.

In my living room watching, I am not laughing

Cause when it gets tense I know what might happen

The world is cold, old men take action

She’d been glued to the TV for the last three months, not letting anything get between her and the little ox that could tell her what was happening, tell her if she should be worried or not.

Ten years old, it’s something to see

Another kid my age dragged under a Jeep

Taken and bound, found later under a tree

I wonder if he thought the next one could be me

This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Stuff like this only happened to other people, it didn’t happen to her. Other people lost their brothers, other faceless, nameless people a million miles away, people whose lives would never touch hers. God if only that was true.

It’s ironic, at times like this you pray

But a bomb blew the mosque up yesterday

There’s bombs in the busses, bikes, roads

Inside your market, your shops, your clothes

Her brother had believed in God, he believed that good people went to Heaven and that his soul was safe. For the first time, she wished that she believed in something, that she had something to put faith in besides herself. Not God probably, right now she hated Him more than anyone else in the world.

My dad, he’s got a lot of fear I know

But enough pride inside not to let that show

My brother had a book he would hold with pride

A little red cover with a broken spine

On the back he hand wrote a quote inside

“When the rich wage war, it’s the poor that die.”

He had always carried a little book with him, a pocket collection of great papers like the Constitution, the Napoleonic Code, and the Ninety-Five Thesis that was a gift from their grandfather. She could remember my brother getting that when he turned ten. In the next eleven years, she’d never seen him without it.

And meanwhile, the leader just talks away

Stuttering and mumbling for nightly news to replay

The rest of the world watching at the end of the day

Both scared and angry like

What did he say?

The government had said the war was working, that headway was being made, that everything was going great. What did those stupid politicians know? In her house, things weren’t great at all, things would never be okay again. He was gone, the brother who had teased her, who had fought with her, who had rescued her from monsters and boogiemen and all the other things that scared her when she was a kid. He couldn’t really be dead, he couldn’t really have left her. Tears sprang to her eyes and it hit her finally as she looked up at the gleaming casket. He was gone, disappeared, never coming home.

With hands held high into a sky so blue

The ocean opens up to swallow you

“Liz, you wanna say something?” her mother asked suddenly. Taking a deep breath, Liz stood up and walked up to the head of the grave where a priest was standing. Everything felt unreal and she wondered if it was possible that she might wake up and find that he was still with them.

Clearing her throat, she turned to look at the people who had showed up. She saw his friends and ex-girlfriends, the teachers and coaches that had loved him so much, the three younger siblings besides her that he had left, their father’s tear-stained face, and her mother’s dead eyes and something seemed to explode in her chest. No, she wasn’t going to thank them for coming, she wasn’t going to spew some shit about him dying for her country. She wouldn’t stand here and lie to them like everyone else did. For once, she’d make them listen.

With hands held high into the sky so blue

As the ocean opens up to swallow you

And for the first time in twenty-one days, four hours, and fifty-two minutes, she found her voice. “My brother was against war in any form,” she began. “He didn’t join the military to do his patriotic duty: he did it because there was no other choice if he wanted to go to college. All deaths during war are senseless, and his is no different. David Gregory Danberg lost his life because of a pointless and never ending war,” she saw peoples’ eyes widen in shock and anger, but she ploughed on. “He will never get married, he will never have children, he will never get the chance to grow old and sit on a back porch somewhere and watch the sunset. That was taken from him for no reason by someone he didn’t hate who I’m sure didn’t hate him.” She broke down again and tears rolled down her face. She turned away from the crowd and walked to the casket. She spread her arms across it and rested her head right over where her brother’s was.

With hands held high into the sky so blue

As the ocean opens up to swallow you

“How many more people have to die before they stop?” she asked, her voice sounding broken and her heart pleading with whatever god there was to help the world. “When does the cost become too high?”

With hands held high into the sky so blue

As the ocean opens up to swallow you

Please review. Flame if you want, I really don’t give a damn. My brother is a Marine, he loves his job and I’m proud of him, but I’ll be damned if I’ll agree with the fact the he signed on to die so that rich bastards can put more gas in their tanks and more bucks in their banks. He shouldn’t have to die for them and if he does I’ll make Cindy Sheehan looked like a dream come true.

The war in Iraq is wrong. Deal with that fact.

But review anyway and always support the troops because it’s not their fault they’re there.