Are You Aware? We Are All Enlisted

battlefronts - we are all enlisted - Mormon Women for Ethical Government

This is part I in our “battlefronts” Awareness Wednesday series. Read the other posts in the series here.

I have been thinking about the words “We are all enlisted till the conflict is o’er.” As a pacifist, I am generally not a big fan of battle-themed songs, despite their stirring and jaunty tunes. But this one feels particularly relevant to the lives we are leading today, and as I have thought about the message, I can appreciate the value of metaphors that allow us to identify and “fight” the battles in our lives.

If you are like me, you have been worried about a lot of people, and situations beyond our control. Thinking too much about the future is the thing most likely to trigger my anxiety at the moment. But I also understand that I have it pretty good. There are others for whom this battle is literally one of life and death. There are people with more intimidating and numerous foes to battle. This month we want to take a look at some of the battles that are being fought.

We know some of you are fighting those battles.

We know there are battles to be fought at home: battles with your teenagers and older parents about the importance of social distancing and minimizing contact with the outside world; battles with technology or the lack thereof; battles with children over homeschool and the way they are treating their siblings and other family members; battles with feeding and nurturing growing minds and bodies, and sustaining everyone’s health; battles with disabilities and health issues that are difficult under the best of circumstances and now compounded by all the new problems; battles with debilitating anxiety and depression (and really the last thing you needed was a pandemic); battles with added situational stress for people whose temporary “homes” are prisons and detention centers; battles to protect yourself and your children from domestic abuse when it’s harder than ever to escape to safety.

We know there are battles being fought on the streets: battles to keep essential programs running, because they don’t run themselves; battles to find any work, to bring in whatever meager income you can for the time being; battles to keep businesses afloat in these turbulent times; battles to keep people fed and toilet-papered at a time when they might even fight each other over such commodities; battles to access basic necessities on small incomes and government assistance; battles to keep the peace when the world is on the edge; full battalions of delivery persons allowing us to stay at home; battles to find safe shelter, because the streets are your home.

We know there are battles being fought on the front lines — frontlines that our generations have never experienced on this scale: battles with lack of funding and preparedness by governments and organizations; battles with scarcity; battles with bureaucracy and inefficiency, battles with hoarding and panic; battles with ignorance and willful disregard; battles with worry, inundation, and exhaustion; battles with isolation and seeking to comfort the comfortless; battles with lack of personnel or needed skills; battles with playing the role that only God should play — deciding who will live and who will die; and all this because of a war with an insidious, omnipresent, unseen enemy.

We see your stories. We hear your voices. We strive to empathize with your pain. You are in our thoughts. You are in our prayers. We are each fighting a battle, but we also want to assist in battles beyond our own.

Perhaps in the song’s phrase “Glad to join the army,” the first word should be changed from “glad” to “willing.” But in an effort to sustain ourselves and one another, we may find ourselves humming, “Glad to join the army, we will sing as we go; We shall gain the vict’ry by and by.”