On All Fronts

This memoir, On All Fronts, by Clarissa Ward, is a very interesting perspective of war from the point of view of a journalist. Ward, a news producer, was able to travel around to different countries and interview all sorts of people involved in an ongoing war. This memoir would not seem like it has much relevance to today's society, and my life specifically, but something very interesting is that when you read into something close enough, you can find some comparisons to everything. One very interesting thing that I found in this memoir came on page 220. Ward says, "I remember one Syrian woman telling me that if you can hear the jets, you're OK. If you're about to get killed you don't hear anything." Ward goes on to say that she doesn't know if there is any truth to this but in that moment, it didn't provide much comfort either. I found this to be very interesting for two reasons, if it was true, it goes to show how much of a normality this war was for society. They already had this much knowledge and they didn't think anything of it. If it wasn't true, then it shows the morale of society during this time, the jets were something they just shook off and just thought of it as normal at this point. For this memoir, I had a lot of trouble connecting it with my own life. I just feel as if society is very different today, at least from where I have seen it. The more I looked into it, the more I could loosely connect a few things from our reality today, versus Ward during the time of this memoir. One thing that I was able to connect was part of what I had mentioned earlier in this writing. On page 221, Ward writes that, "Now, with the jets overhead, he smiled at me across from the room and sort of shrugged, as if to say 'Allahu a'lam'-- God knows." I chose to use this quote because it shows that they thought of it as a new normal and were not phased by it. I connected this with the "new normal" that much of the world has gone through with the Coronavirus pandemic. Many different people chose to make jokes of the virus and shrug it off, much like the person in Ward's memoir. Whether it was on social media or in real life, there were people everywhere who would make jokes of the virus to try and bring a positive perspective, to make people laugh. This memoir is very important when thinking about human perspectives because it shows that there are many different perspectives, not just of war, but on life as a whole. Ward goes around from country to country, interviewing people from everywhere, seeing all different perspectives on the ongoing war. I feel as a society, that we should come together and try to see both sides of the story. I believe it would unify us and also make both sides find a middle ground and be able to make compromises.