©Moronic Ox Literary Journal - Escape Media Publishers / Open Books
Poetry
Moronic Ox Literary and Cultural Journal - Escape Media Publishers / Open Books Advertise your book, CD, or cause in the 'Ox'
Novel Excerpts, Short Stories, Poetry, Multimedia, Current Affairs, Book Reviews, Photo Essays, Visual Arts Submissions
War Cries
Unheard Voices, Unmarked Graves
First published at age 13, Kerry Arquette went on to write articles for dozens of national magazines and her work was featured in Chicken Soup for the Writer’s Soul. She is the author of two picture books including What Did You Do Today? (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), which won the Colorado Book Award, and was later selected for inclusion in the compilation, Sweet Dreams: Five Minute Bedtime Stories. Her picture book, Daddy Promises was released by Concordia Publishing.
Arquette was also Executive Editor of Memory Makers Books, an imprint of F+W Publishing specializing in scrapbooking and paper crafts. With business partner, Andrea Zocchi, she founded Cantata Books Inc., a publishing company responsible for dozens of popular art and crafting titles. Arquette is, herself, a prolific multi-media artist.
Kerry also holds a Masters degree in criminology and has worked with crime victims as part of the Denver Colorado Police Department. She is married to Denver attorney, Mark Senn, and has three children, Erin, Brittan, and Ryan. She is the daughter of well-known author, Lois Duncan.
In 1941, Hitler ratcheted up his persecution of Europe’s Jewish population by ordering “The final solution of the Jewish question.” That “solution” was the mass murder of millions of Jews. Many of the Jewish men, women and children that died over the following years were shot by German murder squads made up of soldiers and enthusiastic civilians. Mobile gassing vans were used to murder dozens of Jews at a time. Then larger gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities, were installed in prison camps. Jews, already corralled in sealed ghettos and internment camps, were shipped to these killing centers for extermination.
The war lasted six long years. The toll on human lives was astronomical - more than 60 million people died.
Too often, when confronted with devastation of this magnitude, we tend to view the dead as a statistic - a solid block of entangled nonentities. This approach allows us to maintain a comfortable feeling of emotional detachment so we feel less horrified, frightened and threatened. But to truly understand WWII, we must step into the painting and view the events through the eyes of those who participated. The individual brush strokes that make up the macabre picture are dipped in the blood of men, women and children no different from us.
In the end, the sound of war isn’t heard in the rattle of machine gun fire or the bellowing of bombs. It is in the voices of those who lived and died and the stories they have to share.
Can Books Get Us Trough These Hard Times?
by Kerry Arquette
Trump’s comments throughout his campaign dehumanized Muslims, undocumented immigrants, women, members of the LGBT community, African Americans, war veterans, scientists, doctors, Iowans, the disabled, and many others. With the precision of a surgeon, he divided the American “us” into a new order of American “us” and “them.” Or perhaps he merely pulled off the bandages to expose a lesion that has been festering, and rotting for decades and beyond. Whether Trump’s comments were intended simply as a strategy to divide the populous in order to
conquer his opponent is open to speculation. Whatever his reasoning, Trump has been voted President and, some might advise, that it is in our best interests as a nation to put the ugliness behind us and to support the new administration. That will be very difficult to do.
