July 13, 2006

*Sigh*

I feel it creeping up behind me. The fear sets in as my mind imagines a thousand spiders, large and small fighting their way over my shoelaces. They squirm over and under my pants. I attempt to shake and scream, but I’m paralyzed like some loser stuck in a box on Fear Factor. There is no way out. Tiny legs prickle my skin, some slow others fast. I can’t stop the sensation as it rises higher. Dread and paranoia consume me. I know they aren’t going to stop climbing. They’re in a never-ending battle to drive me to the brink of madness. My muscles tighten; I clench my jaw and close my eyes. Maybe it’s all a dream…a nightmare stripped from my mind and forced into reality. But the truth is, there are no spiders. It is the only way I can describe the feelings I get thinking about what’s going on in the world today. The cynic in me thinks the worst, WWIII is coming, how could it not? Very few generations have been safe from a large-scale war, why should we be any different. I don’t believe we are, we’re on the cusp of something major and I fear what and when. We haven’t changed. We haven’t learned from the past. People still want power, money, and control. Nothing is ever enough—people must have more. People will continue to want more until there is nothing left to have.

Perhaps I watch too much news. I know I've said it many times before. Though I don’t remember so many things happening at the same time around the world like this before…maybe I was just too young then. We have North Korea playing bad ass and Venezuela who wants to be picked next for the team. Many Mid-East countries/groups want to do harm to Israel—but don’t fuck with the Jews because they’ve had enough of this shit over the last thousands years and they can fight back now, and they are. Iraq of course will take another ten years; Afghanistan is maybe another five if we’re lucky. But don’t forget about Iran, Somalia, or the Congo’s internal power struggles. How about India and Pakistan who have been fighting over Kashmir for years and have no intentions of giving up. Bombings, religious killings, sectarian violence, kidnappings, executions, it never seems to end. Men, women, and children dying by the hundreds of thousands, it’s sickening to think we’re still doing this to our own brothers and sisters in the 21st century.

What about us though? Aren’t we supposed to be the guardians of the free world? Well, our forces are stretched so thin right now that if anything happens where we have/need to get involved, we’re fucked. We’ll be forced to draft. This country can’t afford to send any John or Jane Doe out to war. We need to be selective; we’ve seen what happens when we’re not.

What will happen at G8 when country leaders are gathered together talking about the state of the world? I shudder at the thought. Will they get anything done? Will someone take advantage of the situation and launch an attack? Will any of it ever matter?

I know I’m not the most well informed person out there and I never claim to be, but in the last few years I made a choice to know what’s going on, though I’m still not sure why. I always claim to live in my head, to prefer fiction over reality. While most times that’s still true, I can never truly cast aside current events in the world, because, after all, I am connected.

We’re all connected.

We are all flesh and blood. We are all the same with minor differences. We are all born, we breathe, if we’re lucky we grow old and we die. Many of us are given back to Mother Earth through scattered ashes or boxed up six feet under. Some of us are lost and never found. But you cannot escape from the truth for too long. You can try and hide from it, ignore it, or even deny it, but eventually you will open your eyes and the truth will be there staring back at you with blood on its hands. Isn’t it time to wash the blood off and heal the wounds?

I never understood the movie Red Dawn when I was a kid. It wasn’t until years later that I watched it again and thought “Oh…I get it now!” What would this country be like if another war tore through our land? The last time we actually went to war on our own soil was in the late 1800’s. That’s a long time to be free of war. People in other countries haven’t had a week without war their entire lives…

Would we be strong and stand up and fight? Would I? With the technology and power the world possesses, is it possible to even survive? “Fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here.” That’s a Bushism. It makes sense, I guess, but there will come a time when ‘they’ will get tired of ‘us’ destroying their land and hit us again. Are we really ready? Do we want to be ready to go to war again? I sure as hell don’t. War is fine for history and the movies; we shouldn’t be fighting anymore!

If I prayed, I would pray for the world. I would pray for the safety of the children. I would pray for wisdom for the leaders of this planet. I would pray for compassion and hope. Well, I don’t pray. Simply because I feel that if there were this mystical creature everyone calls God, he/she/it would be pretty pissed off at us for fighting over he/she/it, land, power, and whatever else, for no good reason and wouldn’t answer my prayer anyway. If there were a God he/she/it would probably have wiped us all out with a natural disaster and started all over again, because I wouldn’t want to be considered the father/creator/maker of this human race. I don’t think I’m any more enlightened than anyone else, and yes, the world is full of wonderful, upstanding people, but from what I see, read and hear is enough to make me weep for our future. I just hope we have one.

3 comments:

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Anonymous said...

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