The Night Blog

Note: I’m a sucker for a challenge. This is Ash’s Five Word Friday challenge (to be found at: http://www.trawo.blogspot.com/) if anyone wants to join. I thought I’d try my hand at poetry…but most definitely not the happy or rhyming kind. Eerg. The words: light bulb, flower, baby, avidly, and picturesque. Hope I got it right.

——–

So softly;

It starts

Darkness—

A greed of the most virile sort

Stretching to

Consume and to strangle

A light! A bulb of most magnificent—

Artificiality

The gloom (so dampening)

Begins a swift ascent

By a pond, a lake most murky,

There is yet another sign—

Soft petals feather out

In undulating curves of crimson

The darkness sighs at this

Rebellion; to crush and melt away the hope

A cry! Beneath that sallow, vacant light;

Under that watchful crimson eye

A child—

A child of life in which darkness may breed

But no; there is more;

A guardian—watchful, avid, strong

Looks down upon the newborn

With eyes lit up and lips to curl with wonder

Picturesque, is it not? A scene, a hope;

To light a shadowed way

Like all the legends since;

All the tales of greatness—heroes—to rise up from the mist.

If a stranger walked up to me right now and asked, “What do you know?” I honestly would have no idea how to respond.

Sometimes I wonder what truth is. A cop could say that truth is when a person does something; an attorney could say that truth is the evidence of their actions. A mathematician could prove an equation, and say that is real. Truth is something that can be proven. Like most things, however, I have a feeling it’s more than that.

Ever wondered if there’s a reason? More than once. More than a hundred times, in fact. So many that I’ve lost count, not that I would count such a thing anyway.

If there were a reason, what would it be?

Perhaps purpose isn’t a set thing. Like fates, like endings, it shifts and changes to fit. Not the natural events, like a hurricane or volcanic eruption, or even the natural process of a country becoming impoverished or protest rallies forming. No; I mean the fates where the action of a single person change everything.

I think of destiny as a map. Ever heard the quote, “All roads lead to Rome”? Think of this in the opposite way. All roads lead away from Rome, because Rome is old-fashioned and you can’t live there forever. In order to leave, however, you have to choose a road to travel that depends on the heart, the mind, the will of every individual on the planet. Even the sickly child in some third-world country struggling to stay alive. Even the miscarriage, even the abortion, even the follower who treds only the footsteps of greatness. Each road is connected, intertwined, and the only thing holding together these fragile pieces are the choices a person makes. There would be so many, many lines, like stars in the Universe, like hairs on a rabbit or breaths in a lifetime. Somewhere along these lines, there would be great cities, small towns, tiny villages, some existing for forever and others drifting slowly into nonexistence.

That is fate. And some would say, fate is purpose; fate is the reason we are alive.

I hate to disagree, but it’s a statement meant for the idealists and romantics-at-heart. To have a single purpose in life would be preposterous, unless you set out with that goal and are determined that it be the only for you. The ripple effect. Every step make a wave, no matter how small or insignificant in the face of vast oceans. Sometimes, those ripples are widespread and die out quickly; sometimes they’re small, but cause others, until they merge to form great surface-changing movements.

That would be a truth, if there were such things as truths. That choices change.

Even if a person dies and is forgotten, they’ve caused change because there is something they’ve done to be forgotten.

And then there is love. If love were a truth of the world, it would be an extremely finicky one. Like the law, in fact: full of loopholes and doubt and unrealistic goals that people work for anyway.

My mom stayed up with me until late tonight playing cards with me because I couldn’t sleep. I text my friend and she tells me she’s sleeping but talks to me anyway. I call my dog and he comes and he licks my leg (ew!) and I pat him on the head. He goes to sleep at the foot of my bed.

If that’s not love, I don’t want to know what is, because surely it would be a lesser thing than this. That, at least, is one of my truths.

Another would be religion. It’s the worldwide constant (I can’t really say Universal, can I, seeing as we have seen little of the Universe and I would be presuming much). I’ve said before, people need something to believe in, even if that something is that there is nothing to believe in.

Fanatics are irritating. Then there are the missionaries, the Amish, the people who live with little and choose that life. I have to admit a small amount of admiration towards them, though for the most part I think the only reason people belong to a certain religion is because their parents did it, and their parents before them. Tradition is a nasty habit.

Even so, I’d take a fanatic over an atheist any day. Those who are strict atheist are quite terrifying because how can you live not believing in anything at all? Or rather, believing that there is nothing more to the stars than the lights in the sky?

I also admit to being something of a cynic when it comes to religion. Sixteen years of forced Church made me come to realize things about religion that most people never get. Tradition refused to take root in me, as it did some of my friends, because I refused to stop doubting. And there was so much to doubt. Really, I wanted evidence before I went ahead and wasted all my weekend time on praying or genuflecting or whatever it is that religiously inclined people do in their spare time.

I also admit to a certain level of hope. It’s a strange feeling, believing that there is something, but having no idea what. I’ll call it “believing in believing.” Such a strange word to say over and over.

I’d rather be a fanatic than a complete atheist because at least fanatics die happy. All atheists die with is the certain knowledge that there’s nothing more. And even that’s true, I don’t want to know about it. Leave me my ignorance, for it’s my only defense after faith has abandoned me.

To sum it all up, I wouldn’t know what is true and what isn’t. In fact, I have a feeling even if I could understand all the concepts and whatnot, I wouldn’t want to know. Why:

1. Leave my romanticism alone
2. Some things are better left walled off
3. Going insane is not a favored pastime of mine
4. I’m running out of reasons but I’m sure I’ll think of more; after all, I don’t know everything [no one does]…so I guess that’d be a bit of truth right there, too, if you don’ t think it’s too presumptuous
5. There could be perfection out there. If there is, it would be mighty ugly what with all the different ideas of perfect in the world all combined into one figure

Boy, can you imagine?

It’s impossible for age to matter. Not in terms of the things that make a difference, that really mean something; in the grand scheme of things and the everyday routine.

I write a lot. And when people read what I’ve written, they go, ‘you’re a high school student? ah.’

As if it changed anything at all.

Some people grow up faster than others, I know. Certainly, some people never grow up at all. And some grow old far too soon. The typical case is somewhere to the edges of these extremes or right in the middle. At least, I used to think so.

Then I realized it’s not a scale. Age is, I mean. It’s not a scale at all; not for judging writing, or ability, or whether a person can be a president or not. That’s a ridiculous law, I think–the age law. You have to be 30-something (31?) to run for president. It’s not about age. Not at all.

Thinking of age as a scale is like sight. You can see colors, and shades, but there is so much more there that isn’t immediately visible. There’s infrared, and radio, and gamma ray. There could be little lines of energy running around, connecting people to destinies and whatnot, but no one would ever know it because no one could see it.

Some people grow up faster than others. Hearing that, I think, well those people must’ve had a hard childhood or something. But that’s not it either.

“A word is not the same with one writer as with another.  One tears it from his guts.  The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”  -Charles Peguy

It’s true. For both writing, and age. Some people grow up working and loving and feeling but they do it all in moderation. And other people grow up knowing things no ordinary whatever-year-old should know. A genetic thing? Perhaps. An adaptation? Who knows.

All I can say is that it gives me an eye twitch every time someone tells me I “write well for someone my age.” Trust me, there are more of those people than you’d think.

I don’t like it, not just because it colors how people judge what I write, but how other kids write.

I think this is an example of adult-kid differences. Prejudices, even. There’s all this uproar about how kids don’t respect their elders; how they don’t listen or follow instructions. There are Ph.D.s out there looking for answers, and psychologists sifting through research trying to figure it out. Sigh. Sometimes people look so hard for something that they don’t believe the obvious is a solution at all.

“You have to earn respect,” my dad tells me. What he doesn’t know, and what I don’t tell him because I’m a wuss like that, is it works both ways.

For some kids, perhaps this isn’t true. Perhaps they really do hate their parents, but for the majority that’s only true because 15, 16-year-olds can see and hear as well as anyone. Better, even. Where I live, I’m referred to as “one of the kids.” I’m one of the kids. Thus, I am less and not equal to people just three years older than me.

They do it at school, too. “Because I said so,” “because you’re not old enough to know better,” “because you’re just a teenager.” When really, what difference does 3 years make? If a person is going to be rebellious when they’re 17, their birthday isn’t going to change one thing.

I never understood that. “Never” being the relative term, as I’m really not that old at all. I can’t remember anything before seven years ago, though I’m more than twice that. It seems like everything the older generations do is based on that fact, that I can’t remember and don’t have much experience. And? Does that make me unable to make decisions?

Statistics are terrible. Terrible as in, they shouldn’t exist. To the public, at least, because every school shooting makes everyone else more afraid. When added up, they say “there’s been three times as many shootings in this decade than in the past five combined” and people assume that this means kids these days are unstable and untrustworthy. No, it means there’s so much pressure on kids these days that it causes them to snap.

It’s always been like this. Unstable, I mean. Even in the old days when the perfect family was a mother, father and boy and girl, with a dog at their side. When people lived with white picket fences and dinners were served hot every night at 6:00 p.m. sharp. Pot roast and potatoes.

It’s my opinion that those people had more problems than kids these days. It relates back to the whole denial-or-sanity thing. You live in denial like the old families, with all the problems being solved by a leather belt, or your childhood is torn up by divorce and loud fights. Wonderful options, huh? Perhaps it’s better to just avoid problems like that, but they fester.

My point being…there are always expections. Perhaps now more than ever, but they’ll always be the exceptions. Drunk driver teens, teen pregnancy, overall bad decision-making–exceptions. Exceptions that cause people to believe the worst of the rest.

So…no judging. At all. Not for this high school student, at least. I can stand it, people thinking I’m not a sentient being simply because I’m younger than they are. I’ve stood it this far, and sometimes there are people who know different. Those people are my heroes, if you want the truth. I’m going to be one of those people, I’ve decided.

Even when I’m a senior, and the freshmen start acting immature I’ll know they aren’t representatives of the rest. Even when I’m middle-aged and some kid shoots up his classmates and then himself because he has major respect issues, I’ll know he’s the exception. Always, always the exception. Not the rule.

Smoke drifts lazily upward. I dream.

There is a meadow. With every breath of wind, innumerable fronds of yellow grass wave to the sky. Scattered cottony puffs coalesce above to form an umbrella against the searing sunlight.

The ground is cool here, beneath a wondrous giant redwood. Far above, so far I believe my neck will break from straining to see such a distance, branches sway. There is such harmony here.

He’s there. He sits beside me and puts an arm across my shoulders. I’m happy then.

The smoke dissipates and I wake to find an hour has gone by.

My best friend is an avid reader of horror novels, Anne Rice, the humorous Macalister novels, even some Patricia Briggs werewolf-type fiction. I do too, sometimes, though occasionally I’ll switch over to my best owl buddy’s collection and read some David Klass; something about people and societies and whatnot.

Needless to say, she’s sort of a fiction freak, my good friend. I’ll call her…Rice. That would amuse her.

One day, in a text, she said to me, “I’d want to be a vampire.”

And suddenly I realized how much that would suck eggs. It is one thing to be dependent on food, such as plants or meat, but it’s a completely other thing to be dependent on another species. Wouldn’t that be the pits? You wouldn’t be these big badasses because in the end everyone would know how you stay alive, and be able to take advantage of that.

“Why?” I asked her. Because really, I didn’t know.

“I’d want to live forever,” she told me. I could believe that one. I’ve thought it often enough myself.

If I lived forever, I would be miserable. Just the thought that I’ll be dealing with all the idiots and violence in the world, forever, would make me depressed. And besides, a million lifetimes spent drinking blood. The same thing, over and over. It’s like I read in a book once, “what about blood clots? Or diabetics? Does it taste bad when you eat garlic, or when the blood coagulates in your throat?”

Good questions. Ones I’d never want to answer.

“I wouldn’t want to live forever with my mistakes,” was all I replied. Because I didn’t want to crush any dreams or anything like that. Rice knows it isn’t real, but she doesn’t know it wouldn’t be as nice as they make it out in the movies or books. Really. Even the tough plots wouldn’t be so realistic.

So no, eternity is out of the question. Realistically and as a…future goal. How terrible! That your relatives would never pass on. Cruel though it may be.

Wind. Shivers, rushing beneath skin, trembles through fingers. Hair, blown forward, wild.

The canyon wall stretches on, into darkness—where’s the end? Or, perhaps, the end is just the beginning…

The beginning of…?

Feet slip. Slivers of stone tumble down, disappear. It’s the tempting of death—the abyss—that’s so intoxicating. It calls.

Freefall. A searing glimpse of death.

Then the save. Arms are yanked upward. Cloth catches the breeze—colors dyed to mimic fiery cliff faces.

Oh, to fly! To keep going, never stop; not for walls, people, nor societies. To flaunt the end, to start anew;

The ultimate.

It’s a far cry from home, California, despite only being a state or so over. Where I am, near Sacramento, it’s hilly and the grass is tall and yellow. The rolling landscape and trees make it seem like a picture right out of Africa. Not that I’ve ever been to Africa.

I’m on vacation again, this time visiting relatives who aren’t very relative at all. This is why I love staying home; because I know what the rules are–spoken and unspoken–and that reassures me.

There are a few things that I know, though. Being here, is the ultimate loneliness. I realized it when I was given a pullout bed–incidentally, the bed is in a car far from the house–and when I tried texting my friends, they came back even though I had 5 bars and network service. Sigh. My materialistic life style suffers on vacation, I admit. Perhaps someday I won’t need to say, “im crshed nite lol” to others in order to get a restful night sleep. I’m exhausted because it bothered me that I couldn’t reply to a text sent to me, asking a question.

It was, possibly, the most lonely thing I’ve ever imagined. I’m here with just my dad, and it’s not like I talk to him anyway so it’s like being all alone. When I went out for the night, I discovered that the lighting in the car was very dim indeed. I wanted that flashlight that was offered to me, despite it being the weaker thing to do.

The screens wouldn’t close. They were roped open because the mechanism that pulls them up was broken.

The bed was cold but it was stiflingly hot and humid. Smoke from the 800-plus wildfires blocked my view of the house, the garden, and just about everything else outside the car. I couldn’t roll up the windows because I didn’t have the keys to start the engine.

It grew darker and I just sat there for a while, thinking and wondering and missing home. What I want the most right now is to hold my puppies. I keep thinking that every noise is one of them, rolling around or tugging at the hem of my shorts. When it turns out to be nothing but imagination and the willingness to believe, I read.

And keep reading. I mean, it’s not like I’ll be able to sleep.

It’s true, then: grow up one way and every other feels wrong. I grew up with people, and despite enjoying solitude more than most company, being so alone felt so off.

When I went back into the house to retrieve some toothpaste–arrg I have complaints about that in a moment–the house was so quiet. My dad’s bedroom door was shut and the couple we’re staying with was sleeping in the loft upstairs. So I dug around and found some toothpaste and retreated, because loneliness isn’t one of those things you mention to just anybody.

Yesterday we flew ExpressJet, and they fed us until I was sick to my stomach. I spent the entire time with my nose glued to the window, and if Superman flew by just then, I wouldn’t have cared enough to notice. My eyes were all for the landscape, the Sierra Nevadas, the Sacramento River.

That’s not my problem. My problem wasn’t the security personnel either. It bugs me that I had to buy a small bottle of contact solution because my other was just one ounce too big. It bothers me that I had to leave my toothpaste behind because it was too big, that I was afraid to pack nail clippers–I mean really, nail clippers?–and a shaving razor for fear we’d be stopped. “I think the ITA guys just like pawing through people’s underwear,” my dad told me. I thought he was being ridiculously high-handed for saying it. They’re just people doing their jobs, for heaven’s sake.

No; security let us through and one of them even smiled at me and I smiled back.

What bothered me was the people. I went and sat down, and my dad dumped his luggage on me so he could go buy a soda that he ended up just throwing out because our flight arrived.

The looks! There was an elderly couple and when they passed be me, they moved far around. There was a businessman explaining something to his friend, and every once in a while they would look around suspiciously. And be comforted by the fact that there were two security officers standing nearby, looking around and laughing and drinking coffee as if the terrorists hadn’t already won.

That’s what my dad said, too. Sometimes he says the stupidest things, things that I already know because I’m not oblivious, but sometimes he says things that make a bit of sense. That’s what he said when we were packing.

“The terrorists have already won,” he said.

And I thought about the meaning of the word, to inspire terror. Then I wondered, how could it be, that our goal has shifted from being strong in the face of terror to working so hard to prevent it that we become afraid nonetheless?

There was a woman talking on a cell phone. She had a black bag at her feet, and she kept looking around as if nervous. Immediately, I thought, what if she’s a…?

What idiocy is this? Who am I, to look around and label a person a terrorist because she nervously talks on a sleek black phone and there’s a bomb-sized bag at her feet?

Yet I do, and everyone else does. And the faces are grim and the terrors real, and I know then that not one of these people cares a bit about innocence or truth. It becomes that we are afraid because of something that did not happen to us, did not happen near us or because of us and yet we are afraid.

Perhaps it’s the uncaring factor. Perhaps it’s because, in the event of a terrorist attack, we would die without knowing WHY. Why us? Why me? Why anyone? It’s random; not the place, but the people in that place at that time. We’d never know, and so struggle to understand and avoid and eventually it’s becomes true, that there is terror in every decision thus made.

And the terrorists have won.

Possibly, that’s the most logical thing my father has ever said to me. He’s so arrogant sometimes that it kills me. But it’s not from a lack of information.

I thought about writing last night. I have a paper notebook, but my dad has the laptop. This laptop. I can only use it when it’s out, and he’s not using it. Which is rarely. So when I went back into the house last night to scope out the toothpaste, I was also looking for somewhere to write. I pondered starting up my relatives’ computer but decided it would be an unwelcome intrusion. I went back to the car with my 10-year-old Aquafresh dug up from the pits of the bathroom drawer.

I can’t help but wonder, now, if the term Superpower is not flexible. After all, isn’t it true that whomever has control of the mind has control of the body?

I have a dream, sometimes. It’s of a great stone wall that towers over everything, though in this dream “everything” is but the cracked landscape behind me. Nothing of import lives in that barrenness. But nothing at all lives near this wall.

It’s just me. And the wind, and the dirt that hears the wind whisper in a language I can’t speak.

A feel of vastness, and life—danger. I perceive danger beyond the wall.

The dream makes me cry because I know that the wall is my protection, and everything across it is what makes me want to live.

The puppies are restless. I’m keeping a little brown-nosed one who has black stripes running up her nose. We named her “Tiger,” but my mom says if we give her away like we are the other 5 pups, her owners will rename her. “Tiger” is not a girl’s name, it seems. So I’m keeping her.

The blister on my wrist cracked and bled just a bit. Will it never heal?

And I read a good book. A friend of mine told me once that anyone can publish a book. It isn’t such an amazing feat to get something published, not if you have the right agents and the right material. Books get published because people predict that other people will read them. Not for any intelligence level or deeper factor.

He told me that, while anyone can write anything, most books are just actions. Words.

I’ve determined that while it might be just fine to simply say how a person feels, it would be a great accomplishment to be able to convey that through completely unrelated context. It would be a good goal, I think. Something that leads a person to understand more than when they cracked the cover.

Books make me fall in love over and over. Something my drop-out brother and college-bound brother, neither one, really gets. One simply doesn’t read, and the other reads action books, espionage and from start to finish there’s no letting up. It’s nice, sometimes, not to be forced to think. But the mindlessness really bugs me.

I can tell I’ve read a good book because when I finish the last page, there is the wish that it’d go on. More than that is the quiet. The peace.

Then I realize I’ve been learning, the whole time. That there was a deeper meaning, something so subtle and resonant it seemed to sneak between lines and paragraphs. When it’s done, I sit back and for a long time I stare at the wall thinking nothing at all. Because the best ideas are the ones you don’t think about, I guess.  They’re the ones you feel, and can’t really explain in straightforward words and sentences.

And the creation of those peaceful moments is not planning, I’m thinking. But it’s also not reckless writing, not like blogging is. More, it’s knowing what you want people to know, and telling it in the quiet moments. There aren’t many quiet moments in non-stop action novels, unless they’re moments I can’t quite comprehend just yet.

So then you have to think, if there were one thing I would want people to know, what would it be?

Be sure to spray sunscreen on the part of your hair, otherwise it hurts to brush and eventually peels like you wouldn’t believe. No, that’s not dandruff, I swear!

That probably isn’t such a good idea. Though it would be funny if more people started putting sunscreen in their hair, only to realize it doesn’t come out. At least, mine doesn’t. It’d be a decent thought experiment, if anyone had months to waste on writing for the cause.

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia- Fear of the number 666.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- Fear of long words.

I just finished watching Lions for Lambs. My parents didn’t like it, because of the abrupt, unsolved ending but I rather did. It seems more…honest. Movies that end with people getting fired and others dropping out of school aren’t so enjoyable to watch. But then, movies where everything ends up happy are pretty unrealistic. So I suppose you could say this preserves the realism while still maintaining a semblence of hope for the characters…by avoiding the end completely.

The pessimists would say, it failed. People died and the media-governed society went on to live unhappy stereotypes, kept satisfied by tidbits provided by government hands…The optimists would say, no! The government plan was exposed and the journalist regained her dignity and became famous!

And in the end, the soldiers died anyway, no matter the reputations saved or nefarious plans brought to light.

“Just another movie made to criticize the Bush administration,” is how my dad put it.

Well, probably. But I did think it was sort of sad how many high school students don’t know what country borders Minnesota. If the stats were true, I’m assuming.

Eh, war is necessary / war is unnecessary, what’s the difference, huh? You have the protesters out on the streets and the protesters who yell encouragement from their sofas at home. And then you have the protesters who don’t really protest at all until it’s the popular thing to do. I’ve always…disliked bandwagon junkies.

“Is war necessary?”

“Necessary? Naw, but it’s pretty darn essential.”

I could go through and explain how people are built to survive, to be ambitious, to be the top dog and all that. I could say, war keeps things shook up because it does. Keeps the population of third world countries in the balance, as ashamed as I am to say it. It’s a difficulty that brings out the best or the worst in a person, though some might have been better off staying home in their air-conditioned, freeze-dried homes. All nice and safe and they never realize, even when they’re dying or perhaps up until then, what cowards they are. How useless they are at pointing and shooting, or not asking questions. Yes, for some, war is not necessary nor essential because it would prove them to be weaker. I suspect that living in comfort your whole life turns out more cowards than any one country really needs. Or wants to admit. So for some, staying home would likely be the the better option, if not the safer one.

I’d like to say war, on a nation-wide or worldwide scale, is not the necessary thing. More, singular prejudices and the need to survive, to be on top, might lead one person against another person as easily as it would a group of people against a nation.

So no, not war in general. Small wars. Disputes that escalate until third parties decide they can use the opportunity to gain a foothold and jump on board, throw the dice in with one faction or another. Power games, power games–

And then there’re the times when some good comes of it. Everyone knows, that which does not kill you makes you stronger.

Ah, probably not true in the case of wars. But sometimes, on rare occasions, catastrophic loss and sovereign hatred can change. In a horrible, dispicable way…and then sometimes people have the fortitude to learn from their mistakes.

So when we’re gone, when our great-great-great-great grandchildren are bones six feet under, and all the buildings here are razed to the ground and the people have evolved beyond recognition. And every record of past histories has long been buried under change, under evolution and the need to move on…perhaps then, history will repeat itself. Over and over. But only eventually.

I’m all for peace. I love the idea that a person can be whatever she wishes. That a kid can grow up and not be drafted, a father or mother won’t be killed in roadside bombs, or a rift between neighbors won’t form in such a way that the hostility goes on for hundreds of years…

It’s all well and good. Realistically speaking, I even think it’s possible.

But a world without war, I believe, wouldn’t be so alive. The people could live fat and happy until the end of their days but what kind of end is that to civilization? You look in textbooks and see timelines, of past battles, of important people and places…well, they didn’t get there by living in comfort.

In terms of evolving, of making a difference, I don’t think I’d ever want a world without war. I say that because I haven’t seen it, I’m sure, but I can imagine, as that third party, what the consequences would be.

Like I’ve said before, sometimes you try so hard to solve the problem on one side of the boat, you reach so far, that the whole thing ends up tipping before you know what hit you. Except in this case, the boat wouldn’t tip. It’d sink. Slow but sure.

No one probably even understands what I’m trying to say. I’d put it in condensed format but that’d take all the luster out of it. All the meaning because words are just words without a setting and an imagination.

I want to try an example. Imagine…a world where everyone is at war. Every country, every person is at war with his or her neighbor. They live in constant fear. Children are drafted by the army because all the men and women of fighting age had long since died for their government. Values and morals mean nothing. All that drives the fight forward is stubbornness and a cause that is truely meaningless in the face of the body bags stacked in neat five-by-ten rows.

The land is raped by people with guns who call themselves soldiers. Civilians are no longer civilians because they’ve been forced to fight to protect themselves. Perhaps on the homefront, there is some speck of nationalism. In a few people, that is the driving force, that fanaticism. And then you have two types of people, the zealots and the frightened.

The end of the world, some would say. This is the end of the world, but eventually, nature would take its course. Some power would make a subtle, world-changing move and just like that it would end.

The truth, I think, is that if all the world were at war the war would end.

Perhaps not in two years, or two decades, or a century but it would end as sure as it would bring leaders and fighters out of the woodwork. Not like today’s wars, where one faction is depleted and restocks, then launches everything at the other faction who is depleted and restocks…it goes on. Even when one battle is won, there is another around the corner. Even with the victory of one war, there will be another sure as the sun rises and politicians are ambitious.

That’s one side of it. Then you have the possiblility of world peace. Yay! you say. Peace for all!

Things don’t look so good. You’d think peace would bring prosperity to all. But as the wars break up and the soldiers go home to loving, relieved families, there’s a new problem.

War makes people care because it holds hostage what a person loves the most. It takes away a father, a son, a daughter, a niece or nephew and the family is sick with worry. They donate money, set up protest rallies, stand up and believe in something. While all the inner cowards watch from their sofas at home, those with strength enough get up and do something. The threat propels them forward.

So what happens when there is no threat?

Beauty. Pages and pages of it, in every magazine and newspaper. Articles about celebrities, about new technology that cures cancer, about people rescuing cats from burning buildings and saving the blue whale.

Families are whole. There is no need for defenses, so Homeland Security and such organizations are split up and sent off. Food supplies are flown to impoverished countries and not a single child starves. In the U.S., the cities grow bigger than ever, bloated with immigrants and population booms. Buildings rise higher, bridges taller, streets longer. There are gardens, and art galleries and bakeries where once there were recruiting stations and army bases.

Years go by. The gardens are still there, wilted and brown from pollution, but they’re still there. Fire rescue is no longer needed because some scientist somewhere, who was no longer needed to fight in the wars, has invented a fire-proof, water-proof material with which to build homes. Another, somewhere else, has created a hands-off automatic pastry machine. Bakery employees are unneeded, and go off to seek other jobs. The art galleries are closed and converted into housing to accomodate the growing population. All the art, now, is online. With a click of a button, anyone around the world can visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

People don’t walk anymore. They are carried, by moving sidewalks and escalators for steps and they don’t even have to stand, if they don’t want to. In fact, they don’t even have to work. There are machines to do it for them! With such a high unemployment rate, the goverment is forced to go on a set-salary scale for every person, which of course they should’ve done long ago.

Journals publish musings by everyone. It becomes the law for them to accept every piece of work, so as not to create dissention within society. Even the prisons are shut down, because all of the prisoners are either rehabilitated or dead. There’s a strict death penalty, because of course no one wants to deal with criminals who will only try to provoke fighting, and fighting is bad.

No war, no crime, no effort.

It’s the end of the world, I would say. Not only would it eventually lead to a utopia (I’ve always hated utopias), but it would mean that no one meant anything. Each person would be reduced to that tally mark when the government official comes around and takes polls. One more number in the census, one more equal paycheck. No one would ever mean anything, would ever have purpose beyond living. Living for the sake of being alive might sound well and good, but it’s the reasons for living that give being alive its meaning.

Some disaster would come. Perhaps we would have steel walls and fire-proof homes. Perhaps we would never have cancer, or wars, and women wouldn’t get raped walking home and men wouldn’t get jumped for the twenty dollar bill in their pockets. But something would change everything, something no one could suspect.

It could be a disease. With nothing else to do, the government puts its head to genetic mutation research and what could the protesters say–at least they’re not making bombs! Some small anomaly would go wrong and disease would spread throughout the entire world. Unstoppable, because of that singular, all-enclusive arrogance and comfort that comes with peace.

Yeah, we forgot that part, didn’t we?

Live in one way for too long and you start taking it for granted. So when a virus, a new, never-before-seen one sweeps through the water system what defense do we have against it?

It could be a meteor. One big enough that it would kill any civilization, warlike or not. But at least the warring peoples would be wary enough, at the first signs of trouble, to take cover. At least they would be tough enough to withstand a trauma that no white-bread, spoiled, never-worked-a-day-in-his-life man wouldn’t.

Even if something like that didn’t happen, what would be the point of living if not to try to make something better? If nothing you did would ever change a thing, why do anything at all?

Sheep. We’d be sheep.

I like to think we have wars for a reason. That we have crime for a reason, and not just to make us tougher or learn from our mistakes. Not even to push us forward, that necessity would cause a society to develop new, advanced technology. Not even that.

Living in the absence of fear would be the worst thing that could happen. It would make the lower classes into those “pompous rich folk” some people so criticize. It would lower the uppers, until their way of life was not special at all and everyone would be equal.

Equality is one of those things that is better left imperfect.

I don’t enjoy the thought of people in pain. Of early death, of violence. But I also believe in the necessity of it, on some level. Not wars–wars might keep us on our toes but they aren’t exactly good for anything besides keeping that population line down. Without it, gruesome as it may be, I do believe the people who don’t die would be a whole lot worse off. In the long run, that is. I’ve always been thinking in the long run here.

-Shrug- Just thoughts. Just thoughts on the nature of war and the balance of peace and conflict, the balance that shapes heroes and allows healthy childhoods at the same time. Nothing important, I’m sure, though I really do think humanity is poking the bull and isn’t quite expecting the bull to pole back. Whatever you might take that to mean.

Baa.