h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

17 January 2004

So often lately I have been trying to tell myself that I am on the cause of goodness, that things here have been changing that there is hope for people after all. I am not quite ready to give up on that yet, I will not allow my mood to cycle so rapidly. I know that what I am facing here is nothing more than the actions of a few assholes, but why are they such assholes.

An interesting night, for so long here things have been so calm. The occasional half-hearted mortar attacks, occasional RPG nothing big. Protest yesterday, dead interpreter and that was about it. My perspective is changing. There was a time in my life when someone that had been shot was a murder victim, his death to be investigated and the culprits brought to justice. Now, it is just another death. In a land where death is so commonplace a dead man is just that, only a dead man. One death seemed so light until just now, as I type it. Still it is only significant in its insignificance, in the fact that it I describe yesterday’s protest as basically peaceful because only one person died.

Tonight’s mortar attack was more than half-hearted. It started with 5 rounds around 8 PM. Four duds and the fifth exploded on a part of the compound where no one happened to be standing. No big deal, we joked about it. Couple of hours go by, I’m waiting to go out on patrol. More mortars started coming in. Still nothing more than an annoyance. Of the hundreds of rounds to have dropped on me there have only been a few that have done any damage to anyone. I idly thought about the difficulty of actually finding a mortarman who pops a couple of rounds and moves. You basically have to stumble onto him.

Then came the patrol. Routine, nothing that hasn’t been done time and time again. We took rounds, returned fire. Yet another firefight, routine even if it is unusual lately. None of what I have described to you is anything new for me. It has all been done so many times in so many ways. In the words of the Bhagavad-Gita; “I am become death the shatterer of worlds…” The past ten months of combat haven’t been heavy. I still find what I have done and what I have faced to pale in comparison to the great wars of the past. I can vaguely understand what people that have seen years of combat go through and I am amazed at every single one that makes it back into the world. I have seen so many broken human beings. Gunshots, shrapnel the worst are the would be bombers. Finding what used to be a human being in small, wet, red pieces is something that just cannot be described. I remember once seeing someone’s face lying on the sidewalk. No head, no skull just the face. It didn’t even look real.

You and I gentle reader find these things to be unnatural, disturbing. High explosives and automatic gunfire on your streets seems so out of place. Here it is simply a part of life. I am not talking from my point of view but from the locals. It would seem that mortars and gunfire are as natural as thunder and rain. This is what is finally starting to get to me. I just want to know. Why? What is wrong with people? I know these are unanswerable questions. Yet, I must ask them. If I don’t I think I just might lose my humanity. Although after viewing so much of humanity I am not sure I still want to be a part of it.

I no longer feel fear here, I never let it affect me and it slowly left my system as I grew more accustomed to death as a way of life. While I don’t fear during firefights any longer, I am saddened after them. More and more I think of how stupid we all are. Of how much greatness mankind has been able to build for himself. Of how I can live in a world with the paintings of Botticelli, the poetry of Keats, music to make the angels weep, and enough ICBMs to undo it all.

It isn’t just here, it is everywhere. Look around you and you will see it in your daily lives. You will see the greed, the selfishness, the uncaring, unfeeling, unthinking masses of humanity teeming all around you. The same greed that causes a perfectly able person to park in the handicap spot. The lust for the power that the grade school bully can exert over his classmates, the brain-dead zombies watching someone else’s vision of reality on their evening sitcoms and “reality tv.” Theses are the same elements that left unrestrained led us to the orgy of violence that is the daily fare for so much of the world.

It is a stain on Homo Sapiens. One that we have not scrubbed off since we have descended from the trees. No, it is no new tale and so many of us have a greater disdain for violence than ever before. In some places, violent death is shocking. Yet, technology puts such destructive power at our disposal that if we don’t cleanse the stain soon we might not make it. I wonder sometimes if we really deserve to make it after all….

hi Flipper,

I see you have taken my advice about spacing between paragraphs beyond the Saddam/Bush thread.

It *is* all about greed, isn't it? All wars, all inhumanity towards fellow humans. Greed and power. I also worry that people in the western world are slowly going brain-dead. They are being fed a steady diet of junk food, junk television, junk morality . . . and meanwhile being kept placated my 'toys' and gadgets (supplied by cheap labour in third world countries) so that whatever is going on outside their small personal universe becomes unimportant. It's scary that they don't see or don't care about what is coming next. I mean, I'm all for carpe diem, but this doesn't mean also burying one's head in the sand.

<>

I think if you truly ever begin to believe we don't then 'they' will have won for sure. I know it must be terribly hard not to despair at times, but as long as you are still able to love - even just one person - then you are still human and alive and I think this makes it all worth it.

take care,

az

Az, sometimes all that keeps me going is history. The more you read of it the more you find people are as they have always been. The noble of mind and heart are and have always been the minority

Hello Flipper

It's all about getting one over on the next guy: making sure you survive and your genes live on, rather than anybody else's. That basic trait of all living beings manifests itself as greed and avarice in mankind. We really haven't changed much since we were up in the forest trees. What has changed, as you say, is that we now have weapons that do not rely on physical strength, but on the ability to acquire them.

Human beings are nasty creatures.

However, alongside that, some bits of the human race do seem to have developed a desire for peaceful living, of compromise and negotiation.

I'm not sure though, how long it would take that peace-loving section of our species to turn to guns and violence, if it's survival was threatened.

In the UK we haven't been faced with serious threats to our society for centuries. Would we turn on neighbours, friends, even family, if the alternative was death? Another unanswerable question.

Stay alive...

Frenchbean