Friday, May 28, 2004

Losing the Big One
Maybe this is God’s way of saying, “Life sucks. Get over it. Who the @$%! do you think you are?”

And why should we win? Where is it written that people deserve to be happy, and fulfilled, and safe, and well fed, and dry? And alive? Where is it written that life on Earth just has to get better and better for all of mankind?

If people are too dense to grasp that there can be alternative ways of thinking, and that not everyone is interested in Compromise, and in Diversity, and in Openness, and in Peace In Our Time, and in Equality, and in Human Rights, and in the Personal Freedom to kill ourselves with overeating and overconsuming and overthinking and overbeing, and that mankind is perhaps not yet ripe to be just one happy family, then maybe they should be conquered by people with less benevolent and less idyllic ways of thinking, and be forced to forfeit their values and happiness and security and satiety, if not their lives. (Phew! I think that was the longest sentence I’ve ever written!)

Of course it’s not a matter of good and bad. Life and death aren’t good and bad. They just are. The same goes for lightness and darkness; wisdom and ignorance; love and hate. So if Western Civilization is destroyed by Islamic fundamentalism, and by the West’s smug and pompous refusal to see this destruction in the making, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. It would just be a thing. Where is it written that life on Earth just has to get better and better for all of mankind?

Yes, it would be extremely unpleasant for tens of millions of people, at least, should Western Civilization be destroyed by Islamic fundamentalism, but so what? Where is it written that people deserve to be happy, and safe, and well fed, and dry? And alive?

Why oh why didn't Arafat accept Barak's offer at Camp David? Or at least say he'd think about it? Or even try to haggle for a bit more? Why did he say NO? I have this crazy gut feeling that it would have changed everything, and not just for Israelis and Palestinians.

Perhaps this feeling is just something akin to nostalgia, a naive yearning for something that never was, and maybe never will be.

Because I've got this horrible feeling that we're going to lose. Not enough people get it, and we're going to lose, all of us.

what's that called? A premonition?

Update: Bish said it’s not called a premonition. He said it’s called anxiety. He also said that this post is very badly written and I should rewrite it (Meanie). I said it’s good for my ego to have a badly written piece glaring at me from my blog. Anyway, it’ll soon disappear forever into the darkness of my archives.

Bish said it’s like the ten plagues. Pharaoh and the Egyptians didn’t get it after the first one, and even after the tenth most horrible one they raced after the Israelites into the desert on their chariots, to bring them back. Let’s hope it doesn’t take that many for the West to wake up.

John said "Get a grip kid, when the appeasers wake up they'll really go to town on the terrorists bastards. There's no rage quite like that of a suitor waking up to fact that he/she is being two timed." Teehee. I'm feeling better already.

To my query “Where is it written…”, a nice reader pointed out that it is written in Isaiah 2, 4:

Thus He will judge among the nations
And arbitrate for the many peoples,
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks:
Nation shall not take up
Sword against nation;
They shall never again know war.

(From the new translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the traditional Hebrew text).

Well, it’s a long time coming, that’s all I can say.