Violent Past

                There has always been violence in our world. The Earth itself was crafted from the violent churning of the Cosmos. It is almost in the nature of the denizens of Earth to be violent. It seems to be something in our genetic code, passed down through the stardust in our DNA. We’re violent and never seem to learn or evolve from that taste for violence.  Yet we can.

                Violence still solves nothing. (I’m not concerning myself with evolutionary violence, or natural violence between prey and hunters.) The murder of innocents for a religious belief, or any belief really, is no way to solve an ideological conflict. The only time it has ever terrifyingly worked is through genocide. One group of human beings has to hate another group of humans beings so completely that they wipe out any trace of their existence from history. And to what end? Just to an end really.  History only has a memory as long as those who remember.

                Alexander the Great conquered a huge portion of the globe in his drive for Global control, he died at 25 and his Empire was split up into various factions and sections and even warred with each other. The Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the British Empire, and so on and so forth, history has shown that no people will be dominated for very long by a foreign power.  All that violence, bloodshed and terror upon the regular peoples stuck in the middle was eventually for nothing. The blood of heroes and martyrs has soaked the ground under our feet and for what? What was it for? Land? Gold? Profit? Treasure? My God can beat up your God? What purpose did it serve? A kings glory? A theological victory? Or just to build mountains of the dead.  Empires fail.

                I will admit there have been some interesting technological advances through warfare. Penicillin for one thing is a war-time discovery. There were even some clever men that used war to come up with fairly fantastic ways to preserve food and improve some existing ideas. Yet none of those Empires, tyrants, Kings, what have you, lasted.  In some cases, when the cause was indeed a moral one, a just one, the only response to violence was violence. I can only use the Greek defense of Athens to preserve Democracy and World War II because seriously, something had to be done about Hitler, to justify the violence of war. But look how we had to end WWII. We had to be the only nation to ever actually use a nuclear device on another nation to end it. The death toll was astounding. And now, we’re allies. In fact, the Japanese and the Americans were almost always Allies, except during WWII. The Japanese were our Allies in WWI.  But I’m off my point…

                I don’t see the point in attacking innocent people who are just going to work, the dentist, or the store because you don’t like how some other country believes in a different God than you.  Blowing up a train station, a mall, a building doesn’t make you a hero to a cause; it just makes you an asshole.  An asshole so incapable of understanding mercy, forgiveness, decency and what honor really is that we have no pity for your grievances. We don’t care that you feel oppressed. We don’t care that the education of women is somehow evil to you. We don’t care that you don’t like pork. We don’t care about your causes, because you’re just an asshole. Or even a whole nation of assholes. Assholia.

                Earth is small and as far as I can tell no one is making any new ones near-by. We have to share this blue marble in space whether we want to or not. I implore these assholes to stop spilling the blood of innocent people.  I implore them to resist the use of terror and bullying to try and get their way and to look to men of peace, of reason, of surety for guidance and abandon the violence that has kept you in darkness.

                “An eye for an eye only makes all men blind.”