Anything They Say posted some photos of Isreal's asymmetrical response to a few kidnappings. It got me writing a comment of enough length that I decided to post it here:
Here's how I make sense of it. Some call it "asymmetrical warfare" but that just rings a little too, oh, bureaucratic-sounding to me. I mean it's factually accurate, but it doesn't quite capture the situation in a nutshell. The term also implies that Lebanon as a whole committed the kidnappings. Which is a complete lie, as we well know. So the only conclusion I can come to is a really big one, with big implications: there is no such thing as a country. Borders seem really false to me. The only reason I can think of that borders exist is to designate certain populations as legitimate targets for scapegoatism and mass murder. When most world decisions are made by about 1% of the population (most likely much less), it's the other 99% that suffer, 99% of the time. This leads me to the further conclusion that nationalism and patriotism exist only to designate people as stand-ins or whipping boys for the sole purpose of further legitimizing the using of people as chesspieces. These people are inanimate objects in the eyes of all rulers. It's all a nice game for them. The only reason people don't rise up and kill all the rulers is because people are still stuck to the belief that their governments have their best interests in mind. Dissent is a mere thorn in their side; they quash it with charges of "treason" and whatnot. I think the people of Lebanon, as well as the people of the U.S., should rise up, but they won't, because we've all been conditioned to play the game. It sucks. That's all I can say about this right now.
As for the emerging great war in the Middle East, it will only get worse. I wonder whether it will expand beyond that region. I wonder if all hell will soon break loose. I wonder about WWIII, and whether it will be a spectacular, all-out, nuclear war; or whether it will be just a slow wearing down process that finally turns the tide against the world population explosion. I wonder if we'll ever see 7 billion people on the Earth.
I see our government legitimizing every act of genocide. I see our government saying things to the effect of, "We won't bomb you as long as you meet our impossible demands." I see a propaganda assault rising to a fever pitch. I see hopelessness and distrust of government everywhere amongst the masses, but with an accompanying sense of powerlessness. I see us all standing in the wings, watching, and when the genocide reaches us, we'll be powerless to stop it.
We all die sometime. But artifically-derived violence of man-on-man is not a good way to go out, because it hurts us right where it counts: in the soul. Where's the love? Where's the honor? Where are these fundamental underpinnings of the human heart? Where is our bravery, our self-respect, our compassion? Must everything be a matter of intellect and numbers? Isn't suffering a good enough reason to realize that all this is wrong?
Apparently not. We're caught up in abstractions like freedom and democracy, when the truth is self-evident: people are fucked. What good is democracy anymore? Where is it hiding? We've all been programmed so far. We still believe in a living, breathing America. We believe in a Constitution, a piece of paper that somehow protects our liberty and our right to live as we wish. It only works if most people still follow it. But most don't, not anymore. It's all windowdressing and PR campaigns.
We are a brilliant people, we Americans. We have derived countless labyrinthes of mental models, we have taken countless circuitous paths and U-turns to reach conclusions that are demonstrably false. Checks and balances, the Fourth Estate, the free press - these abstractions have set up a virtual reality in our brain, a virtual reality that is supposed to parallel what goes on outside in the physical world. A virtual reality that is supposed to serve as a road map and a guiding force with which to navigate the political terrain. But those maps are outdated. It's like hunting for treasure using a 17th-century pirate's map. It's just silly, to me.
What's reality, then? Dead people. Pain and suffering. No amount of debate between the "left" and the "right" will ever change that. The Malkins and the Moores, the O'Reilly's and the Donahues, these only distract us, it appears. Oh sure, I follow them as much as the next guy, but this is personal. My heart tells me everything I need to know.
I just feel so bad for those poor people in Lebanon, in Palestine, yes, even in Israel. It is a life of fear and distaster. Ours, on the other hand, is a life of a sense of impending doom. We all feel it in our guts and in our bones. Some kind of apocalypse is afoot. We don't know when or where or how, but we feel it is coming. I believe that feeling derives from an ancient karma, passed down ancestrally. It is true there is no distinction between now and then and what is to come. Time is indeed illusion, no matter how naive or new agey that may sound. We are born and we live and we die in the blink of an eye. In the same way, geography is meaningless. The big picture is that what happens to one person anywhere, also happens to all people everywhere, on the level of the soul. Your blood is my blood. It's one big mass mind - that's humanity.
God bless America? God bless Earth.
