At What Price?

What is wrong with the people who run our world?

What is it they want so much that they are so quick to condemn millions of innocent lives? What could possibly be worth that price?

Have they never seen what a starving child looks like?

Have they ever heard the wails of grief when a mother or a father finds the broken body of their 3 year old, flesh torn from their bones because of bullets and bombs?

Are they incapable of understanding what that feels like?

Does it really escape them to care about anyone besides themselves?

The wars of the 20th Century killed tens of millions of human beings who had no quarrel with anyone's government. These were regular, normal human beings. People with families, and small quiet lives, who wanted nothing more than a way to live in peace, support their families, and leave their children a better world than the one they got. They aren't soldiers, they aren't insiders to government power. They're literally innocent civilians, like the vast majority of the people on this earth. People who want to live in peace, happy to mind their own business, to respect their neighbors and their differences, to help each other, to share, and to have sanity.

People who just want clean water to drink, and fresh food they're willing to grow themselves. But even that is taken from them. The governments of the world think nothing of condemning tens of thousands of people to suffering and death, violence, rape, abuses, oppression and murder.

There is something so basically and so profoundly wrong with that, it cannot be sane. It is the worst form of mental illness that a human being can be infected with.

What arrogance does it take to wave off thirty thousand innocent deaths knowing over half are children under 14? What arrogance makes a single man feel comfortable knowing 500 million children died because of what he believes is "good" for the world?

What single human male on this earth is so profoundly superior to the children he kills that he could actually believe that his insignificant notions of how things should be, really matter more than a piece of dog crap in this universe?

Who are they who demand that people meet to commit mass murder until the last one standing "wins"? What is it they believe they are winning? Who wins? And who loses? And who pays all the prices? And who doesn't?

If military forces exist to protect the innocent, then why do they kill them?

If military forces and governments are not fully engaged in protecting the weak and the innocent and the defenseless, then tell me, who are they protecting? What is it all for, if not for the people of this world?

If governments have the capacity to perform ultimate good in this world, can anyone tell me why we don't even expect them to try? How has it come to be that we know and accept it's the last thing they're interested in? What is wrong with us?

It is apparent that the people of this world are theirs to prey on for games of masculine power, deceit, posturing, greed, perversion, lies, gambling and all forms of self serving selfish self adoration. When anyone is in a position that every move he makes affects other people, is he not obligated to consider the effects of his actions on every single person he would affect? Shouldn't it require their consent? Isn't that at minimum what we call being responsible persons?

What would happen if we all behaved like our governments do? Wouldn't the world devolve into a bloody, suicidal crisis? It would. In record time.

Are the governments of earth exempt from acting responsibly? Are they above compassion? Are they above justice? Are they entitled to lie and steal and loot their own people because of their arrogance and whims? Are these people somehow so special that they should not be held accountable for their nuclear bombs and bullets and murder? Are any one of them better than any one of us? Are any one of them better than any of the millions of children they've murdered?

I don't think so. I don't think these people have any such rights.

We are witnessing the world come apart at the seams over a battle of demented testosterone and hubris. We are the pawns, and the stakes are everything. It's completely insane. Do we really want an emergent victor if these are the players?

It's clear to me now that when we let our beliefs become more important than reality, we will ultimately destroy ourselves. For that reason alone we must no longer accept the insanity or the lies of anyone in power. We have to start demanding better, loudly, endlessly, relentlessly. Is it worth losing all for the sake of the pride of a handful of completely forgettable men? You tell me.