208,002 Books Never Written.

Apr 15, 2009 01:26

I was reading a little bit on World War 2 today, and it pushed my mind into all of those bodies that I could never possibly understand. This is not only because they have participated in events which I literally cannot fathom, but also because of how many lives were lost. The lives of people roughly my age or a little younger. A whole generation of fathers and/or brothers wiped away.

I read about battles that I had never known about, or only learned in such passing that I forgot them almost immediately. Okinawa is little more than the name of a place in the Pacific Ocean to me. It is an Island on which 100,000 Japanese soldiers, 100,000 native islanders, and 8,000 Americans lost their lives (part of me wonders if the "low" American casualties were enabled through the "collateral damaging" of the islanders, though I suspect the Japanese did not try to hard to discriminate either). Twice the population of Champaign-Urbana wiped out. It blended with the recent shootings of two vendors in some protests here.

At these points in my readings, I always imagine two things in this order: 1. I am walking through the deserted city/town/area which my mind has emptied to grasp the scale of the loss of human life; 2. I am a soldier/victim/terrorist/vendor, with a history, a career path, a wife (or at least some girl that I like), and suddenly it doesn't matter. Those desires fade into dust.

A whole book could be written about any one of these people. But some 208,002 books will never be written. And so, of course, I am forced to ask the question a mid-western, liberal white male always asks when faced with such a thought: Why? Why must humans be so inhumane?

I was at first inclined to say that there is a fundamental lack of respect for life. There is a failure to appreciate that other person's history or career or wife. But I guess this failure is understandable because that other man is currently failing to appreciate your history and hopes and wife, so you have to kill him, so that he does not kill you (or, in your mind, your history, your hopes, your wife). So what is it that leads us to the point at which we MUST fail to consider the humanness of the other person in order to convince ourselves we are still human?

To get to that, I must briefly digress. Humans need three basic things to survive: food, water, and shelter. Our genes have coded the desire for these things within us, along with a desire to sow our seeds and spread our genetic material. That is how genes, and therefore humans, work. But humans have a fairly unique special condition: we can, for whatever reason, want things that we don't need. And, while other creatures my be capable of this, humans can do it on levels so abstract as to be mind-boggling. This is not a matter of simply wanting more food or more sex. This is a matter of wanting power, wealth, love, revenge, comfort, camaraderie, knowledge, and more far beyond the necessity of fulfilling our needs. And that is all well and good.

But we have come to view ourselves as better than the lowly animals, who are slaves to their needs. We have culture and intelligence, and thus we are important. But that belief in importance is a tenuous and shaky one. It leads us to think the weirdest things about this added "life" we have been granted on top of merely being "alive." It is almost as though we must find the minutiae of our lives important to remind ourselves that we are important. I have spent several weeks in a funk when my music player broke. Apparently, I strongly believed that my iPod was IMPORTANT to my daily mental health. Other people trash cities when their football team loses a game. Some know that it is important to drink wine properly or to use proper grammar when speaking English. Ideals of freedom are important. Keeping the ugly truth from people is important. So, of course, is revealing it to them.

When people only found the three needs important, they did not war. They fought. They skirmished. They murdered. And always with a clear purpose: the obtaining of one of life's necessities. At some point, though, someone was able to convince others that something was more important than these three things. I don't know what it was, who convinced who, or how it happened (there are of course several decent sociological theories that attempt to answer this, but I won't bother with them for now), but once it did happen, people warred. People fought, not as individuals or even self-sustaining tribes. They warred as groups, nations, religions, races, cultures, and more.

So what, then, is my ultimate conclusion here? It is a strange and somewhat sad one: War is not allowed to occur because human life is devalued. No, the devaluing of human life is a necessary condition for winning a war and for protecting one from the horrors of war, but it is not the cause of war. The cause of war seems to be the over-valuing of unnecessary things as super-important when, in fact, they are not.

Indeed, by all accounts, if the ONLY thing we (meaning all of us) were concerned with was ensuring that everyone in the world had proper food, water, and shelter, then the goal would be accomplished within our lifetimes. And the reason that this does not and will not happen is not because we devalue the lives of those other people (although that certainly does occur), but because people tend to place importance in odd, unimportant things. For many third-world leaders those ephemeral wants are power, control, and fame. For the American majority, the wants are excessive comfort, sport, technology, and freedom from being troubled with other peoples' problems. For me, they are many and myriad. And it would probably help if others would learn exactly what I need to: Prioritize properly, and everything will fall into place.

-Pocket is wondering how he can obtain a copy of Spore, thinking of Michael Chabon's latest work, typing a journal entry, concerned about his slight belly and lack of dating prospects, and trying his best to remember people he never forgot because they are people he never knew.
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