"Through yellow smoke whirling into light
Buildings split, bridges collapsed
Crowded trams burnt as they rolled about
Hiroshima, all full of boundless heaps of embers
Soon after, skin dangling like rags
With hands on breasts
Treading upon the spilt brains
Wearing shreds of burnt cloth round their loins
There came numberless lines of the naked
all crying" -Poem by Sankichi Toge: Hibakusha (A-bomb survivor)
The Atomic bomb is the most recent way to cause death on an impossible scale. From the moment the first Homo Erectus threw a rock at another tribe looking to encroach on his territory to the dropping of the atomic bombs human history is the definition war.
When you give humans absolute power they almost immediately turn to violence (Stanford Prison experiment). When we look at our history books, often the most violent countries are the most praised. Think about it, The Spartans, The Athenians, the Japanese, The Persian empire (although they were fairly peaceful they are still portrayed as violent), The U.S, Great Britain, the list just keeps going on and on. Maybe peace is just overlooked but why is it overlooked?
What does this mean? Is conflict in our nature? What do you think?
3 comments:
Conflict IS our nature. We exist only in relation to other things and people. To oppose something is to insure its survival. Odd isn't it?
Count Sneaky
But does that mean that conflict should be encouraged? Is peace tangible or worth striving for?
It really IS odd.
Do you mean we exist in competition? or we just exist? I am curious.
First, observation tells us that conflict arises when our thoughts and another's thoughts,opinions,beliefs,culture and desires meet each other.Peace is the word we use when conflict is mitigated, compromised,or neutralized.Competition, we rationalize, is a basic tenet of Nature. This, of course may hold true for the body and the environment it is subject to
daily...but it is, obviously, not true of the mind. The problem is that the mind does not know that it is free and willingly takes on the identity it carefully crafts for itself from the stuff of the culture. A "Self" then becomes that fragment of consciousness that "other"
person who is loving, obnoxious,threatening, competitive, good, evil and etc.,etc. The Count was born curious,with nine lives,most of which have been used up.
It really is ODD! The world, I mean. Count Sneaky
Post a Comment