Screw it, this is an early article. You'll get the next one on time.
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<dd>Last Monday the FSB, the Russian equivalent to the FBI or CIA and the successor to the KGB, reported that they had assassinated Shamil Basayev. Basayev, a major leader of the Chechen separatist movement, orchestrated the 2004 takeover of a school in the city Beslan which killed 331 people, most children. (Anyone heard of Beslan?)</p>
<p><dd>It was only after I saw the Washington Post’s photos of people wracked with sobbing grief over the coffins of their young sons and daughters, the heaped flowers lying in the wreckage of the bombed school, when I came to my inevitable conclusion.
<p><dd>The world is really screwed up.</p>
<p><dd>Did you know that the world is currently fighting twenty-two wars? Did you know that in 2002 alone an estimated fifty-five million, eight hundred, four hundred twenty people died from violence? Of course you didn’t. Joe Stalin was right. A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic; fifty-five million deaths isn’t even worth notice.</p>
<p><dd>Depravity and disorder are the watchwords of our era. There should be a book to dissuade people from the starry-eyed ideal that modern intellect, science, and technology can finally bring peace, harmony, and an end to all human maladies. Hell, I would write it. I think
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here would be a fitting title.</p>
<p><dd>Those were the words inscribed onto the gates of Hell, according to Dante Alighieri, and the world today is as sure a hell as any. Oh, it’s not just murder, it’s not just children-killing. You think hell is that simple? You think that the fires of hell are as lukewarm as simple
death?</p>
<p><dd>Don’t fear death. Death is an entirely natural process, and even when brought about unnaturally has something peaceful about it. Fear distortion. Fear the unimaginable chaos, the senseless logic, the discordant choir of humanity. Before you blame diseases, before you blame another person, race, religion, or country, blame yourself. Let he who has no sin throw the first stone, right? That’s what Jesus said when they were about to stone Mary Magdalene, you know. (A lot of stones went unthrown that day. All of them, in fact. But the next day? And the day after that? Who can tell?)</p>
<p><dd>Everything’s out of whack. In Africa you have people starving to death; in America, you have people intentionally vomiting up their food to “slim down.” In North Korea you have engineers developing nuclear missiles; in South Korea, you have avid internet-café gamers launching virtual nukes at enemies. In the Middle East, women are stoned as adulterers; in Canada you have Nelly Furtado releasing an album called “Loose” and a hit single titled “Promiscuous.” In Darfur, you have genocide and violence erupting over ethnic differences. In Fire Emblem Wars you have raging arguments about calling people bad names behind their back.</p>
<p><dd>I don’t care if you’re Christian or atheist. I don’t care if you’re Jewish or Muslim, Sunni or Shia, white or black, Asian or Hispanic, Indian or Native American or Slavic or Arab. I don’t care if you’re a communist or a fascist or a neo-Nazi. I don’t care if you’re George Bush, or John Kerry, or Ann Coulter, or Zinedine Zidane, or Britney Spears, or Lebron James. I don’t care if you’re French or Italian, American or Mexican, Canadian or Swedish.</p>
<p><dd>I care if you’re human.</p>
<p><dd>Don’t you think it’s time we rose above our petty little ideological grievances? Don’t you think it’s time we stop dividing ourselves along class lines, religious lines, or even country lines? Don’t you think it’s time we start paying attention to the fact that 99% of our genetic coding is essentially identical?</p>
<p><dd>We’ve been kicking around in the sandbox for nigh on five thousand years, cutting each other’s heads off and organizing into violent cliques that batter each other into pieces. Blame Mother Nature. That bitch has switched ideology for genetics. Survival of the fittest simply doesn’t exist anymore. Now selection preys on ideologies; those that can attract the most converts thrive and survive. Why? Simple. The more converts an ideology has, the easier it is to beat another ideology’s converts into submission.</p>
<p><dd>Are we going to let ourselves be tooled by our beliefs? I can see them, sitting around a poker table and using human lives as chips. Democracy grins and pats his stacks of red, white, and blue, boasting that he controls the entire west. Meanwhile Radical Islam steadily wins more chips and uses them to rob Democracy of his. (Communism sulks in a corner, muttering that he should have cashed out before the Soviet Union’s collapse.)</p>
<p><dd>Oh, and don’t think the great poker game is that clear-cut. Players can
share chips. Democracy’s chips, in fact, also belong to the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and so forth. Then you have Christianity, Islam, and Judaism battling for the same chips, with Atheism, Wicca, and even Druidism joining the fray. Video games, TV shows, books, they’re all ideologies fighting for human support. The losers inevitably fall into impotence and forgetfulness.</p>
<p><dd>Anyone who believes that one ideology will eventually (in, say, another five or six thousand years) rise above all others and bring order to the world is hopelessly deluded. </p>
<p><dd>Mother Nature, mindless as she is, has run into a dead end. No single ideology will ever crush all others because no human ever has only one ideology. The most idiotic human being might still be patriotic to his country, enjoy the music of a particular band, and eat at a particular restaurant, one life giving support to countless ideologies. No single belief will ever claim his loyalty and the loyalty of every other human, forging the disparate elements of this forsaken race into a unified whole.</p>
<dd>
Ideologies will rise and fall, governments will wax and wane, and we will just keep on killing each other. Here’s to a bright future, ladies and gentlemen.
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Grondring is angry and frustrated. Can’t you tell?